Those Who Have Borne the Battle by James Wright Read Free Book Online Page B

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:
    And you, my fathers, whom God and the history of your country have ennobled, may well bear a chief part in keeping this peaceful birthday of our town. You are indeed extraordinary heroes. If ever men in arms had a spotless cause, you had. You have fought a good fight; and having quit you like men in the battle, you have quit yourselves like men in your virtuous families, in your cornfields, and in society. . . . To you belongs a better badge than stars and ribbons. This prospering country is your ornament; and this expanding nation is multiplying your praise with millions of tongues. 15
    At the time of this speech, fifty-two years after the end of the Revolution, attitudes had changed thoroughly. The democratization of heroic memory and the practical need to mobilize sailors and soldiers for the War of 1812 had engendered a more conscious effort to celebrate the heroes
who had served—and increasingly Americans defined all who served as heroic.
    Effectively, this inclusive embrace constituted an unspoken commitment to those who would serve. The nationalist Port Folio celebrated the 1815 dedication of the monument to those who fell defending Baltimore in 1814, noting that such a thing was a “public act of justice and honour to those who have fallen in defence of their country and it sets forth an example that is altogether