Israel Potter's Patriotism: A Problem

In his serialized novel, Israel Potter, Melville transformed Israel Potter's 1824 autobiography, in which Henry Trumbull elaborated a veteran's plea for a pension, into a more complex work that considers the costs and consequences of military actions along with the contributions of patriots and war heroes. Such disparate, even paradoxical aims—celebrating the patriotic veterans who defended democratic ideals of dissent while critiquing the war founding the United States that they fought in—produce ambivalences and ambiguities that complicate interpretation of the novel, especially when viewed from a transatlantic perspective.