Holger Hoock’s Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth

I’ve been reading Holger Hoock’s great book Scars of Independence: America’s Violent Birth. It’s a really illuminating book because it shows that our revolution happened to be our first civil war. Like all civil wars, things can get ugly. There were not just the heroic American patriots against the villainous British soldiers and Hessian agents. There were Loyalists in America who suffered by ostracism and violence in various forms at the hands of the American patriots. Murray Rothbard in Conceived in Liberty brought this to my attention; it is paradoxical that a country fighting for liberty would instigate a wave of repression against Loyalists who did not want to fight or those Americans who were on the fence about joining in the war effort. I also consider the tarring-and-feathering to be a predecessor to the current toleration of torture by the federal government. I see the mob violence as a precursor to the waves of American mob violence through history. The ostracism of the Revolution predates the exclusion and identity politics of 21st-century America

I am not writing to condemn the American Revolution. I consider our founding to be the honorable birth of a largely admirable albeit flawed country. I also admire the story of an underdog force battling against the largest empire. That story must have stirred up hope for peoples who wanted to be free and enjoy their rights. The Americans certainly inspired the French revolutionaries. It certainly inspires Americans today. And for good reason. It is because of the violent sacrifice of our forebears that we are independent and enjoy prominence and whatever liberties we have. I am very happy we separated from Britain. Especially after I consider how British police departments take upon themselves the power to investigate speech on Twitter. And Alfie Evans died because the government ordained his death.

Which brings me to the real topic: how did the Americans use stories of British atrocity to rally the people to the revolutionary cause? That was a question on my head as I read Hoock’s brilliant and trenchant analysis of how stories of murder and rape united the people against their “mother country” and helped to cement an American identity.

Man shall not live by high ideals alone, but by the shared experience of suffering and violence that proceeds from the mouths of the distressed.

Stories of War-Time Anglo-Murder

Chapter 5 of Hoock’s book, “Violated Bodies,” begins with the ambush of a ten-man Continental Army patrol by a fifteen-strong British-Hessian unit. The Continental patrol was led by Lieutenant William Martin. Martin is slain by the comrades. The day is May 31, 1777, a year after the Americans declare their independence.

George Washington recovers the body of Martin the day after the death. The body is taken to Bound Brook. “He then ordered the mangled corpse to be washed and put on display as evidence of the enemy’s brutality,” Hoock says.

According to the report of George Washington’s close aide Alexander Hamilton:

He had several cuts in his head, each of which was sufficient to dispatch him, besides a number of more inconsiderable scars about his body and hands. It is evident, that the most wanton and unnecessary cruelty must have been given him when utterly out of a condition to resist. This may be relied on as a fact.

Within days, Patriot newspapers will give more details. It emerges that Martin asked for quarter; the killers of course denied it to him, according to the story.

General Cornwallis denies that Martin ever asked for quarter; he attributes the multiple wounds to the fact that Martin was killed by multiple people. “When a man is kill’d in that manner,” Cornwallis says, “his body must of course be mangled.”

Washington, however, proceeds to display the body. Something interesting happens.

[T]hat spring—as reports kept coming in that the British routinely offended against the codes of war—the American Revolutionaries, and especially the Continental Congress and Continental Army, were also experimenting much more widely with investigative and forensic methods. Thus they hoped to turn bodies mangled in small-scale military defeats into moral and polemical assets in their war for popular American support—and even to attract British and international sympathies.

Here is a lesson: whenever you see a setback, use losses to your advantage. If you don’t always win battles, you can at least gain support through your defeats. That’s what the hardy and enterprising Americans thought.

Holger Hoock gives a great summary of the critical problem that stories like Lieutenant Martin’s brutal killing posed:

In mid-January, Congress took the unprecedented step of appointing an investigatory committee charged with looking into these allegations. The nation’s representatives, many of whom had legal training, made it their business to expose possible war crimes. In the midst of battle, no one had the time to observe, let alone verify, such transgressions, and so it had to be done in the aftermath. Sorting facts from rumor, hearsay, supposition, and fabrication would test the skill and judgment of the congressional investigation. But telling a plausible, well-evidenced story of enemy atrocities against America’s combatants as well as her new captives and civilians, would prove to be a crucial new weapon in the imperial civil war—and a critical tool, too, in the project of forging the new nation.

