Regarding the Pain of Others in the American Revolution
Under Alien Skies: Environment, Suffering, and the Defeat of the British Military in Revolutionary America by Vaughn Scribner (University of North Carolina Press, 2024)
Reviewed by Matthew J. Sparacio
In May 1776, August Wilhelm Du Roi, a Hessian lieutenant in the Service of the Duke of Brunswick reported a truly terrifying sight: the ocean was on fire. “The sea at night looked like fire,” he noted in his journal, recalling how “sparks would fly” if their vessel cut through waves. “It was like sailing in liquid flame” (29). This was his experience of phosphorescence at sea. During his time fighting for the Crown in the War for Independence, Du Roi was repeatedly awed and frightened by the devastation wrought by illnesses like scurvy, the infinite stretch of uncleared North American forests, the forbidding scale of the Appalachians, and suffocating clouds of insects. He was trapped in what he called a “forlorn country” (90). Under Alien Skies suggests that Du Roi was not alone in his despair. In this short work, Vaughn Scribner argues that the environment contributed more to the British defeat in the American War for Independence than the fighting itself.
The environment – or perhaps better to say the *perception* of the environment – was truly in the eye of the beholder. Scholars of early America have long discussed the diametrically opposed attitudes Europeans held towards the New World Environment. Karen Kupperman’s landmark 1984 article outlined English anxieties about climate, and other scholars, such as Stephen Adams, have offered expanded commentary on the tension between the optimistic Edenic descriptions of North America often found in promotional literature with the alleged hellscapes described by colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The British and German soldiers at the center of Scribner’s analysis expressed this second viewpoint. Their fears were heightened because these folks didn’t know a lick about where they were.
Under Alien Skies gives us an interesting and unusual perspective: that of British soldiers and Hessian mercenaries. It joins the growing literature about the “common” British subject during the American Revolution and War for Independence. This scholarship is less concerned with the colonial Loyalist (sometimes called Royalist) but examines instead British folk from Britain. Scribner’s scholarship fills in an important gap between recent work on British military and political leadership (the case studies, for example, included in Andrew O'Shaughnessy's excellent The Men Who Lost America) and the camp followers (as highlighted by Serena Zabin’s impressive The Boston Massacre: A Family History). Instead, Scribner focuses on the newly arrived troops who were still trying to figure out how to survive in the Americas. And as Scribner notes, many never did.
Scribner offers several vivid examples of British and German fear and awe of the strange and dangerous Atlantic and North American environments (such as the ocean in flames described by Du Roi at the start of this review). But the monotony and doldrums of urban life in colonial North America proved just as dangerous to these soldiers. Scribner is not the first to mention the reactions to and consequences of the piercing cold of North American winters – Jordan Taylor’s 2022 article discussed the implications of climate-induced isolation – but Scribner is the first to examine the harsh winters through the lens of mental health, anguish, and suffering.
This is a work of new military history that eschews the battlefield and the glory associated with it. It follows the important work of Ricardo Herrera on the “Grand Forage of 1778.” It is grounded in, but refuses to romanticize, the typical experience of wartime combatants. Here are soldiers whose lives were defined by “hurry up and wait.” Readers encounter wartime experiences not filled with pulse-pounding drama, but instead – and Scribner does a great job of showing how this is worse – the vampiric doldrums of winter and summer, when the climate and weather sucked away energy, focus, and good health. There is (rightfully so) ample scholarship on the tribulations faced by the Continental Army and militias throughout the war, but Scribner highlights how, at least for those in New York, the winter of 1780 proved especially catastrophic and the stuff of nightmares for British and German soldiers. War, at times, is boring. Boredom can bring its own horrors. And bad weather can make it worse.
Readers follow along the footsteps of these men and families from their muster and deployment to (assuming they survived the war in the colonies) their return home. The environment of war provided many sources of anxiety and suffering. First, the Atlantic passage of these soldiers and their families was unlike anything they’d ever experienced. The roiling Atlantic was uncompromising and, when calm, stretched into a seeming infiniteness that had no parallel to life on land. Once in America, the terrain, flora, fauna, weather, and disease all continuously reminded those in and affiliated with the British military that their strange surroundings were unsafe. Distance from the familiarity of home, the grotesque violence of war, and loneliness weighed heavily on these men’s psyches. Some eventually entertained thoughts of, and practiced, what they called at the time "self-murder.” “Suicides that eluded any obvious cause,” Scribner explains, “demonstrate how the isolated, traumatic, and harsh experiences of waging war” invited these decisions (125). Those who persisted despite these environmental challenges (and patriot-armed resistance) were rewarded with another dangerous Atlantic crossing. And these were not always joyous and happy returns home, as some soldiers proved irrevocably changed by their time in North America.
