Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America 9780812203028

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Sealed with Blood

EARLY AMERICAN STUDIES Daniel K. Richter and Kathleen M. Brown, Series Editors Exploring neglected aspects of our colonial, revolutionary, and early national history and culture, Early American Studies reinterprets familiar themes and events in fresh ways. Interdisciplinary in character, and with a special emphasis on the period from about 1600 to 1850, the series is published in partnership with the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

Sealed with Blood War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America Sarah J. Purcell

PENN University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 2002 Sarah J. Purcell All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission of the publisher. Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 First paperback edition 2010 Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4011 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Purcell, Sarah ]. Sealed with blood: war, sacrifice, and memory in Revolutionary America I Sarah ]. Purcell. p. cm. — (Early American studies) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8122-3660-2 (cloth) 1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775-1783—Social aspects. 2. United States— History-Revolution, 1775-1783—Monuments. 3. United States—History—Revolution, 1775-1783—Influence. 4. Memory—Social aspects—United States—History—18th century. 5. Memory—Social aspects—United States—History—19th century. 6. National characteristics, American. 7. Nationalism—United States—History—18th century. 8. Nationalism—United States—History—19th century. 9. Political culture—United States—History—18th century. 10. Political culture—United States—History—19th century. 1. Title. II. Series. E209 .P93 2002 973.3—dc21 2002276325

To Ed and Mary Purcell, with love

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Contents

Introduction: Public Memory and the Revolutionary War 1 1

"Blood-Bought Fame": National Identity and Commemoration During the Revolutionary War, 1775-1781 11

2

"Gratitude Shall Be Written on Our Hearts": The Nation and Military Gratitude, 1781-1789 49

3

"Republican Emblems" and "Popular Devices": Heroes and Their Audiences in an Age of Party Conflict, 1790-1800 92

4

National Crisis and Destabilized Memory, 1801-1819

5

The Return of Lafayette: Memory and the National Future, 1820-1825 171 Afterword

210

Notes

213

Index

265

Acknowledgments

277

133

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O memory! Thou midway world, 'Twixt earth and paradise, Where things decayed and loved ones lost In dreamy shadows rise, And, freed from all that's earthly, vile, Seem hallowed, pure and bright, Like scenes in some enchanted isle All bathed in liquid light. —Abraham Lincoln, "Memory"

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Introduction: Public Memory and the Revolutionary War

Military memory, especially memory of the Revolutionary War, is really at the heart of American national identity. Between 1775 and 1825, public memories of the Revolutionary War contributed to the formation of American nationalism and helped to shape the character of an expanding political culture in the early republic. As has been true in many other countries, the shared memory of sacrifice and the hardship of war has helped to define American values for over two hundred years. Michael Kammen has reminded us that war plays "a fundamental role in stimulating, defining, justifying, periodizing, and eventually filtering American memories and traditions."1 Images of Revolutionary heroes and martyrs have frequently been used by politicians, writers, and a host of ordinary people to imagine and explain what they think America means. The violence of the Revolutionary War had an indelible effect on the politics of the American Revolution and on the men and women who saw their lives torn apart by the fighting. This book traces the effects of that violence, though it does not focus on the war itself. Instead, this work focuses specifically on commemorations of the military aspects of the American Revolution in order to elucidate how public memories of violent conflict shaped many early Americans' lives. By commemorating the Revolutionary War in sermons, newspapers, monuments, parades, songs, and material culture, Americans created a set of stories that sought to give meaning to the real violence of war. That meaning was inextricably bound up with the process of nation building, as people created for themselves new ways of feeling American. Commemorations were designed to downplay the bloodshed and division of war in order to bring disparate Americans together around images of shared sacrifice. Military commemorations between 1775 and 1825 helped Americans to imagine what their nation was about, but memories did not remain static over that fifty-year period. Public memories of the Revolutionary War spread to

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Introduction

ever widening socioeconomic groups, who adopted the language and style of commemorations to their own political uses —a process I refer to as the democratization of public memory. Even before the fighting ended, public memory of the war was focused on a fairly narrow group of martyrs and heroes around whom an American nation might unite in grateful praise. In the process, however, military commemoration also created a symbolic language of nationalism by stressing the importance of sacrifice for the common good, and as time progressed, this language began to be spoken by wider and wider groups of people who stressed that their own sacrifices were important to the nation. By 1825 the original elite heroes were still remembered, but women, white men from the lower ranks of society, and African Americans were all drawing attention to other aspects of national military glory and to their own accomplishments. The democratization of memory did not mean that the nation was instantly transformed into a society that offered equality to all Americans, nor did military commemorations necessarily grant direct power, such as the right to vote or hold office, to these groups. But the language of commemoration did enable various people to draw attention to themselves on an important public and symbolic level, which was one early step toward broadening the nation's political culture. The style and content of commemorations also changed in the process, as Americans used military memory to envision a more democratic nation fifty years after the war ended. Revolutionary War memories began as part of the culture of republicanism created during and after the Revolution. Republicanism has been one of the most studied and most durable concepts in early American history over the past thirty years, and as an analytical category it still has something to offer if used carefully.2 By creating a republican society to replace their allegiance to the English monarchy, Americans constructed representative government founded on cherished precedents set during Roman times and tested through the years by the English Revolution and other European governmental experiments. The American republic was defined by representative government based on the idea of popular sovereignty. The government, led by select, meritorious leaders, would seek to represent the will of the people. But republicanism went beyond just a form of government to encompass an entire set of values in American life. Self-sacrifice, military heroism, love of liberty, benevolence, fear of centralized power, and a reverence for the common good merged to form a republican ideology that helped to organize American thought and action. Warfare occupied a particular place in this republican ideology, and early commemorations of the Revolutionary War

Introduction

3

crystallized a vision of republican heroes who had set aside their self-interest to risk their lives for the common good, had proved their worth through merit, and were deserving of everlasting public praise. While military heroes like George Washington might also fit the ideological requirements necessary to become good representatives of the people as political leaders, the republican suspicion of power kept their military accomplishments separate from civil government, which was always to remain firmly in civilian control.3 This contradiction in republican ideology—the fascination with military heroes and the simultaneous suspicion of actual military power —helps to explain why memories of the Revolutionary War became so powerful in the early years of nationhood. By creating glorious, sanitized, and often sentimentalized images of the Revolutionary War, government officials and many Americans themselves fashioned ideological rallying points for a cohesive nation without having to resort to coercive military power to ensure that cohesiveness. By commemorating the Revolutionary War, Americans created a national mythology for themselves. They transformed the bloodshed, division, and violence of war into beautiful symbols of unity and national cohesion. Because the war had been such a cataclysmic event, military memories tended to highlight in the strongest possible terms the necessity of Americans' bonding together. Even so, although many nationalistic commemorations appeared on the surface to offer a completely consensual idea of what the American community should be, in reality, nationalism and memory were both subjects of constant conflict and change. There was no single, correct memory of the war that defined what the nation was, although various groups and individuals tried to claim that there was. In order to stress unity, Americans continually struggled to create a national identity favorable to themselves and their interests, while simultaneously using memory to maintain the appearance of patriotic impartiality. Conservatives, members of the social elite, and governmental officials often used symbols of the Revolutionary War to create an image of the American nation that met their own ends and usually excluded women, African Americans, and poorer white men. But conservatives could not maintain exclusive control of military memory, and their glorification of sacrifice during the Revolutionary War created a role in the nation's mythology for some of the very people they wished to exclude — especially for poorer veterans both black and white. Americans did not agree on exactly what memories of the Revolutionary War meant, but most of them did agree that memories were impor-

