I HAVE WRITTEN THIS STORY DOWN IN THE YEAR 1826, ON THE fiftieth anniversary of the founding of our nation, to commemorate the short life of my brother Samuel Meeker, who died forty-seven years ago in the service of his country. I am sixty-four. Although I hope to go on living in health for some time yet, the major portion of my own life is spent. It has been a happy life, and successful, for the most part.
I no longer live in Redding. After Sam’s death I hated the place and wanted to go away; but the war went on for almost three more years, and while the fighting was on it was difficult to think of building a new life in another place.
For the first few months after Sam’s death I was not able to do much more than my basic chores. But time heals wounds, and by the next fall I had become used to the ache in my heart, and I began to think about what I should do with my life. I started to make a study of calculating and surveying with Mr. Heron who was kind and didn’t charge me for lessons. When the war finally ended Mother and I sold the tavern and moved out to Pennsylvania where new lands were opening up and surveyors were much in demand. After moving around a bit we finally settled in the town of Wilkes-Barre. We built a tavern there, and I began buying and selling land. With the profits from this activity I built a saw mill, and then a store to go along with the tavern, and then I joined with some other men to found a bank. I married and had children, and with work and God’s will I prospered, so that I am able today to enjoy my children, my grandchildren, my orchards and my gardens in peace and comfort.
Mother never really got over Sam’s death. She kept to her vow, and so long as the war went on she refused to serve Continental officers. I had to do it myself. She lived to a ripe old age and even at the end she would frequently speak of him in conversation or tell stories about his headstrong ways to my children. But she was tough in spirit, she survived to enjoy her grandchildren and her new life. She left her mark on the history of our country.
It will be, I am sure, a great history. Free of British domination, the nation has prospered and I along with it. Perhaps on some other anniversary of the United States somebody will read this and see what the cost has been. Father said, “In war the dead pay the debts of the living,” and they have paid us well. But somehow, even fifty years later, I keep thinking that there might have been another way, beside war, to achieve the same end.
HISTORIANS HAVE A GREAT MANY WAYS OF FINDING OUT what happened in the past and why, but they cannot find out everything. In writing this book we have stuck to history as closely as we could, but of course we have had to make a good deal of it up. The town of Redding, Connecticut, is real, and existed in those days exactly as we have described it—at least insofar as we know. The house we have called the Meeker tavern is still there, at the southeast corner of the junction of Route 58 and Cross Highway. The church burned down and another was built on the site in1833. In the churchyard you can find the gravestones of various members of the Heron and Meeker families.
General Putnam’s Redding encampment is now known as Putnam Park. A few huts have been rebuilt to show how they were in the old days, and if you ever go there, you can see the slope where somebody might have slipped down from stump to stump, although today it is overgrown with trees again.
Many of the people were real, too. General Israel Putnam was a famous American patriot, the tough-minded, loyal, brave kind of man we have described him as. Colonel Read was also a real person, and did the sort of things we had him do in this book. Tom Warrups was real, and really lived in a hut such as we have described up behind Colonel Read’s house. Ned, the slave, was real, and he died exactly as we have described it. William Heron was a real but somewhat mysterious figure in history. It appears that he was working for the Americans as well as the British. At the least he must have been a double agent, but historians are not sure exactly what role he played in the war. Captain Betts, Daniel Starr, Amos Rogers, little Jerry Sanford, the minister John Beach—these, too, were real people. And they lived and died just as we have told it here.
Of course the exact things that we have had these people do and say in this book are fictitious. We have tried to make them act as we believe they would have acted under these circumstances, but we are only guessing.
What about the Meekers? There was a Meeker family in Redding, who owned the mill down by the Aspectuck River, where Jerry and Tim went fishing for shad. You can find the spot near where Meeker Hill crosses the river. But we don’t know much more about the Meekers than that. Essentially, we have made them up—Tim, Sam, and their mother and father. Betsy Read, too, we made up. We have been as careful as we could to make sure that they did the kinds of things they would have done in those days. However, we have used modern language in telling the story. Partly this was to make the story easier to read; but mainly it is because nobody is really sure how people talked in those days.
What about the story itself? The main historical incidents are all real, except of course for the part the Meeker family played in them. Yale students did rush away to get weapons and join the war in 1775. The Rebels did come through Redding and collect people’s weapons, because Redding really was a strong Tory town. The trip across to Verplancks Point was invented, but Verplancks Point was real—you can visit the town of Verplanck today—and people did make the sort of trip that the Meekers made. Furthermore, cow-boys such as we described were stealing cattle and robbing people. The British raid on Redding under General Tyron really happened just as we have told it. The Rebel messenger was shot, and the fighting at Daniel Starr’s house, according to eye-witness reports, occurred in the way we described it, including the beheading of Ned. Moreover, Captain Betts, Mr. Rogers, Jerry Sanford and some others were later released, but Jerry Sanford died in a prison ship sometime afterwards.
