Have the remains of a Rev War ship turned up in the Savannah River?

It sounds likelier than not:

Perhaps the cannons were tossed overboard or they served as ballast. Maybe the old artillery pieces are related to a Civil War ironclad, which was scuttled by its Confederate crew. The Corps doubts that theory.

Archaeologists and Britain’s Royal Navy are offering an even more intriguing and exciting possibility.

They told CNN last week that — based on measurements and appearance — the cannons may be from the HMS Rose, a famed British warship that mixed it up with colonists during the revolution or, as the UK calls it, the War of Independence. Nearly 250 years ago, the British scuttled the ship in the Savannah River to block the channel and prevent French ships from coming to the aid of colonists trying to retake the city.

If this is the Rose, then it’s a significant find. That ship’s crackdown on Rhode Island smugglers at the outset of the Revolution prompted that colony to outfit vessels for the protection of American shipping, which in turn laid the basis for the Continental Navy.

After playing a role in the fight for New York in 1776, the Rose’s career ended at the bottom of the Savannah River three years later when British forces defending the city scuttled her to prevent French ships from navigating the channel. The Franco-American assault on the city in 1779 was, of course, one of the allies’ greatest disasters.

New and forthcoming Rev War books of note

The TBR stacks keep getting higher. Here are a few Rev War titles to add to your list, if you haven’t put them there already.

• Back in 2019 I directed your attention to a forthcoming book on Banastre Tarleton. It looks like it’s coming out this summer. This is a Savas Beatie title by two authors who’ve done good work on militia from the South Carolina backcountry. Definitely looking forward to getting my hands on a copy of this. And if you’re a fellow Tarleton buff, hold your (dragoon) horses, because…
• …Westholme just published a study of Tarleton’s British Legion by John Knight. Looks like a major reappraisal of the green-coated Tories who battled their way through the South, and most welcome.
• Speaking of the Southern Campaign, Westholme is really spoiling us Carolina aficionados. To the End of the World is a new examination of the Race to the Dan River by Andrew Waters.
• Donald Johnson’s Occupied America looks at the ways civilians navigated British military rule in Revolutionary cities, and the effect of occupation on allegiances. I’ve long been interested in civilian experiences during the Rev War, so I’m excited about this one.
• Robert Parkinson’s Thirteen Clocks, due out in May, makes a case for racial fear as a critical factor in the movement toward independence. Parkinson has already written acclaimed scholarship on the role of race in the making of the Revolution, and I suspect this new book is one we’ll be talking about for quite some time.

Help save three Rev War battlegrounds in the South

Here’s a fantastic preservation opportunity from the American Battlefield Trust. Land from three Rev War sites is in play, including a crucial acre at Great Bridge, VA–site of the Patriot militia’s 1775 victory over Lord Dunmore’s forces. Every dollar you give will net an 80-to-1 match!

Bernard Bailyn, 1922-2020

We’ve lost another eminent scholar of early America—indeed, he was a titan of the field.  Bernard Bailyn passed away on August 7 at the age of ninety-seven.

It would be hard to overstate Bailyn’s importance to the study of colonial and Revolutionary America.  His work was wide-ranging; he wrote about New England merchants, the Revolutionaries’ ideology, Loyalists, colonial migrations and demographics, and Atlantic connections.  A two-time Pulitzer winner, he was also a recipient of the Bancroft Prize and the National Humanities Medal, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  He was an innovator, both methodologically and conceptually.

Bailyn’s book The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution was one of the most transformative studies of the American founding ever written.  It’s one of those rare historical works that makes you feel as if you’ve seen its subjects’ world from the inside out; a work so profound in its implications, so persuasive and elegant in its presentation, and so saturated with source material that you can’t help but see the past differently once you’ve read it.

He trained some of the most acclaimed American historians of the twentieth century, including Pauline Maier, Gordon Wood, Mary Beth Norton, Jack Rakove, and Peter Wood, and he was himself a student of Perry Miller, the seminal scholar of Puritanism.  For that reason, his death almost feels like a sort of trans-generational rupture, as if we’ve lost a flesh-and-blood link between the field’s modern foundations and some of the finest practitioners still working today.  But his own body of scholarship and the ongoing contributions of his students (and their students) should ensure that we’ll continue to feel his influence for a long, long time.

Charles Royster, 1944-2020

We lost one of America’s finest historians this year.

Some time ago word went around on Twitter that Charles Royster had passed away, but I didn’t see anything official until somebody passed along this obit from the AHA.  Royster was Boyd Professor of History at Louisiana State University.

He completed his Ph.D. at Berkeley under Robert Middlekauff, writing a monumental dissertation—monumental both in its importance and its size—on the Continental Army.  The dissertation became the basis of his book A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775-1783, which won the Francis Parkman Prize, the National Historical Society Book Prize, and the Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award.

That volume alone would have been sufficient to establish him as one of the premier scholars of American history, but his Civil War study The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans was just as acclaimed as his first book, winning both the Bancroft Prize and the Lincoln Prize.  He was also the author of Light-Horse Harry Lee and the Legacy of the American Revolution and The Fabulous History of the Dismal Swamp Company: A History of George Washington’s Times.

I first encountered Royster’s work when I was fresh out of college.  At that time I was a newly-minted aspiring historian who had decided to study the American Revolution.  On a family trip to Williamsburg I found a copy of A Revolutionary People at War in a bookstore.  It probably had a bigger impact on me than any academic book I’ve read, whether at that time or since.  It was one of my first experiences with a work of history that asked such probing questions and constructed such meaningful answers.

