David Ramsay was the premier historical interpreter of the American Revolution to the generation that lived through it and the first post-Revolutionary historian of South Carolina. His ambition was to make the American Revolution meaningful for mankind. Of Irish ancestry, he was born near the Susquehannah River in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, the son of James and Jane Montgomery Ramsay. His father, a small farmer, was able to send him to the College of New Jersey (later Princeton), from which he graduated in 1765. Before studying medicine in Philadelphia he was tutor in a Latin school in Worcester County, Maryland. The dominant influence in his medical training was Dr. Benjamin Rush of Philadelphia, with whom he corresponded throughout his life. Thus when Ramsay arrived in Charleston on the eve of the Revolution armed with letters of introduction, he came from a strong dissenting background with an education that was both...