On July 4, 2026, the United States of America will reach its 250th anniversary. A century ago, in our sesquicentennial year of 1926, Weird Tales magazine was in its third and fourth years in print. I haven't found anything yet by which the publisher and editor acknowledged the sesquicentennial. I'm not sure that I will. I also haven't found and can't think of any weird tale set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. I admit that my title above is misleading. At least it's not clickbait.
Washington Irving (1783-1859) was the earliest American author to have appeared in Weird Tales. Born during the final year of the Revolutionary War, he died seventeen months before the Civil War commenced. His lifetime, then, stretched between two of our foundational wars. It's possible to think of American history as a fabric held up by the tentpoles of war. Irving's life might illustrate that idea. Another example, and a minor one to be sure: Weird Tales magazine was founded after the Great War had ended and possibly only because there had been a war. The great era of Weird Tales--if we can call it that--ended before the Second World War began, or at least no later than in the course of that war. Like so much American greatness, this one came in an interbellum period.
Weird Tales reprinted four of Irving's stories, the last being "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" (Nov. 1928). When I said that I can't think of a weird tale that has the Revolution as its backdrop, that's not quite true. After all, the Headless Horseman is rumored to be the ghost of a Hessian soldier, while a stream in a haunted place in Irving's story flows by the tulip-tree where Major André was captured by three Americans in 1780. The American Revolution also figures in "Rip Van Winkle," which can also be called a fantasy or a weird tale. As for a weird tale of the Revolution written in later years, especially in the twentieth century, I can't think of a one.
The Civil War is closer to us in every way. Years ago I met a hog farmer in southeastern Indiana whose grandfather was a twelve-year-old boy when Morgan's Raiders came around and stole some horses from his father's barn. Only two generations separated that hog farmer from the war. Only one more separated me from him. On another farm not far away, a widow in her nineties told me that there were supposed to have been graves on a point of land above the forks of a ravine where escaped slaves had been buried. I looked where she asked me to look. Did I see, or did I only make myself see, several grave-sized areas of sunken soil on that point? Although I have an ancestor who served in the Revolutionary War--his name was William Hall--I have nothing comparable to tell about it. It really was so very long ago, closer to the English Renaissance and William Shakespeare's time than it is to our own.
I can think right away of a weird tale set during the Civil War. It's called "The Valley Was Still," and it was written by Manly Wade Wellman. Weird Tales published Wellman's story its issue of August 1939, the month before another war began. "The Valley Was Still" was adapted to film in an episode of The Twilight Zone. It was broadcast in November 1961, one hundred years and a few months after the war began. Ambrose Bierce wrote stories about the Civil War. So did Jack Matthews. Some of these are straight war stories. Others, such as Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," have certain weird elements or show the influence of weird in our lives. I recently read some of the late Mr. Matthews' stories in his collection Tales of the Ohio Land (1978). Like H.P. Lovecraft and Washington Irving, Jack Matthews had a well-developed sense of place. I have been to some of the places about which he wrote. The author Fitz-James O'Brien was killed in the Civil War. Both he and Bierce had stories reprinted in Weird Tales.
Men in Revolutionary times wore breeches and stockings, gorgets and ruffles, tricorn hats and even wigs. Although they had long rifles, most carried muskets--all were muzzleloaders. The men who fought the Civil War wore trousers and kepis and fired factory-made rifles, some of which were breechloaders, as well as the first machine guns. They went up in balloons, rode on railroad trains, and communicated by telegraph. We have photographs of them in camp and in the aftermath of their battles with each other. We have images of their fresh corpses. These have immediacy and tragedy that no engraving or drawing of the eighteenth century can match. Although there weren't any movie cameras just yet, watching The General--released on New Year's Eve 1926 and starring Buster Keaton--is like opening a window into the past, a really astonishing experience when you get down to it. As we watch, it's hard to believe that we are not in fact seeing film footage from 1862. When that movie was made, there were countless thousands still living who vividly remembered the war and its events. That was only one hundred years ago. There are people still living who were alive then.
