My Trip Back to Abigail’s Time

I heard the Declaration of Independence read in the streets yesterday.

It was proclaimed in a loud voice that:

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”

The town’s crier went on to read that “all men are created equal;” that governments are meant to serve the people and to get their power from the people they serve, not vice versa; and that whenever a government grossly forgets its place, “it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it” and to create a new one.

The Declaration was greeted with a lot of “Huzzahs!” though there was some definite skepticism and even disgust expressed among the crowd of listeners.

Some people didn’t think the effort necessary. Others believed the king was in the right; to say otherwise, they snipped, was absurd and offensive. And while I didn’t take any polls, chances are that a majority of those assembled were sunshine patriots who would slink away or shut up as soon as it became too difficult.

Yes, they recognized they were being treated unjustly, but they didn’t want to suffer any further than they absolutely had to, and so they would submit to whoever they needed to. They just required a reminder or two that they actually belonged with the first group of people in the crowd: the ones who thought freedom was too much of a bother.

I sat on a modern bench in Colonial Williamsburg, Virginia, taking all of that in. It begs the question of what my historical fiction heroine Abigail Carpenter first felt on hearing those words up in Princeton, New Jersey.

That’s not detailed in Maiden America. I actually never considered whether she cheered the news with every ounce of her being, or whether she felt an immediate fear at the thought of breaking free from everything familiar and of what she would have to sacrifice to do so.

Perhaps I’ll touch on that in Designing America, which I hope to officially start writing next month. Yes, that story takes place years after the war began and The United States was declared its own country, but Abigail must have thought about it all the same.

Perhaps she even doubted the cause of liberty a time or two.

I mean, as history shows, The Declaration of Independence was well worth the effort. True freedom always is. It’s just that, sometimes, it doesn’t feel like it in the moment.

The French Thought WHAT About Philadelphia Women?

I’m almost done conducting my research for Maiden America II: Designing America, and it’s been just as fascinating as my previous expedition into early U.S. history. Here’s a few of the more interesting tidbits, which may or may not make it into the story:

·         Some of the French wondered whether Philadelphia women were lesbians, since they had an “odd” tendency to visit female friends for days at a time.

·         According to one New England patriot who served almost the entire length of the war and therefore saw just about every state, the prettiest girls in the U.S. were those found in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

·         After the French openly declared war on Great Britain (it had been secretly giving the States funding before), it went about taking everything it could from its rival. In fact, the only thing that saved the island nation from direct attack was bad weather.

·         With that said, most the British and Americans over in the U.S. agreed that the weather was on the locals’ side.

·         Most American soldiers were never really compensated for their efforts. At the end of the war, they were discharged with practically worthless paper notes for three months’ pay and permission to keep their guns. That was it.

·         Legend has it that bayonets were first used in seventeenth-century Spain (today’s Bayonne, France) after a desperate soldier out of ammunition jammed his knife into his musket’s muzzle for the hand-to-hand fighting he knew was coming. A hundred or so years later, the British were using the weapon to full advantage, sending many an American troop running for safety to avoid being impaled.

·         The British navy wasn’t quite so daring as its army, with Admiral Thomas Graves avoiding fights at all cost. His laziness played a huge part in the American’s victory at Yorktown.

·         Another huge part in why that siege played out how it did was because of poor communication and bickering among the military leaders.

·         American women were quite the feisty little things back then. Joseph Plumb Martin recorded how he and his fellow soldiers would try to commandeer horses from the locals, but were often thwarted by young ladies who would steal the horses back, taunt the men for not properly intimidating them into submission, and then invite them over for dinner just as nice as you please.

·         The soldiers did more starving then fighting.

·         James Armistead Lafayette was an American slave who spied on the British, even though they would have liberated him in a heartbeat for deserting his master.

·         During almost the entirety of the war, New York City was filled with Tories entertaining the enemy.

That’s just a smidgen of what I’ve learned. I still have one and a half research books to get through, plus my trip to Colonial Williamsburg at the end of the month. After that, it’s time to put all of this intriguing information into America and Abigail Carpenter’s continuing saga.

Can’t wait! 'Cause let me tell you... This is gonna be good.