Revolutionary Identities

Abstract

Revolutionary Identities Sean Michael Gallagher (bio) Congress's Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union holly a. mayer University of Oklahoma Press, 2021 408 pp. War, Patriotism and Identity in Revolutionary North America jon chandler Boydell & Brewer, 2020 260 pp. Occupied America: British Military Rule and the Experience of Revolution donald f. johnson University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020 304 pp. Despite military history's reputation as the specialty of retrograde buffs, historians of the Continental army have long grappled with questions of identity, culture, and community in the American Revolution. Especially since the 1990s, scholars including Caroline Cox, John Ruddiman, Holly A. Mayer, Charles Patrick Niemeyer, and Judith L. Van Buskirk have used military records as an archive of early American conceptions of youth, gender, class, and race. Moreover, since the Revolution was a war for independence, military historians at least since Charles Royster have also explored how soldiers shaped American nationalism. All three books reviewed here build on this voluminous scholarship with military histories of political identity in the Revolution. While earlier scholars tended to explore questions of political identity in the American Revolution through dichotomies—Patriot/Loyalist, provincial/national—the three authors discussed below show that inhabitants of the thirteen colonies fashioned far more, and far more complex, senses of self during the war. Jon Chandler questions the depth of Continental soldiers' national identities in War, Patriotism and Identity in Revolutionary North America. [End Page 213] Drawing primarily on memoirs, diaries, and officers' correspondence, Chandler argues that soldiering generated imagined communities among Patriots that were broadly continental and even global. The first two chapters follow attempts by officers and Congress to inculcate an "imagined geographical community … around perceptions of continental commonality" among soldiers (9). Rather than just a fight for the independence of thirteen colonies, Patriots rallied inhabitants to fight for a free North America writ large, including Canada and the West. The identity politics of American independence was in some sense the imperial patriotism of 1763 metastasized, as Patriot leaders promoted a "common cause to preserve the memory of the Seven Years' War and its legacy of continental hegemony" (59). In Chandler's telling, Congress's decision to create a common all-union army was not about promoting attachment to a nation but to generate an even more capacious North American sense of self among its citizens. The remaining three chapters show the failure of that continental identity, as the war sparked both intensely regional and international senses of belonging among soldiers. Against Washington's hopes, men tended to view soldiering as service to their own communities rather than for an abstract America. Regiments resisted campaigning beyond their state lines. Officers reported tension between the different state regiments and antipathy from local communities toward soldiers from afar. These regionalisms subsided as the war went on, but soldiers replaced them with a sense of membership in an "international military community" (158). Fraternizing with French soldiers and British prisoners, continuing to conflict with civilians, Continental soldiers began to see themselves as belonging to a martial honor culture that was apart from civilians and that transcended the Patriot cause. It was only after the war, Chandler suggests, that leaders nationalized the Continental army, mythologizing it as a symbol of American unity while actual affinities between Americans remained fragile. Chandler's analysis is somewhat cramped by a singular focus on the identities of white soldiering men. Literature such as The Blind African Slave, or Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nick-Named Jeffrey Brace, in which the African-born Brinch traces his transition from slavery to freedom serving in the Connecticut Line, would enrich Chandler's point that revolutionaries possessed complex geopolitical identities. Moreover, since Chandler is at least partially responding to Mayer's argument in Belonging [End Page 214] to the Army (U of South Carolina P, 1996) that the Army was a protonational community, it seems odd to ignore the camp-following women who are at the center of her book. Nevertheless, Chandler's study persuasively demonstrates that the United States was borne of senses of community beyond the nation-state. Indeed, in Congress's Own: A Canadian Regiment, the Continental Army, and American Union, Holly A. Mayer...