‘Revolution Song’ review: Russell Shorto tells the story of the American Revolution through six colonial lives

“Revolution Song: A Story of American Freedom” sprawls from Long Island to London, from Manhattan to the wild forests of upstate New York’s Iroquois country.

Following six historical figures as they grapple with the implications of the American Revolution, author Russell Shorto (“The Island at the Center of the World”) weaves multiple storylines together in an episodic history laced with melodramatic flourishes. Gen. George Washington’s battles against a superior military foe are but one strand of an account that brings less familiar characters to the fore. One such personality is aristocrat George Germain, who directed the British war effort against the rebellious colonies. A third figure who strides Shorto’s pages is the Seneca warrior Cornplanter, who was reluctantly drawn into the clash of European interlopers on the North American continent.

Shorto argues that all these players contested the meanings of “freedom” in its most expansive sense. For Washington, freedom meant independence from Britain, while Cornplanter and the tribes of the Iroquois confederation had their own notions of freedom that set them apart from the Europeans.

Not all of this holds together; Shorto’s narrative is at times unwieldy and diffuse. He organizes the book loosely around the idea of the individual, a newfangled notion in the 18th century. The “focus on the individual,” Shorto writes, “led people to new insights, new proclamations and assertions of rights.” In this regard, Germain, who had a semi-feudal view of society, is rather an odd fit here. He stood against the ideals of Washington and the Founders, and his inclusion is puzzling.

The remaining three characters — who, Shorto writes, “personified ‘revolution’ as fully as did the man who became the first president” — struggled to find their own places in a world turned upside down.

In Albany, shoemaker turned lawyer turned political organizer Abraham Yates viewed the progress of revolution with a skeptical eye. He worried that one set of elites would be replaced with a homegrown version of the same. He was a populist who distrusted men of high standing like Washington. As political debates erupted, Yates took a strong stance against a centralized federal government as sanctioned by the Constitution. For Shorto, men like Yates represent an important tendency in the debate over freedom. They may have lost the battle over American governance but deserve to be recognized by posterity.

“All men are created equal” meant just that: men. However, Margaret Moncrieffe Coghlan, daughter of a British officer, had her own notions of personal freedom. As a teenager in New York, she witnessed the mayhem of a revolution that did not extend to women. Forced into an arranged marriage in 1777, she left her husband and fled to London, where she took a succession of lovers, faked her own death to escape creditors and turned up in Paris on the eve of the French Revolution. Her unpaid bills caught up to her, and she was imprisoned back in London.

On her release, she wrote her memoirs as a way of paying off her debts. “Coghlan’s very life had in a sense been a search for the freedom that both historic revolutions had promised,” Shorto observes. The ideals of the 18th century age of revolution promised liberation from old hierarchies but delivered little for women.

Also excluded, of course, were slaves. The story of Venture Smith is perhaps the best part of “Revolution Song.” Taken from Africa as a boy and sold into slavery, by 1739 Smith had ended up on Fishers Island in Long Island Sound. His journey to liberation was extraordinary. Allowed to work on the side, Smith chopped wood and explored the eastern fringes of Long Island and the waters of the Sound. (Among other things, Smith’s saga is a reminder that slavery did exist in the north.) After a failed attempt at escape, he was sold to a family in Connecticut. With the money he accrued from his freelance toil, Smith struck a deal with his owner and purchased his freedom in 1765. Using his skill as a woodman, Smith built a house on the Connecticut River in Haddam and became the center of the small free black community there.

When viewed through the eyes of Smith, the clamor of revolution seems far away. He existed on the periphery. “Venture Smith, so intent on his own march toward freedom, wanted no part of the larger one,” Shorto writes. Smith achieved his own personal revolution — an important victory in itself.