STATES DYCKMAN: An American Loyalist

by James Thomas Flexner ‧ RELEASE DATE: Aug. 12, 1980

States Dyckman (1754/55-1806), whose family name New Yorkers associate with various historic houses, came to Flexner's attention through a cache of papers unearthed at the most imposing of those houses, Boscobel: here was a chance for the biographer of Washington and Hamilton to write the life of an unknown. But Dyckman, if little known, was neither a common man nor an ordinary Loyalist: he has a claim to some small fame--which was also his claim to a considerable fortune--as the bookkeeper whose juggling enabled the lordly British quartermasters to keep their vast Revolutionary-War profits (gained largely because they owned the wagons they hired). And the Dyckman we meet here is not the equivalent of a fictional character--another hope of Flexner's--because the papers give sure evidence of only one personal trait: the profligacy which impelled Dyckman to return to Britain (after a first, eleven-year stay during and after the Revolution) to claim a larger reward--eventually $2,850,000--for his indispensable services. Two conclusions can justifiably be drawn: that Dyckman, a person of some standing along the Hudson, was keenly aware--as he wrote to his wife--that ""Here we would be nobody""; and that his blackmail was not regarded as such by his targets (""If in the service of the quartermasters he dissembled and took advantage, why should he not dissemble and take advantage of them?""). But it is not news to Flexner or anyone else that the Loyalists were not automatically persona grata in Britain; nor is the high-level profiteering a revelation. And even the championship of Dyckman's cause by ""the fiery polemicist"" William Cobbett, though marginally interesting, is less remarkable than Flexner seems to think. Meanwhile, the one aspect of Dyckman's private life that would especially have fattened a novel--his beloved sister's addiction to laudanum and States' run-ins with her callow husband--expires here for want of evidence as to how States felt. Every time, indeed, that Flexner tries to fill one or another gap with conjecture, he unwittingly makes a case for historical fiction; whenever he tries to treat Dyckman as prototypical, he demonstrates the merits of the disparaged ""dry Ph.D. thesis."" The real subject here is not Dyckman but--in apparent keeping with the papers--Dyckman and the quartermasters and the British courts. A historical footnote, then, in fancy dress.

Pub Date: Aug. 12, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Little, Brown

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION