Those Who Have Borne the Battle (11 page)

Woven into this story are themes of patriotic service and sacrifice, themes that were becoming more powerful in the new Republic. But the soldier on the street was a different type of hero, unnamed and anonymous. And he was marked by destitution and need. The clearly sympathetic author-narrator could only allow that by his service this veteran had “earned the privilege to beg”—and to suggest that we had an obligation to respond to this situation.

The question framed here was simply: what is the obligation of democracy to those who sacrificed in its service? This question had been debated during the Revolution, resonating at Newburgh and in Philadelphia, as well as encampments of both regular and militia forces. It would continue to be relevant for centuries to come. Richard Kohn in his discussion of the officers at Newburgh raised questions as old as Odysseus and as recent as Vietnam—if not Afghanistan:

The revolutionary generation had difficulty assuming an obligation to veterans and to their survivors. The nascent government agreed to support widows of those who had been killed in service—although in the early years this applied mainly to the widows of officers. As early as 1776, members of the Continental Congress agreed that there was a need to provide support for those categorized as “invalids.” Yet the financial burden itself was left to the states. Among them, there were differences of opinion about defining adequate compensation and constant challenges in finding sources of funding. This resulted in uneven, unreliable results.

As for the healthy veterans—a description that was not precise and largely included any war wounded who retained all of his limbs—a quick handshake was enough. Most Americans believed that, after all, the veterans in good health were richly compensated by the ability to live and to thrive in this remarkable new nation.
⁴

This assumption framed the debate about the government's responsibility, if any, to its veterans. The idealized revolutionary-era narrative was largely unambiguous: citizens were accountable for the defense of their Republic. Service was a reciprocal, necessary responsibility of citizenship. All specified male citizens had an obligation to serve in the militia in defense of the rebellious colonies and then the new nation.

George Washington, despite his real doubts about the long-term military capacity of militia, was unequivocal in his statement of this obligation. “Every Citizen,” he stated, “who enjoys the protection of a free Government, owes not only a proportion of his property, but even of his personal services to the defence of it, and consequently that the Citizens of America (with a few legal and official exceptions) from 18 to 50 years of age should be borne on the Militia Rolls.”
⁵

If militia service was part of the living contract citizens had with the Republic, a cost of government that was as necessary as taxes, then it followed
that those who served were only meeting their obligation. They
owed
their service when called upon to defend their country. No payment or gratuity should be necessary or expected as a result of meeting the terms of the contract.

There was a flaw in this logic, though, evident at the outset, as the colonies needed to find some means to fill the ranks of the regular army with volunteers—and to sustain the ranks of the militia beyond minimum obligations. Conscious of this difficulty, Washington pointed out that patriotism may have led officers to enlist at the outset of the Revolution, but this could not be sustained. “Few men are capable of making a continual sacrifice of . . . private interest or advantage, to the common good.” Washington believed that no army could survive for long if it relied only on a sense of public virtue to maintain its officers and enlisted men.
⁶

Argued differently, more bluntly,
Port Folio
, an aggressive nationalist publication, asked in 1813, “Are republics necessarily framed to be, in all respects, ungrateful? Will they bestow on their champions neither riches nor honors, gratification nor fame? Must their warriors fight in the character of amateurs, purely for the sake of killing and dying and when they fall must Oblivion receive them to her blighted embrace?”
⁷

The reluctance to extend favors to veterans who did not have significant injuries was rooted in Republican opposition to establishing in this new nation a class of pensioners. There was a sense that part of the corruption of Europe stemmed from the extension of pensions and sinecures to favored individuals and classes. America had neither the inclination nor the financial means to follow this aristocratic path of favoritism. Congress did accept individual petitions for support, but its approach remained cautious and very conservative. Veterans had no more right to receive government support than other suffering citizens did. The Congressional Committee on Claims said in response to petitions from indigent veterans with claims of war-related injuries, “Congress cannot undertake the support of paupers merely because they may have been at some period of their lives engaged in the public service.” Patriots could not expect special treatment.
⁸

The position that wartime service was an obligation of citizenship, without pensions and other recognition, was mirrored in the common
attitude toward war memorials, at least as a responsibility of the national government. By the time of his death in 1799, Washington was a true national hero, but a proposal to construct a mausoleum for the man in the new capital city failed to garner sufficient support. As late as 1817, John Adams reminded advocates of federal sponsorship of memorials that official government paintings and statuary “have in all ages and Countries of which we have any Information, been enlisted on the side [of] Despotism and Superstition.”
⁹
Nevertheless, by 1817 the dominant narrative of shared responsibility for democracy, with no expectation of recognition or gratuity—or memorials—was already losing ground in the Republic.