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tant to proper patriotism. The tension between this conflict and the desire for consensus created a particular vision of the American nation that unfolded between 1775 and 1825. Wartime commemorations created great, semiaristocratic heroes and held that they should be praised by a unified American people. The real "people" played their role in this drama of unity by celebrating heroes on holidays, approving of certain plays, buying particular literature, or subscribing to patriotic sermons. But as the people accepted the message that the glory of the country was bound up with wartime sacrifice, more humble individuals — most especially war veterans themselves — demanded their share of public gratitude. Public memory was able to shape national identity even as it was constantly changing in the hands of diverse Americans, all seeking to define their own version of patriotism. 1 purposefully employ the concept of public memory—as opposed to private memory, history, or simple commemoration — in this book.4 Michael Kammen's 1978 book, A Season of Youth, examined the image of the American Revolution in a variety of American cultural forms, but he restricted himself mainly to the period after 1826, when the Revolution had passed from the subject of memory to the subject of imagination.5 My study looks at the ways that the Revolutionary War was portrayed in public culture by those who lived through it and the generation that followed them — two formative generations that have recently received attention from scholars.6 Public memory and private memory were often closely intertwined in the foundational period of American history. Alfred Young's biography of Revolutionary George Robert Twelves Hewes shows how studying the private memory of members of those generations helps to uncover how "common people" understood the Revolution and lived its consequences. Young juxtaposes private memory with public memory of the Revolution, which often muted the participation of lower-class individuals, and he argues that only after "ordinary" citizens had begun to demand more power in society by the mid-i82os did tales of grassroots events such as the Boston Tea Party become important public symbols.7 My own work confirms this pattern but also traces its roots to the 17805 and 17905, when claims by common veterans like Hewes that their own heroism mattered were first initiated. This book offers a national picture of the public memory of the Revolutionary War that should provide the wider context for the stories of individuals like Hewes. National memory and national history have much in common, but they are not the same. Serious efforts to write national histories of the Revolutionary War began in the 17805 and continued through the start of the nineteenth century. Between 1785 and 1789, David Humphreys, David Ramsay,

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5

and William Gordon all wrote histories of the Revolutionary War that they maintained would provide an "objective" assessment of America's national greatness that could be passed on in the future.8 William Gordon aspired to be "a faithful historian, on whom posterity may depend, when the interested productions of partisans are no longer regarded."9 David Ramsay assured readers of his controversial 1785 History of the Revolution of South Carolina that he had "carefully watched the workings of his mind, lest passion, prejudice or a party-spirit... warp his judgement."10 Ramsay sought to write "impartially" because he maintained that "an historian should neither be a panegyrist nor satirist, but an impartial recorder of past event, for the information of after ages."11 While Mercy Otis Warren's 1804 history of the Revolution clearly betrayed her allegiance to the Democratic-Republican party, she sought to record the war as it really happened. But this kind of history writing was really a different project from the creation of collective public memory. The public memory of the Revolutionary War created by countless small-scale local commemorations, oddball newspaper articles, poems, memorials, funerals, sermons, portraits, and plays was all about passion, prejudice, panegyrics, and party spirit. Even when the creators of early commemorations made claims of impartiality, they often purposefully used the overblown language of conventional heroism to stress how Revolutionary War accomplishments were as impressive as those of the ancient Romans or the greatest British military heroes in a subjective bid to glorify the nation. Public memories of the war were not so much records of what happened as they were shared images of what past events were supposed to mean. This is not to say that there was ever any stable public memory of the war but rather that creating stable memories on which to base patriotism was a constant goal. Many different voices contributed to the public commemoration of the Revolutionary War, and even when government officials, conservatives, or elites like the Society of the Cincinnati sought to control public memory, they often faced opposition and conflict. One of the most interesting aspects of the development of the public memory of the Revolutionary War between 1775 and 1825 is how these conflicts developed and changed over time. Beginning during the period of political party conflict of the 17905 and culminating after the War of 1812, it became clear that public memories were highly controversial and contested as different people consciously employed images of the war to enhance their own social capital and political power. Even the seemingly most stable stock character of Revolutionary War memory, the great war hero, had been called

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Introduction

into question by 1818. But although these intentional uses of public memory and the very process of democratization that opened up public culture helped to destabilize memory itself, the Revolutionary military past continued to offer Americans a core around which to define their national pride until 1825 and beyond. The public memory of the Revolutionary War created national identity by allowing early Americans to imagine a shared history of common sacrifice, at first by great war heroes and then increasingly by average people as well. The nineteenth-century French philosopher Ernest Renan stressed how important an understanding of this kind of mythic past was to understanding the history of nationalism. Although Renan's imperialist outlook is certainly out of favor, his idea of what made a nation cohere still has much to offer. Wherever a people could not claim to share religion, blood, race, community interest, or geography as a basis for national identity, the past became incredibly important as the "rich heritage of memories" that would act to bond people together. In his seminal essay "What Is a Nation?" Renan wrote that "The nation, like the individual, is the fruit of a long past spent in toil, sacrifice, and devotion. . . . Thus we see that a nation is a great solid unit, formed by the realization of sacrifices in the past, as well as of those one is prepared to make in the future."12 Scholarship on the creation of national identity has increased tenfold in recent years, and many scholars still recognize some utility in Renan's approach. Benedict Anderson's tremendously influential work Imagined Communities stresses how public culture, including memories of a shared past, allowed people to create images of their "communion" as they imagined their connections with one another to form national allegiances. Memories of wartime successes and sacrifices made up some of what Linda Colley has referred to as the "mental furniture" necessary for eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Britons to imagine what their nation meant. Eric Hobsbawm has shown that nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europeans were even willing to fabricate ceremonies and traditions based on a wholly mythic but nonetheless widely believed past in order to constitute their national identities. All these scholars define nationalism as an imaginative process and seek to uncover what cemented the bonds of fellow feeling between people.13 While continuing to view nationalism as an act of imagination, a recent group of early American historians has also drawn our attention to the practices that instilled and exhibited such sentiments. These scholars have begun to analyze how public culture, particularly public celebrations, helped give Americans a sense of national identity while at the same time clearly de-

Introduction

7

fining racial, gender, class, and political limits to membership in the American political community. Len Travers's study on how celebrations of Independence Day aided "in the formation and communication of national identity and national consciousness in the early republic" considers how patriotic memories of the Declaration of Independence, and of the American Revolution generally, were expressed in the exuberant festive culture of Boston, Charleston, and Philadelphia.14 David Waldstreicher broadens that picture to demonstrate how the panoply of public celebrations in the early republic created nationalism out of the whole cloth of partisanship and division. Waldstreicher stresses that American nationalism was formed by a set of political practices, conflicts, and rites of citizenship enacted in the streets.15 Simon Newman's work on festive culture and popular political culture in the 17905 emphasizes how national identity was created in and around partisanship and boundaries of race, class, and gender.16 My work defines nationalism both as an imaginative process and as a political practice and shows how the two combined in manifestations of public memory. Commemorations of the Revolutionary War created abstract ideas of what the ideal American nation should be; at the same time, however, pondering the Revolutionary military past provided the basis for Americans to imagine that they had something in common across regions and sometimes across racial, class, and gender barriers, even as those barriers were simultaneously strengthened in other ways. Participating in commemoration, whether by reading a book, seeing a play, or turning out in the streets for a public celebration, also enabled people to put their ideas about the nation into practice and to enact some of the conflicts that belied the image of consensus that was often simultaneously propagated. Even more importantly, military memories played a unique role in the creation of American nationalism as an ideology, an identity, and a practice. No work has yet adequately explained how Revolutionary War bloodshed legitimized the American nation by providing a specific focus for Americans' self-fashioning. That is what I will attempt to accomplish. In doing so, I hope to make a significant contribution to the ongoing historical debates over memory and nationalism by placing emphasis on the role of war in the creation of nationalism. Memories of the Revolutionary War were important, if for no other reason than that many early Americans said so over and over again. This book takes them at their word but also looks critically at how military commemorations show us particular aspects of the development of national identity. Charles Royster's work in the 19708 and 19808 on the intellectual and

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Introduction

cultural consequences of the Revolutionary War first laid the groundwork for this kind of look at public memory of the war, but few historians have followed up on Royster's tantalizing hints that the memory of that war had a profound influence on American national identity.17 Eighteenth-century Americans had no doubts, however, about the significance of military memory to their patriotism and national identity. The playwright Jabez Peck laid out the issues when he asked in 1787: Ought we ever to forget those arduous, those bloody struggles we endured in that dangerous contest? — a contest in which thousands of our dear friends yielded up their lives on the sanguine plains. And shall we, who are enjoying the blessings for which they fought 'till their last breath, forget to celebrate those transactions? Ought we not, on the other hand ever to bear them on our minds, and endeavour to impress on the minds of the rising generation, the inestimable value of the liberties they possess, and the dangerous struggles their predecessors endured to secure to them those invaluable blessings?18

