The Many Lives of James Bird: From “Mournful” Ballad to Nostalgic Legend

Abstract

In late 1814, the US military executed for desertion a young marine from Luzerne County, Pennsylvania, who had served honorably with the fleet of Commodore Oliver Hazard Perry during the War of 1812. Only a year prior, James Bird’s hometown newspaper, the Wilkes-Barre Gleaner, had praised his bravery during the Battle of Lake Erie, when Perry and his men routed the British navy. After news of the youth’s death spread in 1814 to 1815, Gleaner editor Charles Miner penned the lyrics of a ballad that would disseminate the story far beyond Bird’s home and time in history. The long life of the ballad of James Bird is as unusual among triumphant War of 1812 ballads as is its tragic narrative. Through the years, versions of it have been collected from New England to the West Coast. This paper explains the marked staying power of the ballad and Bird’s story by considering the historical and cultural context for their transmission in different eras. In the early nineteenth century, when the new nation was still forging its identity, Bird’s heroism and subsequent death served the competing interests of partisan politics and national mythmaking, while also reminding the postrevolutionary generation of the dangers of arbitrary power. By the end of the nineteenth century, however, the wartime poetry of a young and politically charged republic became the subject of shared nostalgia amid the potentially troubling consequences of rapid industrialization and urbanization. One element of the ballad’s reception remained constant over time: the willingness of Bird’s admirers to overlook the youth’s potential flaws, lest they jeopardize his merits as a folk hero. Ultimately, the ballad’s appropriation by each successive generation also owed to a fruitful interaction between print and oral culture in which the reading public helped combine and propagate new elements of the story. Over time, the ballad nearly became secondary to the anecdotes surrounding it, and the “truth” of the young marine’s life became as malleable as its meaning.