#MeToo in the Age of the American Revolution

Rape is a common feature in war.

Not only that; it seems to be more common in society than we recognize.

How do we start to notice how bad the problem of rape can be? Part of that is through the telling of stories.

Stories of rape certainly convinced more Americans of the necessity of fighting the British and of their unworthiness to rule the colonies.

The victims of British soldiers included married women, single women, pregnant mothers-to-be, septuagenarians, even girls. Ideas of male honor must also be considered: British soldiers abused and humiliated women in front of their husbands or fathers.

The lascivious lust of the British was captured in a very unsettling cartoon called The able Doctor, or, America Swallowing the Bitter Draught.

The able Doctor, or, America Swallowing the Bitter Draught (London, May 1774)

According to Hoock:

Lord Mansfield is holding down the bare-breasted, prostrate, helpless America. Lord Sandwich, restraining her legs, has lifted up the sheet that covers her torso and seems to be peeping at her genitals. Prime Minister Lord North, his left knee pointing at America’s groin, forces tea down her throat. At right stands an overbearing soldier, his sword inscribed “Military Law.” A second female allegory, representing Britannia or Liberty, averts her face in shame. America is being abused on a visual axis between a paper inscribed “Boston petition” and a scene that anticipates “Boston cannonaded”—the Massachusetts capital serving, once more, as a site of violent confrontation. The threat of military attack is conveyed through implied sexual violence.

Holger Hoock tends to note the potential problem with these rape stories, in that they focused on the honor of the fathers to the expense of highlighting the trauma that the women themselves would suffer.

I want to focus on how the Patriots and Americans used stories of rape to show the criminality of the British and emphasize the righteousness of an innocent people being threatened on such a personal and venereal level.

Rape was considered a capital felony according to ancient English law. That did not stop soldiers from taking certain liberties during wartime.

Though the numbers can’t be effectively quantified, we do have real stories that we can point to.

Take the case of Abigail Palmer (1777):

The previous December, several British soldiers had come to the house of Abigail’s grandfather, Edmund Palmer, who farmed near Pennington, New Jersey. The men had taken control of the premises and raped Abigail for “three Days successively” as more soldiers kept coming and going. They also assaulted Edmund Palmer’s married and pregnant daughter Mary Phillips, as well as Elizabeth and Sarah Cain, fifteen and eighteen years of age, who happened to be visiting the Palmer family. On one occasion, several soldiers seized Abigail and Elizabeth, “pull’d them both into a Room together,” and—ignoring their screams and Abigail’s father’s attempt to shield them—”Ravishd them both.” The soldiers threatened to poison them. They said they would run a bayonet through their hearts or “blow their brains out.” On the third day, the two girls were eventually dragged to a British army camp, about a thousand yards away, where “they were both Treated by some others of the Soldiers in the same Cruel manner,” remembered Elizabeth. Only after further assaults did an officer put a stop to the girls’ abuse and arrange for them to return to their families.

Hoock goes on to clarify that these soldiers had no particular reason to go to the Palmer house. “British soldiers invading households may have used an ostensible search for rebels as a pretense to force their entry or talk themselves in,” he says.

I digress here for a while. Sometimes I have read stories of police officers who do routine searches, happen to come around women, threaten them with punishment for the possession of drugs, and take sexual advantage of them. But more on this later.

How could these stories come out? Hoock notes that the revelations of Palmer’s story and the stories of other victims came to us because of the Patriots’ persistence in seeking to create a fuller picture of British atrocity. In addition, it is due to the courage of the women who came to tell their stories to a receptive and hurting audience.

Physical evidence, however, did not seem to play a major role in sexual assault cases compared to the investigations of battlefield atrocities. But stories played a big role. So did memories of British rape during the subduing of the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, where rape was used as a reprisal for earlier defeats. “Rape…was endemic in the British Army.”

I’m also reminded of a contemporary problem. I’ll be returning to this.

