Rebels, Redcoats, Hessians, Native American warriors, figure in these true stories of life, conflict in Pennsylvania
Sunbury
Press Inc. has published five volumes in John L. Moore’s Revolutionary
Pennsylvania Series.
The series includes Murder on Killbuck Island and Against the Ice: The Story of December 1776, the Northumberland author’s two latest releases.
The series includes Murder on Killbuck Island and Against the Ice: The Story of December 1776, the Northumberland author’s two latest releases.
Moore’s
non-fiction books reflect a half century of research and travel to historic
sites throughout Pennsylvania. The books in this series detail episodes of the
American Revolutionary War. They frequently tell about the warfare that
occurred all along the thinly guarded Pennsylvania frontier as Indian warriors
allied with the British raided border settlements.
The volumes are 5-by-8 inch paperbacks, ranging from 120 to 128 pages, with full-color covers.
The books in the
Revolutionary Pennsylvania Series
1.) Tories,
Terror, and Tea (2017
2.)
Scorched Earth: General Sullivan and the Senecas (2018)
3.)
1780: Year of Revenge (2019)
4.) Against the Ice: The Story of December 1776 (2020
5.)
Murder at Killbuck Island (2020)
About the author
A retired newspaper editor, John L. Moore
employs a journalist’s eye for detail and ear for quotes in order to write about
long-dead people in a lively way. His books are based on 18th and 19th century
letters, journals,memoirs and transcripts of official proceedings such as
interrogations, depositions and treaties.
Moore may be reached by
email at: tomahawks1756@gmail.com.
The covers of most of
Moore’s books feature frontier scenes by Andrew Knez Jr., a noted Pennsylvania
artist from McMurray, Pa. Knez specializes in historically accurate scenes of
the Eastern Frontier. The URL of his website is: http://www.andrewknezjr.com/
Sunbury Press Inc.
Headquartered in
Mechanicsburg, Pa., Sunbury Press offers wholesale rates for retailers, and can be located on line
at: www.sunburypress.com.
An independent publishing company, it
was founded in 2004 by Lawrence Knorr. It publishes trade paperbacks, hard
cover and digital books.
Books in the Revolutionary
Pennsylvania Series are also available online at amazon.com
About the books
With the sesquicentennial of the
American Revolution on the horizon, Tories, Terror, and Tea delves
deeply into contemporary accounts of the times that so severely tried the souls
of Rebels and Tories alike.
The American Revolution didn’t end when
the British surrendered at Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781. More than eight months
later, a force of Indians and British burned the western Pennsylvania settlement
of Hannastown, then the Westmoreland County seat. The town was never rebuilt.
Everybody knows that American soldiers
suffered terribly during the winter the Continental Army spent at Valley Forge.
Few recall that Brigadier General Anthony Wayne couldn’t get Pennsylvania
political officials to provide suitable clothing for the troops of the
Pennsylvania Line although he repeatedly documented that hundreds of men lacked
even “a single rag of a shirt.”
Did you know that when the Continental
Congress fled Philadelphia as the British army approached, its members went
first to Bethlehem and sought to make the Moravian town the U.S. capital for
the duration of the war? Or that the wagon hauling the Liberty Bell away from
the British broke down on the street in Bethlehem?
Scorched Earth: General Sullivan
and the Senecas
Throughout 1778, Iroquois war parties
repeatedly raided the frontiers of Pennsylvania, New York, and New Jersey. In
1779, General George Washington decided to punish them. He sent Major General
John Sullivan into the Iroquois country with orders to make it
uninhabitable.
Sullivan’s invasion force of thousands
of soldiers marched it into the Pennsylvania hinterland, up the Susquehanna
River, and into the Iroquois homeland. Along the way, the troops burned every
village and destroyed every farm they found. As the army advanced, the
Indians – men, women, and children – fled.
Drawing upon first-person accounts kept
by Sullivan’s officers, the author chronicles how the troops devoted much more
time to laying waste to cornfields than they did to fighting Iroquois
warriors.
Washington himself was
ecstatic. “Their whole country has been overrun and laid waste,” he
said. In the end, many more Indians starved during the following winter
than were killed in battle with Sullivan’s soldiers.
