When I first began to think about writing a book on the experiences of Isaac Frye and his family during the American Revolution, I felt naked in spite of wearing my twenty-first century clothes. A great deal about life in the eighteenth century was different. Since then I’ve sent quite a few days in these clothes, thinking about what it meant to have lived during the American Revolution.

It was a hard life, and war made it much more difficult. I have no delusions of time travel, and am thankful for all the surviving records I’ve had access to while piecing together Isaac and Elizabeth’s Frye’s story during these times.

-CEF