The Revolution's outcome felt far from inevitable to the people living through it

Atkinson's central corrective to popular memory is that the American cause, in its first two years, was frequently on the verge of collapse, not marching confidently toward an assured victory. The Continental Army was chronically underfed, undersupplied, and prone to mass desertions when enlistments expired, and colonial leadership itself was divided over whether independence was even the right goal well into 1776.

He emphasizes that contemporaries, including Washington himself in his private correspondence, expressed genuine despair at multiple points about whether the cause could survive, a tone strikingly different from the confident, foreordained narrative later generations imposed retroactively. This matters historiographically because treating the outcome as inevitable erases the genuine contingency and risk that shaped decisions at the time, replacing hard, uncertain choices with the false comfort of hindsight.

Atkinson's narrative restores that uncertainty, showing readers a war whose ending was never remotely guaranteed until very late in its course.

Takeaway: history that reads backward from a known outcome tends to erase the genuine uncertainty the participants actually lived with.