Written in My Own Heart's Blood (138 page)

AUTHOR’S NOTES

Dams and Tunnels

In the 1950s, a great hydroelectric project was started to bring power to the Highlands, and, in the process, many dams with turbines were built. During the construction of these dams, a good many tunnels were built, a number of them long enough to require a small electric train to transport men and equipment from one end to the other. (If you’re interested in this project and its history, I recommend a book called
Tunnel Tigers: A First-Hand Account of a Hydro Boy in the Highlands
by Patrick Campbell, though there are several other good sources.)

Now, Loch Errochty does exist, and it does have a dam. I don’t know whether it has a tunnel exactly like the one described in the book, but if it did—that’s what it would look like; the tunnel and train are taken from multiple descriptions of the hydroelectric constructions in the Highlands. My description of the dam itself, its spillway, and its turbine room are based on those at the Pitlochry Dam.

Banastre Tarleton and the British Legion

There will likely be a certain amount of quibbling about my inclusion of Colonel Banastre Tarleton in the Battle of Monmouth, as the British Legion of which he was a commander (a regiment of mixed cavalry and artillery) was technically not in existence until after General Clinton’s return to New York following the battle. However, the British Legion did consist of two separate parts: cavalry, under the command of Banastre Tarleton, and artillery, and these parts were organized separately. The cavalry unit appears to have been in some stage of organization in early June of 1778, prior to the battle, though the artillery unit (reasonably enough, given the problems of equipping and training) was not organized until late July, after the battle, when Sir Henry Clinton had returned to New York.

Now, there is no report that I can find as to the definite whereabouts of Colonel Tarleton during the month of June 1778. While neither he nor his British Legion is listed in the official order of battle, that listing is admitted by every source I could find to be confused and deficient. Owing to the large number of militia units taking part and the irregular nature of the battle (by eighteenth-century standards), various small groups are known to have been there but were not documented, and others were there but under confusing
circumstances (e.g., a portion of Daniel Morgan’s Rifle Corps was reported as taking part in the battle, but Morgan himself didn’t. I don’t know whether his absence was the result of illness, accident, or conflict, but apparently he wasn’t there, even though he plainly intended to be).

Now, if
I
were General Clinton, in the throes of imminent departure from Philadelphia, and more or less expecting the possibility of attack by Washington’s Rebels,
and
I had this nice new cavalry unit forming up in New York—would I not send word to Colonel Tarleton to bring his men on down, to lend a hand in the evacuation and to have a bit of field experience to meld them together as a new unit? I would, and I can’t think that General Clinton was less soldierly than I am.

(Besides, there is this interesting thing called novelistic license. I have one. Framed.)

The Battle of Monmouth

The battle lasted from before daylight ’til after dark: the longest battle of the Revolution. It was also by far the messiest battle of the Revolution.

Owing to the circumstances—Washington’s troops trying to catch an enemy army fleeing in three widely separated divisions—neither side could choose its ground, and the ground over which they fought was so chopped up and patchworked with farms, creeks, and forests, they couldn’t fight in the usual manner, with lines facing each other, nor was it possible to develop effective flanking maneuvers. Thus it wasn’t so much a classic eighteenth-century battle as a very long series of pitched fights between small groups, most of whom had No Idea what was going on anywhere else. And it ended up as one of those indecisive battles that no one wins and where no one has any idea for some time afterward what the actual effects of the battle were or would be.

With two hundred–odd years of historical perspective, the general take on the Battle of Monmouth is that it was important not because the Americans won but because they didn’t actually lose.

Washington and his troops had spent the preceding winter at Valley Forge, pulling together what men and resources they had and forming those troops into (they hoped) a real army, with the help of Baron von Steuben (who was actually not a baron but thought it sounded better) and other European officers who lent their services either out of idealism (
vide
the Marquis de La Fayette) or from a sense of personal adventure and ambition. (As the Continental army was a trifle lacking in money, they offered instant promotion as an inducement to experienced officers; a mere captain from a British or German regiment could become a colonel—or occasionally, a general—in the Continental army, no questions asked.)

Consequently, Washington was itching to find an opportunity to try out the new army, and General Clinton provided an excellent opportunity. The fact that the new army did acquit itself very well (bar the occasional snafu such as Lee’s botched encircling maneuver and mistaken retreat) was a shot in the arm for the Rebel cause and gave both army and partisans new heart to continue the fight.

Still, in terms both of logistics and results, the battle was One Big Mess. While there is a tremendous amount of material on the battle, and a great many eyewitness reports, the fragmented nature of the conflict prevented anyone from ever having a clear idea as to the overall state of things during the battle, and the staggered arrival of so many companies of militia from Pennsylvania and New Jersey meant that some companies were not documented as having been there, even though they were. (Sources note “several unidentified militia companies from New Jersey,” for instance. These are, of course, the companies commanded by General Fraser.)

From a historical perspective, the Battle of Monmouth is also interesting because of the participation of so many well-known Revolutionary figures, from George Washington himself to the Marquis de La Fayette, Nathanael Greene, Anthony Wayne, and Baron von Steuben.

Now, when you include real people in a historical novel, you want to balance a realistic and (insofar as is possible) accurate portrayal of them against the fact that the novel is seldom
about
these people. Therefore, while we do see most of them (and what we do see is based on reasonably accurate biographical information
¹
), we see them
en passant
, and only in situations affecting the people who are the real focus of the novel.

