Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth - Softcover

Hoock, Holger

 
9780804137300: Scars of Independence: America's Violent Birth
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0804137307 ISBN 13: 9780804137300
Verlag: Crown, 2018

Inhaltsangabe

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE

A magisterial new work that rewrites the story of America's founding

The American Revolution is often portrayed as an orderly, restrained rebellion, with brave patriots defending their noble ideals against an oppressive empire. It’s a stirring narrative, and one the founders did their best to encourage after the war. But as historian Holger Hoock shows in this deeply researched and elegantly written account of America’s founding, the Revolution was not only a high-minded battle over principles, but also a profoundly violent civil war—one that shaped the nation, and the British Empire, in ways we have only begun to understand.

In Scars of Independence, Hoock writes the violence back into the story of the Revolution. American Patriots persecuted and tortured Loyalists. British troops massacred enemy soldiers and raped colonial women. Prisoners were starved on disease-ridden ships and in subterranean cells. African-Americans fighting for or against independence suffered disproportionately, and Washington’s army waged a genocidal campaign against the Iroquois. In vivid, authoritative prose, Hoock’s new reckoning also examines the moral dilemmas posed by this all-pervasive violence, as the British found themselves torn between unlimited war and restraint toward fellow subjects, while the Patriots documented war crimes in an ingenious effort to unify the fledgling nation.

For two centuries we have whitewashed this history of the Revolution. Scars of Independence forces a more honest appraisal, revealing the inherent tensions between moral purpose and violent tendencies in America’s past. In so doing, it offers a new origins story that is both relevant and necessary—an important reminder that forging a nation is rarely bloodless.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Holger Hoock was educated at Freiburg and Cambridge and received his doctorate from Oxford. He currently serves as the J. Carroll Amundson Professor of British History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research in the Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. His previous books include Empires of the Imagination and The King’s Artists. An elected fellow of the Royal Historical Society, Hoock has recently been a Kluge Fellow at the Library of Congress; visiting scholar at Corpus Christi College, Oxford; and senior fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study, University of Konstanz.

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The American Revolution is often portrayed as an orderly, restrained rebellion, with brave patriots defending their noble ideals against an oppressive empire. It's a stirring narrative, and one the founders did their best to encourage after the war. But as historian Holger Hoock shows in this deeply researched and elegantly written account of America's founding, the Revolution was not only a high-minded battle over principles, but also a profoundly violent civil war--one that shaped the nation, and the British Empire, in ways we have only begun to understand. In Scars of Independence, Hoock writes the violence back into the story of the Revolution. American Patriots persecuted and tortured Loyalists. British troops massacred enemy soldiers and raped colonial women. Prisoners were starved on disease-ridden ships and in subterranean cells. African-Americans fighting for or against independence suffered disproportionately, and Washington's army waged a genocidal campaign against the Iroquois. In vivid, authoritative prose, Hoock's new reckoning also examines the moral dilemmas posed by this all-pervasive violence, as the British found themselves torn between unlimited war and restraint toward fellow subjects, while the Patriots documented war crimes in an ingenious effort to unify the fledgling nation. For two centuries we have whitewashed this history of the Revolution. Scars of Independence forces a more honest appraisal, revealing the inherent tensions between moral purpose and violent tendencies in America's past. In so doing, it offers a new origins story that is both relevant and necessary--an important reminder that forging a nation is rarely bloodless.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chapter Six
Slaughterhouses

The George Washington of American legend is the humanitarian who, in a young lady’s widely published acrostic, “Intent on virtue, and her cause so fair, / Now treats his captive with a parent’s care!” From the very start of the conflict, Washington had been adamant that his army’s conduct towards prisoners of war align with European customs. The honor of the American nation, as well as Washington’s own obligations as a gentleman officer and wartime leader, was at stake. It was, after all, for a place among the world’s civilized nations that Amer­ica was vying. For leaders like Washington, treating prisoners of war adequately was a genuine moral concern that also made sound strategic sense.

Washington had a personal history to reckon with. In his very first combat mission, on the Ohio frontier in 1754, he had failed to prevent his Native American allies from committing the gruesome ritualistic murder of a French envoy, Joseph Coulon de Villiers, Sieur de Jumonville, and then massacring other French soldiers after they had surrendered to him. Washington had covered up the disaster as best he could. His official report glossed over the extreme violence, making it sound as if all French casualties had been sustained during an honest fight. But when he had to sur­render Fort Necessity to the French later that year, Washington—unable to read French—signed terms of capitulation that held him responsible for Jumonville’s “assassination.”

When the British and American Loyalists resurrected the mur­der charges two decades later, we can only imagine how it must have nettled Washington, who guarded his honor and reputation as jealously as any gentleman officer in the British Empire. He appreciated that he must go out of his way to observe—and, cru­cially, to be seen observing—the codes of civilized warfare. Wash­ington knew that defending “the sacred Cause of my Country, of Liberty” required him and his army to embrace Enlightenment ideals and what John Adams called a “policy of humanity.”

