patriotic gore

I know that the Revolutionary War was a real war, with fierce battles and casualties among the warriors and lots of "collateral damage" to civilians and their property. One of my own ancestors, Captain Levi Ely, who led a company of Massachusetts men, was killed in the battle of Stone Arabia near Utica, New York, on October 19, 1780.

Now there is a new book, Scars of Independence,  by Holger Hoock, that apparently drips with bloody violence committed by both sides. I'm on the library's waiting list to read it, for I'm not sure I really want it permanently near my books about Washington and the Continental Congress. The Times' book review cites some passages. It wasn't just the British and their Indian allies who were brutal.

Hoock narrates the brutal “campaign of terror” Gen. John Sullivan waged in Iroquoia during the summer of 1779, a scorched-earth march involving one-third of the total Continental fighting force. George Washington himself planned the campaign, telling Sullivan to pursue “the total destruction and devastation of their settlements and the capture of as many prisoners of every age and sex as possible. It will be essential to ruin their crops now in the ground and prevent their planting more,” wrote the Patriots’ supreme commander, whom the Seneca nicknamed Town Destroyer. Sullivan followed Washington’s orders; his men put at least 41 Indian towns to the torch. They desecrated native graves, raped native women and mutilated native bodies for profit and for sport. One lieutenant, William Barton, sent a party of his men “to look for some dead Indians.” The soldiers returned to camp having skinned two of them from their hips down for boot legs: a pair for Barton’s commander and “the other for myself,” he wrote in his official journal.

 I guess the lesson is that war is hell and war was hell, despite the airbrushed history many of us were taught.