Citizen soldier’s handwritten account of the Virginia siege that helped bring American independence was sold after Sotheby’s auction
WaPo article here.
WaPo article here.
It was Oct. 3, 1781, during the siege of Yorktown, Va., in the Revolutionary War. Duncan’s battlefield diary is a rare account from a “citizen soldier” of the historic fight that would end the war and lead to full American independence...
“To have an English-language ontemporary journal written by a Continental [Army] soldier … is exceptionally rare,” Selby Kiffer, Sotheby’s international senior specialist for books and manuscripts, said before the auction.
“The content, the fact that it was about such a pivotal event, that fact that it just reads wonderfully — this gripping, first-person narrative — that fact that it’s still in the family of Captain Duncan,” he said...
On Oct. 14, as Duncan and two friends were sitting in a crowded trench around midnight, a sentry called out a warning of an incoming shell.
Duncan had jumped up to see where it was headed as it landed in the trench about two feet from him and blew up. “I immediately flung myself” aside, he wrote.
“Although the explosion was very sudden and the trench as full of men as it could possibly contain, yet not a single man was killed,” he wrote. “Only two of my own company [were] slightly wounded.”
He added: “We all counted it a most miraculous escape. Were I to recount all the narrow escapes I made that night it would almost be incredible.”..
At Yorktown, he became a member of Brig. Gen. Moses Hazen’s brigade. Duncan was well educated. He wrote legibly, using an ink bottle and a quill pen, said Kiffer, the Sotheby’s expert. “He writes very well and very vividly,” he said...
“To have an English-language ontemporary journal written by a Continental [Army] soldier … is exceptionally rare,” Selby Kiffer, Sotheby’s international senior specialist for books and manuscripts, said before the auction.
“The content, the fact that it was about such a pivotal event, that fact that it just reads wonderfully — this gripping, first-person narrative — that fact that it’s still in the family of Captain Duncan,” he said...
On Oct. 14, as Duncan and two friends were sitting in a crowded trench around midnight, a sentry called out a warning of an incoming shell.
Duncan had jumped up to see where it was headed as it landed in the trench about two feet from him and blew up. “I immediately flung myself” aside, he wrote.
“Although the explosion was very sudden and the trench as full of men as it could possibly contain, yet not a single man was killed,” he wrote. “Only two of my own company [were] slightly wounded.”
He added: “We all counted it a most miraculous escape. Were I to recount all the narrow escapes I made that night it would almost be incredible.”..
At Yorktown, he became a member of Brig. Gen. Moses Hazen’s brigade. Duncan was well educated. He wrote legibly, using an ink bottle and a quill pen, said Kiffer, the Sotheby’s expert. “He writes very well and very vividly,” he said...
