For God and Country: Crafting Memory and Meaning from War and Independence

Sarah J. Purcell. Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 278 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $35.00

Jonathan D. Sassi. A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. 298 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $52.00

On April 20, 1778, Reverend Jacob Cushing, a Congregationalist minister from nearby Waltham, stepped onto the green at Lexington, Massachusetts, to deliver a sermon marking the third anniversary of the Battle of Lexington. As battles go, Lexington had actually been a minor skirmish. But its symbolic importance as the first military conflict of the American Revolution had grown over the prior three years. Accordingly, Cushing called on the public memory of the battle to praise the sacrifice of every soldier who had fallen in combat since that first fatal day. But Cushing, mindful of the sacrifice that still lay ahead, also used the intensity of the moment to exhort his audience for a renewed commitment to the cause. "To arms," he shouted midway through his sermon! "To action, and the battle of the warrior!" "The honour and glory of GOD," Cushing continued, "and the salvation of your country under GOD, call aloud upon all." ¹

Cushing was not innovating. By 1778, religious symbolism, nascent nationalism, and hope born out of sacrifice infused sermons, orations, editorials, and private correspondence. John Adams had touched on these same themes two years earlier in a report to his wife Abigail concerning ratification of the Declaration of Independence. "I am well aware of the Toil and Blood and Treasure, that it will cost Us to maintain this declaration, and support and defend these States," Adams wrote from Congress. "Yet, through all the Gloom . . . I can see that the End is more than worth all the Means. And that Posterity will tryumph in that Day's Transaction, even altho We should rue it, which I trust in God We Shall not." Adams also anticipated widespread and ongoing celebration for what he saw as the "most memorable Epocha in the History of America." The 2^nd of July, Adams argued, would be properly solemnized "with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires, and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more." ²

Adams was off by two days, but he had accurately predicted what would become the American national holiday. His expectation of widespread celebration, however, did not require any stretch of the imagination. By 1776, public commemorations had already proven their worth as strategies for shaping public opinion and, over time, public memory. And they continued to gain in importance throughout the Revolution and into the Early Republic, an experience that has been largely ignored in the traditional historiography. A growing body of literature has, however, begun to correct this oversight, most notably two studies of popular political culture by David Waldstreicher (In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes [1997]) and Simon Newman (Parades and the Politics of the Street [1997]) and an enlightening treatment of history and memory by Alfred Young (The Shoemaker and the Tea Party [1999]). Not surprisingly, this avenue of inquiry has attracted additional attention in the form of more focused studies of public politics and historical memory.

Building on the work of Waldstreicher and Newman, Sarah Purcell examines how public commemoration of war over a fifty-year period influenced the public memory of the Revolution and, in turn, the public acceptance of a new national identity. "Military memory," Purcell argues, "especially the memory of the Revolutionary War, is really at the heart of American national identity" (p. 1). But this public memory was ever-changing, shaped and reshaped by public events and by the shifting political and social context of the Early Republic.

Purcell's analysis of the dynamics of public...