Veteran Americans

Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction

Benjamin Cooper

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781625343314
• eBook ISBN: 9781613765715
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Literature

"I may dare to speak, and I intend to speak and write what I think," wrote a New York volunteer serving in the Mexican War in 1848. Such sentiments of resistance and confrontation run throughout the literature produced by veteran Americans in the nineteenth century—from prisoner-of-war narratives and memoirs to periodicals, adventure pamphlets, and novels. Military men and women were active participants in early American print culture, yet they struggled against civilian prejudice about their character, against shifting collective memories that removed military experience from the nation's self-definition, and against a variety of headwinds in the uneven development of antebellum print culture.

In this new literary history of early American veterans, Benjamin Cooper reveals how soldiers and sailors from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War demanded, through their writing, that their value as American citizens and authors be recognized. Relying on an archive of largely understudied veteran authors, Cooper situates their perspective against a civilian monopoly in defining American citizenship and literature that endures to this day.

Chapter 1

Revolutionary Captivity

1776–1820: Mary Rowlandson, Ethan Allen, Lemuel Roberts, Thomas Dring

Of the war I did partake;

With anxious care, and hardships there;

My nature I did break.

Full eight long years, I served there,

My country to defend;

Now I’m forsook, my nature broke,

May all appear, my friend.

—Benjamin Fowler, “The Lamentation of Poor Benjamin Fowler, Who Served Faithfully in the American Army . . .” (ca. 1783–1800)

To my knowledge, no work of scholarship has tried to take Revolutionary prisoner-of-war texts as a significant ripple in the captivity genre, nor has scholarship recognized the troubled voices within these texts that reflect the early American veteran’s foreclosure from social and political life—no Revolutionary War literary history, no work on early American autobiography, no study of captivity narratives.1 It is the Revolutionary captive’s perceived status as a political prisoner that is the tale I tell here, because that part of the story has not yet been told. The captivity narrative during the Revolutionary War was a nationalistic form, yet many veteran captives did not feel part of an emergent nation even as they wrote in the genre. A public skeptical of veteran complaints made matters worse; moreover, many veterans often suffered the traumatic return of their own injurious memory that writing about military captivity after the fact so often solicited.

This incredible civil-military strain has yet to find traction in early and nineteenth-century literary studies, which is remarkable given that twentieth-century American literature addressed such drift quite frequently. To this absence, Revolutionary prisoner-of-war narratives represent what could be called the first gasps of an American veteran literature. Furthermore, these veteran narratives recalibrated the dynamics of North American captivity, which up until the Revolution typically had involved a member of the majority in power (a white woman, such as Mary Rowlandson) being taken by powerless members on the outside (such as a displaced Native American tribe). American prisoners of war discovered that they were the powerless outsiders, and moreover, they soon came to realize that no one was coming to repatriate them despite their narrative protest.

Between its initial publication in 1682 and the years leading up to the American Revolution, Mary Rowlandson’s captivity narrative was reissued only once, in 1720. It was republished three times in 1770, once again in 1771, and twice more in 1773. What was it about the captivity narrative, and this one in particular, that resonated with a people about to wage the Revolutionary War? Critics who have taken note of the resurgence have attributed Rowlandson’s wartime popularity to the resonances between her kidnapping and that of colonial North America. Revolutionary readers returned to the Native American captivity narrative because they could easily identify in Rowlandson a captivity analogous to their own. Greg Sieminski has pointed out that in 1770, when Rowlandson first reappeared in circulation, the city of Boston had already been occupied by the British for two years.2 Political subjection exacerbated the colonists’ growing rage militaire, reaching its boiling point in the Boston Massacre in March the same year. Rowlandson became a patriot, so to speak, on the title page to the 1773 edition published in Boston by John Boyle with a rifle, defending her homestead from an approaching horde of white-faced British invaders.3 The short answer to why captivity narratives became popular during the Revolutionary War was because the captivity trope was good for American nationalism—just take out Wampanoag Indians and insert General Thomas Gage.

Figure 1. Mary Rowlandson, A Narrative of the Captivity, Sufferings and Removes of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society.

The nation-building possibilities of this villain substitution from Native American to British were enticing. In a letter to his longtime friend and member of Parliament David Hartley from 1780, Benjamin Franklin disclosed a recent “order of congress” instructing him to publish a “schoolbook” of British cruelties in taking Americans captive “and to have thirty-five prints designed here [in Paris] by good artists and engraved, each expressing one or more of the different horrid facts, to be inserted in the book, in order to impress the minds of children and posterity with a deep sense of your bloody and insatiable malice and wickedness.”4 That children’s book never materialized, but its congressional motivation was the same as the martialization of Rowlandson in 1773. The war captive on the Revolutionary page—be she historical, such as Rowlandson, or contemporary such as the multitude of prisoners-of-war whom Franklin worked to liberate from British prisons during the war—was more abstraction than actual person, a faceless rhetorical instrument by which the developing nation might imagine itself as victim to, while also different from, British depravity. No matter that cruelty toward prisoners went both ways in actual fact during the war, each textual remembrance of past and present Revolutionary captivity worked to help wartime colonial readers rationalize their real acts of violence against the British. Such claims about captive texts and impressionable readers have usually been made because they coincide with larger critical investments related to sympathy in early American literature.5

