Author: John Rees

John Rees is an independent writer and researcher specializing in the common soldiers’ experience during the War for American Independence, and in North American soldiers’ food from 1755 to the modern era. Since 1986 he has produced over 150 monographs on these subjects. For fifteen years John served as military food columnist for the quarterly newsletter Food History News. He also wrote four entries for the Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink, thirteen entries for the revised Thomson Gale edition of Boatner’s Encyclopedia of the American Revolution, and has contributed to Gastronomica: The Journal of Food and Culture, Military Collector & Historian, Muzzleloader Magazine, and Repast (quarterly publication of the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor). A list of his publications, plus a number of complete works, may be viewed on this website.

Diaries and Journals Posted on

Christmas Day: A Soldier’s Holiday?

Soldiers’ celebrations depended on circumstances, personal beliefs, and family or community traditions. David DeSimone notes in his article “Another Look at Christmas in the Eighteenth Century”: [From the seventeenth century the] celebration of Christmas was outlawed in most of New England. Calvinist Puritans and Protestants abhorred the entire celebration and likened it to pagan rituals […]

by John Rees
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Nineteenth-Century Remembrances of Black Revolutionary Veterans: New Jersey Soldier Oliver Cromwell

Harriet Tubman escaped from slavery in 1849. She became a major conductor on the Underground Railroad, as well as an advocate for Women’s Rights. A year later the Compromise of 1850 included a controversial Fugitive Slave Law that compelled all citizens to help in the recovery of fugitive slaves. Free Blacks formed more Vigilance Committees […]

by John Rees
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Nineteenth-Century Remembrances of Black Revolutionary Veterans: Jacob Francis, Massachusetts Continental and New Jersey Militia

Philadelphia Blacks, under the leadership of well-to-do Robert Purvis, organized the Vigilance Committee to aid and assist fugitive slaves in 1837. Purvis’s wife, Harriett Forten Purvis, the daughter of successful Black businessman James Forten, led the Female Vigilant Society. Robert Purvis was referred to by some as the “President of the Underground Railroad.” Also that […]

by John Rees
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Nineteenth-Century Remembrances of Black Revolutionary Veterans: Edward Hector, Bombardier and Wagoner

Nat Turner launched a bloody uprising among enslaved Virginians in Southampton County in 1831 the same year that William Lloyd Garrison of Boston began publishing The Liberator, the most famous anti-slavery newspaper. In 1833, the American Antislavery Society, led by Garrison, was organized in Philadelphia. For the next three decades, the Society campaigned that slavery […]

by John Rees
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Nineteenth-Century Remembrances of Black Revolutionary Veterans: Thomas Carney, Maryland Continental Soldier

John Russwurm and Samuel Cornish establish the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal, in New York in 1827. The paper circulated in eleven states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe, and Canada. The same year, Sarah Mapps Douglass, a Black educator and contributor to The Anglo African, an early Black paper, established a school for […]

by John Rees
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War as a Waiter: Soldier Servants

In August 1779 Continental army surgeon Jabez Campfield wrote, “How hard is the soldier’s lott who’s least danger is in the field of action? Fighting happens seldom, but fatigue, hunger, cold & heat are constantly varying his distress.” In the same vein, eighteenth century common soldiers spent much more time preparing meals, digging fortifications or […]

by John Rees