Book Reviews: "The Wedding Gift and Other Stories" by Thomas H. Raddall

Tarleton's corps was famous, of all the loyalist troops the most dashing, the best led, the most relentless, and, therefore, the most hated by the rebels.

Thomas Raddall was a Nova Scotia novelist/historian whose books, both fiction and nonfiction, are almost exclusively set in his home province. The Wedding Gift and Others is one of several collections of short stories inspired by the history of Nova Scotia from the French and Indian Wars to the aftermath of the Great War.

Several of the stories feature former members of the British Legion, who homesteaded after the war in what would eventually become Canada. Raddall explores the trials and triumphs of exiled Loyalists from the perspective of a fictional Legion officer, a former planter from the South Carolina Upcountry named Sumter Larrabee. The first story in the cycle, "A Harp in the Willows," begins when Larrabee, other survivors of the Legion, and their families arrive on the rocky shore of Nova Scotia. Newly released from internment in New York, they are woefully unprepared to face the winter that is almost upon them. Their first months in the province are brutal -- fatal for many -- and finish with a disaster that finally breaks them as a unit and scatters individual troopers from New Brunswick to the West Indies.

Behind those grim visitors who walked like cavalrymen and talked like negroes was all the bitterness of a civil war in which they had risked everything on the losing side. For two years since the surrender at Yorktown they had eaten out their hearts in captivity or as refugees in New York, watching from that distance the confiscation of their estates and properties by "patriot" committees eager for plunder, knowing that any man who had fought for the king could look for no hope or mercy within the confines of the victorious states.

Other stories in the cycle tell of Larrabee's later life as he makes a home for himself in the province, and the adventures of his descendants -- generations of hardy sea captains, privateers and footloose adventurers -- down to Miss Letty, the charming, sharp-witted old school teacher who is the last of his name. In nearly every story, Raddall manages to work in some vignette, flashback or mention of the Legion, and the pride that Nova Scotians take in their loyalist ancestry.

Curiously, "Harp" is an almost direct fictionalization of a paper Raddall presented to the Nova Scotia Historical Society. At times you even catch him re-using his own sentences. In his stories, the real-world Port Mouton becomes Port Gambier, while nearby Liverpool, Nova Scotia, presumably served as the model for Oldport. He does the same with some -- but only some -- of the people. In another story in the arc, "The Sword of Justice," Knyphausen (who died in Nova Scotia) is mentioned under a fictional name, whereas Colonel Mollison retains his own in "Harp." So does Banastre, of course, and various other background figures such as Governor Legge. Historical events are generally presented quite accurately. I can't imagine why he chose to do it that way, and it does get a bit confusing if fiction and history are inclined to run together in your memory.¹

A pity Tarleton wasn't there. Then if ever they needed his infectious young laugh, his large daring eyes ... his headlong courage. But Tarleton had gone to England to write his story of the Southern campaign with a pen as reckless, as unsparing as his sword; and there he stayed, the finest British leader of light troops in his day, wasted in sour memories, and women and wine and Parliament.

Raddall's stories first appeared in the 1930s and '40s in a variety of magazines from Blackwood's to Saturday Evening Post. Later, they were collected in this anthology and two or three others, such as At the Tide's Turn and Others. Raddall's fiction is often overly sentimental -- hardly surprising, given when it was written -- and shows its age badly at times, but in general it is folksy and charming, written in an anecdotal style that begs to be read aloud.

Above all, it makes a delightful change-of-pace to see the Legion written about in friendly terms. Predictably for a Canadian author, he neither presents the loyalist cause as overwhelmingly good -- he has some cutting remarks for "fair weather" loyalists who abandoned the lower colonies to avoid their debts, in the hopes of living off the Crown in exile -- nor demonizes the rebels, except through the subjective and bitter memories of the men they drove into exile. "The Passing Show" even provides an ironic end-note to Sumter Larrabee's personal war with the lower colonies. As a man well settled and prosperous in the new life that was forced upon him, he finally makes peace with the concept of the United States by ordering the ships in the harbor to drop their flags to half-mast in tribute to the death of George Washington.

History, most of it rebel-contemporary and bigoted, has said many things of Tarleton's men; but history has missed the story of their last and greatest battle together, where their courage, endurance, unselfishness, and discipline shine like stars.

My favorites among the stories are "A Harp in the Willows" (from which all the quotes here are taken) and the humorous "Memorial to Miss Letty," which tells of the last Larrabee's campaign to fund the raising of a monument to her privateering ancestors. (If Nova Scotia delights in its loyalist heritage, it takes equal pride in generations of bluenose privateers who were "feared and respected all the way from Cape Cod to the Spanish Main.")

On the last day, with an assortment of shipping lying in the bay and the ships' boats taking off women and children, the men of Tarleton's Legion formed up on the beach for their last parade, in orderly ranks, in their separate units, cavalry and infantry, the caricature of a once-smart corps with their ragged and patched green uniforms, their broken boots, their scorched beards and haggard faces. Their backs were to the sea, their eyes toward the black desert of the hillside and the mute rows of chimneys. ... There was a silence. Then Colonel Mollison pulled off his hat and called a hurrah for the King. They gave it, a shout that rang around the bay. And they gave a cheer for Mollison himself, and another for Banastre Tarleton, across the sea in England.

Raddall is also the author of several novels, though as far as I know, none of them feature Legion characters. At least one, His Majesty's Yankees, takes place during the Revolution. He is also the author of academic papers on loyalist settlements in Canada generally, and the Legion in particular, which appeared in venues such as the publications of the Nova Scotia Historical Society.

But the thing that wrings your heart at Port Gambier is the cemetery they left behind, a pathetic group of low mounds in the pasture-land between the railway and the road. They're marked with chunks of field-stone, all unlettered but one, a polished slate slab brought from a distance -- Halifax perhaps -- and the epitaph all gone but 'Born 1758' and at the bottom 'A True Friend Lies Buried Here' -- as if Britannia herself had put it there, purposely without a name, to mark them all.

Notes:

¹ Thomas H. Raddall, "Tarleton's Legion," Collections of the Nova Scotia Historical Society 28 (1949): 1-50. (Available online, see links.) [ back ]