"As the confederates advance into Pennsylvania during the Gettysburg Campaign, a group of Franklin & Marshall College students follow Robert Nevin, their former professor of Greek, into the army, forming Lancaster County’s only Civil War artillery battery – Independent Battery I, Pennsylvania Light Artillery. Join the men of Independent Battery I as they await the enemy at the Susquehanna River, and at the threatened state capital of Harrisburg. Learn of the experiences in Philadelphia where they expect to quell draft riots, and follow them as they serve at Harpers Ferry in ‘ironclad’ railcars on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad and build fortifications on Maryland Heights. March with the men as they are sent to the defenses of Washington DC. Join them as they experience Confederate General Jubal Early’s attack on the city, debate the issues of the 1864 elections, and witness Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, as well as the Grand Review.†[from the publisher]
xvii [1], 268, [1]] pages : illustrations, maps ; 24 cm.
Notes
Autographed by the author.
Includes author's note, notes, about the author and index.
"The Black Boys, also known as the Brave Fellows and the Loyal Volunteers, were members of a white settler movement in the Conococheague Valley of colonial Pennsylvania sometimes known as the Black Boys Rebellion. The Black Boys, so-called because they sometimes blackened their faces during their actions, were upset with British policy regarding American Indians following Pontiac's War. When that war came to an end in 1765, the Pennsylvania government began to reopen trade with the Native Americans who had taken part in the uprising. Many settlers of the Conococheague Valley were outraged, having suffered greatly from Indian raids during the war. The 1764 Enoch Brown School Massacre, in which ten school children had been killed and scalped, was the most notorious example of these raids." [from Wikipedia]
Summary
"The American Revolution has traditionally been depicted as a struggle between North American settlers and British imperial forces, but this intensively researched study from Spero, the director of Philadelphia's American Philosophical Society Library, analyzes the crucial role of settler attitudes toward Native Americans in sparking the conflict. While administrators in London viewed Native people as important trading partners within their American empire, many white colonists saw them as a terrifying menace and 'wanted to be free of the Indians as much as they wanted to be free of their imperial overlords.' Spero tells of the little-studied Pennsylvania backcountry rebels called the Black Boys, who in 1765 revolted against Britain's willingness to accommodate Native interests. Readers who have been accustomed to considering the Revolutionary War as a conflict between American liberty and British oppression may find this account discomfiting, but Spero presents convincing support for his thesis that hatred of Indians and desire for their lands played a pivotal role in fomenting the revolution and 'produced the roadmap' for the next century of American history, delving deeply into previously underutilized sources, including the journals of fur trader George Croghan. Spero's thoughtful work is an important contribution to ongoing reassessments of the nature and meaning of the American founding." (from Publishers Weekly.com)
Includes bibliographical references (p. 207-236) and index.
African American resources at Lancaster County Historical Society.
Summary
During the revolutionary era, in the midst of the struggle for liberty from Great Britain, Americans up and down the Atlantic seaboard confronted the injustice of holding slaves. Lawmakers debated abolition, masters considered freeing their slaves, and slaves emancipated themselves by running away. But by 1800, of states south of New England, only Pennsylvania had extricated itself from slavery, the triumph, historians have argued, of Quaker moralism and the philosophy of natural rights. With exhaustive research of individual acts of freedom, slave escapes, legislative action, and anti-slavery appeals, Nash and Soderlund penetrate beneath such broad generalizations and find a more complicated process at work. Defiant runaway slaves joined Quaker abolitionists like Anthony Benezet and members of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to end slavery and slave owners shrewdly calculated how to remove themselves from a morally bankrupt institution without suffering financial loss by freeing slaves as indentured servants, laborers, and cottagers.
