Neil Goodwin
Thirty people came out on a gray afternoon on Saturday, October 22, to hear this year's J. Robert Maguire lecture. Neil Goodwin spoke about the "shadow war" on the Vermont frontier, borrowing the theme from his recent book, We Go As Captives, an engaging account of the Royalton Raid in 1780, its causes and consequences.
Mr. Goodwin's lecture was engaging, entertaining and helped us understand the turmoil and secret diplomacy that pulsed through the Champlain Valley and the rest of Vermont in the years after Mount Independence fell to the British.
You can listen to the lecture with the sound file in the sidebar.
And for more information about We Go As Captives, we'll take the words from the publisher, The Vermont Historical Society:
The newly released book, We Go As Captives: The Royalton Raid and the Shadow War on the Revolutionary Frontier, is a fast-paced, action-packed history that situates the raid in the broader context of Vermont’s role in the Revolutionary War and the complex relationships among the British and French empires in North America, various Indian nations seeking their own paths through the conflict, and independent-minded residents trying to establish their identity within the emerging American republic.
We Go As Captives revolves around the story of Zadock Steele, a young man who was captured in the attack on Royalton and subsequently wrote about his harrowing experience as a prisoner, first of the Mohawks and then of the British. Barefoot, ill-clothed, at the mercy of people whose language, customs, and tendency toward mayhem were utterly incomprehensible to them, Steele and the other captives were hustled north to imprisonment in Canada. After two years, as Steele’s resignation turned to despair, he and a few comrades, unaware that the war was about to end, executed a daring escape from the infamous Prison Island in the St. Lawrence River.
The J. Robert Maguire lecture is named to honor Bob Maguire of Shoreham, whose great interest and respect for American history moved him to oppose a nuclear power pant planned on the shores of nearby East Creek.