Sophia’s War contains three story threads, two of them as historically accurate as I could write them. The third, and major, thread is my invention.
The first of these stories has to do with the treatment of American prisoners by the British in New York City during the Revolution. While I had known about the notorious prison hulks in Brooklyn’s Wallabout Bay, it was Edwin G. Burrows’s brilliant Forgotten Patriots that provided me with the full depth of misery American prisoners experienced. While Burrows has estimated that some seven thousand died upon the field of battle, he provides good evidence to show that as many as eighteen thousand died in Britain’s New York prisons!
Burrows’s book and bibliographic sources (bibliographies being the amateur historian’s mother lode) offered the kind of detail I have been able to present here. For example, even the name—however ironic—of the prison ship the Good Intent is real.
The other true story is that of British Major John André and General Benedict Arnold. Arnold is America’s most notorious traitor and his story is an event about which much has been researched and written. For example, all the secret letters that passed between Arnold and André may be read in Carl Van Doren’ s Secret History of the American Revolution. I have quoted only a very few of them, but what is here is accurate. Indeed, the depth of research about this affair is so rich, so detailed, that I can write with confidence (for example) that the Cahoon brothers, who rowed André to shore, muffled their oars in sheepskin, that the major gave a sixpence to the boy who directed him to Tarrytown, and that the phases of the moon in the night sky are as they were.
With all the research focused on the André/Arnold story, there are two moments that must be accorded as remarkable coincidences. The first is the driving away of the Vulture, and the second is the presence of John Paulding and his friends near Tarrytown, which allowed the capture of André.
By my reading, there is no convincing evidence as to how and why those things happened. It is here my fiction takes over. Sophia Calderwood is a complete invention, and it is she who links the treatment of prisoners to the capture of André. This tale is Sophia’s story, or, as Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, “There is properly no history, only biography.” Sophia is as true an individual as I could hope to create, and her actions provide an explanation as to what really happened in 1780.
Let it be clear, however, that beyond Sophia and her family, every character in this book is real, be it John André, Robert Townsend, Peter Laune, Dr. Dastuge, or Provost Cunningham.
History provides endlessly amazing stories. Historical fiction, I believe, can illuminate those stories with the ordinary people who make extraordinary history. Or let me put it this way: Truth may be stranger than fiction, but fiction makes truth a friend, not a stranger.
Avi