Under Alien Skies is nominally an environmental history, but it is also very much a transatlantic history of emotions. The study of the American Revolution and the War for Independence needs more of this critical research. The field lags behind U.S. Civil War scholarship in this regard. Nicole Eustace’s landmark Passion is the Gale is the last true work that embraces emotion as a historical framework, and it was published almost twenty years ago. Unlike Eustace, who kept her study limited to Pennsylvania, Scribner studies men and women circulating throughout the Atlantic World. Under Alien Skies provided an opportunity, at the very least, to engage with notions like topofilia, or the emotional bonds between people and their environments, or perhaps consider the limitations of emotional regimes when communities were in motion. Scribner's analysis dances around these concepts but never addresses them. Perhaps he did not have to. In the midst of war, it was the estrangement from their familiar environments that served as the source for many of these soldiers' duress.
Although not neatly situated within the historiography of emotions, Under Alien Skies fits into what we can now confidently say is the “dark turn” in the historiography of the American Revolution and War for Independence, characterized by serious attention to street violence, terroristic activities, physical pain and suffering, psychological trauma, and suicide. This interpretive shift is unfolding about fifteen years after the field of U.S. Civil War studies experienced its own interpretive reckoning. Taking cues from Civil War historians like Diane Miller Sommerville’s Aberration of Mind: Suicide and Suffering in the Civil War–Era South (2018) and Dillon Carroll’s Invisible Wounds: Mental Illness and Civil War Soldiers (2021), Scribner leans heavily on more recent psychiatric and medical studies of Afghanistan and Iraq War soldiers’ struggles with PTSD and mental illness resulting from their miliary service. With Scribner’s framework grounded in history and clinical psychology, we are better able to empathize with soldiers, loyalists, and camp followers ensnared by the war in North America. Historians understand there is always an element of risk here. Are insights anachronistic? Is there a good reason to think that cultural meanings remained static despite their wartime context? These are important questions. But the fact that Scribner began this scholarly conversation and is brave enough to ask these questions is impressive enough.
Scribner reminds us – to borrow the title of another recent contribution to the history of emotions in the U.S. Civil War – that the war for independence was a war fought and felt (and lost) by British and German soldiers. And for a small number of these soldiers, their environment of war proved too much to bear. They took their own lives. It is Scribner’s delicate handling of these tragic examples that marks Under Alien Skies’ most innovative contribution to Revolutionary scholarship. Scribner's work therefore joins T.H. Breen (American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, 2010) and Holger Hoock (Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth, 2017) in moving squarely away from ideological or economic interpretations of the war to highlight the centrality of inequality, suffering, violence, and mental anguish.
This is a rendering of the American Founding at odds with the celebratory narratives being revitalized for the four hundredth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. In Scribner’s work, virtuous principles don’t drive the contingencies of the era. Instead, it is grotesque power struggles and an acknowledgement of the vulnerability of those fighting for Crown or colonies. To be certain, there were those who, during the war, extolled their righteous motivations as so eloquently stated in the preamble of the Declaration. But far more people cared less about the cause of liberty – or the authority of the King in Parliament – than merely surviving.
Rigorously researched, Under Alien Skies is a quick read that offers something for everyone. Although focused on soldiers’ lives and experiences from the eighteenth century, it nonetheless raises several important questions for us today. First, it calls attention to the different attitudes people in the eighteenth century had towards the environment. Unlike today, where hubris overflows in announcement after announcement about the ability to “fix” the climate, people in the past held no such illusion. They did not think they could, at least in the circumstances they found themselves mired in, control the environment. Nor could they get out of its way. They were completely at the mercy of forces beyond their control.
If the natural world is uncompromising on its own, the environment of war must be even more difficult to navigate. Has modernity, as suggested by Susan Sontag, anesthetized us to environments of suffering and war today? Are we simply oversaturated and therefore incapable of regarding the pain of others? How can we process the images and videos documenting the inhumane and brutal occupations of Ukraine or Gaza? How can we respond to the brusque language emanating from the White House since January 2025, with the accusations that American cities are unsafe "war zones” requiring invasion and occupation? Has modernity made us numb to such things?
On a more fundamental level, this book poses an impossible question: what makes us hurt? Physical discomfort? A lack of familiarity with our surroundings? Detachment from our networks and our wider communities? The sense of unfulfillment from performing the necessary work of maintaining and protecting the institutions that structure our everyday lives? If so, we share just as much with the men who lost the Revolution than those who won it.
Matthew Sparacio is a lecturer of colonial and Native American history at Georgia State University. He mostly posts about dogs and pizza on instagram @calumetsncrowns.