I can propose an explanation as to a lack of weird fiction set during the Revolutionary War or with the war as its backdrop. It goes something like this: the American Revolution occurred during the Age of Reason and before the Romantic Era and the return of weird. Weird, or wyrd, faded as a word and a concept during the middle centuries of the second millennium, only to return during the Romantic Era. For example, the earliest use in verse of the noun weird that I have found is in Robert Burns' poem "Her Answer," from 1795. That was of course after the Revolutionary period had ended. Less significant, I think, but still worth considering is that Americans during the Revolution were less literate as a whole than in later eras (two of the three men who captured Major André could not read), and there wasn't much of a popular press and almost no fiction.
But that doesn't explain why later writers would not have written weird fiction about the Revolutionary War. Or if there is any, maybe I just haven't found it yet.
I should add that, although Gothic fiction got its start in the decade before the Revolutionary War, it may not have traveled very well to America. And although one of our earliest authors, Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810), wrote Gothic works, his were all published after the Revolutionary period, and, as far as I know, none has the Revolution as its backdrop.
In contrast to the Revolutionary War, the Civil War occurred after Romanticism had swept through western culture. The men and women of the 1860s would have been immersed in it, I think, even if it had by then decayed into a kind of sentimentalism. Weird was present nonetheless, and it was approaching a high period, if there was such a thing. If there was such a thing, maybe the high period of weird fiction ran from the 1870s or '80s until the 1930s or '40s (for a total of threescore and ten years?). And maybe world war brought that period to an end as well. Anyway, I don't sense any Romanticism or sentimentalism in the Revolutionary War. The American Revolution instead seems to have been a sober, serious, practical, and realistic matter, even if it was underlain by and fought for the highest ideals. Maybe that's why it worked so well and continues to do so now, 250 years later.
There is a recently released documentary series on the American Revolution available on pay TV. It was made by a man who gained fame--justly--for his previous series on the Civil War. Again, the Civil War is closer to us and more immediate. It would prove difficult, if not impossible, to treat the American Revolution with the same kind of effectiveness. It would be hard to evoke the same kinds of feelings in the viewer that that long-ago series on the Civil War did. But I also think that no one is really up to this task anymore. The minds of the documentary makers and too many of their experts have been taken over by small ideas and their thoughts misdirected by erroneous belief systems. And as the last episode of that series--specifically a quote: "No one is above the law"--demonstrates, their minds have also been taken over by a peculiar brand of derangement that does them no good at all and in fact causes them great harm. I hope they and the rest of the world will soon get over it, if only for their own sake.
I'll add one more thought, because I can't think of anywhere else it might go right now: one of the outgrowths of the American Revolution is our Bill of Rights. Among our rights is the right to speak freely. That right is enshrined in the First Amendment. Enshrined in the Second is a guarantee for all of the others. Non-Americans and anti-Americans harp on our keeping and bearing of arms. What they fail to understand is that we have guns because the only language that tyrants seem to understand is the sound of lead flying in their direction. Our nation began in violence because violence is very often necessary if human beings are to gain or keep their rights and their freedoms. In foreign nations of the past and today, the people are disarmed so that they might be made powerless before their governments. It's easy to take away the rights of people who can't fight back. That's happening apace in the world, including or most especially in the English-speaking world, which is where the modern concept of liberty was born. We in America don't want violence. We want peace. But we also want to be free. Too often, violence is forced upon us because there are those who will always seek to deprive us of our freedoms. That is as true here as anywhere. And so we have the fabric of our history held up, as I have said, by the tentpoles of war. The expression is that the United States of America is the Empire of Liberty. As such, we will continue and forever oppose the empires of tyranny. So I will say, exactly half a year early, Happy Birthday, America!
Copyright 2026 Terence E. Hanley
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