Historians should take Peck's words seriously because many of his contemporaries clearly did. Many scholars have addressed similar issues for other wars and other national cultures. European historians in recent years have devoted an increasing amount of attention to the ways in which public memories of the two world wars have rearranged modern national identities. George Mosse and Jay Winter both stress the indelible mark left on modern Europe by the immense sense of loss related to these wars.19 Other scholars have charted ways in which not only the world wars but also smaller conflicts ranging from colonial wars to the Gulf War have altered modern European self-perceptions.20 American historians have not entirely ignored the importance of military memory to the formation of national identity, but most of their efforts have focused on conflicts other than the Revolutionary War. Jill Lepore has shown how stories, commemorations, and visual representations of King Philip's War shaped American memory and identity (both white and Indian) from the seventeenth into the twentieth century. Kurt Piehler's survey of American war memory sheds some interesting light on the Revolutionary period, but its real strength lies in its assessment of the effects of the world wars on the creation of modern America. Interesting work is beginning to be done on the far-reaching consequences of Mexican War, Spanish-American War, and Vietnam War memory.21 Even more attention has been paid in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to the public memory of the Civil War and its consequences

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9

for the American nation. Perhaps because the Civil War so explicitly tore apart the American nation, scholars have more thoroughly investigated how romanticized images of the war and efforts to reconcile its conflicts helped to bring the country back together and to confirm a new sense of national identity. At the same time, scholars, including David Blight, Nina Silber, and Amy J. Kinsel, have shown how certain uses of Civil War memory, especially racialized images, have continued to be divisive.22 Anyone who has paid attention to recent controversies over the flying of the Confederate flag at the statehouses of several southern states can grasp that the public memory of the Civil War is capable of causing fresh wounds. Public memory of the Revolutionary War, which insured the creation of the American nation in the first place, deserves as much attention. In fact, many memories of the Civil War, the world wars, and even Vietnam echoed Revolutionary War memory, and any understanding of how those later wars shaped American national identity is incomplete without understanding the Revolutionary precedent. I seek to offer a picture of how Americans first defined themselves with reference to fighting, mourning, sacrifice, and triumph —all themes that retained their currency in later decades and centuries. To be sure, remembering warfare was not the only way in which early Americans constituted themselves into a nation, nor was the process completed by 1825. Reverence for other national symbols such as Plymouth Rock and the Declaration of Independence helped people imagine aspects of their national identity not related to sacrifice and bloodshed. The United States Constitution established the framework for national government and became a symbol, albeit a contested one, of loyalty and what Liah Greenfeld has called "a nation in the American sense." Edward Countryman has shown how the "collisions" between whites, African Americans, and Indians contributed to a particular understanding of a unique "American character" up until the end of the nineteenth century, and other scholars have argued that westward expansion and the creation of Indian and Mexican "others" beyond American borders did as much to shape American self-perceptions.23 Most Americans also held on to regional, religious, and parochial identities even as they were developing allegiances to the American nation, and the vision of a single nation was not wholly accepted until after the Civil War. Alongside these other strands of American nationalism, public memory of the Revolutionary War held great power in public culture and profoundly influenced national politics. Revolutionary War memory could be a powerful social force. The following five chapters trace the nature of early Ameri-

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Introduction

cans' efforts to use that power and to properly commemorate the Revolutionary War. Commemorations of the Revolutionary War, as a military conflict, played a very specific role in the public culture of Revolutionary America. The war itself was only part of the larger political and ideological Revolution in America at the end of the eighteenth century, but without a successful conclusion to the war, none of the other changes would have been possible. I examine in this book the ways that Americans publicly remembered their war in order to work through their feelings about a whole host of political, ideological, and social issues. The links between the war and the larger Revolution mean that sometimes the two may seem to be conflated in the sources, but that is only because military memories often moved Americans to articulate their feelings about the nation in terms that were important for their conception of the broader Revolution as well. I focus here on expressly military commemorations —the celebration of war heroes, parades on battle anniversaries, celebrations of the signing of peace treaties, plays about the war, and many other forms of military memory—in order to show how pondering the sacrifice of war allowed Americans to express their larger hopes and aspirations for themselves and for their Revolutionary nation. In many ways, the questions that plagued Americans during the early republic about what kind of nation they lived in continue to plague us today. We still seek to understand if there are any essential beliefs that hold us together. Whether in a military reenactment in a local Fourth of July celebration or in more ominous circumstances such as the invocation of "freedom fighters" by the modern militia movement, we must recognize that the Revolutionary War has had a defining influence on the malleable concept of American patriotism. To understand how the Revolutionary War contributed to the earliest formation of national identity is to understand something crucial and long lasting about American political culture.

Chapter i

"Blood-Bought Fame": National Identity and Commemoration During the Revolutionary War, 1775-1781

To Die, or to be free? That is the question. — "A Soliloquy on the Times" (Baltimore) Maryland journal, July j, 1775

At the Battle of Bunker Hill on June 17,1775, Dr. Joseph Warren was shot in the face at close range and killed instantly. Although Warren was a well-known political orator, physician, and president of the Provincial Congress of Massachusetts and was about to be commissioned as a major general in the Continental Army, he fought at Bunker Hill in the ranks alongside ordinary soldiers. His death was almost certainly messy: when his remains were collected ten months after the battle, they could be identified only by Paul Revere's dental records.1 In its physical reality, Warren's death was not unlike thousands of others that followed over the next eight years of war with Great Britain, but on a symbolic level his demise soon came to mean something much greater. The actual grim violence of Warren's death was transformed and sentimentalized into a tool for mobilizing public support for the war. He became the first great celebrated martyr to the cause of American liberty, and nearly at once he was transformed from a local figure into a national hero. The commemoration of Joseph Warren, the heroic martyr, inspired patriotism during the war and stimulated the national imagination as an example of the glory that would accrue to those who made the ultimate sacrifice for the sake of American political principles. A wide variety of orators, authors, politicians, and average Americans quickly fastened on the heroic image of Joseph Warren after the Battle of

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Bunker Hill as they sought to impose some meaning on the chaos of war around them. Instead of staring the realities of death and warfare in the face, Americans sometimes diverted their eyes to focus on a glorified version of violence that was at once more patriotic and more palatable. The instant memory of the glory of warfare, carried throughout the colonies by a burgeoning print culture, offered solace in the midst of real bloodshed and fear. Although it was obvious that not all Americans supported the patriot cause, martyrs like Joseph Warren allowed patriots to tell themselves stories to the contrary. An excellent example of how quickly and effectively Warren began to make his mark on public memory appeared in Georges Cambridge Almanack for 1776. Daniel George, the almanac's author, was a seventeen-yearold "crippled" boy whom the Boston preacher Samuel Williams had recommended to Salem publisher Ezekiel Russell as a prodigiously talented astronomer and writer. Russell published the first of a series of almanacs by George in 1775 just as the Revolutionary War began. George's Cambridge Almanack for 1776 contained extensive accounts of the battles of Concord and Bunker Hill and listed the names of all those killed at the battles of Lexington and Concord. But the greatest tributes were reserved for Joseph Warren, "that honorable, renowned, and magnanimous hero" of Bunker Hill. The almanac's second edition contained an acrostic on the martyr's name and a "poem on the late General Warren" that typified the outpouring of personal and public grief that characterized heroic commemoration: We sore lament both one and all, In sackcloth let us mourn, Brave General Warren's hapless fate, And weep upon his urn. My trembling hand, my aking heart, O! how it throbs this day! His loss is felt in ev'ry part of vast America.2

Daniel George cited several reasons for including the patriotic military material in the almanac. He stressed the news value of his highly accurate battle accounts, and he told his readers that by purchasing the volume they were financially supporting him, a disabled boy. But beyond this, George maintained that almanac readers were also "perpetuating the heroic deeds of your brave and renowned Countrymen . .. keeping in everlasting remem-

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13

brance the names of those noble Martyrs to Liberty, who fell in action."3 George anticipated that Continental Army officers and soldiers would carry the almanac with them and refer to the battle descriptions for inspiration, and he dedicated a crude woodcut of Joseph Warren in the almanac's second edition to the American army.4 George hoped that his work might even "enter the solitary dwellings of the poor and iliterate [sic]" to be read aloud.5 Why did Daniel George believe that it was so important to "perpetuate" the memory of Warren and the other "Martyrs to Liberty?" Why turn news coverage of the war into an obvious commemorative exercise? Why elevate Joseph Warren from the field at Bunker Hill and turn him into a figure that even the "poor and illiterate" should mourn and admire? The answers lie in the power of public memory and commemoration of the war to validate the politics of the Revolution and create American national identity. Daniel George assured his largely New England readers that just by purchasing his almanac and by keeping wartime sacrifices properly in mind, they gained admission to a larger community of Americans and linked their cause to the rest "of vast America," where like-minded patriots would also remember Warren's heroic death. In the process of turning the horror of death into a symbol worthy of lasting remembrance, Daniel George contributed to the creation of a new idea of what the American nation should be. Daniel George's commemoration of Joseph Warren and the other, lesser martyrs of Bunker Hill and Lexington and Concord provides an excellent starting point for an analysis of the public memory of military conflict that developed during the Revolutionary War. The main focus of wartime commemoration was praise for great republican heroes like Warren, who were seen to have sacrificed themselves for the cause of liberty. Government officials, social elites, and average people like Daniel George also helped to define a vision of the perfect American nation, united by voluntary praise for the heroes and their deeds. Americans could witness and take part in many different forms of commemoration during the war years. In addition to reading almanacs like George's, they could read other forms of commemoration in newspapers, broadsides, and books. Patriots, especially those living in or near towns like Lexington, Massachusetts; Bennington, Vermont; or Charleston, South Carolina, could attend celebrations, church services, parades, and picnics, all of which dramatized in public form the message of shared sacrifice for the newly created patriotic cause. This popular participation became the basis for the future postwar democratization of memory, although for the time being the democratic consequences of the actions of average citizens remained veiled.

