In his introduction to the published play, Robert Brustein writes, "In Endecott and the Red Cross, a mild-mannered Puritan military man, faced with high-living Anglican-Royalists in colonial America, is forced into shedding blood by political-religious expediency.

In his introduction to the published play, Robert Brustein writes, "in My Kinsman, Major Molineux, the American Revolution unfolds as a violent nightmare experienced by two Deerfield youths seeking out their British cousin in Boston, 'the city of the dead'.

"[10] Before the book's title page, Lowell officially noted, "My sources have been Nathaniel Hawthorne's stories and sketches, Endecott and the Red Cross, The May-Pole of Merry Mount, and My Kinsman, Major Molineux; Thomas Morton's New Canaan; and Herman Melville's Benito Cereno."

Although he tried to complete a libretto for over a year, in a July 1961 letter to his cousin, Harriet Winslow, he admitted that he was writing the piece "to satisfy my Ford [Foundation] opera grant, though I think of a play rather than anything that could be sung.

He finished writing a first draft of his play by early 1962, and by 1963, he'd begun working with the English director Jonathan Miller who'd expressed an interest in directing The Old Glory in New York.

"[16] When "Endecott and the Red Cross" was produced in 1968, Clive Barnes of The New York Times wrote that, although the play was poetic and full of interesting ideas, he didn't think that the production or the writing were fully engaging on stage.

Lowell was horrified by the accusation and responded with the following letter to the editors of The Village Voice: I am shocked by Ruth Herschberger's malicious account of my play Benito Cereno.

.It is perfectly clear that I am horrified by the American tendency to violence when in panic, and that is what the ending of my play--the killing of the slaves and their leader on the mutinied ship--means.

In my poem "[For] the Union Dead" I lament the loss of the old abolitionist spirit; the terrible injustice, in the past and in the present, of the American treatment of the Negro is of the greatest urgency to me as a man and as a writer.