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Public-domain ebook sourced from Project Gutenberg #49351.
Benson John Lossing’s The Pictorial Field‑Book of the Revolution is a hybrid of travelogue, illustrated history and reference work. In the opening pages he explains that his aim is to fuse a personal pilgrimage across the “important localities of the Revolution” with a factual account of the war, arranging the material according to the order in which each site was visited rather than strict chronology. He recounts an eight‑thousand‑mile trek through the former Thirteen States and Canada, gathering sketches, relics and eyewitness notes, and promises an analytical index to help readers navigate the fragmented narrative. The book therefore offers a geographically grounded portrait of the conflict, enriched by engravings of battlefields, forts and landscapes as they appeared in the mid‑19th century.
The prose is earnest and didactic, reflecting the mid‑1800s American historiographical style that prized diligent research and patriotic purpose. Lossing’s voice is that of a meticulous chronicler who balances admiration for his subjects with a critical eye, often invoking classical allusions and poetic language. Readers who enjoy richly illustrated surveys, antiquarian travel narratives, or scholarly yet accessible treatments of the Revolutionary era will find this volume rewarding, especially those interested in the physical sites that shaped the birth of the United States.
The opening · free to read
As my journey was among scenes and things hallowed to the feelings of every American, I felt a hope that a record of the pilgrimage, interwoven with that of the facts of past history, would attract the attention, and win to the perusal of the chronicles of our Revolution many who could not be otherwise decoyed into the apparently arid and flowerless domains of mere history. I accordingly determined to make the record of the tour to the important localities of the Revolution a leading feature in the work. Here another difficulty was encountered. So widely scattered are those localities, and so simultaneous were many of the events, that a connected narrative of the journey must necessarily break up the chronological unity of the history, and, at times, produce some confusion. To give incidents of the journey, and sketches and descriptions of the scenery and relics as they appear at present, in fragmentary notes, would deny to the work the charm of a book of travel, and thus almost wholly remove the prime object in view in giving such narrative. The apparently less objectionable course was chosen, and the history was broken into fragments, arranged, in the exhibition, in accordance with the order in which each locality was visited, the fragments individualized as much as possible, yet always maintaining a tie of visible relationship with the whole. The apparent difficulties in the way of the student which this plan suggests, are removed by the aid of a complete Analytical Index at the close of the work, while the narrative of the tour remains unbroken, except by the continually recurring appendices of history. How far this arrangement shall accomplish the desired result the candid judgment of the reader must determine.
To collect the pictorial and other materials for this work, I traveled more than eight thousand miles in the Old Thirteen States and Canada, and visited every important place made memorable by the events of the war; yet, in all that long and devious journey, through cities and villages, amid mountains and vast pine forests, along rivers and over fertile plantations, from New England to Georgia, with no passport to the confidence, no claim to the regard of those from whom information was sought, except such as the object of my errand afforded, and communing with men of every social and intellectual grade, I never experienced an unkind word or cold repulsion of manner. On the contrary, politeness always greeted my first salutation, and, when the object of my visit was announced, hospitality and friendly services were freely bestowed. Every where the memorials of our Revolution are cherished with devotional earnestness, and a feeling of reverence for these things abounds, though kept quiescent by the progressive spirit of the age. To those who thus aided and cheered me in my enterprise, I here proffer my sincere thanks. I can not name them all, for they are too numerous, but they will ever remain cherished "pictures on memory's wall."
It has been said that "diligence and accuracy are the only merits which a historical writer may ascribe to himself." Neither labor nor care has been spared in the collection of materials, and in endeavors to produce a work as free from grave errors as possible. It has imperfections; it would be foolish egotism to assert the contrary. In the various histories of the same events many discrepancies appear; these I have endeavored to reconcile or correct by documentary and other reliable testimony; and if the work is not more accurate than its predecessors, it is believed to be equally so with the most reliable. Free use has been made of the available labors of others in the same department of literature, always accrediting the source from whence facts were derived. I have aimed to view men and events with an impartial eye, censuring friends when they deserved censure, and commending enemies when truth and justice demanded the tribute. The historical events recorded were those of a family quarrel concerning vital principles in jurisprudence; and wisely did a sagacious English statesman console himself, at the close of the war, with the reflection, " We have been subdued, it is true, but, thank Heaven, the brain and the muscle which achieved the victory were nurtured by English blood; Old England, upon the Island of Great Britain, has been beaten only by Young England, in America." .
In the pictorial department, special care has been observed to make faithful delineations of fact. If a relic of the Revolution was not susceptible of picturesque effect in a drawing, without a departure from truth, it has been left in its plainness, lor my chief object was to illustrate the subject, not merely to embellish the book. I have endeavored to present the features of things as I found them, whether homely or charming, and have sought to delineate all that fell in my way worthy of preservation. To do this, it was necessary to make the engravings numerous, and no larger than perspicuity demanded, else the work would be filled with pictures to the exclusion of essential reading matter.