The Late Magnanimous and Heroic Gen. Joseph Warren, engraving from George s Cambridge Almanack, 2nd ed. (Salem: E. Russell, 1775). Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. The young almanac author, Daniel George, used this crude engraving of Joseph Warren to illustrate his account of the Battle of Bunker Hill, and he inscribed the image "to the American Army." George hoped that enlisted men and civilians would carry his almanac with them and refer to the engraving and poem to keep Warren's memory in mind and to derive inspiration from his example as the war continued. Images and laudatory poems like this one helped to make Joseph Warren one of the greatest martyred heroes of the Revolutionary War.

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During the war, heroic officers were the objects of praise, but "the people" also became potentially important, not necessarily for their own heroic deeds but for their ability to offer proper patriotism and memory in return for the heroes' sacrifices. My analysis does not follow all the events of the Revolutionary War but instead focuses on these important aspects of how an ideal nation was created by public memories of certain heroes and events. As a national experience, the war was bloody and divisive, but the war as it existed in public memory often served to draw patriotic Americans closer together.6 It is not possible to understand the entire Revolutionary War by focusing on the creation of specific military heroes and the meaning of selective public celebrations, but it is possible to grasp something of how Americans started to make sense of the war. Even as the events of the war were taking place, they began to be transformed through commemoration into a set of cultural symbols as public memories of the Revolutionary War began to fashion a sense of national identity where none had existed before. The image of the American nation created in public commemorations was selective, idealistic, and consensual. As writers, preachers, and participants in public celebrations created images of sanitized violence and sacrifice, the process of commemoration itself helped to define the new American nation as many Americans were filled with self-congratulation for keeping the memory of heroism sacred. In the midst of fierce fighting, public commemorations of bloodshed brought the past, present, and future together to form an image of a united American community. Commemorations often expressed Americans' hopes — sometimes overreaching hopes — for their civic order. In order for wartime commemorations to create the image of a cohesive national community, the war had to assume its most glorious and heroic guise in the public mind. Public memories provided images of unity, but they also could become an arena for conflict when people disagreed about what that unity should mean. Cultural visions of civic and national unity sometimes covered over the contradictions inherent in wartime commemorations. Although in reality the war often tore communities apart, patriotic writers, artists, preachers, and orators could not accurately represent the dark side of the conflict. As a sentimentalized picture of violence helped to build the ideas of consensus around American heroism, layers of cultural convention masked the horror of war. And horrible it was. Approximately 25,000 American soldiers, sailors, and militiamen were killed in the war, and over 500,000 Loyalists remained opposed to the Revolution, 60,000 of whom were exiled. America was clearly

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divided, but images of division held little place in the instant commemoration of the war.7 Over 100,000 American men took up arms and left their homes, and an estimated 20,000 women moved with them from camp to camp. Americans contested for their very survival against a well-trained and supplied British army that bettered them on almost every field of contest to the point that for Americans to continue the struggle seemed miraculous for much of the war. Militia troops, and often even the Continental Army, performed poorly. Communities were torn apart by local animosities, especially where the fighting was fiercest in the Hudson Valley and in the South.8 When the war began in 1775, Americans were not sure that it would lead to independence, but within one year the war had transformed into a bitter fight for national survival, and as the war against Britain spread, Americans on both sides of the Revolution spilled their blood and fought for their very existence.9 Despite this considerable atmosphere of social upheaval, the drive for wartime consensus led to a heavy focus in public memory on harmonious commemorations of the northern war. It was much easier to commemorate Lexington and Concord or Bunker Hill, seemingly symbols of military enthusiasm and effectiveness, rather than dwelling upon the fighting in the midAtlantic or southern states that proved much more brutal, partisan, and divisive. When southern events were commemorated, as at Palmetto Day in South Carolina, the focus remained on the early war—before the British and Loyalists had made their full mark on the southern conflict. Commemorating local heroes and local events allowed people to imagine not only their special regional character, but also how their local struggles connected to the nation at large. In each of these locations, regional and national allegiances overlapped and fused into a partly shared, yet diverse, American national identity. Localized celebrations did not negate the idea of one American nation, they merely marked out special regional contributions to the national military effort. People composed their own poetry, songs, and dramas to contribute their views to the public memory of the war and to express their patriotic allegiances to their states and their nation. The balance between conflict and consensus, region and nation, was all part of creating a new image of America. During the war, Americans took the radical step of separating their government from the British monarchy, but they reassured themselves through public memory that social order could be maintained. The elite officers who led the American military forces, and most especially those who gave up their lives for the cause, were represented as men of high merit who, after leading their new country against a bitter enemy, would serve as an inspiration to a new kind of American leader cast firmly in

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the republican political mold. The Revolutionary War was depicted as a measure of Americans' civic humanist strength and worthiness to achieve their own liberty. In this cultural and ideological realm, then, the very war that was dividing the population became the ultimate test of American unity— whether Americans were capable of putting their personal, local, and parochial interests aside in order to form a nation. It is not surprising that public memories of the war helped to solidify an ideology of republican nationalism as military accomplishment came to serve as a test of civic virtue. Military service was certainly not the only way that Americans expressed their hopes for national greatness or future citizenship, but commemorations stressed that it was one of the most important.10 The veneration of past conflicts could also provide the ultimate comfort that if Americans fought virtuously and well, they would be valiantly revered in the future even if they were killed. While the fighting carried on, the promise that future generations would glorify their sacrifice offered hope to patriots facing a daunting military task. Any battle worthy of glorious remembrance would also seem far more worthy of Revolutionary support than those aspects of the war better left forgotten. Brutality between neighbors, fierce vendettas pursued against Native Americans, the vagaries of life in a military camp, and drastic inflation and food shortages were usually left unspoken, as public culture celebrated the noble and the heroic. If the Revolution would transform the future political world, then the war would provide the stuff of future legend. An anonymous ballad reprinted in the Pennsylvania Evening Gazette on 4 April 1778 celebrated the power of history and memory to perpetuate the great nation created by military struggle: Make room, O ye kingdoms, in his'try renowned, Whose arms have in battle with glory been crowned. Make room; for America, another great nation, Arises to claim in your councils a station. Her sons fought for freedom, and, by their own bravery, Have rescued themselves from the shackles of slavery; America is free, and tho' Britain abhorr'd it, Yet Fame a new volume prepares to record it.11

Tales of American military "fame" set the tone for the glorification of the nation during the war and over the subsequent fifty years.

