Revolutionary Reminiscence 

Joanne Freeman: But first, we’re going to take you to the early days of the United States, all the way back to 1824.

Joanne Freeman: It had been about 40 years since the end of the American Revolution, and people were figuring out how to commemorate and remember the war. Here’s scholar Sarah Purcell.

Sarah Purcell: The notion was, there’s something of a feeling of crisis or declension as the men of the revolution were getting older and starting to die off in 1824, and a notion that the nation owed these men one last gasp of gratitude before they were gone.

Joanne Freeman: So Congress decided to invite an old war hero to tour the country as a way to memorialize the revolution’s legacy. But the person they invited actually wasn’t an American. It was the French officer, Marquis de Lafayette.

Sarah Purcell: And Lafayette was a perfect symbol of this because he, for one thing, had such a close relationship with George Washington, so he was associated with Washington ever since the revolution, and also because he symbolized international approval of the United States and French support for the United States in the revolution.

Joanne Freeman: So Lafayette came overseas and traversed from state to state, stopping in cities, small towns and battlefields along the way.

Sarah Purcell: Many of them had very large basically receptions, public parades, rituals of all kinds, usually a ball where he would be celebrated by the women of the communities and just thanking him as a way to also, by proxy, thank the generation of the revolution.

Sarah Purcell: Partly, he was good for this because he had been so young when he joined the revolution. He was only 19 when he came to the United States and became an officer of the Continental Army. And so, he was a little younger and more robust than some of the other founders who had already passed or were about to pass away. And so he was able to undertake this tour because he was slightly younger. And he also made a big effort to connect with average veterans.

Sarah Purcell: So on the battlefield at Yorktown, for instance, he held a receiving line, and elderly men came out of the crowd and shook his hand. And newspapers all over the country reported on these told stories about old men weeping in sympathy as they remembered their years in the Continental Army or the militia.

Joanne Freeman: Sarah says Lafayette was meant to represent a certain nostalgia for revolutionary America, and that his tour helped shape the public memory of the era.

Sarah Purcell: A public memory is a whole collection of behaviors and cultural expressions. It’s really the memory of a whole society put together. So it includes commemorations, and things like parades and monuments, and a whole constellation of cultural ideas about the past, that people used to make sense out of the present. It’s the way that societies interact with their past to give it meaning in the present.

Joanne Freeman: Now, Lafayette sweeping tour across the country happened in 1824, but Sarah says people were creating a collective memory of the revolution decades before that.

Sarah Purcell: Well, it actually started really as soon as the revolution itself started. Memories begin to be formed even while the experiences are still happening. There’s a whole series of local and national holidays that celebrated the memory of the revolution, things like monument building, parades and other kinds of civic celebrations, as well as a whole host of print culture and speeches that people gave to have this shared sense of the kinds of things that should be remembered about the past.

Joanne Freeman: I gather even, basically, funerals and eulogies sort of fall into this camp of ritual.

Sarah Purcell: Yeah, 100%. So funerals and eulogies, obviously, are about remembering the dead, the person who has died. And they had a long-standing precedent in colonial America to serve a community function that was often religious, to put the person’s life in context and give it a meaning for the community.

Sarah Purcell: Probably the greatest example of that is George Washington, where funerals were held for him all over the country when he died in 1799, including funeral processions with mock coffins and all kinds of draping of black cloth and other things that really presage even larger public funerals to come in the 19th century. But it was a way to bring together communities to mourn for the past, but also to glorify the past through that funeral ritual.

Joanne Freeman: Now you just talked about respect and you’ve talked about praise, and I gather that gratitude is also a part of what’s being expressed during these moments in rituals. Is that true?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. Absolutely. Certainly in the early Republic post-revolutionary period, the classical value of gratitude is something that really took on a deep patriotic and political meaning. And so gratitude is something that the public not only feels, so it’s not only my responsibility as an American citizen to just feel gratitude, but to actually show gratitude by paying respect. Gratitude meant that patriotism itself and reverence for the sacrifices of the military was part of what made America great, the willingness to come together and grant veterans respect.

Joanne Freeman: I would assume that in some way or another, the disenfranchised made use of public memory. I would assume that as forgotten as they were, African-American veterans probably had their own ways of claiming some ownership into this larger message. Is that the case?

Sarah Purcell: Oh, absolutely, because there’s great cultural capital to be gained out of that common public memory. And so you’re totally right that disenfranchised people can use that as a tool to associate themselves with the nation. And African-Americans certainly did that, starting right after the revolution. You see it in lawsuits from black men and women suing for their own freedom, and using both revolutionary political rhetoric and the memory of black male military service for the American cause as some way that disenfranchised African-Americans can really try to leverage their own freedom and participation in both civic and political life in the United States very, very early, as early as the 1780s.

Joanne Freeman: So, is that the sort of thing that you mean when you write about the democratization of public memory?

Sarah Purcell: Yes, it is. The fact that once you have public memory of the Revolutionary War and of the American Revolution as a very powerful political concept, initially it was used for men like George Washington, the very revered, people we now know as the founders. But once that language is out there, it’s available to be spoken by people who also want the respect and participation of and in the nation. And so, people like impoverished former veterans who need food, they’re able to talk about, “Look. I have these scars on my body that I received in the revolution, and I don’t deserve to waste away.” Or African-American suing for their freedom, they’re also able to mobilize that language.

