The American Revolution: Writings from the War of Independence (review)

The Library of America has set itself the task of helping to preserve "our nation's literary heritage" by publishing "America's best and most significant writing in handsome, enduring volumes." Teachers and scholars of early American literature might be forgiven for thinking, then, that the Library's publication of The American Revolution would go some way toward compensating for the shelf-full of anthologies produced by and for political historians of the founding era. This collection, I naively imagined, would be our Revolution, complete with songs, ballads, broadsides, plays, poems and, eventually, tales. A "unique literary panorama" as the book jacket puts it. From Freneau to Hawthorne, this would be the Revolution as it entered into the literary imagination.

But you should always read subtitles, too. Writings from the War of Independence is not an alternative anthology for use in an early American English class. Nor is it, on the other hand, simply another place to read Madison, Jefferson, Adams, and others. It is a documentary retelling of the War of Independence that privileges firsthand accounts of battles, skirmishes, sieges, routs, marches, surrenders, and victories organized in chronological order and armed to the teeth with the "poetry" of martial maneuvering. So far is this material from anything that would ordinarily make it into a literary anthology, in fact, that when we are given an account of the Wyoming Massacre drawn from the sketches of J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (someone who is routinely taught in early American literature classes) the would-be farmer's stylistic excess stands out like a very sore thumb. "As no bard has as yet appeared to sing in plaintive strains: 'Mourn, Susquehanna! mourn thy hapless sons,'" writes Crèvecoeur, "shall I be excused in following my feelings and in finishing the short account of their final catastrophe as my untutored but honest impulse directs?" (479) "Well, ok," the Library of America replies, "but make it snappy."

If we were to look for something like literary interest in this volume, however, we would find it in the plethora of entries belonging to the genre of immediacy: forms of "writing-to-the-moment" predominate and they have both a documentary and a stylistic appeal all their own. The cumulative effect of these diaries, journals, and letters (by, for example, St. George Tucker, a colonel in the Virginia militia; Ebenezer Denny, an ensign in the Continental army; Philip Vickers Fithian, a chaplain to the New Jersey militia; and John and Abigail Adams, George Washington, and a scattering of British participants) is to counter the false sense we might have that all writing in the revolutionary period was carried on in the public, print-oriented domain. In place of pamphlets, broadsides, addresses, orations, and speeches, we are given a selection of private (or quasi-private) texts that, even when they are neither particularly gripping nor inventive, nevertheless achieve a reality effect in much the same way that even a bad snapshot can trump a Hollywood still. (On the few occasions when after-the-fact narratives are given, the writing betrays itself almost immediately, as in, for example George Rogers Clark's polished "Narrative of the March to Vincennes," which, a note tells us, was written in 1791). Philip Vickers Fithian's harried but resilient diary of the Continental army's last days in New York, in August 1776, combines prayer ("Be on our side, O Lord, & we fear them not!") with useful observation ("Press warrants are issued to draught three Men out of every five of the Militia, till the several Brigades be filled") and even sound effects ("Whew—! What means this roaring above us?—Crack! Crack! Crack!What can this cracking mean!"). Robert Morton, a Quaker (whose pacifism comes across as a decidedly loyalist sympathy) is caught up in the struggle for Philadelphia in October, 1777: "Oct. 5th.—This morning I went to Germantown to see the destruction, and collect if possible a...