The Great Chain at West Point
A Novel of the American Revolution

About this book:

The Hudson River is the throat of the rebellion—and the British Navy means to cut it. In the freezing winter of 1778, General James Clinton and a brilliant Polish engineer, Thaddeus Kosciuszko, gamble everything on an audacious plan: forge a chain massive enough to stop a fifty-gun warship, haul fifty tons of iron through thirty miles of mountain wilderness, and sink it across the river at West Point before the spring thaw brings the King's fleet north.

Private Thomas Miller has seen the Royal Navy brush aside American defenses before. Now the printer's apprentice turned soldier watches from the muddy riverbank as spies ride through the night with word of flatboats massing in New York, ironmasters battle sabotage and starvation at the Sterling furnaces, and Kosciuszko drives his men to carve forts into sheer granite cliffs. From the charcoal hearths of the Ramapos to the quarterdeck of HMS *Experiment*, the race is on—one side to build an iron barrier, the other to shatter it.

*The Great Chain at West Point* brings to life the desperate, gritty engineering feat that held a fractured nation together. Here is the Revolution not as parlor mythology but as frozen fingers driving stakes into riverbeds, as merchants weighing patriotism against profit, as a Polish aristocrat and a Ulster-Scots general arguing over metallurgy while the British watch and wait. The chain held. This is the story of the men who made it heavy enough.