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Martyrs and Heroes By focusing on a few central heroic martyrs like Joseph Warren, Americans looked beyond the immediate battlefield and created remarkable symbols of patriotism which they thought to be worthy of remembrance and commemoration. For many decades after the fighting was over, these heroes would stand as reminders of the glorious side of war. Heroes and martyrs showed the benefits of patriotic sacrifice. Early in the conflict, Americans comforted themselves and their families with assurances that they were duty bound to sacrifice themselves for higher political principles. Israel Shreve, for example, wrote to his wife Mary about his nervous expectations shortly after he had enlisted in New Jersey in June 1776: "I soon shall Experience the feeling of Battle.... God only knows whose fate it will be to fall." But Shreve reassured his wife, "I have a great Desire once, more to Return, But knowing I owe my service to my Country am Determined to Defend our Rights and privaleges so just, with all my [p]owers."12 Shreve did not want to die, but he was willing to risk his life for patriotic politics. Perhaps Shreve was just the kind of soldier for whom Daniel George had designed his portable account of Joseph Warren's glorious martyrdom. Carrying the martyr's image allowed fighting men to see Revolutionary values compressed into the form of an inspirational hero. There were many ugly ways to die in the Revolutionary War, all of them inglorious in their reality. Just one example will illustrate the brutality, a brutality to which Americans were not accustomed. The Battle of Bunker Hill in June 1775, during which Warren himself was struck down, was the first full-scale battle of the war, and though it was less severe than much of the fighting later in the war, both the Americans who had fortified Breed's Hill in Charlestown, Massachusetts, and the waves of British redcoats who streamed up the hill to displace them faced dire consequences. The American forces lost 140 men, and the British lost 226. Eight hundred twenty six British soldiers and 271 American militiamen were wounded in the battle. But these numbers can only begin to describe the horror of death among the smoke and intense heat on Breed's Hill. As line after line of redcoats charged up the hill carrying heavy packs, they were picked off by musket and artillery fire that littered the hill with bodies and induced mass confusion. When Howe's troops finally mounted the hill and stormed their opponents' redoubt, they charged with bayonets and stabbed to death thirty Americans who were wielding their muskets as clubs. One British officer, who was well accustomed to battle, wrote several weeks later: "the shocking carnage that day never will be out

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of my mind till the day of my death."13 Despite the pervasiveness of death on June 17,1775, only Joseph Warren was enshrined as a heroic martyr, and only a few men were also ushered into the national pantheon of heroes in the months that followed — though the suffering inflicted at Bunker Hill was repeated in battle after battle all over the country during the remainder of the war. Martyrs and heroes were not created by death itself, but rather by the search for meaning among the community of the living. Martyrdom was important because in order for death to become the ultimate patriotic duty Americans had to be reassured that their sacrifices would be remembered. The idea of martyrdom gave those Americans who held Bunker Hill in the face of the British onslaught something to fight for. Patriots like Israel and Mary Shreve had a particular stake in future remembrance because long-lasting memory would legitimize their revolutionary actions and attach lasting glory to their sacrifice. As William Wolcott assured the readers of a heroic poem he published in 1778: Brave sons of war, You well deserve that character . .. Your virtue, high in my esteem, Will surely gain you lasting fame.14

If patriots wished to create a republic devoted to ideas of freedom and liberty, it would be essential for posterity to record their actions. The sacrifices of the present were tied to the prosperity and glory of the future, as at a 1778 Fourth of July celebration in White Plains, New York, when the officers toasted: "To the immortal memory of Generals Warren, Montgomery, Mercer, Herkimer, Nash, Wooster, with all the renowned heroes who have fought, bled and died in defence of their country's freedom.... the war being gloriously ended, may all the blessings that flow from liberty, peace, agriculture and commerce be the future portion of the United States of America."15 In a sense, the future memory of heroic sacrifice actually came to define patriotism itself as Americans exhibited an active concern from the beginning of the war with how they would be remembered.16 The content of early American nationalism was a reverence for sacrifice itself. Revolutionary warfare supposedly sanctified the land where blood was spilled and those who shed their blood for the cause of political liberty. Descriptions of blood soaking the American soil to consecrate it as holy ground filled printed materials and commemorations of all kinds.17 Israel Shreve,

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for one, was listening to the ever present message that death might protect American rights and privileges, the contents of a new civil religion of politics.18 The idealized cultural picture of the war asked the public to live up to the image of sacrifice on the "Field of Blood, where so many of our friends wallowed in their gore."19 Public memory meant that the "wounds, that stream'd with blood" no longer belonged only to the men who fought but to the whole American people.20 Through the process of commemoration, mere public memory of the war was transformed into the "Blood-bought fame" that would become the new nation's reputation.21 The Revolution also became a holy cause to avenge the death of those whose blood colored the American landscape. As Congregational minister Jacob Gushing roared during an early battlefield commemoration in Lexington, Massachusetts, Americans were called "To arms! To action, and the battle of the warrior! .. .towipe away the blood wherewith this land has been stained."22 Wartime commemorations (ceremonies, eulogies, printed pamphlets, newspaper articles, orations, and other forms of public culture) provided the context through which political martyrs acquired their glory and power as national symbols. The clear message of most commemorations was that even death was a small price to pay for liberty and that the dead were worthy of special remembrance.23 At a 1778 Bennington, Vermont, battlefield commemoration, Stephen Jacob said of those who had been killed two years before in a critical engagement between the New Hampshire militia and Burgoyne's army: We mourn their fall, yet joy they once were here, To show their country what they held dear.24

Poets, orators, and especially ministers depicted millions of Americans working together for "the cause, for which heroes have fought, patriots bled, prophets, apostles, martyrs, confessors, and righteous men have died."25 Revolutionary political principles were irrevocably joined to the war through the memory of the heroes who were killed. Boston poet Barnabas Binney said of those who died in Revolutionary warfare: "With Blood they seal their Cause, [and] Die to save their Country's Laws."26 Local preacher Noah Smith declared in a commemorative sermon on the battlefield of Bennington, Vermont: "In fighting, the death of some is necessary, even on the side of victory. . . . There is therefore no just cause of lamentation to those whose friends were slain, for by their deaths our country was saved."27 Public memory amounted to a form of eternal patriotic reward. Author Hugh Henry

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Brackenridge wrote in a 1779 eulogy to fallen soldiers, "It is the high reward of those who have risked their lives in a just and necessary war, that their names are sweet in the mouths of men, and every age shall know their actions."28 Commemorations that drew upon traditional European martyrological imagery transformed the heroic martyrs of the Revolutionary War into symbols of a new kind of national political commitment that their very deaths made possible. Noah Smith, for example, said that those who died in the pursuit of a noble cause "sealed it with their blood." It was left to those yet living to observe the "Custom among the ancients to canonise those who fell in battle, and to send them immediately to the elysian fields. This was productive of good effects among their soldiers, as it made them believe that, to die in battle, was only to enter upon a more happy state."29 Americans adapted the "custom among the ancients" to their own purposes when they commemorated their own central icons of heroic sacrifice. Martyrs who were persecuted and killed for their religious commitment had comprised an important part of Christian religious culture since Roman times, and martyrs like Joan of Arc had also played an important symbolic role in early-modern European political movements. In the seventeenth century, Puritan migrants to America had brought with them an English revolutionary zeal for John Foxe's Protestant martyrology. During the Seven Years' War, James Wolfe, the brilliant British military strategist who was killed while fighting for Quebec, had become the great military heroic martyr on the American continent and a symbol of British victory over the French. The American Revolution now created a new kind of national martyr, one who sacrificed himself purely for the cause of liberty and sanctified the American nation with his death.30 Not all martyrs were created equal, however. Although the glorification of death was a general theme that helped to insure individual soldiers that their sacrifices could be meaningful, justifying the Revolutionary War in political terms meant that some martyrs had to rise above this general standard to stand as examples to the entire American community. To satisfy this end, Americans created for themselves a breed of Revolutionary heroic martyrs who became central icons of national sacrifice. In the tradition of General Wolfe, the most important Revolutionary martyrs were officers, wellborn men who were fit to serve as national examples (and sometimes simultaneously as symbols of local pride). While every soldier's death might be important, it was really only the republican gentlemen, those generals whom the officers in White Plains toasted at their 1778 Fourth of July dinner, who were qualified to stand as political examples to the entire national republican community. In a 1779 eulogy, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, himself one of

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the authors who most praised the glories of average soldiers during the war, provided a veritable litany of the ways that martyred officers would stand as inspirations to future generations: Posterity shall quote them for parallels, and for examples. When they mean to dress the hero with the fairest praises, they shall say he was gallant and distinguished in his early fall, as Warren; he was virtuous, and prudent, and intrepid, as Montgomery; he was young, and faithful, and generous, as Macpherson; he fell in the bold and resolute advance, like Haslet and like Mercer; he saw the honour which his valour had acquired, and fainted in the arms of victory, like Herkimer; having gallantly repulsed the foe, he fell covered with wounds, in his old age, like Wooster.31

