By Thomas Lecaque

This article is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Patrick Lecaque, 1/15/1949-10/11/2025, who taught his son the joy of history, of research, of discovery, and to find the individuals who made up the past. He was and is the reason why the author wanted to become an academic. The New England Regional Fellowship Consortium provided research support for this article.

Christian Ayne Crouch in her magnificent Nobility Lost: French & Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians & the End of New France made the observation that, “Narratives about war run the danger of becoming overwhelmed by their subject matter, which suffocates by either macabre fascination and the allure of romantic conflict or by the sheer horror and magnitude of pain and suffering.”^[1] Her study looked at French military elites during the Seven Years’ War (also known as the French and Indian War) and gave them three-dimensional existences outside of, around, and alongside the battles they fought and died in. That three-dimensional existence is what all academics strive for when examining people in the past, one that not only contextualizes them in a time and place and society but allows scholars to recreate their worldview and thoughts and feelings if possible. The focus of this piece runs the risk of Crouch’s warning, suffocated by the magnitude of the pain and suffering. Yet the suffering explored here is about a life lived during a war as an observer and one left to deal with the grim realities of the battlefields. It is the diary of Charlotte Brown, kept from November 17, 1754, until August 4, 1757. In these years, she served as the nurse matron of the hospital under the British Major-General Edward Braddock during the Seven Years’ War, and then with the hospital to encampments in Philadelphia, upstate New York, and finally New Brunswick.^[2] There are very few sources on the British side written by women from the front lines of the war itself. But that isn’t all that makes her journal unique.

The Death of General Braddock at the Battle of Monongahela, 1755

Brown did not write about battles, and she rarely wrote about her work in the hospital. Those were a blip in the endless sea of her grief. The intimate losses occupied her thoughts more fully than the terror around her. Writing this article after the death of my father, and rereading these pages of the journal, I am immediately pulled into the wreckage of her grief, my grief, and the shared humanity that crosses centuries. Our historical subjects were people, no different from us despite the divide of time. As much as the field of history of emotions has been unexpectedly in the news, most recently with The Atlantic running an article on it in December 2025, this is a well-established field, particularly for medievalists.^[3] Trying to pull humanity out of charters and liturgies, monastic chronicles and episcopal letters, I used it during my dissertation work on the First Crusade–hopes, fears, loves, heartbreaks. I did not expect to see it in a journal that so aggressively avoids talking about the war, about the soldiers, about the battles, even about the hospital. The grief is everywhere else. Writing in the United States in 2026, I’ve never felt more connected to a past human–the continuity in the ways we experience and express our grief, even in a context that should demand taking our focus elsewhere. And maybe that’s always been part of the problem, when we go into the archives seeking our answers about the past: everyday individuals like Brown viewed the wars as tangential events to the more pressing tragedies of their lives, except in the moments they intersect most drastically.

Entry for June 13, 1755 from Charlotte Brown’s Diary

Brown’s life had not been a particularly happy life before the war broke out. We get bits and pieces of the events that spurred her sorrow in her early diary entries. On May 6, 1755, she wrote, “This unhappy day 2 years depriv’d me of my dear husband and ever since to this Day my Life has been one continual scene of Anxiety and Care” (176). Her husband, Edward Brown, had been the Clerk of the Cheque and later Keeper of the Rolls for the garrison at Placentia, Nova Scotia, where he died, May 6, 1753.^[4] We don’t know of what, but given the year and his age (38), illness seems likely.[5] It may be that Charlotte was a nurse for the garrison—we do not know.[6] She and her children had moved back to England in the aftermath. We don’t have enough details about her life to know the conditions when she returned–we have no other family papers than a family Bible and this journal. When the journal begins, she was already aboard the ship that took her to North America, alongside her brother, Robert Bristowe, an apothecary. She served as a nurse matron in the hospital in Braddock’s regiment. Her three children, Mary Louisa, Charlotte, and Edward, remained in England–we do not know who with, possibly her other brother, Richard–and no doubt the separation was another source of her worry as well. Her notes were overwhelmingly about her life—like meeting a Quaker couple on the march who had been married for 44 years and serving them peach whiskey—and that means the fear of the war too. She described Fort Cumberland upon their arrival on June 13, 1754, as “the most desolate place I ever saw,” and was terrified throughout of Native raids and of being scalped (182). Her brother fell ill, likely of smallpox, and the rest of the time on campaign, she was mostly focused on his recovery. On July 11, she wrote that “my brother much better,” before relaying the news that Braddock was killed and a bunch of soldiers dead (183-4). She wrote, “it is not possible to describe the Distraction of the poor Women for their Husbands. I pack’d up my things to send for we expected the Indians every Hour. My brother desired me to leave the Fort but I am resolv’d not to go but share my Fate with him” (184). The next week was a slow comment on news going on and her worrying about her brother, whose health fluctuated until July 17. She wrote, “Oh! How shall I express my Distraction this unhappy Day at 2 in the afternoon deprived me of my dear Brother in whom I have lost my kind Guardian & Protector & am now left a friendless exile from all that is dear to me” (184).

