Revolution War novels
Historical fiction about the Revolutionary War is a genre of novels that sets invented characters inside the real events of the American Revolution, 1775 to 1783, and measures itself against the source record: diary, letter, muster roll and gazette. On this site the anchor of that shelf is Ann Rinaldi, the American novelist who spent 40 years inside the era and gave the genre 6 published novels, 3 of them set squarely in the war itself: Liberty's Daughters (1992), Brides of the Revolutionary War (1993) and Daughters of the American Revolution (2002). Her method, documented in her own notes and the afterword material of those books, is to pull every date, place and rank back to a written primary source before the story is allowed to move.
What counts as a Revolution War novel
A Revolution War novel is a work of fiction whose plot, characters or both are placed inside the American Revolution, and the 2 strongest tests separate the serious books from the costume novels: the setting must be specific to a year, place and campaign, and the author must leave a visible trail of sources behind it. Rinaldi applies both tests to all 3 of her war novels. Liberty's Daughters opens in 1775 with the first shots at Lexington and Concord and follows 2 women, Hannah and Mercy, from a Massachusetts village into the siege of Boston. Brides of the Revolutionary War moves its characters along the 1776 to 1781 front, from the Delaware crossing to the Southern campaign. Daughters of the American Revolution returns to 1775 in a Pennsylvania Dutch community. By contrast, a novel that merely borrows the era's vocabulary and drops it into an 1820s parlor belongs to a different shelf, however often the two are sold together.
The 3 Ann Rinaldi novels set in the Revolutionary War
The 3 Ann Rinaldi novels set in the Revolutionary War carry their own settings and source bases, and the table below gives each one its year, place and the kind of record behind it.
| Title | Year set | Place set | Source base |
|---|---|---|---|
| Liberty's Daughters (1992) | 1775 | Massachusetts; Lexington, Concord and Boston | Diaries and letters of the 1775 militia and of women in the Boston siege |
| Brides of the Revolutionary War (1993) | 1776 to 1781 | New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the Southern states | March routes, campaign records and contemporary accounts of the crossing and the South |
| Daughters of the American Revolution (2002) | 1775 | Pennsylvania Dutch country | Town records and family papers of the German-American communities of that region |
The 2 women at the center of Liberty's Daughters are the clearest example of the rule: Hannah is a young widow whose household sits on the road between Concord and Boston, and Mercy is the daughter of a loyalist-leaning merchant, a split that the source record of 1775 Massachusetts shows was common enough to shape whole villages. Rinaldi's own notes, shared in her reading and interview material, treat the diary and the letter as the two source types that do the heavy lifting in that book, the diary for daily fact and the letter for the politics of the moment.
From the colonies to the war years: the wider shelf
From the colonies to the war years, the shelf widens in 3 steps: colonial America before the first shot, the war of 1775 to 1783, and the early republic that the war made. Each step has its own strongest titles, and each step carries its own source problem, because the earlier the step, the thinner the written record the novelist has to stand on. In the war years the record is thick, with the papers of the Continental Congress and the army correspondence of 1775 to 1783, so the war books on this shelf can name a specific camp, a specific crossing and a specific day. The colonial books lean on town records, land deeds and family papers, and the early-republic books lean on the new federal record, which is why the 3 steps are harder to blur together than they look on a bookstore shelf.
The sources behind the setting
The sources behind the setting of a Revolution War novel fall into 3 classes, and the class an author reaches for decides what the book can honestly show. The 3 classes are government and military record, private paper, and the secondary scholarship that organizes both.
- Government and military record: the Papers of the Continental Congress, the army correspondence of 1775 to 1783 and the state records of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania.
- Private paper: the diaries and letters of soldiers, wives and shopkeepers, the kind of document that puts a human face on a muster roll.
- Secondary scholarship: the campaign histories and regional studies that tell the novelist which day to set a scene on and which road the army actually took.
Rinaldi's notes treat the private paper as the class that makes the difference between a setting and a story, because it is the only class that records what an ordinary household did on an ordinary day. The secondary scholarship plays a different role: it is the check that keeps the invented detail from contradicting the documented one.
How the settings were researched
To see how the settings were researched, start with the day. Rinaldi's working habit, as she describes it in her notes and reading material, is to pin each scene to a dated document before any scene is written: a letter that names a garrison, a diary that names a weather pattern, a muster roll that names a company. The scene is then built around that anchor, and the invented conversation is allowed only where the record goes quiet. The result is a setting that survives two checks: a reader with a map can test the road, and a reader with the primary source can test the date. That habit is also why her 3 war novels cluster on the years 1775, 1776 to 1781 and 1775, the years where the written record of the colonies and the army is densest.
Where to start reading
Where to start reading depends on the part of the era the reader wants, and the 3 starting points below match each part of the shelf to its strongest book. A reader who wants the war at its opening should start with Liberty's Daughters, because 1775 Massachusetts is the moment the record turns from colony to country. A reader who wants the war as it moved through the middle of the conflict should take Brides of the Revolutionary War, for its 1776 to 1781 sweep from the Delaware to the South. A reader who wants the colonial world on the eve of the war should take Daughters of the American Revolution, for its 1775 Pennsylvania Dutch setting, and a reader who wants the era's breadth on a single shelf should read all 3 in publication order, 1992, 1993 and 2002, which is also the order that lets the settings build on one another.