Deference was still important enough in the early social structure of republican America to insure that the majority of publicly celebrated martyrs, who had demonstrated their merit through dying for the cause, were wellborn and high in rank.32 The Revolutionary cult of martyrs created by wartime commemorations had at its core a uniquely American version of military heroism. The Revolutionary War created famous American heroes out of men like Joseph Warren and Richard Montgomery at a time when such heroes were vitally necessary.33 Conventionally, heroes had been strong men whose personal magnetism and strength ennobled the causes for which they fought. American heroes added a republican twist when they were represented as strong men of merit who volunteered to leave their comfortable circumstances to aid their country in the explicitly masculine pursuit of war.34 As the character of Israel Putnam stated in Philadelphia playwright John Leacock's pamphlet drama The Fall of British Tyranny, "Posterity will stand amazed, and be astonish'd at the heroes of this new world, that the spirit of patriotism should blaze to such a height, and eclipse all others, should outbrave fatigue, danger, pain, peril, famine, and even death itself to serve their country."35 Heroes set the highest standard of behavior for republican soldiers. As one Yale College student wrote in a school exercise, idealized officers became "Heroic warriors . . . like to those whom ancient Rome named 'Thunderbolts of War."36 Praise for these central heroic figures was intended to inspire men to enlist and carry on the fight, but it also came to define the nation of patriotic Americans brought together in their praise of a new breed of political gentlemen. John Leacock recognized the power of heroes to galvanize public action in his play The Fall of British Tyranny. The Goddess of Liberty bids those who hear her words during the war:

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Hail! Patriots, hail! by me inspired be! ... May martyr'd patriots whisper in your ear, To tread the paths of virtue without fear . . . Hail! my last hope, she cries, inspired by me, Wish, write, talk, fight and die —for LIBERTY. 3 7

Leacock imagined a unified public response to the call to arms issued by the "martyr'd patriots" he represented. This idea remained remarkably stable throughout the war. In 1781 in the first volume of his three-volume history of the war, James Murray contended that commemorations had turned the dead into "martyrs for the cause of liberty," with power to spur others to action.38 Not all dead soldiers qualified to become martyrs, however, and many average men were entirely forgotten. Although the officer-heroes of the Revolutionary War were set apart from European military heroes by their lack of aristocratic pedigree, they nonetheless represented the top of American society, and this position also separated them from the majority of their men. Charles Patrick Niemeyer has recently reinforced the fact that most men who fought in the Revolutionary War were "young, landless, and unskilled."39 Many officers probably agreed with Charles Lee when he called his Virginia troops "riff-raff."40 A large number of enlisted men were foreign born and a significant minority were African Americans, especially toward the end of the war when filling the ranks became more difficult for both state militia and army leaders.41 During the war, these were not the men who saw their battlefield actions turned into images of heroic public culture; because they were not "heroic" in the conventional sense, it was unclear exactly how their contributions would be remembered by anyone other than their families and friends. Even when Hugh Henry Brackenridge praised the sacrifices of nonofficers in a public eulogy, he made them sound moneyed and well educated as he lauded fallen soldiers who were "the mechanics of the city, the merchants of the counting-house, the youths engaged in literary studies, and the husbandmen the peaceful cultivators of the soil."42 Average, poor enlisted men, and certainly African American enlisted men, did not qualify to become full-fledged public heroes. At the beginning of the war, very few African American writers or preachers could publish their ideas, and white commentators frequently ignored the very real contributions of black soldiers. If black men were depicted in news and commemoration of the war at all, it was usually to show how slaves had deserted their masters

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to join the British. For example, the "Negro" characters appearing in John Leacock's drama The Fall of British Tyranny, who are duped into joining Lord Dunmore's British troops in Virginia only to be sold back into slavery, are almost the only African American figures who appear in wartime commemorative culture. These lampoonish figures, who utter pidgin threats like "me shoot him down dead," are far from heroic and served mainly to scare the play's white readers into believing that the British were inspiring dangerous slave insurrection.43 Most of the many African Americans who served bravely in the Continental Army and American militias were not even afforded such a comic representation.44 During the war, there was no public "heroic" vision of the very real contributions of these men to the military cause, and the individual memory of their acts would have to wait to become a part of the national story of patriotism. During the war, a less "messy" and decidedly more upper-class public vision of patriotism and consensus for the American cause created the imagined American community. This is not to say that Americans had achieved perfect unity during the Revolutionary War; quite the contrary. The daily reality of war was a brutal and often plebian experience, but those experiences went untold when Americans were looking for heroes. During the war, a well-defined group of white, male officers served as the central republican icons that dominated commemorative culture. One of the greatest of these icons was General Richard Montgomery, who became a central figure of military memory almost as soon as he was killed. The immediate efforts to commemorate him as a national martyr to the Revolutionary cause show how one man could be transformed into an American heroic icon and a symbol of national consensus. Wartime public memory of Richard Montgomery also demonstrates how Americans were beginning to define a new national style of popular political culture as they created, argued over, and reacted to public commemoration.45 Richard Montgomery was killed on December 31,1775, when he was hit in the head by grapeshot as he led part of an ill-fated American attack on Quebec. Montgomery, an Irishman and a former captain in the British army, had lived in America since only 1773, when he had married Janet Livingston, a prominent New Yorker, but he adopted the American Revolutionary cause as his own and was commissioned one of the first brigadier generals in the Continental Army. By marrying into one of the richest and most prominent families in the colonies, Montgomery placed himself at the top of the social hierarchy, a fact that combined with his previous military rank to ensure he was given an important early command.

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In September 1775, Congress authorized an invasion of Canada, which it perceived as a vulnerable part of the British Empire. Two groups of militia volunteers set out through a harsh New York and New England winter, one under the command of Colonel Benedict Arnold and the other led by Major General Philip Schuyler, with Montgomery as his second in command. After Schuyler fell ill, Montgomery took command and led the men into Canada. Arnold's troops were delayed on a long march through the ferocious winter weather, and Montgomery set up an ineffective siege outside Quebec before he was joined by Arnold late in the year. Montgomery was killed on New Year's Eve 1776 as he led his volunteer troops in an unsuccessful assault on the fortress. He became the quintessential model of a martyred republican hero as the first high-ranking officer of the Continental Army to be killed in action. Very soon after Montgomery's death, the process of commemorating him as a martyr to "the glorious cause of liberty" began.46 An astonishing variety of people worked to keep his memory alive —albeit for very different reasons —in almanacs, songs, engravings, poetry, and public ceremonies. Upon learning of her husband's death, Janet Livingston Montgomery put on the mourning clothes that she would wear for the rest of her long life, much of which was spent dispensing her family's political patronage and working to preserve the public memory of the man she referred to as "my Soldier."47 The grand-scale public commemoration of Montgomery began when news of his death reached the Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Members learned of Montgomery's demise on January 17 and immediately began work to eulogize him to the American public. Congress was facing a host of problems: internal division over the increasingly pressing decision to declare independence, the fight to keep the lackluster Continental Army together after its initial enlistments expired, and a host of difficulties in financing the war.48 Perhaps these problems inspired Congress to try to make Montgomery the first government-sanctioned hero of the war. The failed attack on Quebec had dramatized the disorganization of American military forces, as well as the considerable weaknesses of militia troops, but Congress tried to turn a tale of military disaster into a source of glory and inspiration. The enlisted men who took part in the campaign later remembered the march mostly as a trip filled with suffering and cold that culminated in the tragedy of the failed assault on Quebec City and Montgomery's death, but the commander's being remembered as a martyr suppressed the memory of woe and created in its place a picture of heroism. The celebration of the martyr allowed the

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divisive and painful reality of the Revolutionary War to become a symbol of national pride. On January 22, 1776, only three weeks after the battle, Congress appointed a committee of distinguished members —William Livingston (Janet Livingston Montgomery's cousin), Benjamin Franklin, and William Hooper — "to consider of a proper method of paying a just tribute of gratitude to the memory of General Montgomery."49 While most wartime commemorations were much more casual, like the almanac poetry of Daniel George, the public commemoration of Richard Montgomery started out as a carefully controlled government project intent on creating the hero as a usable symbol of wished-for consensus. Montgomery would not be left to become a local hero; he took on national importance as congressmen acted to express the will of the "people" whom they represented by providing opportunities for public commemoration. Congress decided upon two fitting tributes for General Montgomery— in the tradition of public martyrs —both of which served didactic and political purposes. First, they ordered the Continental treasury to release the astronomically large sum of £300 sterling to Benjamin Franklin so that he could procure "from Paris, or any other part of France" a stone monument to Montgomery with an appropriate inscription "sacred to his memory, and expressive of his amiable character and heroic atcheivements." The congressional resolution noted that such a monument to Montgomery would be useful "for transmitting to future ages, as examples truly worthy of imitation, his patriotism, conduct, boldness of enterprize, insuperable perseverance, and contempt of danger and death."50 Congress recognized that a physical monument to Montgomery's political, personal, and military virtues could be used as a tool to inspire Americans both present and future. As a form of public commemoration, monuments were meant to set aside space to remind the community of the principles that public martyrs stood for, so Congress was eager to memorialize Richard Montgomery in stone.51 Over the previous three hundred years, Europeans had adopted the Greek and Roman tradition of building funeral monuments to commemorate public heroes, and now the new American nation strove to mark its great man in a similar way, albeit on a smaller scale. Government officials hoped that Montgomery would stand as a permanent marker to the political cause in a nation that had never before had such a central symbol upon which to rely. Congress hoped the monument would bolster the political resolve of those who doubted the war and that its patriotic effects would last long into the future.

