Ordinary Courage E-Book

James Kirby Martin

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 481

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2012

Beschreibung

This remarkable memoir is one of the most celebrated documents to emerge from the tumult of America’s Revolutionary War. The ordinary and yet exceptional experiences of a young soldier in Washington’s army are given a new life in this fourth edition, sensitively edited for a modern readership.

• Classic primary source on the Revolutionary War
• Edited by a leading US authority on the period
• Now with extra maps and a more extensive bibliography
• Includes a new Afterword by Karen Guenther on film portrayals of the continental soldier

Leseprobe

Contents

Introductory Comments

Editorial Method

Acknowledgments

Overview Maps of Joseph Plumb Martin’s Adventures, 1776–1783

Martin’s Narrative of Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings

Preface

Chapter I: Introductory

Chapter II: Campaign of 1776

Chapter III: Campaign of 1777

Chapter IV: Campaign of 1778

Chapter V: Campaign of 1779

Chapter VI: Campaign of 1780

Chapter VII: Campaign of 1781

Chapter VIII: Campaign of 1782

Chapter IX: Campaign of 1783

The Revolutionary War Soldier on Film

Suggestions for Additional Reading

Index

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Martin, Joseph Plumb, 1760–1850. [Narrative of some of the adventures, dangers, and sufferings of a Revolutionary soldier] Ordinary Courage : the Revolutionary War Adventures of Joseph Plumb Martin / edited by James Kirby Martin ; with an essay “The Revolutionary War Soldier on Film” by Karen Guenther. – Fourth edition. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-4443-5135-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Martin, Joseph Plumb, 1760–1850. 2. United States–History–Revolution, 1775–1783–Personal narratives. 3. Soldiers–United States–Biography. I. Martin, James Kirby, 1943– II. Title. E275.M38 2012 973.3′8–dc23

2011051679

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

For

Aunt Jane and Uncle Don McClelland with unbounded affection

Introductory Comments

On a scenic bluff overlooking the Penobscot River in the mid-coast region of Maine stands a tombstone bearing these modest words, “A Soldier of the Revolution.” Buried there is Joseph Plumb Martin. He was born during 1760 in western Massachusetts, just before the outbreak of the American Revolution. He lived for nearly 90 years, during which time the young United States established itself as a legitimate political entity, if not a potential rising star, among the nations of the world. He died in 1850, an “aged man” living in virtual poverty.1

Martin never commanded large bodies of troops in battle; he never held major political offices; he never engaged in vital diplomatic ­negotiations; he never invented anything of consequence or made a notable scientific discovery; and he never acquired great wealth to distribute as a renowned philanthropist. Martin was very much an ordinary person who in his youth served courageously in the Con­tinental army and who in his adult years, according to one of his admirers, regularly displayed “a fund of knowledge, which, with his lively, social disposition, and ready wit, made him a highly entertaining and instructive companion.”2

1 Martin’s remains are buried at the Sandy Point Cemetery in Sandy Point, Waldo County, Maine, close to where he lived from the mid-1780 s to the time of his death in 1850.

2 Joseph Williamson, “Biographical Sketch of Joseph P. Martin, of Prospect, Maine, a Revolutionary Soldier,” The New England Historical and Genealogical Register, 30 (1876): 330–31. See also Philip Mead, “‘Adventures, Dangers, and Sufferings’; The Betrayals of Private Joseph Plumb Martin, Continental Soldier,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, eds. Alfred F. Young et al. (New York, 2011), 117–34.

Martin grew to adulthood in times that were truly extraordinary. British North American colonists had begun to believe that their parent nation of Great Britain was attempting to subvert their fundamental ­liberties. When King and Parliament kept trying to tax them, the Americans vocalized such slogans as “no taxation without ­representation” and spoke anxiously about a plot by home government leaders to shackle them forever in the chains of imperial tyranny. They also ­protested defiantly, so much so that King George III during the summer of 1775 declared them to be in open rebellion. Four months earlier warfare had broken out when British regulars, looking for gunpowder and weapons, marched from Boston into the Massachusetts countryside and became entangled in a day of combat with resolute citizen-soldiers that began at the villages of Lexington and Concord.

Even after this initial shedding of blood, large numbers of colonists, including most patriot political leaders who gathered in Philadelphia during May 1775 to attend the Second Continental Congress, hoped and prayed for a peaceful resolution of grievances. More confrontational delegates, however, insisted upon making full provisions for defense. Their will prevailed. On June 14 Congress voted to establish a Continental army, initially to consist of the ten to fifteen thousand New England enthusiasts who had rallied together to challenge the King’s troops and keep them entrapped in Boston. Soon thereafter the delegates selected general officers, and they named as commander in chief the highly regarded Virginia planter George Washington, then attending Congress and an experienced veteran of the French and Indian War.