Under Alien Skies

Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America

Vaughn Scribner

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781469680774, 9781469680767
• eBook ISBN: 9781469680781
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

The Revolutionary War is often celebrated as marking the birth of American republicanism, liberty, and representative democracy. Yet for the tens of thousands of British and Hessian troops sent 3,000 miles across the Atlantic Ocean to wage war under alien skies, such a progressive picture, as Vaughn Scribner reveals, could not have been further from the truth. In Under Alien Skies, Scribner illustrates how foreign soldiers' negative perceptions of the American environment merged with harsh wartime realities to elicit considerable physical, mental, and emotional anguish.

Whether trudging through alligator-infested swamps, nursing a comrade back to health in a rain-sodden tent, or digging trenches in a burned-out port city, most who fought in America under the British army’s flag ultimately deemed themselves strangers fighting in a strange land. For them, Revolutionary America looked nothing like the “happy land . . . blessed with every climate” that Revolutionary republicans so successfully promoted. Instead, the War of Independence descended into a quagmire of anxiety, destruction, and distress at the hands of the American environment—a “Diabolical Country,” as one British soldier opined, “which no Earthly Compensation can put me in Charity with.”

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Halftitle Page
• Introduction Invasive Species
• 1 Nothing but Sky and Water around Me: Oceans Apart (Coming Over)
• 2 A Barbarous Business in a Barbarous Country: Physical Terrains
• 3 The Very Elements Seemed to Conspire against Us: Flora and Fauna
• 4 I Feel This Miserable Weather in My Stomach and Nerves: Climate, Weather, and Disease
• 5 What Will Become of Us? Mental Illness
• 6 I Have Never Enjoyed My Health since My Return from America: Oceans Apart (Going Home)
• Conclusion Paradise Lost
• NOTES
• Bibliography
• Index