Sometimes, when you’re just beginning to engage with a field, a book will smash its way into your intellect like an asteroid, but then you revisit it later when you’re more seasoned and find the magic’s worn off.  You decide it must have made a big impression only because you read it when you were green and had a narrow frame of reference.  That’s never been the case with me and A Revolutionary People.  Every time I take it off the shelf, it’s as powerful and insightful as it seemed before I started graduate school.  To this day, I think it’s an unparalleled analysis of the Continental Army and its role in defining what the Revolution meant.

The SMH devoted a panel to A Revolutionary People at the first academic history conference I ever attended.  I heard Royster himself would be there, and brought my copy to ask if he’d sign it.  Unfortunately, he didn’t make it.  I regret that I never got to meet him and thank him for his body of work.  But that body of work remains.  I’m sure people will be turning to it for as long as there’s an interest in the American past.

Getting patriotic with Historians at the Movies

Those of you who are hip to Twitter might already be familiar with Historians at the Movies.  If you’re not, here’s how it works: A bunch of history folks crank up the same Netflix offering at the same time, and then tweet along using the hashtag #HATM.  The brainchild of Jason Herbert, it’s become quite the phenomenon.

People have been clamoring for HATM to take on The Patriot, and this Sunday night it’s finally happening.  You’ll want to start the movie at 8:30, but the Twitter commentary usually gets going closer to 8:00.

I’ll be one of many tweeting along, using my professional-ish account @mlynchhist, which I reserve for subjects historical and museological.   Anytime there’s an excuse to talk Southern Campaign stuff, I’m all in.

Rethinking southern exceptionalism in the Revolutionary War

I just read (and enjoyed) Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Politics of Vengeance in the American Revolution by T. Cole Jones.  Like Holger Hoock’s Scars of Independence, Jones’s book challenges the popular view of the Revolution as a restrained, limited war waged according to high-minded ideals.  While prominent Revolutionaries did indeed envision a humane, restrained war, reports of the mistreatment of American prisoners and British atrocities (whether exaggerated or not) led many Patriots to embrace a more vindictive war of retribution.  This had profound and very unfortunate effects for British and Tory prisoners who fell into American hands.

We usually associate the idea of a vindictive, retributive war with the Revolutionary South, and especially the southern backcountry.  After the British invasion of South Carolina in 1780, Whigs and Tories engaged in an eye-for-an-eye struggle marked by lynchings, denial of quarter, and other bloody acts of retaliation fueled by a desire for revenge.

Many writers tend to treat this internecine conflict in the backcountry South as an exceptionally nasty deviation from the war as a whole.  Jones interprets it differently.  “While not denying the violence of the southern campaigns,” he writes, “viewing the treatment of enemy prisoners in the South within the context of prior British and American practice reveals more continuity than disjuncture.  Through this lens, the war in the South emerges not as a drastic departure from a limited European-style conflict but as the intense culmination of a process of escalating violence that had begun in the summer of 1776” (p. 189).

Nor were southerners and backcountry settlers the only Americans to mete out impromptu, retributive violence against Tories.  “Southern militias were not alone in their practice of terrorizing, torturing, and executing loyalists; northern revolutionaries committed similar acts of vengeance,” Jones writes.  “Wherever British forces could project enough power to support loyalist resistance, revolutionary militias and crowds responded with terror and violence” (p. 207).

The work of Jones and Hoock suggests that we need to rethink the ways we write about the Revolution in the South.  Maybe it’s time for us to stop asking why the southern experience of the Revolution was so violent and start asking ourselves whether there was really anything exceptional about it.  And perhaps the selective nature of American memory about the Revolution’s ferocity illustrates the ways we use regionalization to compartmentalize the past’s unsavory aspects.

The Battle of Waxhaws, from the New York Public Library via Wikimedia Commons

David Library collection heading to its new home

The David Center for the American Revolution at the American Philosophical Society (formerly the David Library of the American Revolution) just sent out an update about the move to Philadelphia.  The DLAR’s manuscripts and rare books are already in their new digs at the American Philosophical Society, and the rest of the collection is relocating this winter.

The DCAR’s new web address is https://www.amphilsoc.org/david-center-american-revolution, so update your bookmarks.

New book on Banastre Tarleton coming

Oscar and Catherine Gilbert’s Bloody Ban: Banastre Tarleton and the American Revolution, 1776-1783 is on the way from Savas Beatie.  The Gilberts’ work on backcountry militia in the Revolutionary South has been good, so this one ought to be well worth a place on the shelf.  It’ll be interesting to compare their conclusions with those of Anthony Scotti, whose Tarleton study appeared in 2008.

Military history buffs should be quite familiar with Savas Beatie.  In fact, independent publishers like SB and Westholme have been putting out some of the most interesting Rev War and Civil War books of the last few years—fresh takes on important campaigns, new light on neglected events and theaters, and reconsiderations of prominent figures.

Commemorating a Revolutionary woman at Sycamore Shoals

East Tennessee artist Mary Ruden‘s statue of Mary Patton is on display at Sycamore Shoals State Park until the end of this month.

Patton and her husband operated a powder mill in the Watauga settlements.  Most accounts credit her with outfitting the King’s Mountain expedition.  Sycamore Shoals is an especially appropriate venue for this sculpture, since two of Patton’s big powder kettles are on exhibit there.

This is one of a series of Ruden’s works depicting historic Tennessee women. Her next subject is suffragist Lizzie Crozier French, just in time for the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment.