Each chapter in Victory or Death provides a summary of specific events that were key to the War’s outcome. At the conclusion of every chapter, the author reviews the decisions, for good or ill, that led to the result. For example, he shows that England’s pyrrhic victory at Bunker Hill both raised the morale and preserved the numbers of American combatants, while exposing the danger of British overconfidence.  Making good use of illustrations of the people and places of the American Revolution, Mr. Crowder focuses on these momentous choices made by leaders on both sides:

• Selection of George Washington as America’s Commander-in-Chief
• Britain’s frontal assault on Bunker [Breed’s] Hill
• America’s ill-fated siege of Quebec
• General Howe’s reluctance to finish off the Americans in New York
• Washington’s attack on Trenton
• Britain’s miscues at Saratoga
• Significance of Washington’s Spy Ring
• How decisions about African Americans affected the outcome
• Choices made at Valley Forge to preserve the American army
• The Battle of King’s Mountain
• Appointment of Nathaniel Greene as Commander of America’s Southern army
• Yorktown

Victory or Death concludes with the author’s endnotes, a bibliography, and a detailed index to persons and places. Clearfield Company is pleased to add it to its collection of Revolutionary War titles written by Jack Darrell Crowder.

About the Author: Jack Darrell Crowder is a retired teacher and administrator with forty plus years in the classroom. He holds B.A. and master’s degrees from Texas Christian University and has written twelve books on the American Revolution. He gives talks on the Revolutionary War to school classes, historical societies, and Daughters of the American Revolution chapters.

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Soldiers deserted from all theaters of the Revolution, although roughly as many deserted during the first two years of the war as in the period after June 1777, as the Patriot army became more professionalized. When soldiers ran away, a designated officer placed an advertisement in the local newspaper describing the deserter in considerable detail and offering a reward for his capture. Each ad describes the deserter by physical features, his place of birth or last residence, occupation, company served in, date missing, and other characteristics.

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Under territorial status, the Old Southwest consisted of territory east of the Mississippi, including Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and parts of Louisiana and Florida. Much of this area encompassed lands of the Creek, Cherokee, Choctaw, and Chickasaw Indians. Settlers arriving from the original Colonies were required to obtain passports for passage through Indian country, and after the Revolutionary War, settlers holding land were required to file proof of ownership.

Thus an entire body of records grew up in the pre-statehood period, and this guide starts at the very beginning with a look at the earliest migratory paths and main travel routes through the Old Southwest. In order to locate travelers or settlers on this fast-changing frontier prior to 1820, researchers are told about the major document collections containing public land records and passport and travel documents, compiled at a time when the usual county court records or census records did not exist. Typical records might include names of residents, taxpayers, express riders, petitioners, and Indian interpreters.

In keeping with the Genealogy at a Glance series, this research guide also contains a helpful list of books and articles for further reference, a list of major area libraries, and a list of online sources. In its entirety, it is a four-page distillation of the key ingredients of Old Southwest research, which can be read at a glance and used with total confidence.

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All Tennessee counties are covered, each with pertinent genealogical data such as abstracts of wills and deeds, tombstone inscriptions, marriage records, and sketches of early settlers. The most important records include First Court Records of Washington District, the Marriage Records of Greene, Washington, Jefferson and Knox counties, and Revolutionary Soldiers of Roane County.

“This well-known and well-used book contains a considerable body of genealogical records from most of Tennessee’s counties. . . .it is an extremely valuable tool, primarily for its index, which has one of the best clues to the specific county or counties of Tennessee in which a sought-for family may have lived at one time. No library offering services to Tennessee genealogical researchers should be without it.”–Tennessee Historical Quarterly (Spring 1969).

“It contains a large amount of genealogical and historical data covering not only Tennessee but also the Carolinas, Georgia, Maryland, Virginia and other Southern states.”–“Ansearchin’ News,” Tennessee Genealogical Society, Vol. 16, No. 1, 1969.

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Chief among the families included in this classic multi-family reference are Adams, Alexander, Ambler, Armistead, Ball, Bassett, Blackwell, Bolling, Bouldin, Braxton, Brent, Burwell, Byrd, Carter, Cary, Chilton, Clarkson, Collier, Cooke, Corbin, Creel, Downing, Drake, Duvall, Ferrill, Fishback, Fitzgerald, Fitzhugh, Green, Gwynn, Hammond, Hardy, Harrison, Huddleston, Jennings, Johnston, Keith, Langhorne, Lee, Lightfoot, Marshall, Martin, Mason, Metcalfe, Murray, Neale, Orrick, Parker, Pickett, Raines, Ridgely, Robinson, Scott, Shields, Slaughter, Smith, Steptoe, Stewart, Stuart, Tayloe, Taylor, Turbeville, Washington, Watts, Wright, and Wyatt.

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It is a lesser known fact that there was considerably more intermarriage between Cherokees and Whites than any other tribe, so they have a genealogical significance far out of proportion to their historical numbers. There is also a great deal of genealogical data on the Cherokees, mostly in the form of census records and enrollment records. All of which is to point out the abundance of sources available to Emmet Starr when he came to pen his classic History of the Cherokee Indians and Their Legends and Folklore.

Not to diminish Mr. Starr’s contribution in writing about the early Cherokees, their constitution, treaties with the federal government, land transactions, school system, migration and resettlement, committees, councils, and officials, religion, language, and culture, and a host of other topics upon which he writes eloquently, but his stated purpose in writing the History was “to make it as near a personal history and biography of as many Cherokees as possible.” And in fact more than half the book is devoted to genealogies and biographies, of which there are several hundred. The biographies in particular, each averaging a paragraph or more, are noteworthy for their focus on the genealogical events of birth, marriage, and death over a period of several generations, naming thousands of related individuals in a classic roll-call of family members.

Although written in 1921, Starr’s pioneering work has never been superseded, and we are delighted to make it available to a new generation of researchers.

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