Engraving of the congressional monument to Richard Montgomery, Trinity Episcopal Church, New York City. Benson Lossing, Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (New York: Harper & Bros., 1855). © 2000-2001 www.arttoday.com. Congress began to plan this monument to the martyr General Richard Montgomery almost as soon news of his death in Canada reached Philadelphia in 1776. Benjamin Franklin arranged for the marble monument to be sculpted in France by Jean-Jacques Caffieri, and it was erected in Trinity Episcopal Church in New York City in 1787. In 1818, General Montgomery's widow, Janet Livingston Montgomery, arranged to have his remains reinterred beneath the monument, and they were buried there with great ceremony and public celebration. The monument represents a traditional form of marble tribute for a fallen republican hero.

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But obtaining a costly permanent monument was a long-term project, so Congress also sought a more immediate sign of public patriotism to make the martyr's death meaningful. It turned to a public funeral to provide occasions for the kind of conventional ceremonial display that could firmly establish a martyr's public reputation. British Americans were accustomed to public funerals, in both real and purely symbolic forms as on Pope's Day, but Congress hoped that a ceremony for Montgomery would be a carefully controlled homage to the dead hero without the public licentiousness that sometimes crept into such ceremonies. Congress commissioned Dr. William Smith, the provost of the College of Philadelphia, to deliver a funeral oration for Montgomery on February 19, 1776.52 Smith may have been an unwise choice; his reverence for Great Britain and his lukewarm support for the patriot cause had led to his investigation by the Philadelphia Council of Safety earlier in January. Still, the prospect of Smith's speech generated considerable advance interest and was eagerly anticipated both by Congress and by the patriotic public.53 Dr. Smith planned a stately procession through the streets of Philadelphia and engaged a group of musicians to accompany his oration.54 Members of Congress anticipated that the ceremony would be reported in newspapers around the country, and they hoped it would inspire both military reverence for the dead hero and support for the war. The public funeral for Montgomery also became a public drama with important social dimensions. The entire Continental Congress adjourned to the German Calvinist church in Philadelphia on February 19 to attend the public funeral. Thousands of onlookers, whose presence reassured congressmen that the people of the nation supported the martyred hero, filled the streets. They witnessed a sober but impressive display as the memorial procession passed from the courthouse through the streets of Philadelphia and reached the church, where the city's elites had already positioned themselves. As Smith's orchestra played solemn music, the students and professors of the college filed into the church in full academic regalia, followed by a large number of Philadelphia's clergy, the Continental Congress, the Pennsylvania Assembly, the Corporation of Philadelphia, the Committees of Safety and Inspection, several Pennsylvania Continental Army officers, and members of the battalions of the City Association. The procession was flanked by companies of light infantry and riflemen. One newspaper also related that "two galleries of the church were filled with the principal ladies of the city," who observed the spectacle.55 Although assigned to different locations —outside

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in the streets, in the procession, in the congregation, or observing from the galleries — representatives of many parts of the American community turned out, validating congressional hopes for a broad-based display of public grief. But even within the context of this highly coordinated ceremony, the creation of a usable national symbol around the figure of the dead general was not to be an uncontested process. The inevitable pressures involved in creating an immediately usable past during time of war quickly began to show. As Smith began his oration, it soon became clear that he felt conflict about how to approach his subject. He started his speech with a lengthy review of the "laudable custom" of venerating dead military heroes, referring to the funeral orations and monuments of the Greeks. He then noted how hard it was to compose a proper panegyric in the Greek mold during a civil war and said he feared that "no public character can be drawn alike acceptable to all," but he tried to assure his audience that he had sought to balance an historian's objectivity with praise of the dead hero's true merit. Smith was right to worry about how to balance his task because it soon became clear that his idea of an objective appraisal of the martyrs was not what the audience was prepared to accept in a heroic funeral sermon. The classical conventions of funeral oration demanded that the martyr be praised in highly stylized language that stressed the perfection of the cause for which he died, but Smith violated the convention with his lukewarm praise for the dead. The creation of a new breed of American hero who could see his nation through a split from England required a true panegyric, a form of persuasive oratory that deliberately exaggerated the virtue of its subject to enhance the nobility of a political cause.56 But there was considerable conflict over what kind of rhetoric was appropriate, and Smith was unwilling to conform to convention. After giving a brief biography of Montgomery leading up to his decision to fight for the American cause, Smith emphasized that Montgomery's loyalty to the king "remained firm and unshaken," and he portrayed Montgomery as being worried about the extent to which the attack on Canada was defensive enough to be justified "in the sight of god and the World."57 While before the Declaration of Independence many Americans maintained their allegiance to the king, even as they supported the war, Smith overemphasized the point. To prove what a great commander Montgomery was, the true equal of Wolfe, Smith emphasized a bit too strenuously that Montgomery had led only "a few new-raised men, of different colonies, and perhaps different tempers; ill supplied with arms and ammunition; worse disciplined; unaccustomed to look cannon in the face; to make or to mount a breach."38 While

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his assessment of American forces was accurate, Smith omitted the expected assurances of how well the ragtag Americans overcame such limitations to perform heroic service. When Smith proceeded at the end of his lengthy oration to recognize the other officers who had died with Montgomery at Quebec, he did a poor job of extending his panegyric praise to the lesser martyrs of the battle. In part, Smith's hesitation was caused by Congress's requirements for one national hero, instead of a list of lesser, regional figures of praise. Congress wanted most of the attention focused on Montgomery, but Smith also made a halfhearted effort to boost regional pride. He mentioned in passing that Pennsylvanians would want to remember Captain John Macpherson and said that Captain Jacob Cheesman of New York was "covered with honor and lamented by all who knew him." But Smith's efforts to praise lesser martyrs were hindered not only by their largely regional appeal. He recognized the limits of his own objective historical approach to the oration when he apologized to the audience that the others who fell in Canada "ought to be more fully commemorated on this occasion, if proper accounts of them could be collected."39 Smith was loath to talk about men about whom he knew very little. The audience, however, was less worried about the accuracy of any "proper account" than with the outright glorification of the dead. Overall, in his effort to remain objective in his commemoration of Montgomery and his military aides, William Smith came off as a less than enthusiastic patriot, and his oration fit poorly into the model heroic funeral Congress had envisioned. Smith had based some of his rhetoric about Montgomery's loyalty to the crown on previous congressional petitions to the king, but he had gravely misjudged the political requirements of a commemorative ceremony in early 1776. The image of Montgomery as a national martyr needed to be clear-cut and much more unapologetically patriotic in order to justify continued war and separation from Britain. Just as Congress was deciding to break from the crown entirely, there was no room in public culture for doubt. Ritual funeral ceremonies like those that had been staged in previous years in Boston for the victims of the Boston massacre, which were modeled on ceremonies created to canonize Roman republican heroes, had been public tests of American political allegiance since the 17605, and the war only raised the stakes for political funerals. One wartime historian wrote, for example, that the vitriolic speeches given at the funerals of those killed at Lexington and Concord "produced a great effect," as sentiment in favor of the war "encreased like a violent flame, throughout the whole continent."60