According to this consensus in the scholarship, Revolutionary prisoner-of-war narratives operated the same as Native American captivity narratives. Rowlandson and Franklin were separated by time but not ideology in their joint assault on tyranny and depravity. Robert Denn has more or less subsumed the two genres, arguing that prisoner-of-war narratives were a logical and popular subset of the Native American captivity narrative because both forms worked within a fairly overt system of propaganda that confirmed the “image of the American . . . in simple, homely virtues—loyalty, perseverance and honesty.”6 This critical conflation is understandable because soldiers, sailors, and their editors were clearly aware of their close collaboration with the established tradition of Native American captivity narratives.

Soldier Nathaniel Segar’s publisher made the connection explicit in 1825, claiming “Mr. Segar’s case is the more memorable as being the last, and marking, as a distinct monument, the termination of that long line of barbarities which commenced at the memorable era of Philip’s war.”7 Well before Segar, the Narrative of Colonel Ethan Allen’s Captivity (1779) was the first and, along with another anti-British invective, the Narrative of John Dodge (1779), the most widely read prisoner-of-war narrative of the late eighteenth century, going through eight printings before the Revolutionary War was over.8 Dodge’s editor from the second edition published in 1780 announced his politics quite clearly: “The Narrative of John Dodge is one of the records of frontier life during the period of the American Revolution that displays the intense feeling of hatred and unfairness evinced by the British soldiers to the American rebels.”9 While one of my primary objectives here will be to articulate the important differences within the mélange of Revolutionary-era captivity narratives and what those differences reveal about civil-military relations and the struggles of early American veterans, let me not deny at the outset the significant similarities in how the most popular of these texts circulated.

Rowlandson and Dodge in particular were successful with a segment of the Revolutionary audience because both repressed American complicity in atrocity. Whig readers responded to these texts because they focused on British violence and, as a result, did not focus on the violence that American forces waged on their British counterparts and Native Americans. Narratives such as Dodge’s and Rowlandson’s therefore appealed to liberal readers because such narratives manufactured difference between themselves and the British while also erasing American racism and imperialism against Native Americans. Before being taken captive in 1775, Dodge lived and traded peacefully with Native Americans “half way between Pittsburgh and Detroit,” but then the British army began to offer “the Indians twenty dollars a [rebel] scalp, by which means they induced the Savages to make the poor inhabitants, who they had torn from their peaceable homes, carry their baggage until within a short distance of [Fort Detroit], where in cold blood, they murdered them, and delivered their green scalps in a few hours after to those British Barbarians, who on the shrill yell of the Savages, flew to meet and hug them to their breasts reeking with the blood of innocence, and shewed them every mark of joy and approbation, by firing of cannon & c.”10 Native Americans in Revolutionary captivity narratives had “the blood of innocence” on their hands as they had in earlier texts, although for Dodge, the Revolutionary Indian was less a savage than he was the regrettable dupe of “British Barbarians.” The grotesqueness of this alliance became the warrant for Dodge’s dismay and confirmed for him the justness of the cause for American independence. Dodge and his country were victims, never perpetrators, and indeed one would be hard pressed to find any explicit trace of guilt or remorse in Dodge’s captivity narrative for his actions. Instead, he and several other Revolutionary captives vilified the British axis of evil in order to help discriminate a separate and (they hoped) coherent political identity for their colonist North American audiences that was underwritten by the moral clarity of American liberalism.

Up to this point, I have tried to outline the usual ways literary historians have understood how captivity narratives during the Revolutionary era were produced and consumed as Whiggish propaganda. Such interpretations are useful but ultimately incomplete because they neglect the larger archive of Revolutionary captivity narratives written by American soldiers and sailors, many of whom did not hide behind Dodge’s mask of American exceptionalism but rather struggled with the political emergencies produced by their various states of captivity. The Revolutionary War marks the first time when North American captives were detained under the prospects of liberal democracy, and a new identity—the American veteran—began to emerge in print. While no one would deny that Rowlandson suffered greatly while a captive during King Philip’s War, as did Dodge during the Revolutionary War, was Rowlandson a soldier? She was abducted at home. Was Dodge? He was a trader on the frontier. Would either have imagined themselves to be an American veteran?