Fort Cumberland, 1755

Brown’s next entry, two days later, read, “I am in so much Grief I can think of nothing. Mr. Cherrington was so kind as to order my Brother’s funeral” (184). Cherrington was a friend who traveled with the army–she served as his banker aboard the boats–and the grief is so apparent and vast that he took it upon himself to do the work of planning the funeral. The retreat of the army took her from the countryside–the military hospital left no time to sit with her grief–and she relocated through Philadelphia and New York, before ending up in Albany on the Lake George front. Cherrington was there with her. On April 13, 1756, she wrote, “Went on shore with Mr. Cherrington who was so kind as to arrange a Room. Went out to see the Town which is inhabited by the Dutch, saw several Indians who were adorned with Beads in their noses & ears & black blankets being in mourning for their Friend who were killed in the last campaign” (194). Over the course of the spring and into the summer, she recounted her experience in Dutch Albany, noting—amid what is clearly already a war—that, “July 26^th. This Day War was proclaimed in America” (196).

There are scattered details elsewhere in the journal, with news of Captain Robert Rogers taking prisoners and scalps, after the arrival of Lord Loundon in Albany. But the horrifying details aren’t about the war. On August 10, 1756, she received the kind of news that was impossible to get blasé about, however many accounts we read:

August 10^th. This unhappy Day I rec’d an Account of the Death of my dear Child Charlott. In whom my Soul was center’d. God only knows what I suffer. When shall I die & be at rest! August 12^th. All my Friends come to see me; but at present I have no comfort in anything. God give me Patience. August 14^th. My good friend the minister came to see me & desired me to reconcile myself to my hard fate (196).

Even on the colonial frontier, bereft of family, she had a community doing their best to rally around her, to reach out and try and remind her she’s not alone. It has little to no effect on her ability to move through her grief, a feeling that I recognized keenly, reflecting on the endless array of kind text messages, emails, phone calls I received when my dad died. The grief is paralytic; you show up to work (she showed up to work, though she barely records it), but time moves weirdly. A week after that entry, she recorded the fall of Fort Oswego, and nothing more until October, then once more in November, before December arrived with yet more sorrow: “December 1^st. Mr. Cherrington left Albany for England in whom I have lost all my Friends in one” (197). It is an emptiness so profound, recorded so sparingly and poignantly. The last person she knew before arriving in America, gone. Her husband, gone. Her brother, gone. Her daughter, gone. That line hit differently in an archive reading room a year beforehand, when my father was alive than it did when I was writing this. I understood it so much better after.

John Henry Walker, Capitulation of Fort Oswego, August 1756

The remainder of her journal recounts the extreme cold weather during the winter and then the 1757 campaign season in brief detail. In the edited version, her daughter dies at the bottom of page 196; the journal ends on the bottom of page 198. Brown did not die on the campaign; she eventually returned to England, and the manuscript journal contains notes of accounts from the 1760s. She passed away in 1773 in London. The journal is not a particularly good source about the war itself if what you want are details on battles and military maneuvers. What it gives us, though, is the stark reminder that war is hell even when we aren’t dealing with the war itself. Brown’s journal reminds us that life can be short and hard and that loss is inevitable. And if we are luckier now, with the richness of modern medicine, that doesn’t stop us from seeing it throughout the archives—the loss of partners, of siblings, of children, of friends. These were people, like us, who experienced loss and grief the way we do, no more used to it or more sanguine because of higher mortality rates or the lack of effective medical interventions. No. Like us, they felt pain, and sorrow, and anguish, and loss. And, even if Brown did not record it as frequently in her journal, we also know they felt joy, and surprise, and hope, and carried on even in the face of unimaginable hardship. And that’s a lesson worth taking with us. But the history of emotions gives us a window into what it offers: an incredibly human portrayal of war, how people felt about the experiences of loss, of cold, of hardship, of sorrow, and of profound grief. And if our goal is to deliver three-dimensional portrayals of humans in the past, that makes it an invaluable source.