In regard to the novelistic license mentioned above: a special embossed seal (stamped by the Temporal Authority) allows me to compress time when necessary. True battle aficionados (or those obsessive souls who feel compelled to construct timelines and then fret about them) will note that Jamie and Claire meet with General Washington and several other senior officers at Coryell’s Ferry. Some five days later, we find them making preparations on the day of battle, with little or no description of what was happening to them during the interval. That’s because, while there was a tremendous amount of moving around, nothing of dramatic note happened on those five days. While I do strive for historical accuracy, I do also know that a) history is often not very accurate, and b) most people who really care about the logistic minutiae of battles are reading Osprey’s Men-at-Arms series or the transcript of the court-martial of General Charles Lee, not novels.

Ergo: While all the officers mentioned were with Washington’s army, they were not all at dinner on the same night or in the same place. Commanders (and their troops) came to join Washington from several places over the course of the nine days between Clinton’s exodus from Philadelphia and Washington’s catching him near Monmouth Courthouse (the site of Monmouth Courthouse is now the Monmouth Hall of Records, for the benefit of people who choose to read with a map in hand
²
). The general state of the relations among those officers, though, is as shown during that dinner.

Likewise, it seemed unnecessary to depict the mundane events of five days of travel and military conference, just to prove to the meanest intelligence that five days had, in fact, passed. So I didn’t.

The Court-Martial of General Charles Lee

Lee’s lack of scouting, communications, and (not to put too fine a point on it) leadership led to the massive retreat that nearly scuttled the American attack altogether, this being retrieved by George Washington’s personal rallying of the retreating troops. In consequence, General Lee was court-martialed following the battle on charges of disobeying orders, misbehavior before the enemy, and disrespect to the commander in chief; he was convicted and suspended from military command for a year. There would have been a great deal of talk around Philadelphia regarding this—particularly in the household of a printer who published a regular newspaper. However, the Fraser family had other pressing concerns at the time, and so no mention was made of this.

Quaker Plain Speech

The Religious Society of Friends was founded around 1647 by George Fox. As part of the society’s belief in the equality of all men before God, they did not use honorific titles (such as “Mr./Mrs.,” “General/Colonel/etc.”) and used “plain speech” in addressing everyone.

Now, as any of you who have a second language with Latin roots (Spanish, French, etc.) realize, these languages have both a familiar and a formal version of “you.” So did English, once upon a time. The “thee” and “thou” forms that most of us recognize as Elizabethan or Biblical are in fact the English familiar forms of “you”—with “you” used as both the plural familiar form (“all y’all”) and the formal pronoun (both singular and plural). As English evolved, the familiar forms were dropped, leaving us with the utilitarian “you” to cover all contingencies.

Quakers retained the familiar forms, though, as part of their “plain speech” until the twentieth century. Over the years, though, plain speech also evolved, and while “thee/thy” remained, “thou/thine” largely disappeared, and the verb forms associated with “thee/thy” changed. From about the mid-eighteenth century onward, plain speech used “thee” as the singular form of “you” (the plural form remained “you,” even in plain speech), with the same verb forms normally used for third person singular: e.g., “He knows that/ Thee knows that.” The older verb endings—“knowest,” “doth,” etc.—were no longer used.

If you would like to know a whole lot more about the grammatical foundations and usages of Quaker plain speech than most people normally want to, allow me to recommend to you
No Need to be Ashamed of the Plain Language
by Kenneth S. P. Morse

You can find this on the
QuakerJane.com
website, or Google it (in case that website should no longer be extant).

Scots/Scotch/Scottish

As noted elsewhere (
Lord John and the Brotherhood of the Blade
, see “Author’s Notes”), in the eighteenth century (and, indeed, well into the mid-twentieth century), the word “Scotch” and its variants (e.g., “Scotchman”) were commonly used (by both English people
and
Scots) to describe an inhabitant of Scotland. The terms “Scottish” and “Scots” were also occasionally used, though less common.

Personally, I don’t think political correctness has any place in historical fiction, and therefore those persons in this book who normally would have used “Scotch” do.

Typos and Terminology

Owing to the interesting idiosyncrasies of Scots dialect, some words may appear to be misspelled—but they aren’t. For instance, while an English cook may have made her flapjacks on an iron griddle, her Scottish counterpart was frying sausages on a hot girdle. (This occasional transposition of sounds results in such entertaining items as a Scottish dessert known as “creamed crud” (“curd” to the less-imaginative English). It also results in the occasional inattentive reviewer denouncing the occurrence of “typos” in my books. This is not to say that there
aren’t
any typos—there always are, no matter how many eyeballs have combed the pages—just that “girdle” isn’t one of them.

Besides dialectical idiosyncrasies, there are also the oddities due to obsolete (but entirely accurate) usage. For example, at one point in this book, you will find someone hiding behind a pile of “spiled” barrels. I do
not
mean “spoiled,” and it isn’t a typo. “Spiled” means that a spile (a small wooden peg or spigot) has been driven into a cask in order to broach it and draw off liquid. So the pile is composed of barrels that have been drained of their contents. (Yes, I could indeed have said “a pile of empty barrels” instead, but what fun would
that
be?)

Bibliography/LibraryThing

Having been an academic for a good long time, I appreciate the virtues of a good bibliography. Having been a reader of novels for a lot longer, I sort of don’t think extensive bibliographies belong in them.

Still, one of the side effects of reading historical fiction often is a desire to learn more about events, locations, flora, fauna, etc., described therein. I have a goodish number of references (about 1,500, last time I counted), acquired over the last twenty-odd years of writing historical fiction, and am happy to share the bibliographic information for these.

As it’s not convenient to do that individually with a large number of people, I’ve put my whole reference collection (as of the beginning of 2013, at
least) on LibraryThing—this being an online bibliographic site, where people can catalog and share their personal library information. My catalog is public, and you should be able to access all of it using my name as a keyword. (Individual references also include keywords like “medicine,” “herbal,” “biography,” etc.)