Remembering the Revolution: Memory, History, and Nation-Making from Independence to the Civil War

Forgetting History: Antebellum American Peace Reformers and the Specter of the Revolution

217 Forgettinghistory Antebellum American Peace Reformers and the Specter of the Revolution = Carolyn Eastman Anew era has commenced in history,” wrote peace reformer William Ladd in the preface of his reform-minded children’s book, Adventures of a French Soldier (1831), a radical retelling of a war memoir then circulating in the United States. In the past, Ladd explained, no one had questioned whether war was a necessity; history books commonly offered up heroic accounts of military officers and great battles. In doing so, however, “the death and sufferings of the privates are passed over in the aggregate, and no other account is made of them.” Instead, war histories written by ordinary soldiers offered the reading public new truths about “all the disgusting forms of misery” experienced during war. Circulating accounts written by common soldiers would encourage children to reconsider heroic war histories in the light of the Gospel and “the great moral revolution which is to take place in the world, and which has already begun, when war shall be viewed in its true light; when that grim demon from the bottomless pit shall be bound a thousand years, and men shall seek the things that make for peace,” Ladd reasoned.1 “ 218 CAROLYN EASTMAN Adventures of a French Soldier was one of many books by earnest peace reformers that sought to revise historical narratives by leaving out events in favor of overwrought accounts of suffering, misery, and death: But where were the widows and orphans and the childless parents, whom this fatal victory had bereaved? Alas! they may retire and weep in secret; the gay and joyous crowd think little of their griefs. Where are the wounded? They are yet writhing in pain and anguish, their limbs amputated, and many of them dying a lingering and painful death. . . . And where are the souls of the departed? Who can draw aside the veil which hides eternity from our view, and say how many of them are already doomed to unutterable anguish?2 With strongly emotive passages like these, peace reformers sought not merely to revise history but to escape it. They filled their magazines and pamphlets not with discussions of the big events or sweeping historical change but with the minute, static moments of misery experienced by the widows and orphans, the wounded and dying. To counter the celebration of military heroes ubiquitous in popular media, advocates of peace described at length the ordinary individuals whose piteous suffering, they said, was required for commanding officers to rise to glory. In short, peace reformers attacked war by discussing it in melodramatic terms that took it out of time. But if peace reformers found it expedient to condemn the suffering of individuals, it was politically hazardous to present the American Revolution in the same register or to criticize the generation of founders whose actions had wrought independence from Great Britain. The war had gained in popularity as a source for a muscular nationalism; by the 1810s public prints and speeches frequently invoked with pride the heroes and great battles of the Revolutionary War. Reformers knew that references to the war displayed models of manly patriotism and virtue and helped to establish a sense of shared national identity—making the war’s memory all the more influential and difficult to challenge without fomenting public backlash. As a result, they could be eloquent and persuasive in denouncing war as an abstract concept, but they were compelled to express a conflicted view of the Revolution—alternately ignoring it and offering tepid criticisms mild enough to evade public opposition. Their conundrum demonstrates that the Revolution was not always easy to remember. For American peace 219 Forgetting History reformers the battles that established the United States proved such an ideological minefield during the early nineteenth century that they usually opted to avoid the subject altogether—even as they held forth against war in the abstract. Historians of the nineteenth-century peace movement have offered careful analyses of pacifists’ opposition to war in general and have shown how influential they were among social reformers, but they have not explored peace reformers’ specific treatment of the Revolution.3 Nor have scholars dedicated much attention to the wide range of opinions about the Revolution held by antebellum social reformers across the board. Most reformers saw great benefit in draping themselves in patriotic memories of the war, claiming to be the worthy inheritors of the founders’ Revolutionary vision...