Theft and Counter-Theft: Joesph Plumb Martin's Revolutionary War

Abstract

Theft and Counter-Theft:Joseph Plumb Martin's Revolutionary War Catherine Kaplan (bio) Joseph Plumb Martin's 1830 Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier recounts few daring deeds. Despite long years of service, Martin only once mentions firing a gun. He disdains to parse battle strategy and only rarely extols the nobility of the Revolutionary cause. Instead, Martin portrays the Revolution as a time in which "gentlemen" officers abandoned their men and Americans sold dear the pathetic scraps of food on which their suffering soldiers had to rely. He argues that America committed outrageous thefts: during the Revolutionary era, it robbed soldiers of their just wages and of their virtue, and during the 1820s, it denied them respect and sought to deny them their pensions. Martin's Narrative is less a conventional war memoir than it is a bill—figurative and literal—for services rendered. Martin's Narrative has gone entirely unnoticed by literary scholars. Historians have viewed it as a straightforward series of autobiographical vignettes, useful in providing some insight into a soldier's experience in wartime.1 (Martin's memoir has in fact been published under the earnestly celebratory titles of Ordinary Courage and Private Yankee Doodle.) In reality, however, Martin's Narrative is a slippery and complex text that contains two entwined lines of argument. The first is that the veterans of the Revolution deserved the gratitude and the financial assistance of the nation. Congress had passed the Revolutionary War Pension Act in 1818, and Martin likely wrote his text in response to the criticism of that act that swept the country in the 1820s.2 Continental Army soldiers had been mistreated, Martin suggests in his Narrative, by being denied proper pay and equipment during their years of brave service. The nation must not betray them again in their dotage. Martin's second, more daring line of argument is that the Jacksonian-era commemorations of the Revolution as a time of collective self-sacrifice are delusional and destructive. America has not declined [End Page 515] into self-interest and greed, Martin insists throughout his Narrative, but rather has been conceived there. Martin, in short, wants to do more than claim pennies for old veterans. He links the violation of wartime economic contracts to a broader abrogation of political and social compacts in the new nation. He does so by crafting his memoir as a picaresque, a genre that credits the lowly rogue with a unique vantage point from which to criticize society. Martin's story of theft, economic exploitation, and moral corruption is a scathing and sorrowful critique of the Revolutionary era and the nation it created. Martin claims his authority as a social critic not in spite of but because of his lack of education, power, and money. "I never studied grammar an hour in my life," he writes; "when I ought to have been doing that, I was forced to be studying the rules and articles of war." In this passage, Martin is not really deflecting attention but rather demanding it; he reminds his reader that because the country—and the reader himself—has benefited from the wartime service that cost Martin his education, his debtors would do well not to criticize any grammatical errors Martin makes. But Martin is not finished: immediately after lulling his reader with his protestation of ignorance, he turns to demonstrating his mastery. "I never learned the rules of punctuation farther," he writes, "than just to assist in fixing a comma to the British depredations in the state of New York; a semicolon in New Jersey; a colon in Pennsylvania, and a final period in Virginia," and finally, pointedly, "a note of interrogation, why we were made to suffer so much in so good and just a cause" (xxv). Martin is ostensibly claiming that the country has robbed him of the skills he as author must have and that his countrymen owe him for those losses—but he is demonstrating the skills' possession even as he asserts their loss. Throughout his Narrative, Martin also reminds his reader that he relates only what he actually saw as a low-ranking soldier. "There were several...