Of course there was no execution of Sam Meeker, because Sam didn’t really exist. Sadly, however, the butcher, Edward Jones, and a seventeen-year-old soldier named John Smith were executed by Putnam very much as we have described the death of Sam Meeker. The eye-witness reports on the event are somewhat contradictory, so we cannot be sure of all details, but we have taken the execution of Sam Meeker as much as possible from the shooting of the real John Smith. The place where it happened is still known as Gallows Hill.
And so that leaves one last question: Could the United States have made its way without all that agony and killing? That is probably a question that you will have to answer for yourself.
Much of our research was done among old documents at the Connecticut State Library in Hartford, if you have any interest in finding out more of the real details behind this book and the Revolutionary War in general, here is a list of books which you might find useful:
The American Heritage Book of the American Revolution
DON HIGGINBOTHAM, The War of American Independence
JOSEPH HOYT, The Connecticut Story
CHARLES BURR TODD, The History of Redding, Connecticut
ALBERT VAN DUSEN, Connecticut
CHRISTOPHER WARD, The War of the Revolution
AFTER WORDS™
JAMES LINCOLN COLLIER & CHRISTOPHER COLLIER’S
My Brother Sam Is Dead
CONTENTS
About the Authors
Q&A with Christopher Collier
My Brother Sam Is Dead Timeline
Revolutionary Games
After Words™ guide by Christopher Hardin
About the Authors
James Lincoln Collier and Christopher Collier are brothers who have coauthored eight historical novels for young adults, including The Bloody Country, Who is Carrie?, and With Every Drop of Blood, and who have also cowritten dozens of non-fiction books. The brothers grew up in Garden City, New York, and Wilton, Connecticut. The Colliers were a family of writers and teachers—their father, Edmund, was an editor and author of a number of children’s books about the Old West, and their mother, Catherine, was a teacher.
James Lincoln Collier began his career as a magazine editor who wrote part time. In
1958, James quit his staff job to write full time, and in 1965 he published his first book, Battleground: The United States Army in World War II. This nonfiction book for young people explained important military maneuvers conducted during World War II. Since then, James has written or cowritten more than thirty books for young people, ranging from humorous novels to historical fiction and non-fiction to books about music and musicians. James’s books have won numerous prizes, including the Newbery Honor (for My Brother Sam Is Dead), the Child Study Association’s Best Book Award, the Jane Addams Peace Prize, and the Christopher Award. His work has also twice been a finalist for the prestigious National Book Award. James is the father of two grown children and the grandfather of four. He and his wife live in New York City and have a country home in Pawling, New York.
Christopher Collier went to Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he earned his Bachelor of Arts degree in 1951. After two years of service in the armed forces, he went to Columbia University, where he earned his master’s degree in 1955, and went on to become a history teacher for more than forty-five years. While a history teacher at junior and senior high schools, he was inspired to write historical novels. However, it wasn’t until after he had earned his doctorate at Columbia and began teaching history at the college level that Christopher convinced his brother James to collaborate with him on a historical novel for young people. The result of that first collaboration was My Brother Sam Is Dead.
While Christopher is primarily the researcher of the books and James is the writer, Christopher is a writer in his own right. As a former professor and historian, Christopher has written many scholarly articles and books. In addition to winning the Newbery Honor and other awards for books he has written with his brother, Christopher has won high praise for some of his own books. One of these, Roger Sherman’s Connecticut: Yankee Politics and the American Revolution, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for distinguished achievement in literature. A father of three and grandfather of four, Christopher Collier lives with his wife in Orange, Connecticut.
Q&A with Christopher Collier
Q: What inspired you and your brother to begin writing?
A: Well, I was teaching eighth-grade history and a lot of my students found the textbooks boring. It seemed like they’d forget the information as soon as they read it. I thought the idea of a historical novel was interesting—to write an exciting work on an emotional level with history still inside. I proposed the idea to my brother James (who had written a novel) and he agreed.
Q: How is it writing with a sibling?
A: We’ve written eight historical novels, a twenty-three volume set on American history, and a history of the U.S. Constitution together. And the way that we’ve done this is that we actually never work together! For each book, we do our own work apart from each other. We each have our own focus—I know history and James knows novels. Therefore, I do the historical research and provide an episode-by-episode outline of the storyline. From me, James gets a huge amount of material and historical research—what the weapons were like, how the wagons looked, the colors of uniforms, etc. With this, James then writes the novel. And from that point, it goes back and forth between us, with each revising the other’s work. For example, he may change the storyline that I initially provided. So the novel that is finally finished is from the pen of one individual, not from the both of us.
Q: Is there any similarity between the relationship of Tim and Sam to that between you and James? Any sibling rivalry?
A: Not really. We’ve always been sibling rivals, but nothing serious, only jocular rivalry, really. I guess I’ve identified more with Tim because I’m the younger brother, but I’ve never asked James if he identifies more with Sam.
Q: My Brother Sam Is Dead is very focused on family. What was your family like growing up?
