A Personal Account and a Borrowed History: The Revolutionary War Memoir of James Selkirk

In the decades following the American Revolutionary War, dozens of veterans recorded their wartime experiences serving the patriot cause. Included among these memoirists was James Selkirk (1757-1820), a modest tailor residing in Bethlehem, New York. Raised in Gatehouse-of-Fleet, Scotland, Selkirk immigrated to New York in 1774 and enlisted in the Continental Army months after conflict broke out with Britain. During his six-and-a-half years of active service with the New York Line, Selkirk participated in engagements at Saratoga, Newport, Springfield, and Yorktown and survived the harsh winter encampment at Morristown. In his memoir, Selkirk faithfully recorded the drudgery, deprivation, and dangers that he and his fellow soldiers faced; like the better-known revolutionary-war memoir written by Joseph Plumb Martin, Selkirk’s account is filled with anecdotes centered on the themes of severe military discipline, ill health and infectious disease, unceasing hunger, fatiguing labor, and exposure to inclement weather.

Selkirk aspired to share his narrative with a broader audience via print publication, yet sadly, he died shortly after issuing a subscription proposal, and his written work remains unpublished to this day. With this poster, I will give viewers an idea of what Selkirk’s memoir would have looked like and what his aims in publishing it were. I will also show how he sought to realize his goal by adopting creative editorial and marketing strategies. I will pay particular attention to Selkirk’s extensive borrowing from David Ramsay’s two-volume History of the American Revolution (1789) and the way that these acts of copying effectively transformed Selkirk’s writing into a work combining the authenticity and insight of a personal memoir with the breadth and analysis of a historical account. In other words, by taking material from Ramsay and synthesizing with accounts of his own experiences, Selkirk strove to elevate his work from an individual story into a grand narrative.

Recent scholarship on the life writings produced by Revolutionary War veterans examines how the creation of these texts influenced contemporary practices and perspectives involving public memory, literary activity, and veterans’ status in the early Republic. In addition to showing how Selkirk, as a non-elite author from the lower-middling sorts, sought to assert his authority as a narrator of revolutionary history, my poster builds on existing work by shedding light on Selkirk’s political views regarding the plight of aging Revolutionary War veterans and his marginalized economic status and successful application for a Federal pension in 1818. In telling the story of Selkirk’s memoir and his attempt to have it published, my poster will incorporate an array of visual and textual material, including images of Selkirk’s manuscript memoir, discharge papers, pension records, printed proposal for publication, Ramsay’s history and other contemporary wartime accounts, and graphics with page analyses comparing Selkirk’s text with Ramsay’s.