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Actor Chris McKay playing Shadrack Byfield (center) in the 2011 PBS documentary "The War of 1812." This battle scene represents the Battle of Frenchtown in January 1813 in which Byfield was wounded in the neck. Credit: Tom Fournier
Archival discoveries including a 19th-century autobiography transform our understanding of Shadrach Byfield, an English veteran of the War of 1812 who buried his own amputated arm and designed a custom prosthesis.
A recurrent character in TV documentaries, books and museum exhibits in the U.S. and Canada, Byfield has been celebrated as an uncomplaining British soldier. But the new evidence reveals Byfield's tenacious pursuit of veterans' benefits and his struggles with pain, poverty, and the police.
"They came and pushed me about, and spat in my face, hoping that I should strike them, in order if possible, to take away my pension … They reported that I intended to shoot two of the deacons."
This is how Shadrach Byfield, a 63-year-old disabled war veteran, describes being treated in his local chapel in 1850s Gloucestershire. Implicated in a bitter feud among village Baptists, Byfield would later be accused of slashing the face of an adversary with the iron crook of his wooden arm.
In other parts of his rediscovered autobiography, Shadrach lamented the continued impact of his wartime injuries decades later: "It now pleased the Lord to afflict me with a violent rheumatic pain in my right shoulder, from which the [musket] ball was cut out. I was in this condition for nearly three years: oftentimes I was not able to lift my hand to my head, nor a tea-cup to my mouth."
Frustrated at an employer's refusal to pay him full wages while working as a one-handed gardener, Byfield insisted, "I never saw the man that would compete with me with one arm."
While a Cambridge University historian, Dr. Eamonn O'Keeffe found what he believes to be the only surviving copy of Shadrach Byfield's "History and Conversion of a British Soldier." The autobiography was published in London, England, in 1851, but the only copy known to survive turned up 3,700 miles away in the Western Reserve Historical Society's library in Cleveland, Ohio.
O'Keeffe's findings appear in the Journal of British Studies.
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