Peter’s War: An Interview with Joyce Malcolm
- Peter’s War:An Interview with Joyce Malcolm
Joyce malcolm is professor of law at George Mason University School of Law. She has published extensively on English and American constitutional and legal history. Her latest book, Peter’s War: A New England Slave Boy and the American Revolution (Yale University Press, 2009), is a new departure. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Peter’s War chronicles the life of a Massachusetts slave who fought for American independence. Chris Beneke, associate professor of history at Bentley University and director of that institution’s Valente Center for Arts and Sciences, interviewed Malcolm in June 2009.
How did you come to write about Peter?
Several years ago, I was contracted to do a research project for Minuteman Park, which includes the “battle road” that runs through parts of Lexington, Lincoln, and Concord, Massachusetts, along the route of the opening battle of the Revolution. My job was to find out who lived there in April 1775 and describe what it looked like back then. While I was going through the records of one of these families, the Nelson family, I came across a bill of sale for a Negro servant boy named Peter, one year and nine months old. I made a copy and kept it over the years because it was such a surprise to me that a child so young was sold without his mother and described as a servant.
What sources did you use to write about Peter?
I was able to find Peter’s footprints, but not his voice. I know where he went and the basic facts about his family and their neighbors. I relied on vital statistics. I was able to find out who his biological parents were because there is a record of their wedding in the Lexington church. The couple that bought him had been married for fourteen years and had no children. These documents have more life in them than one might think. Then there were the military records, which were very valuable—regiments that he had served in, and so on. Coupled with the diaries and letters of other soldiers, I could track his movements and research what he would have experienced.
At what point in your research did you feel that you could write confidently about Peter’s thoughts and behavior? At what point did you feel that you could, without too much reservation, speak in his voice?
That’s a very difficult question to answer. I am one of those historians who does as much research as possible before I start to write, and I did this with Peter’s life. Even then it was very difficult for me. Most of the books I have written have been analytical history, and so this had very different demands. Biography seems to me to give the author a little bit more license to imagine what a person might have felt in a certain situation. But it is necessary to be mindful of the distinction between imagining someone else’s feelings and stating the facts that you know, and not to venture into unsupported suppositions.
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The fight at Lexington, April 19, 1775. A mid-19th-century reproduction based on the original Amos Doolittle etching. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division [reproduction number, LC-DIG-ppmsca-05484].
This is as much a story about a small New England community, namely Lincoln, as it is about Peter, isn’t it?
Yes it is, and I find Lincoln very interesting. Lincoln is wedged between Concord on the west and Lexington on the east. Both of those towns were far more aggressive in defending their rights than Lincoln was. I read through all of Lincoln’s town-meeting minutes, and I couldn’t help but notice the reservation and caution in Lincoln when pressed by the Sons of Liberty of Boston. It was interesting to see how this little town and its sober citizens reacted to events that were pulling them into the war. In March 1776 the Lincoln town meeting was asked to decide whether their new representative...
