Lehman on “The Burning of New London” in Essex, Connecticut, 11 Jan.

I had a fine time speaking to the Essex Historical Society and guests in Connecticut last Sunday, and that Sestercentennial series of programs will continue this weekend.

On Sunday, 11 January, Eric D. Lehman will speak to the society on “The Burning of New London,” perhaps the most famous fight inside Connecticut during the Revolutionary War.

Lehman, author of Homegrown Terror: Benedict Arnold and the Burning of New London, will discuss the life of the complicated Connecticut native who led the September 6, 1781, attack on his home state. A force of 1,600 British soldiers and Loyalists captured Fort Griswold and burned down the town of New London. This dramatic story sheds light on the ethics of the dawning nation and the way colonial America responded to betrayal and terror.

Lehman is a professor of English at the University of Bridgeport and the author or editor of 22 books, including New England Nature, A History of Connecticut Food, and the award-winning Becoming Tom Thumb.

All the society’s Winter Lecture Series talks are free and open to the public in Hamilton Hall at the Essex Meadows community, 30 Bokum Road in Essex. Doors open at 3 P.M., with the talk scheduled to begin at 3:30. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis, and the society asks attendees to register in advance.

Reardon on Benedict Arnold’s New London Raid, 10 Sept.

Matthew Reardon will speak at the Ledyard, Connecticut, Public Library on 10 September about his new book, The Traitor’s Homecoming: Benedict Arnold’s Raid on New London, Connecticut, September 4-13, 1781.

The background:

By 1781, the war in North America had reached a stalemate. Throughout the summer the combined Franco-American armies of Generals George Washington and Jean-Baptiste comte de Rochambeau deceived British General Sir Henry Clinton into believing they were about to lay siege to New York City. When in fact, they were moving south toward Yorktown, Virginia, in a bid to trap Lord Cornwallis’ army against the sea.

Clinton, falling for the deception, dispatched former American General Benedict Arnold to attack New London, hoping the move would derail militia reinforcements and supplies headed from Connecticut to the allied armies outside New York City, as well as destroy the privateers which operated out of its harbor.

Situated in southeastern Connecticut, New London was the center of the state’s wartime naval activities. State and Continental naval vessels operated out of its harbor, which doubled as a haven for American privateers. Arnold landed on September 6 and, in a textbook operation, defeated local militia, took possession of the town, harbor, and forts, and set New London's waterfront ablaze.

But that is not how it is remembered. The Connecticut governor’s vicious propaganda campaign against the British and Arnold, who was already infamous for his treachery, created a narrative of partial truths and embellishments that persist to this day. As such, most of the attention remains on the bloody fighting and supposed “massacre” at Fort Griswold. There is much more to the story.

Based on years of research, this book dismantles myths that have cemented around Arnold’s raid and offers a major reinterpretation of what’s significant about it.

Matthew Reardon is a native of northeastern Connecticut with degrees from Sacred Heart University. He served as executive director of the New England Civil War Museum & Research Center for more than fifteen years. He currently works as a middle school teacher in Vernon and serves as a command historian for the Connecticut Military Department.

Speakers at 2019 Revolutionary War Conferences

Here are the line-ups of speakers and topics at two conferences on the Revolutionary War coming later this year.

Though some of the speakers are academics and they’re presenting high-quality research, these aren’t academic gatherings. The focus is sharing stories with other researchers and the interested public rather than developing papers for journals.

Eighth Annual Conference of the American Revolution, America’s History L.L.C., Williamsburg, Virginia, 22-24 Mar 2019

