At last, a stranger replied, “Watch here an hour, and Major Molineux will pass by.” Robin noticed the stranger’s face painted half black and half red “as if two individual devils, a fiend of fire and a fiend of darkness, had united themselves to form this infernal visage.” Passing through “a succession of crooked and narrow streets,” he became confused and angry when no one would direct him to his kinsman’s mansion. With the major’s patronage, Robin expected to rise quickly in society. The clever son of a country clergyman, he came to seek his celebrated kinsman, Major Molineux, a wealthy gentleman in royal favor. Library of Congress.Ġn a summer evening, a rustic “youth of barely eighteen years” arrived in a seaport capital, “the little metropolis of a New England colony.” Although dressed in homespun and having little money, Robin was handsome, alert, and ambitious. NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, from “My Kinsman, Major Molineux”Īccompanied by musicians, a Patriot mob hauls a tarred-and-feathered Tory in a cart in “The Procession,” a 1795 engraving by Elkanah Tisdale.
May not a man have several voices, Robin,
He previously wrote about Pontiac's War for American Heritage. Taylor is the Thomas Jefferson Professor of History at the University of Virginia, has twice won the Pulitzer Prize for History, and was a finalist for the National Book Award. The book is a sort of "prequel" for Taylor's previous book, T he Civil War of 1812, about the important and under-studied War of 1812. Taylor weaves the perspectives of France, Spain, and the various Native tribes into a sweeping narrative that continues through the period into the early Republic as Jefferson's "empire of liberty" expands to the west and sets the stage for later events. Alan Taylor, in his recent American Revolutions: A Continental History, provides an important international context for the War for Independence, a perspective that is too often lacking in general discussions about the conflict.
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