These days the United States seems to care very much about who lays claim to military identity. Congressional actions such as the Stolen Valor Act of 2005 reflect how post-9/11 civil society considers the impersonation of military service so disrespectful as to be unlawful; that act (subsequently overturned in 2012) presumed American veterans undergo an experience so insular and sacred that nonparticipants have no right to speak to it. The usual focus on the nonveteran likes of Rowlandson and Dodge as the authorities of Revolutionary captivity suggests that a sense of separation between civil and military life did not exist for the early Republic and its readers. If, in fact, one were to end the story of Revolutionary-era captivity narratives with Rowlandson and Dodge, one would have the impression that civil-military relations were uncomplicated and that veteran voices (that is, people who were aware of themselves as having undergone a military experience that others had not) did not exist in early national print culture. Yet neither assumption is true.

Early American veterans and their citizenship have always been belated concerns, mostly because both have usually been seen through civilian eyes that tend to remember the Revolutionary War often as “the people’s war.” Not only is “the people’s war” an incomplete if not outright inaccurate record of how American warfare has been distributed among the population of the United States, but, more important, this collective memory disregards the long-standing exclusion of the soldier, sailor, marine, and airman from the public sphere. This compartmentalization has been noted by contemporary military historians such as Jeremy Black, who more recently argued that the professionalization of the modern military has relegated the armed forces “an adjunct of society,” and by political scientists such as Samuel P. Huntington in The Soldier and the State (1957).11 Scholarship aside, anyone who has clapped for the troops at a baseball stadium or after an airplane lands only then to turn to the game or busily disembark has felt, on some level, the petty citizenship I am describing here (and which the Stolen Valor Act made into law).

To borrow Lauren Berlant’s sentiments from a different context, these condescending civilian “moments of oppressive optimism in normal national culture” have an affective history that begins with the textual lives of Revolutionary captives.12 Captivity ultimately empowers Rowlandson and Dodge—she rediscovers her faith, and his hatred for the British becomes entrenched. Yet the Revolutionary captives whom I consider here were embittered and enfeebled by their ordeals, not empowered. At the same time that these earliest of veteran American voices imagined themselves to be the victims of British cruelty, they also lamented the ways in which they and their fellow veterans became the scapegoats to an inchoate and exclusionary system of civilian citizenship that was predicated in part on the sequestration of military experience from public life.

An untold number of soldiers and sailors were detained in one way or another during the Revolutionary War because the fragmentary nature of military records and reports makes it impossible to come to a final reliable number.13 Ethan Allen supposes some 11,000 prisoners died, while various other sources estimate 11,000 died on board the prison ship Jersey alone. Historians since have put the number closer to 18,000 Americans captured by the British between 1775 and 1783. Of that number, about 8,500 died from disease or starvation. Edwin Burrows’s recent accounting has revised the total number of prisoners to 30,000, of which he believes approximately 18,000 died during confinement.14 What can reliably be said is that between 1779 and 1830, more than twenty Revolutionary soldiers and sailors published narratives detailing their experiences as prisoners-of-war. Hundreds more who were never detained (among them such generals as Henry Lee and James Wilkinson and regular Continental infantrymen such as Joseph Plumb Martin, who appears in chapter 2) published their journals and reflective memoirs mostly after the War of 1812.15 Revolutionary prisoner-of-war narratives cover a range of conditions and circumstances. Soldiers and sailors were held in Native American villages under British control, in commandeered churches and makeshift prisons in American cities, on board prison ships such as the Jersey off the coast of New York, and in large detention centers in England.

Old Mill Prison in Plymouth, England, was one of the largest of these bases and home to William Widger, an army private early in the war and a naval privateer later on, who was captured at sea in February 1779 and held as a prisoner of war until Cornwallis’s surrender two years later. His diary, of which only portions from 1781 remain, is a text without a country. The England where Widger lives is an unsettled transnational space with inmates brought in from both sides of the Atlantic: “Sunday 28the. Cloudy, Guards as Usual, raind hard last Night, day before yesterday, 33 Dutchmen were brought to prison the Numbr. of prisoners now confined in these prisones are as follows, vizt. Americans 202,—Frenchmen 437,—Spaniards 50,—Dutchmen 180.”16 The commingling of nationalities in prison unsettles and confuses Widger. Anticipating the ways in which Benedict Anderson would imagine communities centuries later, he subsequently attempts to repatriate himself by reading American newspapers and keeping track of the war’s developments back home.17 He knows, for example, George Washington’s troop numbers and movements; he is overjoyed by Ethan Allen’s successful siege at Ticonderoga.18...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Abbreviations
• Introduction. What We Talk about When We Talk about Veteran Americans
• Chapter 1. Revolutionary Captivity
• Chapter 2. Civilian Memories and Veteran Memoir
• Chapter 3. A Bunch of Veteran Amateurs
• Chapter 4. The Real and Written War
• Conclusion. Veterans in Outer Space
• Epilogue. Khe Sanh
• Notes
• Index