Loyal Subjects

Loyal Subjects considers how the Civil War complicated the cultural value of emotion, especially the ideal of sympathy.

Loyal Subject? By: James H. Nisenson Military maneuvers and comedy have one thing in common: Timing is everything. Samuel C. Horsenail has just been discharged from the British Navy, landing in Boston in May 1772, a little over two years after the Boston Massacre. With his guile, Horsenail is able to purchase a “hardscrabble” farm just outside of the city, but he must indenture himself and his family to the land—that means his wife gets to come to America, but her battle axe of a mother comes too. As the American Revolution sweeps through the colonies, the fast-talking con artist Horsenail toes the line between loyal subject and new-world patriot, playing both sides of the battlefield in a two-sided cloak. Embarrassingly funny and shockingly topical, this good-natured spoof of the American Revolution is one part fact and three parts farse.