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Thomas Lecaque is an Associate Professor of History at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, located on Baxoje, Meskwaki and Sauk lands. His primary research area is on religious violence and apocalypticism from the crusades in the High Middle Ages through the holy wars of colonial North America, but he teaches broadly in medieval world, vast early America, and video games and history courses. He can also be found @tlecaque.bsky.social.

Further Reading:

Brown, Charlotte. “The Journal of Charlotte Brown, Matron of the General Hospital, with the English Forces in America, 1754-1756.” In Colonial Captivities, Marches and Journeys, ed. Isabel M Calder (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1935; reprinted 1967). 169-198.

Browne, Charlotte. Diary, 1754-1757, 1763-1766. New York Historical Society.

Fatherly, Sarah. “Tending the Army: Women and the British General Hospital in North America, 1754-1763.” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Volume 10, Number 3, Fall 2012, pp. 566-599

Hartwig, Marcel. “From the ‘wooden world’ to ‘London in miniature’. Charlotte Bristowe Browne’s Diary, Nursing, and the French and Indian Wars.” In In Pursuit of Healthy Environments: Historical Cases on the Environment-Health Nexus, eds Esa Ruuskanen and Heini Hakosalo (London: Routledge, 2020), 

Nuckles, Erica Ingrid. “Remarks on a march”: a Female Perspective on Gender, Rank, and Imperial Identities during the French and Indian War. PhD dissertation, University at Albany, State University of New York, 1-1-2018.

Endnotes:

[1] Christian Ayne Crouch, Nobility Lost: French & Canadian Martial Cultures, Indians & the End of New France (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2014), 11.

[2] Massachusetts Historical Society, MS S-342, Charlotte Browne journal [photostat], 1754-1757. I’m going to give page numbers for the quotations from Charlotte Brown, “The Journal of Charlotte Brown, Matron of the General Hospital, with the English Forces in America, 1754-1756,” in Colonial Captivities, Marches and Journeys, ed Isabel M Calder (Port Washington, N.Y.: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1935; reprinted 1967), 169-198.

[3] Gal Beckerman, “What If Our Ancestors Didn’t Feel Anything Like We Do?,” The Atlantic, December 5, 2025, https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/01/human-ancestors-emotion-history/684959/ . For established texts, readers of this journal are probably familiar with William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2001), which uses Revolutionary France for his framework of analysis. See, among others, Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, Medieval Sensibilities: A History of Emotions in the Middle Ages, tr. Robert Shaw (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018); Maureen C. Miller and Edward Wheatley, eds, Emotions, Communities, and Difference in Medieval Europe: Essays in Honor of Barbara H. Rosenwein (London and New York: Routledge, 2017); Stephanie Downes and Stephanie Trigg, eds, Facing up to the History of Emotions (Palgrave MacMillan, 2023); and Barbara Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 2006).

[4] Keith Brown, “Catherine Browne Family Bible,” Newfoundland’s Grand Banks Genealogical & Historical Data, 2013, https://ngb.chebucto.org/Families/bible-catherine-browne-family.shtml ; Serena Zabin, The Boston Massacre: A Family History (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2020), 31-32, describes the unhappiness of British troops and officers in Halifax, in 1766-68, “a holding pen for soldiers, much like Ireland, but with worse weather” (32); Placentia in the midst of the war itself would have been significantly worse, even without the threat of attack.

[5] Zabin, The Boston Massacre, 35-7, says that scurvy in particular was a problem in Canada, and the cold itself was nightmarish in a way they were not prepared for—for soldiers, but also the families, as “The meager food, drafty housing, and harsh weather were hard on the children” in addition to the adults (37).

[6] Zabin, The Boston Massacre, 12-13, discusses the logic of army administration of having one woman for every ten men to clean, nurse, and do laundry for them; this may have been Charlotte’s job, or training, before she went on Braddock’s Expedition, but this is speculation.