Writing American Soldiers: Nineteenth-Century Varieties of Military Experience Benjamin Cooper Washington University in St
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Washington University in St. Louis Washington University Open Scholarship All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) 5-24-2010 Writing American Soldiers: Nineteenth-Century Varieties of Military Experience Benjamin Cooper Washington University in St. Louis Follow this and additional works at: https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd Recommended Citation Cooper, Benjamin, "Writing American Soldiers: Nineteenth-Century Varieties of Military Experience" (2010). All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs). 844. https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/etd/844 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by Washington University Open Scholarship. It has been accepted for inclusion in All Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) by an authorized administrator of Washington University Open Scholarship. For more information, please contact [email protected]. WASHINGTON UNIVERSITY IN ST. LOUIS Department of English and American Literature Dissertation Examination Committee: Rafia Zafar, Chair Iver Bernstein James Dawes Gerald Early Robert Milder Vincent Sherry WRITING AMERICAN SOLDIERS: NINETEENTH-CENTURY VARIETIES OF MILITARY EXPERIENCE by Benjamin Cooper A dissertation presented to the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2010 Saint Louis, Missouri copyright by Benjamin Cooper ! 2010 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a lot. First, to Rafia Zafar, who directed this dissertation with great cheer and unwavering commitment. Her graciousness is as much a model for the profession as it is instruction for my daily life. Years from now I hope I can look back and say I did it like Rafia. She along with Bob Milder taught me most of what I know about the nineteenth century. Bob told me when I wrote good sentences, and he told me when I didn’t write good sentences, and this project has benefited immeasurably from his fine eye. Gerald Early has been patient with a brazen young man who burst into his office some years ago and has never stopped showing up. There are few minds more acute than his, and I prize his prolonged investment in my work. Jim Dawes said yes to this project when he just as easily could have said no. His encouragement still amazes and pleases me. I thank Arizona Quarterly for publishing chapter four in a revised form, and I thank even more Iver Bernstein and Angela Miller for their seminar that started the original essay that became the article. Vince Sherry has been intrepid in his support as chair of the English department. So have other faculty, both at Washington University in St. Louis and elsewhere: Guinn Batten, Kathleen Diffley, Dan Grausam, Greg Jackson, Alan Nadel, Dana Nelson, William Paul, Sarah Rivett, Philip Sewell, Dan Shea. Kathy Schneider and Dorothy Negri made my graduate career. People can accuse me of hyperbole, but I say no matter. I wish the world had more of them. I owe more. Parts of this dissertation were written in Missouri, California, Alaska, Alabama, South Korea, Vietnam, and Italy. My family and friends have been more kind than they know, indulging me with places to stay, meals to eat, and a genuine ii interest in what I was doing. This network has ranged from the local—Eric Knoche, Liza Harrison, Jen Mitchell, Carter Smith, Brooke Taylor—to the national and the international—the Chicago Cooper clan, the Hattan clan, the Kellum clan, Merri Dillinger, Dave Schnapp, Meredith Montgomery, Matt and Amy Cooper (and Oskar!), Olimpia and Franco Conti. It is more difficult to acknowledge properly my mother. I dedicate this dissertation to Karin Louise Cooper at the same time I dedicate it for my father, Daniel Roy Cooper, Jr. They both did their best in raising me, and I hope I did my best in honoring them here. If I have done my job correctly, then what follows isn’t a war story but rather a love story. The last word I reserve for Erika Conti. Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, ché la diritta via era smarrita. Grazie mille e tante cose. The woods are no longer so dark. