1777 - Danbury on Fire! - Softcover

Hughes, M. H.B.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0692191461 ISBN 13: 9780692191460

Publisher: Gatekeeper Press, 2018

Synopsis

AS THE AMERICAN REVOLUTION HEATS UP, THE HAMILTON FAMILY MELTS DOWN!

JOE HAMILTON, 13, JUST WANTS DECENT SHOES, BUT WHAT WILL HAPPEN WHEN HIS FATHER AND GRANDFATHER CALL EACH OTHER TRAITORS!

The Hamilton family are Patriot to the bone, except for Joe's pacifist parents. Is this war right or wrong?
Warned not to mix into rebel business, Joe dives headfirst into everyone's business, investigating a war that's barely started and way underfunded. Every Patriot failing revealed by Joe's hero, Lambert Lockwood, sounds like a horrible miscalculation. When Joe's adult cousin says he will hide if the British come, Joe has about had it! Both accident and planning slowly compel Joe to control his own life - and to do his best to manage everyone else's!

Will it be the Liberty Boys' tar and feathers for Joe's father or the British hangman's noose for his Patriot grandfather?

Famous figures abound in this four-day dash from disaster to disaster:

• Gen. William Tryon (star of TV's Outlander series)
• Enoch Crosby (star of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy
• Gen. Benedict Arnold ('Nuf said!)

This intricate braid of facts brings the reader closer to little-known aspects of the Revolutionary period

• Bounties paid (or not) to lure young boys into soldiery
• The artificer corp hidden in a valley near Danbury
• The Patriot Commissary's tempting stash of guns
• The smallpox threat terrorizing the population into inhuman deeds

Oh, yes the redcoats are coming. They seem nice.
Especially one. Maybe way too nice....
When things get hot, Joe runs home ... the very last place he should be.

If you liked Johnny Tremaine or My Brother Sam is Dead you'll love this book!

Check out the inside flap to meet Joe Hamilton, a boy with some heavy family issues!

About this title

From the Author

Few people today know how divided the country was about the Revolution.

Seven years of war against the French had ended in 1763. Knowledgeable citizens recognized that the British had bailed the Americans out of a bad situation: American lack of military experience and logistical infrastructure had almost lost the British their colony.

And yet - the concept of a revolution against the British superpower grew.

When the 1774 Congress of colonies mandated Committees of Inspection to prepare for war, Captain Silas Hamilton, my 4x great-grandfather, signed up for a new and unpopular duty. 
How could I refuse to write a book about that?

From the Inside Flap

FROM 1777- Danbury on Fire

"A year ago, I had still admired Father for refusing to turn traitor, but the results totaled up to be bad. People in Boston lost homes due to battles. Now, with no battles at all in Connecticut, my parents and I had lost our home, the big farm at Bear Mountain, where my Hamilton grandparents and my uncles lived. If I still lived there now, I could pick a mess of greens for supper, to be loaded with butter and larded with pork chunks. Then I could fish in our own pond."
   
"Father had led us out of the Congregational Church during one of Reverend Baldwin's anti-British sermons. When the Reverend enlisted in the Continental Army after the Fourth of July last year, then sickened of putrid fever within a week, Father declared that preaching war went against God's will.

"Old Mrs. Clark sighed. 'You know, Joseph, you'd better think for yourself about what's going on in this world and in your family.'"

"... it gave me a funny feeling to recall the panic in Mrs. McLean's cloud-white face as she mentioned leaving town before it was too late.
Too late for what?"

About this edition

• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0692191461
• ISBN 13: 9780692191460
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 236