Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier
Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier
Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier
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Description
Description
The killing of Jane McCrea on July 26, 1777, on the outskirts of a village in the northern Hudson Valley, would unexpectedly rupture the British advance from Canada that was meant to crush the American Revolution in one knockout blow. On that day, twenty-five-year-old McCrea, an unremarkable person preparing for an impending marriage, was assaulted, scalped, and killed by a group of Native Americans in the employ of British general John Burgoyne. Though the murder was but one of many civilian deaths in a fierce war zone, McCrea's killing had far-reaching consequences for each of the three major parties involved in the Northern Campaign of 1777. In America, she became the great cause célèbre of the Revolution, the sympathetic female victim of the war symbolizing the righteousness of The Cause. In Britain, she was a human-rights tragedy that tarnished the polished surface of British honor and galvanized Whig politicians who shouted out her name in Parliament as an example of how low the nation had fallen. For Native peoples, recruited by both the British and the Americans, and caught in the middle of a war staged on ancestral grounds, McCrea's killing was the opening salvo in a vicious chain of bloody retribution that led to the disintegration of the venerable Iroquois Confederacy and the obliteration of Native homelands. After the war, the nightmarish image of a young Jane McCrea slaughtered on the New York frontier would obsess white Americans who came to fear Native peoples as irredeemable savages. Her murder would help justify the expulsion of Indigenous tribes and open the doors for an expansionary United States that was fully intent on transforming the American continent into its own image.
The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier by distinguished historian Paul Staiti undertakes for the first time a comprehensive investigation into McCrea's life, death, and especially her long and strange afterlife. Using both visual arts and written records, the author reassembles the scattered fragments to illuminate a historical terrain long since shrouded in misinformation, mired in controversy, and relegated to mythology. Coming into view is a major portrait of the persons, cultures, actions, and motives that fatally converged on that hot July morning in 1777.
The Killing of Jane McCrea: An American Tragedy on the Revolutionary Frontier by distinguished historian Paul Staiti undertakes for the first time a comprehensive investigation into McCrea's life, death, and especially her long and strange afterlife. Using both visual arts and written records, the author reassembles the scattered fragments to illuminate a historical terrain long since shrouded in misinformation, mired in controversy, and relegated to mythology. Coming into view is a major portrait of the persons, cultures, actions, and motives that fatally converged on that hot July morning in 1777.
About the Author
About the Author
Paul Staiti is the author of Samuel F. B. Morse and Of Arms and Artists: The American Revolution Through Painters' Eyes; the latter was Colonial Dames of America Book of the Year in 2018 and was nominated for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Non-Fiction. He has written on John Singleton Copley, Gilbert Stuart, Winslow Homer, and William Michael Harnett, and has lectured widely at colleges, universities, and museums, including the National Gallery of Art and the Louvre. He holds a PhD from the University of Pennsylvania, has been the recipient of two fellowships from the The Metropolitan Museum of Art and three from the National Endowment for the Humanities. Currently he is Professor of Fine Arts on the Alumnae Foundation at Mount Holyoke College.
Critical Reviews
Critical Reviews
"No historian of early American art has made a single painting speak to us in so many overlapping voices. And the voices force a reconsideration of all the stereotypes we carry back to that time about women, Native Americans, and the war for independence itself. Staiti has both a keen eye for a story and how to tell it."--Joseph Ellis, author of Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation
"Paul Staiti's "The Killing of Jane McCrea" is a masterly, often gripping account of the horrific incident and its long aftermath. McCrea is barely known today, but for a century following her murder, Mr. Staiti notes, every American knew her name."--Wall Street Journal"Paul Staiti's careful examination of the afterlife of the widely publicized 1777 death of a young white woman on the New York frontier at the hands of "Native savages" is both fascinating and comprehensive. The tragedy that inspired John Vanderlyn's famous 1804 painting is only the beginning of a narrative that encompasses subsequent pictorial representations, political commentaries, poetry, and literature on both sides of the Atlantic. Readers will be enlightened and intrigued."--Mary Beth Norton, Mary Donlon Alger Professor of American History Emerita & Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Cornell University
"Hundreds of women, Native and non-Native, were tomahawked and scalped during the border warfare of the American Revolution. None of their deaths demanded the same attention, then or since, as the killing of Jane McCrea. Paul Staiti deftly navigates the evidence and the misinformation surrounding this tragedy, which became a murder mystery, an iconic painting, and a powerful propaganda tool justifying the treatment of Native Americans. The Killing of Jane McCrea provides a revealing account of a young and expansionist nation's need for a usable legend."--Colin G. Calloway, author of The Indian World of George Washington: The First President, the First Americans, and the Birth of the Nation "Expertly researched and narrated, this study demonstrates how a singular act of brutality fueled a multinational war of words, images, and theatrical performances--and helped justify long-lasting violence against Native Americans."--Wendy Bellion, Sewell C. Biggs Chair in American Art History, University of Delaware
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Westholme Publishing
Pub date:
2025-10-31
Length:
272 pages
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