• Rick Atkinson, “The British Are Coming: Waging Expeditionary War in the Age of Sail”
• Rod Andrew, Jr.: “Not the Swamp Fox: South Carolina’s Andrew Pickens in the Revolutionary War”
• Jack Buchanan, “The Road to Charleston: How Nathanael Greene Dealt with Logistics, Civil War and Politics in South Carolina and Georgia”
• Larrie Ferriro, “Brothers at Arms: American Independence and the Men of France and Spain Who Saved It”
• Stephen Fried, “Revolution, Madness, and Benjamin Rush, the Visionary Doctor Who Became a Founding Father”
• Don Hagist, “A Thousand Lashes: Discipline in the British Army by the Cat o’ Nine Tails”
• James Kirby Martin, “‘In a Wanton and Barbarous Manner’: Benedict Arnold’s New London Raid and the Fort Griswold ‘Massacre’”
• Eric Schnitzer, “The Hessians are Also Coming: Who Were King George’s Hirelings and Where Did They Come From?”
• Lt. Col. Sean Sculley, “The Contest for Liberty: Military Leadership in the Continental Army, 1775-1783”
• Richard J. Sommers, “Founding Fathers and Fighting Sons: The Revolutionary War Forebears of Civil War Soldiers and Statesmen”

Sixteenth Annual Fort Ticonderoga Seminar on the American Revolution, Fort Ticonderoga, Ticonderoga, New York, 20-22 Sept 2019

• John Buchanan, “Nathanael Greene and the Road to Charleston”
• Mark R. Anderson, “Our Kahnawake Friends: America’s Essential Indian Allies in the Canadian Campaign”
• Phillip Hamilton, “Loyalty and Loyalism: Henry Knox and the American Revolution as a Transatlantic Family Struggle”
• Patrick Lacroix, “Promises to Keep: French-Canadian Soldiers of the Revolution, 1775-1783”
• Bryan C. Rindfleisch, “‘’Twas a Duty Incumbent on Me’: The Indigenous & Transatlantic Intimacies of George Galphin, the American Commissioner of Indian Affairs in the South”
• John Ruddiman, “German Auxiliaries’ Reactions to American Slavery and Relationships with Enslaved Americans”
• Jessica J. Sheets, “‘I Hope…We Shall Ever Be on Terms of Friendship’: The Politically Divided Tilghman Family”
• Alisa Wade, “‘To Live a Widow’: Personal Sacrifice and Self-Sufficiency in the American Revolution”

In addition, the Fort Plain Museum’s annual conference is scheduled for 6-9 June. The preliminary announcement lists speakers, including some of the people above, but the full line-up of topics will come next month.

Mistaken Identity at Fort Griswold

Yesterday I visited Fort Griswold in Groton, Connecticut, which is about to commemorate the 225th anniversary of the British army storming the site on 6 Sept 1781. It’s an unusually well preserved eighteenth-century fortification, largely because the U.S. military site continued to use it until the twentieth century, preventing private development. But the people of Groton and New London, across the Thames River, were also quick off the mark to memorialize the battle on their waterfront. They formed a committee to build a monument in 1820 and completed it by 1830 (three and twelve years before Bostonians did the same for the Battle of Bunker Hill).

One reason I stopped at Fort Griswold involves the Bucks of America, which William C. Nell in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855) said was an all-African-American unit attached to the Continental Army. One of the abiding mysteries of the Revolutionary era is that there's no record of this unit besides its flag, now owned by the Massachusetts Historical Society.

Some sources, such as this National Park Service webpage and this article on Wikipedia, say the Bucks of America fought at Fort Griswold. That presents problems for the standard stories of both the Bucks and the fort. The unit was supposed to be a Continental Army unit, and in 1781 the fort was staffed at very short notice by local militia, not the army.

There’s a simple explanation for how this confusion arose. The commander of the Bucks of America, Nell wrote, was a Boston man named George Middleton. In 1855 George Middleton, mayor of Newark, New Jersey, wrote an account of the storming of Fort Griswold, which he had seen from afar as a boy. These were obviously two separate men since the first died on 6 Apr 1815, forty years before the second wrote.

Benjamin Quarles cited the recollections of the younger George Middleton when he described the Fort Griswold battle in The Negro in the American Revolution. (Two local African-American men were among the defenders who died in the battle.) Quarles had no reason to identify Middleton beyond his name and the citation of the battle history where his account was published.

People naturally looked in Quarles’s book for information about the Bucks of America. They didn’t find any, but they did find the reference to George Middleton as an eyewitness to the battle at Fort Griswold. Ergo, they concluded, the Bucks unit must have been there. Unfortunately, it’s a case of mistaken identity.