Reviews of Books

Reviewed by Ready, Aim, Commemorate

Suffering Soldiers: Revolutionary War Veterans, Moral Sentiment, and Political Culture in the Early Republic. By JOHN RESCH . (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999 . Pp. xvi, 319 . $ 40.00 .)

Reviewed by Andrew Burstein, University of Tulsa

Sympathy for revolutionary soldiers took time to become a trope in annual Fourth of July orations. Two recent books explore the process by which popular images of the Continental veteran went from a profound suspicion and disrespect to an equally profound sense of guilt and awe.	1
Sarah J. Purcell's Sealed with Blood evaluates recorded memories of the revolutionary fighting experience, beginning and ending with the Battle of Bunker Hill. As a 1775 almanac described him, the "Late Magnanimous and Heroic Gen. Joseph Warren" (p. 14) stood apart from the other fatalities of the June 17 spectacle, earning him a special place as a national martyr. By the time the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill monument was laid in 1825, much had changed in the manner of honoring military sacrifice and defining patriotism: common soldiers joined gentlemen such as Warren in the pantheon of heroes. Purcell delineates the varied approaches to public commemoration of the war during the five intervening decades.	2
The story she relates is comprehensive, and it contains fascinating juxtapositions. She compares Bostonians' commemorative activities to those of South Carolinian celebrants of Palmetto Day. She describes the Society of the Cincinnati, John Trumbull's commemorative paintings, William Dunlap's controversial 1798 drama that attempted to turn British spy Major John André into a hero, and the legacy of cross-dressing soldier Deborah Sampson. Purcell also recounts how in the early nineteenth century the politicized Tammany Society sought to monumentalize the relics of common soldiers and sailors whose corpses had been unceremoniously dumped into Brooklyn's Wallabout Bay from British prison ships. Arguments in the years after the War of 1812 regarding who was a hero and who was not show how the young nation's history relatively quickly became a battleground. Eventually, the cult of the veteran—hoary, humble old men—became a means of sanctifying democracy. Purcell gives the reader a thorough appreciation for the contested meanings of the Revolution.	3
Consciously building on the work of such scholars as David Waldstreicher, Simon P. Newman, and Alfred F. Young, Purcell looks to add to recent analyses of national identity. She is chiefly interested in the role of "gratitude" for "sacrifice" and the slipperiness of commemorative consensus in politically contentious times. "Public memories provided images of unity," she writes, "but they could also become an arena for conflict when people disagreed about what that unity should mean" (p. 15).	. . .