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Public reception of Smith's speech was cool, at best. John Adams wrote to Abigail Adams that "The oration was an insolent performance.... the appointment of him to make the oration, was a great oversight, and mistake." A routine motion in Congress to thank Dr. Smith and to publish his oration had to be withdrawn when strenuous opposition was expressed "from every part of the room." In March, Congress quietly paid for the ceremony without mentioning or commending Smith.61 The controversy over Smith's commemoration of Montgomery and his fellow soldiers did not end there. Since Congress would not publish the oration, Smith did so himself. At least six different editions of the Oration in Honor of General Montgomery were published in 1776 in Philadelphia; Newport; Norwich, Connecticut; London; and Newcastle. Smith referred to the controversy caused by the oration in his introduction when he admitted that he had edited the text "upon the recommendation of some friends." By the time Smith told his readers that he hoped to have "done justice to the memory of those brave men who are the chief subjects of the Oration," he had been taught a public lesson in the costs of failing at this task.62 Smith's conciliatory remarks did not end the opposition to his commemorative style because national honor and reputation were at stake in the funeral oration. Roger Enos, a lieutenant colonel who had commanded the first battalion under Benedict Arnold, decided that his reputation had been unfairly attacked in the speech. While it was true that Enos's men had defected before reaching Quebec and that he had led them back to their homes in Maine without the consent of his commander, Enos was later acquitted of personal mutiny or wrongdoing by a military court of inquiry. He was dissatisfied with the way Smith portrayed the incident, and he began a national newspaper campaign against the preacher. Enos called Smith "one of the most dangerous writers, and perhaps the most consumate villain that walks on the face of God's earth."63 Public reaction to Montgomery's funeral had clearly stretched beyond what Congress originally intended. The efforts to canonize Richard Montgomery as an heroic martyr, and even the controversy caused by Smith's oration, aptly represent the major themes and purposes of heroic military commemorations during the Revolutionary War. A larger process of using public memory to make sense out of war, politics, and society was at work, and this process had broader consequences. As a martyred hero, Richard Montgomery was supposed to become a permanent monument to the bravery of the American people and to represent their unified gratitude for the sacrifice of war. But nationalism, as represented in the public memory of Richard Montgomery, was not something

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that could be entirely mandated or controlled by government, but was rather contained in a process of both remembering and forgetting, an ongoing negotiation over public culture. Patriots seemed to agree that commemorating Richard Montgomery was an important symbol of their unity, but whose version of memory was correct —that of the congressional committee, William Smith, Roger Enos, or the onlookers at Montgomery's funeral? As the war progressed, Montgomery continued to be "perpetuated in the annals of America" as a "martyr to the cause of human nature and the liberties of mankind."64 The real events of the war intensified and shifted south, but public focus on Montgomery as a symbol remained important. As Congress worked to procure the marble monument to Montgomery's memory, efforts to commemorate the hero continued outside the carefully controlled government elite as Americans memorialized him in newspapers, histories, prints, and pamphlets. Everyone from Thomas Paine to schoolboys to newspaper poets took up their pens in praise of the slain hero.65 Gouveneur Morris, who wrote the following stanza, was convinced that the memory of Montgomery would inspire long-lasting public dedication to his republican political values: Thy name, Montgomery, Still on each tongue shall be; Praise in each breath: Tho' on the fatal plain Thou wert untimely slain, Thy virtue still shall gain Rescue from death.66

Other commemorations like this one, both written and oral, used the language of heroic certitude that had eluded William Smith in his funeral oration and stressed national consensus just as much as Congress had. In his 1778 oration at the annual civic celebration on Boston Massacre Day, Jonathan Williams Austin said that Montgomery seemed "to be raised up by Heaven, to show to what height Humanity may soar." Montgomery, along with other military martyrs, was to teach the public what the Revolution stood for. Austin exhorted the people of Boston: "Let not the ashes of Warren, Montgomery, and the illustrious Roll of Heroes, who died for Freedom, reproach our inactivity and want of spirit, in not completing this grand Superstructure; the Pillars of which have been cemented with the richest blood in America."67 Austin's words show how the success of the Revolution and the new American nation rested on how well people responded to the dead patriots who called their fellow Americans to action.

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Montgomery's memory was often linked to Warren's in this way because wartime commemorations of both Joseph Warren and Richard Montgomery sounded similar themes.68 Several voices —from the humble "crippled boy" Daniel George to the young Boston lawyer Perez Morton, who eulogized Warren in Boston in February 1776 —held up Warren's death, just as Montgomery's, as an example to other Americans who should be willing to give their lives to the nation for the cause of liberty.69 An anonymous newspaper writer was not far from correct when he predicted in 1775 that Warren's "name shall live and fill the world with wonder. . . . His praises shall be spoke for many an age to come."70 A commemorative committee of Congress appropriated $500 for a monument to Warren's memory in 1777.71 Heroic images of Warren the martyr appeared in poetry, almanacs, and broadsides that called Americans to support the Revolution. In 1776, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, the Baltimore schoolmaster, rendered the most artistic and perhaps the most articulate image of Warren as a patriotic example in his first published play, The Battle of Bunkers-Hill.72 In the play Warren recites as he dies an eloquent speech that links his death to Roman and English republican martyrs and invokes the American public to keep supporting the cause he died for: "Weep n o t . . . But rejoyce —For now I go to mingle with the dead, Great Brutus, Hampden, Sidney and the rest, Of old or modern memory . . . fight on my countrymen be FREE, be FREE."73 The fact that it would have been impossible for Joseph Warren to deliver an impassioned farewell oration such as the one written by Brackenridge after his face had been demolished by a musket ball makes even clearer how conventional images of heroic martyrs that often bore little relationship to reality were used to define correct politics.74 Traditionally, the martyr's final words were meant to define the nature of his sacrifice, and Brackenridge made it clear that Warren's sacrifice cried out for Americans to emulate his example, to "fight on" for freedom: " 'Tis ours, now tenfold, to avenge his death."75 Memories of Joseph Warren and his part in the epic Battle of Bunker Hill became symbols with the power to define and inspire political and military allegiance. The potential geographic spread of that allegiance and its power to reach beyond region were also demonstrated when, like Brackenridge, a Baltimore playwright celebrated a Boston martyr in a play published in Philadelphia. Montgomery and Warren were joined in the ranks of heroism by lesser "regional" martyrs like Hugh Mercer, Henry Laurens, and the Baron de Kalb. The "deeds of valor" of these men were supposed to stand as a permanent inspiration to the American people, just as were Warren's and Montgomery's.76

"An Acrostic on the Late Major-General WARREN," An Elegiac Poem, Composed on the Never-to-be-Forgotten Terrible and Bloody Battle Fought at an Intrenchment on Bunker Hill (Salem: E. Russell, 1775). Courtesy American Antiquarian Society. This memorial to the martyr Joseph Warren is edged in black and decorated with a skull and crossbones and a coffin bearing his initials. The acrostic on "Joseph Warren," which praises his merits and accuses British generals and politicians of working for Satan, decorated the bottom of An Elegiac Poem, a cheap pamphlet celebrating the Battle of Bunker Hill. Salem publisher Ezekiel Russell designed the pamphlet to be a portable reminder of military heroism. The coffin was a traditional memorial symbol, but the acrostic reserves special praise for Warren, whose death entered him "in the rolls of fame."

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Those who survived, like the "lad of 15 years" who eulogized Captain Judah Alden in the Massachusetts Spy, reminded one another in print why sacrifice was crucial to establish the republic.77 The heroic status of martyred icons was applied to living officers as well. Even officers who kept their lives, including John Stark, Nathaniel Greene, Horatio Gates, Ethan Allen, Israel Putnam, and George Washington, could achieve lasting stature as American heroes in the public memories of the war.78 Hugh Henry Brackenridge maintained that these men would be recorded in the annals of fame: "The angel of America shall write . . . the names of those who have fought at Lexington, at Bunker's Hill, on the lakes of Canada, at Three Rivers, and before Quebec; the names of those who have fought at Danbury, at Fort Stanwix, Fort Montgomery, Fort Washington; at the German Flats, at Bennington, and on the heights . .. of Saratoga: The names of those who have fought at Trenton, at Princeton, at Ash-swamp. . . ."79 While it wasn't entirely clear what Americans were expected to do to keep the martyrs in everlasting remembrance, public commemorations did offer some clues about how people were supposed to respond to heroic sacrifice. Public memory became an expression of wished-for social consensus that demanded particular behavior. Patriotic men and women assumed particular roles in the national community constructed around the memory of republican heroes. Public participation in commemorations became even more important as the war stretched on and demoralization set in. By 1779 and 1780, national finances were dwindling, and the Continental Army was showing signs of unrest as pay and supplies grew scarcer. Divisive fighting between patriot and Loyalist forces, British gains in the upper South, and even the swearing of mass oaths of loyalty to the king in some areas, such as parts of South Carolina, that had previously exhibited strong American support all took their toll on public morale. States had to turn increasingly to conscription to fill their military recruitment quotas, as the virtuous zeal for military service among common men seemed to decline.80 Under these questionable circumstances, the memory of public heroism seemed more urgent than ever. Men were often exhorted to join the cause and offer themselves up in imitation of the military virtue of their great officers. Calls to enlist were laden with the language of heroic martyrdom. Jonathan Sewell Mitchell, for example, demonstrated the links between republicanism, memory, and attempts to get men to fight in his A New Epilogue to Cato. After comparing a litany of American heroes to the characters in Joseph Addison's Cato, a favorite play among soldiers, Sewell ended his verse:

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