Robert G. Parkinson's "Heart of American Darkness"

Robert G. Parkinson is associate professor of history at Binghamton University. He is the author of The Common Cause and Thirteen Clocks. He lives in Charles Town, West Virginia.

He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Heart of American Darkness: Bewilderment and Horror on the Early Frontier, and reported the following:

I’m afraid the Page 99 Test doesn’t work exactly for Heart of American Darkness. What does appear, however, is still instructive. In 1765, there were protests in response to the Stamp Act that roiled through Maryland. The man who was to be in charge of selling stamped paper, an Annapolis merchant named Zachariah Hood, found his warehouse pulled down, his likeness hanged in effigy, and his family threatened by patriot crowds who convinced him to flee the colony for New York.

That wasn’t the only problem in Maryland, however. There was also a small financial discrepancy causing strife in the Maryland assembly over significant receipts submitted by the colony’s clerk. While the controversy roiled Annapolis, the assembly would not reimburse any other expenses – including the rather significant bills several western Maryland militia officers had submitted for expenses incurred defending the frontier during the Seven Years’ War and Pontiac’s Rebellion.

One of those outraged officers was Colonel Thomas Cresap, the patriarch of one of the two families featured in Heart of American Darkness. Cresap was furious that a clerk stood in the way of his getting paid, and in late November 1765 called upon his friends and neighbors to force the issue’s resolution. By force if necessary.

What occurs on page 99 is Cresap’s campaign to get his neighbors to join him in storming the capital to end this controversy. For his part, the Maryland governor, Horatio Sharpe, was unsurprised that “the people” were going to “March down in Companies to Annapolis, in order to settle the Disputes.” He saw this threat as a piece that fit with the resistance to the Stamp Act. Men like Thomas Cresap (even though he himself was a member of the lower house of the assembly) were going to bully their way to “liberty” – but only as they defined it.

While this particular page doesn’t reflect the entire thesis and theme of the book, I was taken with the particularity of the threat as I wrote this chapter not long after the events of January 6, 2021. That event, I think, will cast a long shadow over how historians view the origins of the American Revolution and how we think about the actions of a handful of “patriots” as they threatened, cajoled, and pressured men like Zachariah Hood to adhere to their conceptions of “liberty” and “justice.”

Learn more about Heart of American Darkness at the publisher's website.

The Page 99 Test: Thirteen Clocks.

--Marshal Zeringue