The plans of military movements have been drawn chiefly from British sources, for very few were made by the engineers in the Continental service. These appear to be generally pretty correct, so far as they represent the immediate movements of the armies in actual conflict; but the general topographical knowledge possessed by those engineers, was quite defective. I have endeavored to detect and correct their inaccuracies, either in the drawings or in the illustrative descriptions.
With these general remarks respecting the origin and construction of the work, it is submitted to the reading public. If a perusal of its pages shall afford as much pleasure and profitable knowledge as were derived from the journey and in the arrangement of the materials for the press, the effort has not been unfruitful of good results. With an ardent desire that it may prove a useful worker in the maintenance and growth of true patriotism.
Far o'er yon azure main thy view extend,
Where seas and skies in blue confusion blend..
Lo, there a mighty realm, by Heaven design'd,
The last retreat for poor, oppress'd mankind;
Form'd with that pomp which marks the hand divine,
And clothes yon vault, where worlds unnumber'd shine.
Here spacious plains in solemn grandeur spread;
EVERY nation eminent for its refinement, displayed in the cultivation of the arts, had its heroic age; a period when its first physical and moral conquests were achieved, and when rude society, with all its impurities, was fused and refined in the crucible of progress. When civilization first set up its standard as a permanent ensign in the Western hemisphere, northward of the Bahamas and the great Gulf, and the contests for possession began between the wild Aborigines, who thrust no spade into the soil, no sickle into ripe harvests, and those earnest delvers from the Old World, who came with the light of Christianity to plant a new empire and redeem the wilderness by cultivation, then commenced the heroic age of America. It ended when the work of the Revolution, in the eighteenth century, was accomplished; when the bond of vassalage to Great Britain was severed by her colonies, and when the thirteen confederated States ratified a federal Constitution, and upon it laid the broad foundation of our Republic.
Those ancient civilizations, registered by the stylus of history, were mere gloamings of morning compared with the noontide radiance which now lights up the Western World; and even the more modern nations of Europe, brilliant as they appear, have so many dark spots upon the disk of their enlightenment, that their true glory is really less than that of the waxing Star in the West. These ancient and modern civilizations, now past or at their culminating points, were the results of the slow progress of centuries; the heroic age {xvi}of America, meteor-like, was brilliant and rapid in its course, occupying the space of only a century and a half of time from the permanent implanting of a British colony, weak and dependent, to the founding of our government, which, like Pallas Athena, was, at its birth, full panoplied, strong, eminently individual in its character, and full of recuperative energies. The head of Britannia was cleft by the Vulcan of the Revolution, and from its teeming brain leaped the full-grown daughter, sturdy and defiant.
Long anterior to the advent of Europeans in America, a native empire, but little inferior to Old Rome in civilization, flourished in that region of our continent which now forms the southwestern portion of the Republic. The Aztec empire, which reached the acme of its refinement during the reign of Montezuma, and crumbled into fragments when Cortez dethroned and murdered that monarch, extended over the whole of Central America: and when 1521. the Spaniards came it was gradually pushing its conquests northward, where all was yet darkness and gloom. To human apprehension, this people, apparently allied by various ties to the wild nations of North America, appeared to be the most efficient instruments in spreading the light of civilization over the whole continent; yet they were not only denied this glorious privilege, but, by the very race which first attempted to plant the seeds of European refinement in Florida and among the Mobilian tribes, and to shed the illumination of their dim Christianity over the dreary regions of the North, was their own bright light extinguished. The Aztecs and their neighbors were beaten into the dust of debasement by the falchion blows of avarice and bigotry, and they form, apparently, not the most insignificant atom of the chain of events which connects the history of the empires of the Old World with that of our Republic.
It is believed that, two hundred years before the Aztecs subdued the more ancient people of the Mexican valley and founded Tenochtitlan, a handful of rough, half-civilized adventurers from the wintery shores of Iceland and the neighboring main, driven by adverse winds they knew not whither, touched upon the bleak shores of Labrador, and traversed the American continent southward as far as Rhode Island, and, it may be, the capes of Virginia. These supposed first modern discoverers of America were the children of the "mighty sea kings" of the Teutonic romances-the Scandinavian reguli, who, scorning to own Gorm the Old of Norway, and Harold Fairhair of Denmark, their conquerors, as masters, forsook their country and colonized Iceland, Greenland, Shetland, and the Orkney Islands, whence they sent forth piratical expeditions, which became a terror to Western Europe. They traded as well as plundered, and by commerce and conquest became potential. Every coast was visited by their squadrons, either for war or traffic. They swept over Denmark and Germany, and by conquest obtained possession of the best portions of Gaul. They invaded the British Islands, and placed the renowned Canute upon the throne of Alfred. Long before Christianity had shed its genial rays over their frozen territory of the North, and banished the barbarous rites of Pagan worship, the lamp of learning had been
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