Sarah Purcell: Now, it doesn’t mean that the memory itself is completely democratic and just equally available to every person, but that it is a tool that people can seize hold of to try to leverage some political capital.

Joanne Freeman: We’re talking about public memory as a unifying thing. We’re talking about public memory as a democratizing kind of a thing, as a tool, but obviously there would’ve been a lot of disagreement about what that public memory was and what it meant. How did that break down into factions or opposing sides? What were they contesting?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. There’s all kinds of record of people arguing and contesting memories of the revolution. And it can take a lot of different forms. Of course, in the 1790s, when the very first era of political contest between the two first political parties in the United States happened, each of them used a lot of memory of the revolution to argue that their interpretation of American politics was, of course completely correct, and that their opponents were violating the proper memory of the revolution. And that broke down even to the point of which holidays the parties celebrated the most.

Sarah Purcell: The Democratic-Republicans tended to celebrate the 4th of July and have very partisan-flavored celebrations. Federalists engaged in celebrations of George Washington’s birthday and battle anniversaries. And these were really ways to just say that you are being nonpartisan and celebrating the past while simultaneously blaming your opponents for not being properly patriotic.

Joanne Freeman: Right. And commemorating events that allow you to highlight things that you can claim as yours. So the Federalist claiming George Washington. How can you protest celebrating George Washington? Then that ropes people in in some ways to sharing that public memory.

Sarah Purcell: Exactly. You also see in the 1820s, when the Bunker Hill Monument was being proposed in Charlestown, Massachusetts, that people proposing that put a lot of time, and effort, and money into designing the monument. It was probably the first very, very major large monument to the Revolutionary War. There were other smaller ones before it. And then some people writing into newspapers saying, “Look. We shouldn’t be spending all this money on a pile of stone when soldiers need pensions,” and, “There are men starving in the streets, and you’re putting all this money into blocks of granite that are supposed to preserve the memory of the revolution when really we owe that recompense to the soldiers themselves.” So sometimes it took a more economic turn in the arguments over the memory.

Joanne Freeman: Now, how did women either engage in this conversation or use it as a tool in the way that we’ve just been talking about?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. Women were a huge part of really all of these rituals, monument building, all of the things that I’ve described, parades. Women were often making the arrangements. They were playing symbolic roles often, but still it’s a way in which they were present at battle anniversaries, honestly, serving food at large gatherings. And it’s not just that women showed up with the snacks, but that they would be publicly praised. And that was seen as a ritualistic part of the proper political celebration of a battle anniversary, for instance.

Sarah Purcell: So it’s important for women to provide sustenance for the men. Women were definitely framed as one of the most important parts of society, the keepers of memory if you will. It’s women’s job to remember the war, remember the sacrifice of the revolution.

Joanne Freeman: And to pass it on through kids. Right?

Sarah Purcell: Right. Pass it onto their children. Exactly.

Joanne Freeman: Now, we’ve been talking about all of this commemoration and even nostalgia for the Revolutionary War. But that last word raises a question. This is a memory of a war. So, is there any of the ugliness of war kept here, or is it really purely a kind of sanitized, publicized version of the war?

Sarah Purcell: Yeah. It’s a good question. A lot of it is pretty sanitized. I do think that the public memory tended to stress the glory of war and sacrificing kind of a generalized term. So for instance, Joseph Warren. The image that still remember of Joseph Warren is John Trumbull’s painting of him dying heroically and expiring in a beautiful shaft of light at the Battle of Bunker Hill, when in fact he was shot in the face at rather close range and his body had to be identified by dental records afterwards. But that’s not what appears in the beautiful heroic history painting that has lasted until today as the memory of martyrdom and the revolution. So it is about death, but it is sanitized to a certain degree.

Sarah Purcell: And I do think that that has created a pattern for American history, where warfare and heroic military sacrifice is something that is so valued as part of our national identity, that it is seen as a very positive thing. But every generation kind of has to learn for itself the ugly side of war. But that’s become a little bit more apparent in the 20th century when the sort of movement for soldiers themselves to reckon with what we now would call PTSD, for instance, and to give a more realistic picture to society.

Sarah Purcell: But there were some memoirs where soldiers did talk about difficult experiences, and certainly violence. There were even women who told the story of their children dying in the Revolutionary War or losing their husbands. But that was seen as, for the most part, more a personal loss and not as much a part of the national story.

Joanne Freeman: Now, you just said each generation needs to relearn for themselves or a re-shape, I guess, for themselves, what these public memories of the past are. So in a way, is nostalgia a form of education? And educational in the sense of educating people about the sort of public memory of the past and what it meant.

Sarah Purcell: I do think nostalgia is one of the drivers of why events from the Revolutionary War or from 200-plus years ago still are important. It is something that might drive people to have a real interest in those events, and to drive them to learn more and to be educated. But I do think, sometimes, pure nostalgia takes the place of education and maybe is a little bit less informed than it might be. And sometimes nostalgia can also be distracting.

Sarah Purcell: Again, it has positive uses to hold people together, but it also can drive people apart. And if people are prone to this idealized division of the past, then sometimes they’re missing the details that might actually tell them something about the present that is different than the nostalgic haze would indicate.

Joanne Freeman: Sarah Purcell is the chair of the history department at Grinnell College. She’s also the author of Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice and Memory in Revolutionary America.