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

Afterword

Afterword In the 18205, Daniel Webster's generation could hold on to the memory of the Revolution to chart a course for the future, but that future turned out to be much more contentious than they could have predicted. Webster's prediction that the memory of battles like Bunker Hill would be sufficient to hold the "whole country" together turned out to be overly optimistic . As sectional issues and conflicts over race and slavery grew more and more heated during the following decades, public memory of the Revolutionary War continued to enhance Americans' sense of national identity, but it increasingly seemed like an identity without the power to cover over real divisions in American society. Even though memory itself had always been contested, public debates became increasingly fractious as the nation came apart. Some of the conflicts and internal contradictions in the image of the ideal nation created by public memory of the Revolutionary War began to break into the open. Public memory had often simultaneously enhanced both regional and national identities, particularly in places with notable battleanniversary celebrations like Charleston, South Carolina; Bennington, Vermont ; and Lexington, Massachusetts. But as issues like slavery and western expansion became increasingly contentious, region and nation were more frequently at odds, and unlike the westerners who used public memory to stress their loyalty during separatist statehood movements in the 17805, Americans in the 18305,18405, and 18508 were increasingly less able to ignore the violence of their own rhetoric.1 As even the appearance of consensus began to disappear, people used military memory in radical ways that drew upon the Revolutionary generation 's traditions but seemed to inject some of the real threat and violence of military rhetoric back into the picture. For example, when Henry Highland Garnet, an African American Presbyterian minister, addressed a national convention of "colored men" in Buffalo, New York, in 1843, he used the language of Revolutionary War heroism to argue for militant resistance to slavery. He began by pointing out the hypocrisy of slave owners who were Revolutionaries: "Did they emancipate the slaves? No; they rather added new Afterword 211 links to our chains. Were they ignorant of the principles of Liberty? Certainly they were not. The sentiments of their revolutionary orators fell in burning eloquence upon their hearts, and with one voice they cried, LIBERTYOR DEATH. O, what a sentence was that!" Garnet denied that anyone who held slaves was properly an heir to Revolutionary liberty.2 Instead, Garnet argued that slaves who tried to take freedom for themselves were the real inheritors of Revolutionary heroism, and he praised Denmark Vesey's 1822plot to overthrow slavery in South Carolina. He said that in the uprising, "Many abrave hero fell, but History, faithful to her high trust, will transcribe his name on the same monument with Moses, Hampden, Tell, Bruce, and Wallace,Touissant L'Overteur, Lafayette and Washington." Garnet then rehearsed the heroic deeds of Nat Turner, Joseph Cinque, and Madison Washington and praised all slaves who were willing to strike out for their own freedom. Garnet used Revolutionaryrhetoric in a radical new context when he said, "Those who have fallen in freedom's conflict, their memories will be cherished by the true hearted, and the God-fearing, in all future generations ; those who are living, their names are surrounded by a halo of glory.... RATHER DIE FREEMEN, THAN LIVE TO BE SLAVES."3 This last rumination on how the memory of heroes demanded political action might have been taken verbatim from a hundred earlier orations praising Revolutionary veterans —but when applied to African American slaves who engaged in armed insurrection against their masters it acquired a whole new meaning. Garnet established himself in a long tradition of African Americans who used the memory of the Revolutionary War to call for freedom, but he did not base his call on the traditional image of black men shedding their blood while serving in the Continental Army or state militias . Instead, Garnet related rebellious slaves, even those like Nat Turner, who were most frightening to the southern white population, to the greatest officer-heroes of the Revolutionary War —Washington and Lafayette. With this powerful image, Garnet heaped the highest of praise and glory on rebellious slaves, a strong image for African American liberation, and one that many white Americans would have considered almost sacrilegious. Revolutionary memory also began to be used in radically conservative ways that directly opposed Garnet's antislavery stance. For example, the celebration of Palmetto Day, Charleston...