Reviewed by Guy Chet | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1

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Reviewed by Guy Chet | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Guy Chet, University of North Texas

A Proper Sense of Honor: Service and Sacrifice in George Washington's Army. By Caroline Cox. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. 368 pages. $37.50 (cloth).
As military historians have come to recognize the crucial importance of social and cultural history in their work, military history has regained a measure of legitimacy and relevance among social and cultural historians. Indeed, by examining the experience of military service in the Continental army, Caroline Cox has produced an instructive cultural history of the army and of revolutionary America, revealing a society intensely aware of class distinctions and committed to the preservation of class stratification. The most intriguing aspect of A Proper Sense of Honor is Cox's use of soldiers' bodies as primary sources. The ways in which the bodies of officers and enlisted men were treated shed light on the unarticulated values and tensions of American society at the time of the Revolution; this approach is particularly useful in illuminating the cultural and political assumptions of those Americans who did not or could not leave written accounts of their experiences and beliefs. The chapter on death and burial is especially interesting in this respect, since in burial ceremonies the handling of the body is consciously infused with public meaning. Perceived distinctions of class and ethnicity were not only revealed in burial rites and procedures but also publicly displayed.	1
Critics might point out that officers' elevated status, social connections, and financial resources compared with those of enlisted men unsurprisingly combined to ameliorate the terms of their service, punishment, health care, captivity, and burial. Cox's contention, however, is not simply that army life was marked by class distinctions. Her argument deals more with early American culture than the culture of the Continental army in particular. She demonstrates that in this ostensibly classless society, middle- and upper-class Americans were obsessed with status and consistently engaged in efforts to improve their manners, appearances, habits, homes, furniture, and other manifestations of gentility. These visible marks of distinction represented an entrée into circles of social and political leadership. This account conforms with findings of other cultural historians—Michal J. Rozbicki's The Complete Colonial Gentleman comes to mind in particular—that indicate colonial elites used aristocratic etiquette much like middle-class Americans had in the early national era: to demonstrate to themselves and to others that they were not common and thereby to assume and project cultural and political authority.¹	2
In the officer corps, this preoccupation with the trappings of gentility was even more intense than in civilian life, since military necessity opened the officer corps to men of questionable credentials: "Wealthy American men who accepted commissions as senior officers knew their social rank as gentlemen matched their military one. However ... the ranks of junior officers filled with ambitious young men whose social standing prior to service was less secure. Anxious to advance and to secure the recognition of their rank as officers and gentlemen, those who were accepted into the officer corps fiercely defended their rights and privileges both to differentiate themselves from soldiers and to define their status among each other" (23). The conspicuous consumption of literature and other consumer goods such as fashion items was useful in conveying genteel status to peers, superiors, and inferiors.	. . .

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