What matters here is the significance of the rape problem for Americans:

Like battlefield atrocities but in an even more immediate, intimate way, sexual assault on American women brought the war closer to home—and demonstrated that an imperial power whose soldiers committed such abuse could never again be trusted to rule America.

British officers sometimes did discipline soldiers for these offenses, but as Hoock points out, the inconsistency of these punishment “also provided the American Patriots with rhetorical ammunition.”

What We Can Learn

Holger Hoock’s insightful analysis of battlefield atrocities and sexual assault during the American Revolution, as well as the stories the Americans told about these things, teaches us some lessons about how to use the accounts of suffering for the purposes of redress and political justice.

The purpose of the investigative experiment of 1777 was to pursue truth, justice, and the American way, to use a Superman phrase.

The committee led by Reverend John Witherspoon and Samuel Chase was very vital for gaining American moral victory and radicalizing the people:

Addressed to the “country in general,” and serialized and excerpted in papers across the colonies and even in Europe, [the report] could help the wronged American nation cohere around a common experience of danger and fear. Witherspoon’s committee had relied on a small number of cases, sometimes with less-than-clear-cut evidence, but it succeeded in telling a plausible and coherent story about the British Army’s cruelty. Across the colonies, the congressional report and similar official publications resonated with, and amplified, the experiences of individual readers. Many of them had already been, or over the course of the war would become, witnesses if not victims of British atrocities in their own cities and towns. The circumstances of each incident varied. But their retelling over time, in pamphlets and poems and from pulpits and in taverns across the land, revealed a common rather than a regionally diverse American culture and accentuated shared experiences. Who, then, could hear of the enemy’s “wickedness and brutality,” asked a poet in the Independent Chronicle, “and not with patriot zeal,/Nobly step forth, to guard their wives and children!/And sheath a dagger in the villain’s heart/Who’d rob us of our peace, our all, our honour!” Such Patriot pens stirred the emotions of wronged republican citizens. In the emerging United States, the print media, and newspapers in particular, were key to forging a political consciousness and a sense of national community and belonging. In this effort, allegations of war crimes proved powerful narrative content.

Furthermore, the Patriots, in pursuit of stories, were very innovative:

[They] invented novel ways of documenting battlefield atrocities to bolster a credible narrative of victimhood and help them legitimize a rebellion and a civil war. Inspired by their enlightened epoch’s empirical turn in legalistic thinking and scientific approaches, and drawing on their members’ journalistic savvy, the Revolutionary authorities deployed mangled and raped bodies to help them build a unified nation and win sympathies abroad.

I am already thinking strategically when I write this. What are some of the wrongs committed by the police and the military of this country? How much attention do they deserve? How can we credibly accuse the State of being the source of these atrocities by its very nature?

Let’s look to our Patriot forbears and see their use of stories to unify a wounded nation at the moment of its birth.

“The war of wounds fed the war of words in the battle for support both domestically and overseas,” Hoock says.

I linked earlier to several stories of police officers and sexual assault. One story that especially galls me is the story of Anna, who claims she was raped by two off-duty detectives. The detectives were named Eddie Martins, 37, and Richard Hall, 33, of the Brooklyn South narcotics unit.

I could not help think of her case, as well as the stories of people in her situation, when I read Hoock’s book and understand the contemporary relevance of British soldiers’ rapine to the problems with sexual assault and abuse in the police forces.

Then there are the stories of British abuse of soldiers who surrendered to them. I am reminded of Daniel Shaver, who surrendered to an angry cop. The angry cop murdered him. Such unlawful killing, wrongly acquitted by the jury, would deserve due punishment.

My question is: Why are we not paying more attention to the stories of abuse and rape and violence of civilians at the hands of police officers?

If we lovers of freedom want to convince ordinary Americans to support our cause, rallying stories and creating reports of abuse and trauma can help unify a troubled and suffering nation around the cause of a creed that will promise to put an end to much of this abuse.

Stories have the power to unify, heal, rattle, provoke, evoke, and intensify emotions and experiences. We have a great opportunity here. Let’s seize the chance and become like our Patriot forefathers, who understood the power of facts and stories to rally together an abused nation and fight for independence. Let us, in our pursuit of truth and justice, remember our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.