Stories

Elias Boudinot

The Commissary's Other War

My official title was Commissary General of Prisoners. My official duty was to negotiate with the British for the exchange and welfare of American soldiers held in captivity. What I also did, from my ...

Hannah Caldwell

The Minister's Wife

I did not choose this war. None of the women I knew chose it. The men gathered in parlors and churches and taverns and debated the rights of Englishmen and the tyranny of Parliament, and they decided,...

Cornelius Hetfield Jr.

The Neighbor Who Chose the King

They call me a traitor. The patriots of Elizabethtown, who were my neighbors and in some cases my kin, use that word as if loyalty to the Crown were a crime rather than the position of every subject o...

The Colonial Capital Remembers

Elizabeth, New Jersey, does not look like a Revolutionary War town. The industrial waterfront, the container cranes of Port Elizabeth, the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike — all of it suggests a pla...