Each year the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution administers an American Heritage Contest for DAR members to show their talent in the arts, with an annual theme. The 2020 theme was “Rise, and Shine Your Light on Your Revolutionary War Patriot.” Submissions are judged on the follow criteria: Quality of Work, Originality, Incorporation of Theme, and Written Expression of Theme.

Manor House Librarian Aryssa Damron submitted a play titled “Just in Time, Henry Wood” and we are proud of her selection as the 2^nd place National Winner, Drama! Chapter Registrar Serena Bell interviewed Aryssa on her inspiration for the play. [A detailed explanation can be found in an earlier blog post, "Going Back in Time to Meet my Ancestor"].

Serena: Tell me about your DAR Patriot.

Aryssa: My Patriot, Henry Wood, was a Methodist minister in North Carolina. He participated in the battle of Guilford Court House. The Sons of the American Revolution (SAR) honored him with a ceremony several years ago.

Serena: Have you written a play before?

Aryssa: Yes, in college [as an undergraduate at Yale] I competed in a 24-hour play contest—we wrote, directed, practiced and performed a play in 24 hours!

Serena: What inspired you to write this play?

Aryssa: I through of the children’s book “Just in Time, Abe Lincoln” by Patricia Polacco. It centers on two boys who are visiting Gettysburg and get taken back in time to the Civil War. Traveling back in time and meeting my ancestor would be a key element of the show, but I didn’t want to be bound by making myself the main character. Instead, I imagined someone who could be one of my cousins--Penelope Slaughter. Slaughter is a family name, and Penelope actually came, in my mind, from Pennuel, one of the sons of my ancestor, Henry Wood.

Serena: What was the most challenging part of writing this play for the American History contest?

Aryssa: The entry length for the submission! I had a big vision and when I realized the maximum length of eight pages, I had to be more succinct that I had originally planned.

The 2021 American Heritage theme is “Rise, and Shine Your Light on Our House Beautiful.”

Longer paper can be found here.

There were many reasons why British Joint operations in the South failed during the American Revolution from 1778 to 1781, but according to Carl von Clausewitz, “If you want to overcome your enemy you must match your effort against his power of resistance, which can be expressed as the product of two inseparable factors, viz. the total means at his disposal and the strength of his will” (Clausewitz 77). During the Southern campaign, the British’s resources and attentions were not fully devoted to the war in America and the American will to win was greater than British. The Americans were fighting for an ideology—the belief in their freedom and liberty from foreign rule—versus the British who were fighting for power and control over a land thousands of miles away. These reasons, coupled with a breakdown in leadership and vision for the Southern campaign and French involvement in the American Revolution, led to Britain’s ultimate defeat. The British underestimated their adversary’s passion for independence and willingness to have a war of attrition or a protracted war to meet her political ends.

To summarize, the main reasons why the British failed in their Southern Campaign are:

1) While the British would have preferred to commit all resources to squashing the American rebellion, the British faced pressure from the French and the Spanish at home and in more profitable colonies like the West Indies;

2) The resources that the British provided their troops on the ground were limited and resources were very difficult for British troops to secure due to the constant threat of attack by the patriots;

3) The lack of commitment from the Loyalists to fight for the British cause, in addition to the small number of troops who actually joined to fight, led to strong strategic and operational failure for the British forces that they were never able to recover from;

4) The lack of centralized power for British decision-making on logistics, moving resources, and communicating effectively with leaders on the ground;

5) Due to misinformation, bad intelligence and lack of communication between British units, British leadership made terrible decisions regarding their strategic and operational movements.

6) The strength of the American will to fight for sovereignty;

7) Additional French resources and naval power at the end of the war that split British resources and attentions to the profitable West Indies.

In the end, the patriot Americans and the French’s one battle of unified joint operations against the British at Yorktown destroyed the British will to continue the war and quickly after, the British declared the end of the war. The British may have had multiple instances where their joint operations were in sync in the Southern campaign (Charleston as an example), but at the end, the additional French resources and the patriot American’s will for independence lost the British the war. The strategy in the South was based in rationality and with potential to succeed; however, British leaders tasked with making operational and tactical decisions made conclusions based on the best possible outcomes, thus skewing the British’s net assessment of the engagement.

