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

The Graveyard Aesthetics of Revolutionary Elegiac Verse: Remembering the Revolution as a Sacred Cause

75 TheGraveyardAestheticsofRevolutionary Elegiacverse Remembering the Revolution as a Sacred Cause = Evert Jan van Leeuwen In his essay on the role poetry plays in constructing a collective memory of American origins, Robert Pinsky defines Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ’s “Paul Revere’s Ride” (1861) as a “conscious effort” to construct a long-lasting myth of the Revolution. Pinsky highlights the poem’s success by pointing out that “many Americans, including [the late] Senator Edward Kennedy, have much of the poem by heart.”1 In his folk ballad, Longfellow overtly casts the Revolution in a heroic and adventurous light— as the victory of a small group of men that “ended with the overthrow of a tyrannical monarchy and its replacement with a republican government,” to use Michael A. McDonnell’s words.2 By centering the action around the “North Church tower” overshadowing the graves of American patriots and by giving the church tower the symbolic function of a “signal light” (line 9) to the Revolution, Longfellow managed to fuse two popular historical Revolutionary narratives: the republican and the millennial.3 Longfellow’s poem literally created a moment in history. The current 76 EVERT JAN VAN LEEUWEN traditions surrounding the legend of Paul Revere’s ride were born only after his poem’s publication in 1860. But the ideological nature of this work—its unifying of republican and millennial discourse—was anything but original. In fact, the poem’s success was probably due to the fact that Longfellow followed an already well-established tradition of Revolutionary War poetry that sought to appeal to readers’ emotions rather than to their reason. Indeed, as historian Michael Kammen has suggested, Longfellow had numerous precursors who made a significant contribution to the way their contemporaries experienced and remembered the Revolution— among them Joel Barlow (1754–1812), David Humphreys (1752–1818), and Philip Freneau (1752–1832).4 Whereas other scholars have focused on the epic poems of these three major Revolutionary-era poets, this chapter instead analyzes their more emotive work. It illustrates that they utilized the conventions of an emotive poetic genre—much as Longfellow would do at a later date—to memorialize personal experiences that they felt to be iconic to the Revolutionary moment and through which they could unify republican and millennial Revolutionary narratives. In structuring his poem around the North Church tower in Concord, Boston , Longfellow can be said to have followed Emma Willard’s “physicalist ” theory of memory, as explored in Keith Beutler’s chapter in this volume . Beutler illustrates how, according to Willard, “geographic locations” and “objects of sight” played a crucial role in constructing a collective memory of the Revolution. He discusses various cases, including one narrative in which a physical relic functioned as a teaching aid and a classroom textbook contained a first-person plural narrative about visiting General Washington’s house and tomb. Beutler highlights the latter case as “most inspiring as a locus of memory.” It is here that the narrative voice, through the association of ideas, is led toward a “rapid communion with the past, and with the spirits of the past,” and thenceforth to intimations “of their immortality and our own!” What happens here is that while the historical events themselves remain locked in an irretrievable past, the young antebellum reader is putatively able to experience the same sublime feelings as Washington himself.5 In the 1820s Willard’s “physicalism” constituted a new way of doing history, so to speak. Yet an understanding of how the human mind’s associative powers were constantly constructing mental bridges between 77 The Graveyard Aesthetics of Revolutionary Elegiac Verse concrete physical objects, the feelings they impressed on the mind, and the memories they evoked had been a structural aspect within the literature of sensibility since the mid-eighteenth century.6 Sensibility was understood as a physiological as much as a mental phenomenon. The human nervous system and human feelings were seen to be inherently intertwined.7 The literature of sensibility centered on the expression of feeling and the cultivation of sympathy in direct relation to sense impressions received from external realities. The sorrowful plight of individuals often formed the basis for pathetic tableaux to which the reader could respond in sympathy and, through the natural association of ideas, be led toward acts of benevolence and charity.8 Unsurprisingly, the idea of visiting a tombstone or a graveyard to experience such fine, often transcendent, feelings became a specific literary convention...