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements ii What We Talk About When We Talk About War 1 1 Revolutionary Captivity and the Soldier’s Self 31 2 “This Republic of Misery”: Joseph Plumb Martin and the Soldier Appeal 75 3 Cooper, Melville, and the Civilian Novel Between the Wars 121 4 “Personal Knowledge of One’s Subject”: Franklin H. Durrah, 175 John William De Forest, and the Varieties of Military Experience Epilogue 215 Works Cited 223 iv WHAT WE TALK ABOUT WHEN WE TALK ABOUT WAR I. The story goes that during a diplomatic trip on behalf of the Massachusetts governor to New York City in March of 1787, Royall Tyler for the first time saw professional theater. Tyler’s experience with the stage jolted a month-long creative frenzy culminating with The Contrast, a trim five-act play which opened at the John Street Theater in New York City on April 16, 1787.1 Widely credited as the first dramatic comedy written by an American and performed by professional actors, The Contrast was well-received by critics and audiences alike.2 The play’s list of private subscribers includes many prominent readers, among them George Washington (two copies of the play were found in Washington’s personal library, one of them autographed by Tyler), Aaron Burr, then Secretary of War Henry Knox, as well as a myriad of other Continental Army officers, from captains to majors and colonels.3 That there were so many military readers of Tyler’s first play should come as little surprise. Only a month after the play’s initial run, the Constitutional Convention would begin in Philadelphia populated with recent heroes of the Revolution. That the play took as one of its central concerns “the contrast between a gentleman who has read Chesterfield and received the polish of Europe [,] and an unpolished, un-travelled American” soldier, is also of little surprise, given Tyler’s recent military life.4 Only a few months before The Contrast’s swift composition and production, the gentlemanly Tyler had joined the army for the second time in his life, on this occasion as a major under General Benjamin Lincoln during Shays’ Rebellion.5 1 Tyler was as much an accidental soldier as he was an accidental playwright, and The Contrast and its author were in many ways two complementary laboratories of sentiment. The play and the author both wanted to understand the process by which becoming “an unpolished, un-travelled American” was more than a rebuke of European polish, travel, and refinement. Tyler was coming to learn it was also an expression of the vexed military ethos the emerging nation was forging. He was at Harvard in 1775 when the Battles of Lexington and Concord took place only a few miles away. After taking his degree in 1776, he joined the Revolutionary Army in Boston under the generalship of John Hancock. At the request of his mother who already had lost her husband to the war in 1775 and who had another son serving as a spy for Washington, Tyler spent most of the Revolution a safe distance from the front.6 Regardless of their duration, Tyler’s intermittent experiences as a soldier visibly left their imprint on his play and its “native themes” (20).7 For the audience, The Contrast would have appeared as an American take on the English comedy of manners. The crowd quickly comes to learn that the gentleman with European sympathies, “who has read Chesterfield,” is Billy Dimple, a smooth-talking New York dandy. As the curtain opens, Dimple is engaged to be married to Maria Van Rough, a woman from the same social caste, but one who is having nagging doubts about his character. He is, in her eyes, “a depraved wretch, whose only virtue is a polished exterior; who is actuated by the unmanly ambition of conquering the defenceless…” (38- 9). Subsequently, the audience becomes acquainted with Henry Manly, the “un-travelled American,” whose role in the play will be to protect and uphold “probity, virtue, [and] honour” (114-15). Manly is a taciturn and somewhat melancholic Revolutionary War 2 hero from the countryside. He has never before been to the city, “[n]ever nearer than Harlem Heights, where he lay with his regiment” (42). The two men could not have been more different. The Contrast proposes there is a choice to be made in the representation of post- Revolutionary New England, and that Dimple and Manly illustrate competing alternatives.8 On the one hand was the familiar parlor game of Dimple, a con man and a rogue, but a con man and a rogue whom people liked. He is loved by three women, among them Maria, Manly’s sister Charlotte, and Letitia, the richest of the three, and therefore Dimple’s real marital interest. As the scoundrel so succinctly puts it: “I must break with Maria, marry Letitia, and as for Charlotte—why, Charlotte must be a companion to my wife” (66). The play offers an alternative to Dimple in the silent but principled honesty of Manly. After Dimple is exposed and pilloried in the last act, Maria’s affections are cleared for Manly to court and, in the final scene, win. During every stage of the action’s development, Tyler’s characters and narrative structures clearly telegraph where the audience’s sympathies should lie, and so when Maria selects Manly over Dimple, the central tension is resolved and the play may end. She has wisely chosen in Manly something more “American” than his counterpart, Dimple, and presumably, Manly is as much Maria’s pick as he is Tyler’s and the audience’s.