 

 

Within twenty-five years of the writing of the Constitution, the revolutionary generation and the Americans of the nineteenth century began to rethink their basic views toward those who fought their wars. One catalyst for this change was that veterans proved effective in demanding more from the Republic that, after all, their service had created. The officers had organized at Newburgh in the Society of the Cincinnati, a hereditary organization of Revolutionary War officers who had served in the Revolution and who reminded all of their patriotic service and of their needs. Increasingly, enlisted men also informally articulated their needs and expectations. No major organization of enlisted veterans existed. Surviving veterans, often by their presence, symbolized a growing sense of nationalism—and this spurred a sense of gratitude, not to mention guilt.

The narrative of heroic service elicited a sense of guilt from those who did not serve in the War for Independence, and this often led to a greater sense of gratitude to those who did. It reminded those who were too young to have served in the Revolution that they had reason to be grateful—and increasingly that they shared in the responsibility for neglecting the patriots. Although this attitude was usually framed positively, demanding that veterans' patriotic sacrifice and heroism had to be recognized, it could also take on a deeper meaning. Feelings of shame began to emerge from the widespread image of indigence and suffering of aging veterans. It was only a matter of time before these widely shared feelings crystallized into a new political cause célèbre.

By the early years of the nineteenth century, both political parties recognized an advantage in affirming their support for the patriotic sacrifice of veterans. Political figures engaged in a debate that would set an enduring American pattern, one in which veterans sometimes became surrogates for partisan views on patriotism and on national defense. In the Adams and Jefferson presidencies, there were great tensions between Federalists and the Jeffersonian Republicans over readiness for another war with England—or with France. This led to claims and allegations of which side was militarily prepared, indeed which side was patriotic and was following the legacy of '76. Each side used veterans to demonstrate their commitment. Partisans would bring to rallies gray-haired veterans who affirmed their sponsor's patriotism. And Republicans proclaimed that these veterans symbolized the value of the citizen soldier—while Federalists insisted they represented the value of an army in a democracy.
¹⁰

In many ways, it became easier to salute those who had fallen in wartime than it was to support those who survived. Few were disposed to argue with the proposition that the war dead, with their final sacrifice, represented America's best values. They symbolized service to the Republic, unselfishness, and courage. Remembering them well was an important part of the narrative of contemporary society: the better they were, the better we are. In Thucydides' telling, Pericles had touched on this very theme millennia earlier in his funeral oration, reminding Athenians of their ties to those who had died in service to their society:

These dead Athenians soldiers were worthy of Athens. So the remembered veterans of the Revolution, their spirit and their glory, were worthy of their cause—and, implicitly, they were worthy of their descendants.

 

 

Early in the nineteenth century, there began in the United States a process that I would call the democratization of heroic memory. During and immediately after the War of 1812, Americans recognized that wars were won and territory protected not just by recognized individual “heroes.” The corollary was that not all heroes and surely not all defenders of the American ideal were officers.

For a republic formed with an unprecedented (if far from inclusive) sense of egalitarianism, it was ironic that officers had been the public face of the Revolution. Within a generation this changed, and the anonymous and the unknown came to share in the heroic memory. Militia and regulars blended in popular narrative. The brave Continental army patriots at Valley Forge and the brave minutemen patriots at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill joined, officer and enlistee together, in what became an undifferentiated story of sacrifice and heroism.
¹²

Whereas the early celebrations of the Revolution focused on officers and “heroes,” by the 1790s, Jefferson's followers, the Republicans, were already democratizing memory. “Beginning in the early 1790s, both Democratic-Republican and Federalist newspapers began to publish occasional pieces with the message that individual and humble soldiers ought to be accorded public respect for their service to the nation.” Such respect was not only appropriate, it was politically advantageous.
¹³
This enlarged pantheon of heroes, anonymous perhaps, abstracted even, also allowed any veteran to become representational. And they did, as they marched in declining numbers in Fourth of July parades and were buried in their family plots and church burying grounds.

Public grave markers and memorials honoring the service of dead Revolutionary War veterans tended in the early period to be largely for officers—or perhaps for battles. Few public memorials existed in this first generation, and those that were erected were supported by private groups or local governments. In 1794 the Boston Masonic Lodge built a memorial
for one of its members, militia officer and local physician Joseph Warren, one of the first men killed at Bunker Hill. Private subscriptions paid for the monument to that battle. Enlisted men typically went unrecognized in any public way. This changed in the early nineteenth century. Enlisted men who had served in the Revolution were commemorated in life and in death. And the old Republican-Whig aversion to monuments lessened as the patriotic symbolism of the Revolution was widely embraced.
¹⁴

By the 1830s, especially as public and private cemeteries began to replace church burying grounds, the obelisk became a symbol of American memorialization of the patriot generation. These memorials consciously borrowed from classical structures. They were simple, relatively inexpensive, unimposing forms. They did not overwhelm with pageantry.

Speaking at the bicentennial of the Town of Concord in 1835, Ralph Waldo Emerson evoked the memory of the citizens of his community who stood up in 1775. “Those poor farmers who came up that day to defend their native soil acted from the simplest instincts. They did not know it was a deed of fame they were doing. These men did not babble of glory; they never dreamed their children would contend who had done the most.” He addressed those remaining veterans in the audience: