Early American Literature

Benjamin Cooper's Veteran Americans: Literature and Citizenship from Revolution to Reconstruction offers a fascinating and wide-ranging look at writings by and about veterans published during or after three formative conflicts: the American Revolution, the Mexican War, and the Civil War. Linking works from the 1770s to the 1880s, the author asserts that ordinary veterans participated in the literary marketplace to remind the public of their service and sacrifices. These actions, Cooper emphasizes, were not so much calls for sympathy as they were demands for respect from a nation that they helped to establish and then reshape through their martial endeavors. Civilian readers throughout the long nineteenth century, however, mostly ignored veterans and their concerns, even as the nation commemorated its democratic values and opportunities. These selective memories came about, in part, because audiences associated former soldiers and sailors with having the corrupt intentions of beggars, thieves, and confidence men who sought to take advantage of the public's goodwill when requesting pensions or other types of aid. A developing democratic society in the United States also saw itself engaged in "people's wars," in [End Page 595] which citizens of all stripes, and not just combat veterans, contributed to the nation's past triumphs.

Cooper usefully builds on prior scholarship such as Dana D. Nelson's Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States (2015). Like Nelson, Cooper explores the efforts of ordinary people who asserted their public presence through print, or had their stories recovered in more established authors' works, even if these latter writings were unsympathetic to commoners' interests and grievances. In this manner, Veteran Americans evaluates "how literature helps manufacture American citizenship" by promoting a sense of cultural and national belonging for those on the margins of society (10). Cooper focuses on veterans as a distinct group with their own genre, as framed through memoirs, pension and prisoner-of-war narratives, newspaper submissions, pamphlets, and other material. Thus one value of Veteran Americans lies in its inclusion of texts not often examined by, or familiar to, scholars of early American culture. This archive reveals disenfranchised individuals who felt removed from how the larger populace of noncombatants celebrated their nation as a participatory democracy. Part of the problem the veterans' narratives encountered, Cooper continues, was that they competed against more popular and critically accepted genres, from historical romances in the early nineteenth century to works of realism in the latter part of the period, that adopted former servicemen's words, memories, and experiences. Stephan Crane's Red Badge of Courage (1895) presents one example, wherein the novelist never faced combat and was not born until after the Civil War. Despite veterans' facing such problems, Cooper is convincing in his argument that figures such as Joseph Plumb Martin, who fought in the Revolutionary War, "were not simply silenced victims whose injustices were interchangeable but rather wry and inventive literary practitioners" (79).

An additional contribution of Veteran Americans is its chronological reach across the long nineteenth century, from which the author evaluates the broad historical overlaps with, and divergences from, each generation's war and the narratives spun from them. This approach makes Cooper's work distinctive since a large body of scholarship has assessed memories of war, public rituals, democratic ideals, and the writings about these categories within specific postwar periods. Alfred F. Young's The Shoemaker and the Tea Party: Memory and the American Revolution (2000), Sarah J. [End Page 596] Purcell's Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (2010), and John Mac Kilgore's Mania for Freedom: American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War (2016) are examples that consider the cultural currents within the post-Revolutionary era. For the years after the Civil War, we have Elizabeth Young's Disarming the Nation: Women's Writing and the American Civil War (1999), David W. Blight's Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory (2001), and Brook...