Washington had absorbed the codes of war pertaining to the capture, treatment, and exchange of prisoners of war, as far as conflicts among European powers were concerned, when fighting alongside British officers in the Seven Years’ War. These codes of war allowed an army to imprison any enemy soldier or officer in order to prevent him from taking up arms or as a ransom for peace terms. Captors, however, had no right over the life of a surrendered soldier: prisoners of war were not to be killed unless they made a new attempt to fight or had committed a crime warranting death. Both sides had a vested interest in the preservation, and ultimately the exchange, of expensively trained captive soldiers.

In the eighteenth century, conventions of war dictated that captive soldiers were to be fed, housed, and cared for like one’s own armed forces, although they were to receive clothing and payment from their own state or army (and not their captors). En­listing prisoners of war in one’s own military was forbidden. Dur­ing most eighteenth-century conflicts among Western European powers, ransoms and, increasingly, agreements between belliger­ent powers, so-called cartels, regulated the imprisonment, provi­sioning, and exchange of captives. Although a state was bound to procure its own prisoners’ release—a promise that was crucial to recruitment—commanders might delay exchanges in order to temporarily impose a greater economic burden on their opponents or deny them fighting strength. At war’s end, ransom or compen­sation would settle mutual claims. Unlike soldiers, captured offi­cers were commonly released back home or allowed to move freely within a specified territory, on their honor and parole—from the French for “spoken word”—to abide by certain restrictions.

These principles of prisoner treatment were not easy to up­hold under the conditions of war. Unequal numbers of captives, inadequate record keeping, and the sheer scale of transcontinen­tal warfare in the eighteenth century meant that exchanges were complex to organize. There was, therefore, a broad trend away from large-scale exchanges and towards holding prisoners for longer periods of time in the captors’ homeland. In the American Revolutionary War, unique politico-legal circumstances further complicated matters: the British refused to designate captured rebel combatants as prisoners of war, since that would mean recognizing the United States as a sovereign state. In doing so, they rendered large-scale exchanges characteristic of wars between European nations impossible, which meant that both sides faced the challenge of keeping unusually large populations of captives. Throughout much of the war, British officers sought to arrange partial, ad hoc exchanges on the honor of the local commander and without formally invoking the king’s name, so as not to com­promise the government’s position.

Whereas Washington was bent on a pragmatic humanitari­anism and hence willing to participate in exchanges in order to alleviate prisoner suffering, Congress wanted to use the issue of prisoners to force Britain to recognize the United States. It also wished to avoid returning too many British soldiers. It was keen not to pay for large exchanges if accounts could not be settled. And it preferred to conceal the short terms of enlistment of Ameri­can soldiers. Throughout the war, American and British leaders blamed each other for the repeated collapse of exchange negotia­tions. The numbers of prisoners exchanged through ad hoc ar­rangements, though probably totaling several thousand over the war as a whole, proved too small to relieve in a meaningful way the pressure on detention sites in most places at most times.

Some British officers in America demanded that “rebel” cap­tives be treated as such, and not like prisoners from legitimate, conventional European armies. At least keeping them indefinitely, suggested the Irish-born Captain Frederick Mackenzie, “and in a state of uncertainty with respect to their fate, would certainly strike great terror into their army.” He worried that the failure to implement capital punishment—“Not one rebel has suffereddeath, except in Action”—only encouraged the insurgency. Never­theless, even Mackenzie later insisted that it was “right to treat our Enemies as if they might one day become our friends. Humanity is the characteristic of the British troops, and I should be sorry they should run the risque of forfeiting what redounds so much to their honor, by one act of even necessary severity.” Mackenzie advocated strategic humanitarianism in order for Britain to create the right climate for postwar reconciliation. In practice, the British could hardly treat American captives as traitors without any rights. This was, first, because officials in charge of recruiting German troops had asked the British government not to complicate their task by repeating the situation of the anti-Jacobite campaign of 1745: pris­oners then could not be exchanged, a predicament the German negotiators were now well aware of. And once the Americans had captured significant numbers of British troops, Britain had to treat American captives as de facto prisoners of war in order to protect their own from retaliation.

* * *

Washington set the tone early on in the Anglo-American debate about prisoners. Just weeks after taking charge of his new army at Cambridge in 1775, he complained to General Gage that “the Officers engaged in the Cause of Liberty and their Country, who by the Fortune...

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Verlag
Crown
Erscheinungsdatum
2018
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0804137307
ISBN 13 
9780804137300
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
576
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
gpsr@libri.de
gpsr@libri.de

Friedensallee 273
Hamburg
22763
Deutschland

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