Alan Pell Crawford is a cultural dynamo: highly regarded writer, entertaining speaker, and guitarist in a local band called the Ham Biscuits. He’s also been a speechwriter for former New York State Senator James Buckley and congressional press secretary, a PR man, a high-level freelance writer (The New York Times, The Nation, The Washington Post) and these days is promoting his latest book, “This Fierce People: The Untold Story of America’s Revolutionary War in the South” (Knopf). The 400-page book is a tour de force and worthy addition to literary lifeworks including “Twilight at Monticello: The Final Years of Thomas Jefferson,” “How Not to Get Rich: The Financial Misadventures of Mark Twain,” and “Thunder on the Right: The ‘New Right’ and the Politics of Resentment.”
At a recent reading at Fountain Bookstore in Shockoe Slip, Crawford regaled a packed house with tales from “This Fierce People,” assuring listeners he did not break any new ground before telling them things they likely didn’t know.
Revolutionary hero Francis “Swamp Fox” Marion, for instance, was seen by a contemporary as “not larger than a New England lobster,” which is at some variance with his portrayal by actor Leslie Nielsen (later of “Airplane!” and “The Naked Gun” fame) in the Disney series “The Swamp Fox,” which ran from 1959-61. American revolutionaries never called themselves patriots, Crawford added, and – one of his major points – the Revolution was America’s first civil war. He also confessed an early career critic had dismissed him as a “foppish dabbler,” a criticism of Crawford that his audience didn’t seem to take to heart.
Unlike many historians, Crawford doesn’t write for specialists or fellow academics but for the general reader. This account of the Revolution in the South, while deeply sourced, is vivid and memorable. Crawford also has a novelist’s eye for details, some of which are unforgettable.
While most revolution lit focuses on Bunker Hill, Paul Revere, Valley Forge, crossing the Delaware and other northern events, much of the crucial fighting took place in the South, he explains. Most battles were considered skirmishes by the British, often involving less than two or three thousand combatants as compared to European bloodfests like the 1813 battle at Leipzig, “where half-a-million men would fight.”
Which is not to suggest a lack of ferocity, especially when colonists seeking independence clashed with colonists loyal to the Crown. This was, Crawford notes, a civil war in which “neighbors were killing each other with horrifying regularity.” A contemporary wrote that combatants would “pursue each other with as much relentless fury as beasts of prey.” Men and boys who had chosen neutrality were “frequently murdered as they rode along the road.”
This ferocity, Crawford explains, was in part fueled by slavery, which was a constant reminder to colonists seeking independence, whether slaveholders or not, that they did not want to be dominated by the British or anyone else. What was appropriate for slaves was anathema to them. English statesman and writer Edmund Burke put it this way: “In such a people, the haughtiness of domination combined with the spirit of freedom, fortifies it, and renders it invincible.”
“This Fierce People” is brimming with small details that bring the larger story fully to life. War paint used by Native American fighters was sometimes made in Germany and shipped by the British. John Adams characterized Virginia compatriots of Washington and Jefferson as “scrambling for rank and pay like apes for nuts.” Officers surviving on thin rations used hair powder to thicken their soup while Francis Marion, adrift after a shipwreck, was spared starvation when an unfortunate dog swam to his lifeboat and was converted to meat and drink (blood) that kept Marion and fellow castaways alive for six days. Privation was not universal. Benjamin Cleveland, an officer in the North Carolina militia, weighed in at around 450 pounds and died at the breakfast table.
Crawford augments his page-turning talents with insights into the Colonial era’s bloodletting technologies, as befitting a book about war. Many American soldiers were partial to “number 2 goose shot” which at 20 to 30 yards “would tear a man apart.” After the battle of King’s Mountain (in South Carolina) a study of corpses discovered that marksmen on both sides “had killed each other while taking aim: one eye would be open and the other shut, in the usual manner of marksmen when leveling at their object.”
Crawford also reminds us that mayhem was widespread back in the good old days. After a 1780 London riot destroyed a distillery, the “fetid gutters ran with alcohol” that was sopped up by men, women and children, some of whom experienced a fatal last call. “Lurching for more drink too close to the burning buildings, some died in the flames.”
Crawford’s historic outlook also informs his musical life. His band, the Ham Biscuits, plays songs that “are very old,” he says. “Nobody really knows how old ‘St. James Infirmary’ is. And I have an interview in which Jelly Roll Morton (1890 – 1941) tells how he listened to ‘Make Me A Pallet On The Floor’ when he was very young. That interview was recorded sometime around 1938. Almost all the music we play has that folkloric vintage quality.”
Playing in a band gets him away from his desk. “I played guitar from age 11 to 15 or so, then put it up for decades,” the author says. After a trip to New Orleans, where he heard the Preservation Hall Jazz Band perform, he decided he needed to play again. Besides that, he was an extrovert who needed contact, he says.
After meeting singer Solomon Miles at Perly’s Restaurant a few years ago, the band came together with a lineup that includes keyboards, percussion and a trombone player. But Crawford doesn’t sing, he says: “That would be the end of life as we know it.” As for the band’s name, he says he “realized you cannot have a festive occasion in the South without ham biscuits.”
Crawford’s parallel universes sometimes overlap. During a recent Ashland band gig a reader brought along a copy of “This Fierce People” for signing. Fame increasingly dogs him: A couple of days later, while shopping at Advance Auto Parts, a customer pointed at Crawford and said, “Ham Biscuits.”
Dave Shiflett posts his writing and original music at www.Daveshiflett.com
