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

This book examines what Sarah J. Purcell calls the military memory of the War of American Independence in American life through the 1820s. Many modern historians of the Revolution have taken their lead from John Adams, who wrote: "The Revolution was indeed effected in the period from 1761 to 1775" (Page Smith, John Adams [Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1962], p. 1097). For them, the development of American nationhood was overwhelmingly a political story. Purcell does not neglect politics; but she convincingly contends that the experience of war from 1775 to 1783 and the selective memory of that experience figured largely in Americans' understanding of the nation they created.

The process began almost with the start of fighting, as preachers, politicians, and patriotic writers glorified the sacrifices of the first heroes to fall in battle, especially Joseph Warren and Richard Montgomery. By the end of Purcell's span of time, the United States had at least fifteen Montgomery counties. One of her postwar themes is the central place of gratitude to war veterans in public discourse. At the same time, she has a keen eye for attempted appropriations of military memory for partisan and other purposes. This book is not simply a study of celebratory nation-building; it is also a sophisticated exploration of the diverse uses to which dramatic war experiences could be put after victory. Purcell recognizes, too, the silences which helped to construct military memory. The bitter civil conflicts in which Americans killed Americans—especially in New York, New Jersey, and the Carolinas—found comparatively little place in the rhetoric and writings of the postwar years. By contrast, the bones of American prisoners of war, lying exposed near the anchorages of the British prison ships in which they died, remained symbolically significant into the nineteenth century. As the public story of the war grew more democratized, the prisoners, not the militia killers, took center stage.

Purcell includes some interesting and valuable pages on those who took "a more skeptical view of Revolutionary War sacrifice" (pp. 109-10), a theme antedating the 1790s—for example, in Robert Munford's play The Patriots. One of the cogent insights emerging from Purcell's study is the success of quasi-official public memory of the Revolution in suppressing skepticism and dissent. Just as the United States Constitution quickly became the reference point for debates over public policy, even for people who had opposed it, the War of Independence became the test and exemplar of patriotism. Public evocation of the Confederate war effort remained potent in parts of the United States long after the Civil War, but overt loyalism vanished after the Revolution, surviving in politics only as an accusation and an insult. This is a measure of the pervasive influence of what Purcell calls war, sacrifice, and memory in Revolutionary America.