Benson John Lossing

It was by the placid waters of the Chesapeake Bay that some of the most dramatic scenes of the Revolutionary War were played out, paving the way for the birth of a new nation. In Virginia and Maryland, the struggle for independence from Great Britain was finally won at battlefields and towns that stretch from Annapolis to the Shenandoah Valley. In 1848, New Yorker Benson J. Lossing embarked on a two-year trek that covered thousands of miles through the original thirteen states and Canada. His mission was to collect and preserve the stories of the men and women who had fought to make the United States a reality. His original work was published in 1850, consisting of two illustrated volumes comprising over 2,000 pages of first-hand history. In this edition, we have excerpted the chapters that deal with the war in Virginia and Maryland (including West Virginia, Washington, D. C., and the Albemarle region of North Carolina). It was the scene of some of the war's hardest fights. Williamsburg... Richmond... Fredericksburg... Spencer's Ordinary... Mount Pleasant... Blue Licks...the Battle of the Capes... Yorktown... Norfolk...these are all places where the drama of the American Revolution was played out. Benson J. Lossing tells the stories of the heroes and villains of the war from the accounts of the people who were there. The book includes illustrations of the people and places that played such a big role in our nation's founding, but that too often have been lost to the passing of time. Lossing's account also tells the stories of Jamestown and the English settlements at Roanoke. His descriptions of the trip he took to gather the stories in this book are also a remarkable portrait of what America was like in the decade before our nation's second crucible by fire - the Civil War.