The Many Liberties of War

Towering over the topic of war literature in America for more than forty years has stood Edmund Wilson and his Patriotic Gore (1962). Like one other post-World War II production, Godzilla, the movie lizard brought to life in the aftermath of nuclear holocaust, Patriotic Gore has seemed largely impervious to the outside world, able to mutate its formulations to fend off new challengers. That is until now. Though the flaws of Patriotic Gore have been long since catalogued, only a few recent works move the discussion beyond Wilson and avoid his ominous shadow. Jennifer C. James's A Freedom Bought with Blood is one of them.

The plan to beat back the beast is, largely, to ignore it and then to pen a study deliberately aimed at one of its weaknesses. Lyde Cullen Sizer used this formula to an extreme—by not even listing Wilson in her bibliography—when exploring women and Civil War literature and, in A Freedom Bought with Blood, James—who (barely) acknowledges Wilson's presence—uses it when exploring African American war literature.¹ The categories of gender and race largely resided in Wilson's blind spot but, to be fair, back then they did not dominate the analytic center stage in the way that they do now. Time marches on and as historical explorations have increasingly focused on such groupings, Wilson, occasionally, has been made to appear the world's greatest racist misogynist. Jennifer James, along with Sizer and others, does a great service by sidestepping talk of reptiles and bigotry, and after reading A Freedom Bought with Blood, one can't avoid the feeling that a study of African American war literature was terribly long overdue.

But in a smart introduction James explains why her book is by no means late: A Freedom Bought with Blood returns to our attention an overlooked tradition of writing and understanding that coincided with the much more scrutinized history of African American military participation. James shifts her focus away from non-fiction to imaginative literature, nee fiction, to develop a new subfield of American war writings. Why has the creative front of African American war literature received so little notice until now? A Freedom Bought with Blood does not offer an explicit answer. No doubt that several of the books and authors chosen by James have cycled between obscurity and a moderate acknowledgement accounts for some of the inattention. However, there is more to it. Lacking access to influential media, nameless American authors and their narratives are more easily displaced by those dominant in the culture; the messages of subversion often inherent in minority artists' work hasten the departure.

James beautifully demonstrates these forces at play in the depiction of the black Revolutionary War figure Crispus Attucks. The fugitive slave who died from two bullets while leading a group against British soldiers during the 1770 Boston Massacre set the scene, James contends, for the 1855 beginnings of African American war literature. The linkage of a black body to an event central to a burgeoning nationalism proved complicated. Attucks's act declared his identification with white colonists, the "people," and their cause: "He had imagined himself as a citizen" (p. 3). But to assign such significance to Attucks or the five thousand black men who joined the Continental army would challenge the way in which most white Revolutionary leaders imagined their national origins.

Paul Revere's engraving of the Boston Massacre, which specifically names Attucks in text while portraying him (and all other figures) as white, served as one of many attempts to dismiss black involvement in the founding of the United States. Attucks, as an African American hero, had been erased. Eighty-five years later, William Cooper Nell returned to Attucks his proper role in the famed conflict with the 1855 publication of Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, "the first full-length treatment of black participation in...