Revolutionary Pennsylvania Series

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.

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

Tories, Terror, and Tea

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.