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  • Growing Up in Interesting Times
  • Joyce Lee Malcolm (bio)
Emmy E. Werner . In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution. Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2006; paperback, 2009. xvii + 158 pp. Illustrations, chronology, notes, and index. $14.36 (paper).

The young subjects of Emmy Werner's book, In Pursuit of Liberty: Coming of Age in the American Revolution, were clearly victims of that supposedly ancient curse, "May you live in interesting times." Indeed, Americans have found the era of the American Revolution such an interesting time that their thirst for books about its leading figures seems insatiable. New biographies of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, and their colleagues appear on and are snapped off bookstore shelves at a relentless clip. Rare is the Founding Father, Mother, general, or politician who has not been the subject of scholarly attention. It is therefore refreshing to see a volume that focuses on the comments and experiences of the children of that time, part of a growing interest in those others present during what was, in fact, a civil war.

While there are still relatively few books of this sort for the American Revolutionary War, this more modern attention to the average man and woman, to the poor, to rank-and-file soldiers and sailors, minority groups, native Americans, patriots, loyalists, and the British and French participants now has quite a history of its own. Historians appreciate that prior neglect was not due solely to a preference for the movers and shakers or simple disinterest so much as to the difficulty of finding written records by and about more obscure individuals. In addition to the Werner volume, there is a growing stream of books rectifying the situation by scouring a wide range of official records and unearthing letters and journals to reconstruct the lives of these groups and individuals. A sampling of recent publications includes Gary Nash's books, The Unknown American Revolution and The Forgotten Fifth: African Americans in the Age of Revolution, both published in 2006, the same year Werner's Pursuit of Liberty first appeared; Graham Russell Hodges' ground-breaking publications on slavery in the mid-Atlantic states, Root and Branch: African Americans in New York and East Jersey, 1613-1863 (and earlier, Slavery and Freedom in the Rural North); and journalist Cokie Roberts' volume, Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation. The invaluable facsimile series, Eyewitness Accounts of [End Page 420] the American Revolution (1968), has done us all a great service, supplementing such useful memoirs as Ordinary Courage: The Revolutionary War Adventures of Private Joseph Plumb Martin by reprinting rare and out-of-print wartime journals. My personal favorite is the diary of Dr. James Thacher, surgeon to the Continental Army, an acute and articulate participant whose thoughtful memoirs breathe life into the long-suffering men of the Continental Army. Howard Zinn has launched a series of bottom-up histories with Ray Raphael's People's History of the American Revolution (2001); and Arthur Calhoun's social history, The American Family in the Colonial Period, was recently reprinted. The information about ordinary life these works uncovered, along with the availability of caches of early materials online, has helped other scholars keen to broaden our understanding of those who lived through the Revolutionary War. Nevertheless the task is often daunting.

My recent biography, Peter's War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution, impressed upon me the exhaustive sleuthing required to resurrect the life of one obscure eighteenth-century child. I began with the discovery of a single frayed piece of paper tucked among the deeds of the Nelson family of Lincoln, Massachusetts: a 1765 bill of sale for the nineteen-month-old "neagro servant boy named Peter." It shattered my preconceptions of slavery. Intrigued about the sale and purchase of so young a child, surely no one's idea of a servant, I determined to find out what I could about his life and that of his owners. While I discovered the full arc of Peter's life with details about his owners' family, their neighbors, and his later military record—he served several enlistments in the war, one of those child-soldiers...

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