The American Revolution Remembered, 1830s to 1850s: Competing Images and Conflicting Narratives

Abstract

This book examines the contested nature of American revolutionary memory in the two decades before the Civil War through an analysis of the era’s visual images. The author asserts that images of the revolutionary past were vehicles through which American cultural identity was formed and reformed during the antebellum period. Examining pictorial histories, illustrated biographies, and popular painting, Karsten Fitz seeks to understand “how certain images came to possess power within American cultural memory during the mid-nineteenth century” and “assess them within their cultural and historical contexts” (p. 66). The author concludes that the evolving circumstances under which images of the Revolution were produced precluded a static view of the nation’s formative event. Instead, many pictorial narratives competed for public attention. Some grafted women and African Americans onto the story of America’s founding in ways that complicated the national mythology without subverting it. Fitz argues that antebellum illustrators and audiences found the story of David and Goliath a satisfying signifier for interpreting revolutionary events. Drawing heavily on Paul Revere’s famous engraving of the Boston Massacre (1770), lithographers placed the colonists and the British in a binary relationship where a corrupt, worldly British Goliath was defeated by the simple, but morally superior American David. Pictorial representations such as William Croome’s 1844 “Affair at Lexington” depicted minutemen as lacking military knowledge but able to withstand the British Goliath due to the righteousness of their cause. Fitz argues that these virtuous minutemen remained “the most prominent ‘collective’ allegorical personification of the colonists’ struggle with Britain in the decades before the Civil War” (p. 162). Minutemen could also be linked with antebellum ideas about agrarian virtue; so their place in commemorative imagery bolstered an evolving national identity.