Stonington Defiant

Caria Davidson’s story of Stonington, Connecticut ("History Happened Here,” October) is an engaging description of that delightful, formerly war-torn, village. The article’s one shortcoming is the failure to mention the fine recent book that is so central to her subject, James Tertius de Kay’s The Battle of Stonington: Torpedoes, Submarines, and the Rockets in the War of 1812 (Naval Institute Press, 1990).

While Ms. Davidson describes the British attack, which originated from motives as Delphian as any ever employed to justify such a travesty (a British flotilla bombarded the helpless citizenry of Stonington with fifty tons of projectiles over a four-day period), de Kay brilliantly employs Sir Thomas Masterman Hardy’s assault on the village, which had absolutely no military significance, as a microcosm illustrative of Yankee tenaciousness in the face of British aggression.