The Trials of John Joseph Henry: The Politics of “Revolutionary Services” in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania

Abstract

ABSTRACT John Joseph Henry's Account of the … Campaign Against Quebec in 1775 (1812) recollects a revolutionary campaign to indict the leaders of Jeffersonian America. Historians value the text as a record of this early campaign—which left Henry permanently disabled—but the narrative focuses on the present. Henry evokes a brief moment of national (and individual) health to indict current national and state leaders who preserved unbroken bodies only by keeping themselves safe: these men, who never served, now attack those who did, purging from office Federalist veterans (such as Henry, a district judge). Their impeachment of Henry was a partisan persecution, he believed, proving to him the struggle for liberty was a “lost cause” in Jefferson's America. If he had imagined that those who “never looked an enemy in the eye” would cast “ancient veterans” aside, Henry wrote ruefully, he would “never have drawn a trigger.”