“Women in War Symposium,” Schuylerville, 6 May

On Saturday, 6 May, the Saratoga County 250th Commission and the Marshall House will host the the 2nd Annual Women in War Symposium, offering perspectives on the various roles women played during the American Revolution.

The scheduled presentations are:

• Don Hagist: “Killed, Imprisoned, Struck by Lightning: British Soldiers’ Wives on Campaign”
• Philip Hamilton: “The Excitement and Perils of War: Henry and Lucy Knox’s Revolutionary War”
• Katie Turner Getty: “In the Greatest Terror: Women and Children in Crisis after Lexington and Concord”
• Alexander Cain: “‘I Have Scarcely a Mouthful of Bread for Myself or Children’: Mary McAlpin and the Plight of Loyalist Women during the Saratoga Campaign”
• Jenna Schnitzer: “After Burgoyne Surrendered: Women of the Convention Army”

This symposium will take place from 9:00 A.M. to 3:00 P.M. at Saratoga Town Hall, 12 Spring Street, Schuylerville, New York. The $50 registration fee will cover morning refreshments and lunch. For more details and registration, visit this page.

On the day before the symposium, the organizers will offer “Through the Baroness’ Eyes,” a four-hour tour of sites of the Burgoyne campaign as experienced by Frederika von Massow Riedesel, wife of General Friedrich von Riedesel, Commander of the German Division of Burgoyne’s Army. Along with her three young daughters, the baroness accompanied her husband to America and left a journal and letters recording her life with the army.

The tour will follow Riedesel’s path from Fort Edward (The Red House) through Saratoga (now Schuylerville) to the Saratoga Battlefield (Taylor House) and finally the back to the Sword Surrender Site. It involves some walking over uneven terrain. There is a separate $60 registration fee for this event.

“Nothing but the Horrors”

One measure of the poor reception for the American Heroes Channel’s American Revolution series among historians this week was how it drove Alex Cain to start a blog. His first post said:

…the Battle of Lexington, as depicted in “The American Revolution”, is woefully inaccurate and replete with factual inaccuracies. For the producers to say the Lexington militia were all armed with squirrel rifles, that the “minutemen” actually blockaded the Road to Concord, and that the battle took place in a random field outside of Lexington is unacceptable and grossly misleading.

Cain is the author of We Stood Our Ground: Lexington in the First Year of the Revolution, studying each soldier from Lexington, so he knows that particular patch of ground.

It looks like Cain’s second blog posting is an extract or excision from his new book, I See Nothing but the Horrors of a Civil War: The Rise, Fall and Ultimate Triumph of McAlpin’s Corps of American Volunteers, about a set of Loyalists from New York and “the Hampshire Grants,” now known as Vermont.

Here’s a bit from the blog about the wife of corps leader Daniel McAlpin, a retired British army captain who had settled near Stillwater, New York, until the war broke out:

Mary McAlpin described her family’s treatment at the hands of the rebels in vivid language. “From the day her husband left to the day she was forced from her home the Captain’s house was never without parties of the Rebels present. They lived at their discretion and sometimes in very large numbers. They destroyed what they could not consume. Shortly after the capture of the fleeing loyalists a group of armed Rebels with blackened faces broke into the McAlpins’ dwelling house. They threatened Mary and her children with violence and menace of instant death. They confined them to the kitchen while they stripped every valuable from the home. A few days after this, by an order of the Albany Committee, a detachment of Rebel Forces came and seized upon the remainder of McAlpin’s estate both real and personal.” Mary McAlpin and her children were taken to an unheated hut located in Stillwater and locked inside “without fire, table, chairs or any other convenience.”

Hoping that the hardship would eventually break Mrs. McAlpin and induce her to beg her husband to honorably surrender, the rebels kept Mary and her children in captivity for several weeks. Mary McAlpin refused to comply and instead responded her husband “had already established his honour by a faithful service to his King and country.” Enraged, rebels seized Mary and her oldest daughter and “carted” both of them through Albany. According to the Reverend [John] Munro, “Mrs. McAlpin was brought down to Albany in a very scandalous manner so much that the Americans themselves cried out about it.” A second account stated “when Mrs. McAlpin was brought from the hut to Albany as a prisoner with her daughter…they neither of them had a rag of cloaths to shift themselves.”

I See Nothing… is available in digital and print-on-demand formats.