About This Book

She was stabbed by her drunken husband on a storm-tossed ship in the North Atlantic. She forgave him before she died—and history never recorded her first name. Mrs. Whitlow, wife of a British soldier, is just one of the thousands of women who followed their husbands to war during the American Revolution. These women lived in the barracks and camps and endured the hardships of garrisons and campaigns in an unfamiliar and often hostile land. They faced the challenges with fortitude, proving themselves resourceful, industrious, and intrepid, but their involvement in the conflict that founded the United States has been largely lost to history. Incidents and brief mentions abound in the military writings and iconography of the era, but stories of individual lives are nearly nonexistent, which has caused this large population to be almost entirely overlooked.

Combining archival research with deeply human storytelling, Invisible Lives: British Soldiers’ Wives in the American Revolution by Don N. Hagist brings together, for the first time, the myriad glimpses of these wives to tell the larger story of how they lived, worked, suffered, and survived as women in a foreign war. Drawing on court martial proceedings, muster rolls, marriage licenses, newspaper notices, and rare surviving letters, this meticulously researched work reconstructs the lives of women who were present in every theater of the Revolutionary War. What emerges is a portrait of remarkable resilience. These women crossed oceans, survived sieges, nursed the wounded, and raised children in the chaos of an eighteenth-century war. These many moments come together to provide a more complete and invaluable picture of British soldiers’ wives and their place in the army and the surrounding society. For readers of women’s history, military history, and the American Revolution, this is an overdue and deeply moving reckoning with the lives history had left behind.

DON N. HAGIST is managing editor of the Journal of the American Revolution. An expert on the British army in the American Revolution, he is the author of many books and articles, including Noble Volunteers: The British Soldiers Who Fought the American Revolution;  British Soldiers, American War: Voices of the American Revolution; and The Revolution’s Last Men: The Stories Behind the Photographs. He lives in Providence, Rhode Island.