Private Freeman’s Seashell: Fragments and their False Promises

In 1900, an American soldier picked up a shell on a beach somewhere in the Philippines and put it in his pocket. Within a few months he had deserted his unit, run away, gotten caught, been tried before a court martial, and gone to prison. Due to a quirk of the Judge Advocate General’s bureaucracy, his personal effects were sent not to his family, but to Washington, DC, where the shell ended up at the bottom of a box at the United States National Archives. It remains there today, along with thousands of letters, photographs, and lucky charms abandoned by military deserters as they fled their barracks. What do their unintentionally preserved mementos tell the historian about soldiering? About the ethical decisions that people make in wartime? These objects are fetishes of long, complicated chains of events, and they are reminders of decisions made under severe duress. Among wartime experiences, military desertion is among the hardest to see. Shame and silence surround it, and for a crime as serious as it is, desertion leaves a remarkably thin documentary trail. Fragments, traces, and residues are often all deserters leave behind. Are there ways to access desertion stories through those fragments, or does the deserter’s seashell offer us false hope about our ability to know the past?