Works Cited

Allison, Robert J. The American Revolution: A Concise History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Carpenter, Stanley D.M. “British Strategic Failure in the Southern Campaign, 1778-1781.” Naval War College Paper, 2008.

Clausewitz, Carl von. On War. Edited by Michael Howard and Peter Paret. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.

Lib. of Cong. U.S. Govt. Web. 5 November 2017. <http://www.loc.gov/>.

Mahan, Alfred Thayer. The Influence of Sea Power Upon History: 1660-1783. New York: Dover, 1987.

O’Shaughnessy, Andrew Jackson. The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution, and the Fate of the Empire. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

Image: “Cow representing English commerce being milked and dehorned by France, Spain, Holland, and the United States while the British lion sleeps, during the American Revolutionary War.” Lib. of Cong. U.S. Govt. Web. 5 November 2017. <http://www.loc.gov/>.

When I was brainstorming for this year’s American Heritage Contest---the theme was “Rise and Shine Your Light on Your Revolutionary War Patriot”--I was initially at a loss. I knew the basics about my ancestor, Rev. Henry Wood of South Carolina. I was never the family genealogist, but I was the family storyteller, and there is where I found my way forward for this year’s contest. Not through a quilt or a costume, a painting or a photograph, but through the pen. Alright...through a keyboard.

Last year, as part of a career goal, I re-read all the picture books of Patricia Polacco, an absolute queen of the genre who writes longer-form pictures books. The story draws you in as much as the picture -- and she can really yank you in. Most of her books make me tear up. While the majority of her books draw on her real-life experiences, I found one book that was different. It was called ‘Just in Time, Abe Lincoln’ and it centered on two boys who are visiting Gettysburg and get taken back in time to the Civil War! As you can guess from the title, President Abe Lincoln narrowly saves the day, and them, and their love of history is cemented forever as they come back to the present day.

As I considered how to use my words to enter this year’s contest -- I did not have the skill set to crochet the likeness of Henry Wood in a blanket or scarf -- I thought of this book immediately. I thought of how fun time travel was, and how I loved to see it used in unique ways.

I’m not an artist though, and so instead of a picture book, I imagined a play. Traveling back in time and meeting my ancestor would be a key element of the show, but I didn’t want to be bound by making myself the main character. Instead, I invented a cousin: Penelope Slaughter. Slaughter is a family name, and Penelope actually came, in my mind, from Pennuel, one of the sons of my ancestor, Henry Wood.

Every story needs an exciting incident, and in the Polacco story, it’s boredom. I wanted something more though. One thing my DAR chapter, Manor House, has never shied away from in our events is letting veterans talk about their experiences today. We’ve hosted groups who help veterans with PTSD and trauma, who help them find jobs after deployments, et cetera. It doesn’t take a brain surgeon to know that veterans today face real issues, and that it’s likely veterans of the past dealt with their own issues. PTSD may be a recent diagnosis, but it’s not a recent phenomenon. That’s when this dual story came to me. I love chiasmic stories -- stories that tell a parallel narrative using separate characters or timelines. Using that literary technique, I imagined my main character Penelope traveling in time to meet her ancestor, Henry, and through speaking with him, she unlocks something about her relationship with her own father, a veteran of Afghanistan.

To weave in some reality to my imagination, I took the biographical data I knew about my ancestors -- names, birthdates, ages after the war, wives and brothers, the battles he fought in. It was all readily available through tombstones, death records, and a commemorative ceremony held for my ancestor by the Sons of the Revolution years ago. It took nothing but a few keystrokes and a Google search to verify the date on which Henry Wood’s daughter Charity was born, and the year his first wife died.

The biggest problem I faced in this contest entry was the limitations on length. 8 pages of a play isn’t much of a play at all, especially when you have to establish two timelines, multiple sets of characters, and build some heft into the emotional moments, but I did what I think was my best. The length is definitely a win for some of the other categories -- a 15-line poem can be cranked out in an afternoon, and could end up being a national winner without taking up a whole page!

As my writing drew to a close, I knew the final moment I wanted, and I hope that the characters’ attempts to “try and understand” not only moves the judges but can inspire me in my continuing service work with veterans of the present. We will never have the same experiences. We can never truly know what they want through, but we can try and understand by listening and researching, and that is what inspired my American Heritage contest entry.

Image: Henry Wood tombstone