Victory at Sea

Victory at Yorktown

Richard M. Ketchum

Henry Holt and Company. 350 pp. $27.50.

It's good to remind ourselves from time to time just how close the American colonies came to remaining a British possession. Ketchum's book serves as that reminder. "A haunting question," Ketchum writes, "is whether a true majority of Americans had wanted the Revolution in the first place. Chances are that they did not. If, in John Adams's colorful phrase, 'We were about one third Tories, and [one] third timid, and one third true blue,' this suggests that somewhere between a majority and two-thirds may have opposed the war."