1780:
Year of Revenge
1779 was the fifth year of the American
Revolution, and many Iroquois Indians living in western New York sided with the
British. Their war parties repeatedly raided frontier settlements in
Pennsylvania and New York. To punish them, General George Washington sent an
army led by General John Sullivan to invade the Iroquois homeland. Sullivan
burned their villages and destroyed their farms, and Washington believed the
Iroquois had been forced out of the war. But Washington had miscalculated:
Sullivan had only kicked a hornet’s nest.
For the Iroquois, 1780
became a year for revenge. As winter ended, their warriors didn’t wait for the
snow to melt before they sharpened their tomahawks, donned their snowshoes and
headed for Pennsylvania. The first attacks caught settlers making sugar in
their maple groves and rebuilding farms damaged by previous raids. The warriors
terrorized the entire frontier.
Across Pennsylvania, militia
officers scrambled to protect their settlements. As William Maclay of Sunbury,
Pa., implored Governor Joseph Reed, “… Help us if you can.”
Against the Ice: The story of December 1776
A
wintry December 1776 forced General Washington’s army to struggle against the
ice, snow, sleet, and wind as well as against Hessian and British soldiers. First-person
accounts to chronicle these struggles. In the weeks prior to Washington’s
victory over the Hessians at Trenton:
- Continental regiments coming south from Albany, New
York, to join Washington in Pennsylvania’s Bucks County ran into a severe
snowstorm as they marched across northern New Jersey.
- Militia troops from Dover, Delaware, marched through
snow to join Washington in eastern Pennsylvania. En route, they met a
congressman fleeing Philadelphia who predicts that Washington may soon
need “to obtain the best terms (of surrender) that could be had from the
enemy.”
- A Philadelphia militia company, ordered to make a
night march, “hadn’t marched far before it began to rain and snow,” the
sergeant said. When the men reached their objective, they were “as wet as
rain could make us and cold to numbness.”
Washington’s
offensive against Trenton began on a “fearfully cold and raw” Christmas night
on the Delaware River’s Pennsylvania side with “a snow storm setting in,” an
officer said.
“The wind is northeast and beats in the faces of the men,” the officer said. “It will be a terrible night for the soldiers who have no shoes.” Even so, the soldiers crossed into New Jersey, then marched nine miles to Trenton.
Downriver,
hundreds of General John Cadwalader’s militiamen also managed to reach New
Jersey even though, as Colonel Joseph Reed reported, “the ice began to drive
with such force and in such quantities as threatened many boats with absolute
destruction.” Cadwalader called off the offensive when his men couldn’t get the
cannons ashore.
Murder at Killbuck Island
One Sunday in 1782, white vigilantes
suddenly appeared at a camp of Delaware Indians on an island in the Allegheny
River near Fort Pitt in western Pennsylvania. Guns blazing, they attacked,
killing several Indians and neutralizing U.S. soldiers assigned to guard them.
These Delawares were active allies of
the American army. Two held the rank of captain, and others had served as
scouts. The chief, Colonel Killbuck, escaped by swimming.
The true story of these killings ranks
among the most obscure of the many unprovoked attacks that Native Americans
have suffered at the hands of white people. The account of the attack on
Killbuck’s camp is one of seven dealing with various aspects of the Revolutionary
War. Others tell how:
Church
bells rang to signal Benjamin Franklin’s return from London in May 1775.
Hundreds of Philadelphians rode out to meet John Hancock, Samuel Adams, and
John Adams, coming from Massachusetts to attend the Continental Congress.
Pennsylvania
soldiers mutinied in their winter camp at Morristown, N.J., in January
1781. Ten months later, they were in the American army’s front lines at
Yorktown, Va.
A wealthy landowner on the Susquehanna River’s West Branch wanted
Hessian POWs to build a stone fort to replace a wooden defense burned by
pro-British Indians.
Pennsylvania militia officers confiscated the guns of Loyalists,
then redistributed them to soldiers marching off the fight the British.
Tories in Buck County robbed tax collectors whose revenues
financed the local militia. After the war, several fled to Canada. At least two
were hanged.