A: That’s an interesting question, and one I’ve never been asked before. Due to their own destinies, the Meekers fell apart, but not into companionship. In my own family there are three siblings—me, James, and a younger sister who lives in Taos, New Mexico. We’re all very companionable—friends—but we’re not cohesive. For example, we’re not together during the holidays. Our parents taught us to be very self-reliant and independent. There was a lot of financial need when we were growing up, and at the age of ten or eleven I had my first job. For most of my high school years I worked for our father, who had a tree surgery business.
Q: Was the setting of My Brother Sam Is Dead based on your childhood?
A: Yes, we grew up in Wilton, Connecticut. We moved there when I was eight and my brother was ten.
Q: For My Brother Sam Is Dead, how did you decide on the theme of the Revolutionary War?
A: The first thing I thought was that if you are going to ask someone to read a whole book, it had better be important. And the Revolutionary War is one of the three or four most important events that has happened in the United States, and many think the most important. Another factor was that I had finished a dissertation about the Revolution in Connecticut, so I knew a lot about it. A third thing is that writing about wars is literarily rich and exciting, while, at the same time, you are able to remain factual. With a wartime novel you can more easily create a page-turning narrative. Finally, we first published the book in 1974, recognizing that the American Bicentennial was on the horizon in 1976.
Q: As you said, My Brother Sam Is Dead was published in 1974. That was also a time directly following the Vietnam War. Do you think that had any impact on your work?
A: For the text itself, it didn’t really have a specific impact, because my information was based on my written dissertation which I had been working on since 1958. What may have been influenced by Vietnam was the reception the book got by teachers who were impacted by the Vietnam experience. Therefore, the reception it received was supported in part by the “Vietnam syndrome.” Consider a previous children’s novel about the Revolutionary War, Esther Forbes’s Johnny Tremain (the 1944 winner of the Newbery Medal). Johnny Tremain provides a simple interpretation of the Revolution that puts it into easy categories of “good” versus “bad.” That novel came into the marketplace during World War II, which was a nationally popular war during a patriotic time in our country. However, that book shows the war in a way it didn’t really run. The Revolutionary War was both a revolution and a civil war. We wanted to write a version of the Revolutionary War that was historically sound, thus providing elements of both civil and revolutionary war, in which America could be honestly portrayed as divided.
Q: As you say, your book is notable for presenting the Revolutionary War in a very impartial manner—showing the faults of both the British and the Americans. How intentional was that?
A: It was very intentional. The Revolutionary War is part of the historical myths that Americans believe. One of the reasons for writing this book was to undermine that myth and bring the real story †o these kids. If the first impression of the Revolution that a ten- or eleven-year-old has is reading this book, it is significant.
Q: The book is filled with a kind, of dark irony—Life, the father, being killed in a British prison ship and Sam being killed by the Continental Army. Could you talk about that?
A: The irony is clearly intentional and runs throughout the book. Indeed, irony is important from the first scene, where Sam tells his family that he is going to kill Lobsterbacks and Timmy notices that Sam himself is wearing red.
Q: Did you hesitate about making the novel so dark, especially for younger readers?
A: Well, one thing is that when we wrote the book we intended it for seventh or eighth graders, like the age of the students I taught. However, most schools’ curriculum has the Revolutionary War being taught in the fifth grade, so that’s when our book gets read. When writing the book, I would tell James to lighten things up. I think in the original version, James had Timmy’s mother become an alcoholic, and I told him to take most of that out. I thought, Hey, James, it’s dark enough. But remember that the 1970s w
as a pretty dark time already, and the book reflects those times. Perhaps the book was more acceptable during that time than during the Reagan era or at the present moment. Would it win prizes today? I don’t know. On the other hand, it should speak to Americans today, because we’re making the same mistakes now that we made in Vietnam, and we have a need for heroes—someone for people to look up to. It’s too bad that our political system is such that anyone running gets attacked, and the public perception is that everyone in public office is a scoundrel. I wish George Bush would have read the book.
Q: What other lessons do you want a reader to get out of the book?
A: I want a reader to understand the complicatedness of the Revolutionary War. Maybe there was as much bad as good that came of it, especially if one considers the Meekers. I think any book that deals honestly with war will be antiwar, because any book that glorifies war isn’t telling the truth.
Revolutionary Games
Play Duck on the Rock!
For an up-to-date version of a game that Tim played, try this version of the game Duck on the Rock. For this game, you’ll just need a couple of friends and an equal number of hand-sized beanbags or hacky-sacks. Place one player’s bag on a slightly large object that is waist high or taller (you could use a large rock, tree stump, mailbox, etc.). This player’s beanbag is called “the Duck.” Now, all the players stand in a line several feet away and toss their beanbags at the Duck, trying to knock it off. When it falls, all the players who have tossed their beanbags run to retrieve them before the Duck’s owner can place his or her beanbag back on the Rock and tag another player. If another player is tagged, then he or she becomes the Duck.
My Brother Sam is Dead Page 15