War Stories: Defining the American Revolution

In his best-selling book, 1776, David McCullough introduced readers to John Greenwood, a patriot fifer who served in Washington’s campaign of 1776. McCullough reported that when the sixteen-year old heard news of the bloodshed at Lexington and Concord, he walked 150 miles to join the patriot forces, telling astonished listeners he was “going to fight for my country.” Yet Greenwood, even in his memoir written thirty-five years later, could not gloss the reality of this moment so easily. He told a different story. In 1775, he was serving an apprenticeship far from his family in Boston. He slipped away in the confusion, “to see my parents.” Only when Greenwood arrived at Boston and could not cross British lines did he enlist in the army - because he found himself alone and hungry. He stayed in the army only until he was reunited with his family. He then joined a ship and spent the rest of the conflict at sea, pirating. Even so long after the war, Greenwood could not bring himself to omit that he joined a British ship in order to escape captivity in Jamaica. Greenwood “the patriot” ended his Revolutionary career plundering an allied Spanish ship.

That McCullough could misread Greenwood’s memoir is testament to the power of a triumphalist narrative of the American Revolution as a founding moment. Stories explaining the founding shape not just popular ideas of this period, but also historians’ research agendas. One result is that we fail to come to grips with the social history of the period – especially the violence and trauma of the conflict and its legacy among the people who lived through it. This paper will explore alternate war stories told in Revolutionary memoirs and suggest we might more accurately frame the movements of this period as an American tragedy.