“Like a shock of electricity upon a morbid system”

Yesterday I discussed how An Authentic Narrative of the Life of Joshua Slocum was anything but an authentic memoir of a Revolutionary War soldier.

Joshua Slocum had spent time in the Continental Army, to be sure, but the book his son John published in 1844 went into great detail about events his father had nothing to do with, producing bogus stories based on preceding books and popular lore.

When the war began, Joshua Slocum was about fifteen years old, probably living in the part of Wrentham that became Franklin. Although there are cases of boys that young serving in the siege of Boston—as musicians, servants, clerks, substitutes for older brothers—there’s no documentation that Joshua did. He probably stayed in the countryside and worked on the farm. Four years later, when he reached the typical age for military service, he enlisted for one of the Rhode Island campaigns.

Because John Slocum wanted to connect his father to the famous events of the Revolutionary War, he wrote about 1775: the Lexington alarm, the siege of Boston, the capture of Fort Ticonderoga. When he created the book, in the middle of the nineteenth century, one of the most celebrated events from that year was Gen. George Washington taking command of the Continental Army.

This is how the Authentic Narrative treats that moment:

When this heart-cheering intelligence [of George Washington’s appointment] reached Cambridge, my father informed me that one long, loud and joyful acclamation rent the skies—each successive post catching the sound, till it was wafted through the entire line of the arm, operating upon it like a shock of electricity upon a morbid system.

If, continues he, the mere announcement of his appointment could create so much enthusiasm and awaken such joyous sensations through our ranks, what must have been the feelings inspired when, on the 2d of July, fifteen days from the date of his commission, Washington, in company with Gen. [Charles] Lee, arrived at Head Quarters in Cambridge—when, for the first time, we were permitted to see, face to face, the great man who, under God, was destined to achieve the Independence of his country, and to lay broad and deep the foundation of this stupendous republic? For myself I shall not attempt to describe it—language would fail in the attempt.

As eyewitness testimony, this is worthless. Indeed, Slocum didn’t even try to provide details of the generalissimo’s arrival.

As a reflection of how Americans of 1844 wanted to think about Washington, however, it’s very interesting. Since John Slocum was writing without any reliable input from his father, this passage is entirely untainted by what the fighting men of 1775 actually thought. It’s a pure expression of myth.

Slocum depicted the provincial troops around Boston as “a morbid system” needing a jolt of power. Ordinary men were excited to learn about the new commander-in-chief, not because he represented support from colonies outside New England but because they somehow sensed he was the “great man who, under God, was destined to achieve the Independence of his country.”

Actual diaries from July 1775 show much less emotion. Some barely mention Washington. Most of the soldiers had probably never heard of the man. Few entertained thoughts of independence yet.

Those newly dubbed Continental soldiers probably did share the nineteenth-century Americans’ wish to believe their success was destined and protected by God, but so have many other groups in history. Stories like this are one way to reinforce that belief.

John Slocum might come up in Tuesday’s panel discussion at the Cambridge Public Library about “The First Commander Remembered.”

Slocum’s “Authentic Narrative”

In 1844, John Slocum published An Authentic Narrative of the Life of Joshua Slocum: Containing a Succinct Account of His Revolutionary Services through a printer in Hartford.

This book fit into a growing genre: memoirs of unheralded Revolutionary War veterans looking back from old age. The most vital of these was Joseph Plumb Martin’s Narrative of Some of the Adventures, Dangers and Sufferings of a Revolutionary Soldier (1830), but I have a fondness for The Revolutionary Adventures of Ebenezer Fox, of Roxbury, Massachusetts (1838).

U.S. pension laws had encouraged veterans to write down their memories in order to authenticate their claims. I posit that that led men toward composing and then publishing these longer autobiographies. 

Joshua Slocum had died in 1816, at about the age of fifty-six, so he didn’t feel that impetus. Instead, his son John set down the veteran’s stories, shifting between third person, first person, and quoted documents.

Or so John Slocum claimed. He acknowledged pulling large sections of the book from other sources, such as the chapter on the capture of Fort Ticonderoga, which his father had no part in. But in truth he borrowed a great deal more. Over and over, the details in this Authentic Narrative just don’t add up, exposing a later perspective shaped by borrowed details and wishful thinking.

The book starts out by saying: “The subject of this sketch was born in the town of Franklin, Franklin county in the State of Massachusetts, in 1760.” The town of Franklin was never in Franklin County, and neither of those places legally existed in 1760. It’s possible Joshua Slocum was born in the town of Wrentham, which calved off Franklin during the war; there was a Slocum/Slocomb family there, but his birth doesn’t appear in the surviving vital records.

On the day after the town received news of the fighting at Lexington, the Authentic Narrative says, the “Franklin company” set out toward Boston. By the time those men made camp, “The intelligence of the surrender of Ticonderoga and Crown Point, with all their valuable stores, had already reached Roxbury.” That would mean the company took more than a month to travel fifty miles.

Somehow Joshua Slocum wrote a dramatic letter to his Loyalist father from Roxbury on 16 June 1775 but was also in one of the regiments based north of the Charles River that fought the Battle of Bunker Hill the next day.

In fact, Joshua was wounded—but he refused to leave his post! And a good thing, too:

Among the [British] killed was Major [John] Pitcairn, one of the flower of their army. I shall always believe that it was my rifle that sent him to his final account—for, as the enemy ascended the hill, I selected an officer answering his description, for a target, and as I took good aim, and my rifle seldom missing its object, I am very certain I killed him.

This account, then, is yet another claim to have killed Maj. Pitcairn. The narrator almost always refers to his weapon as a “rifle,” though such guns were almost unknown in New England at the time.

A month later, the narrator claims to have been about to volunteer for Col. Benedict Arnold’s expedition to Québec when he received a letter from a family friend dated 20 July. Since Arnold started to recruit in early September, that letter must have traveled even more slowly than the “Franklin company.”

The letter invited Slocum to leave the Continental Army camp, go out to the recruiting station at Worcester, and become a clerk in the friend’s company. Like most armies, the real Continentals frowned on soldiers deciding all by themselves where they’ll serve, but that’s what this account said Slocum did. 

And on it goes. Massachusetts Soldiers and Sailors of the Revolutionary War states that a Joshua Slocumb of Franklin served in the Rhode Island campaign of 1779–80. Ironically, the Authentic Narrative never mentions Rhode Island—most likely the one stint of military service by John Slocum’s father.

In 1882 Dr. Charles Elihu Slocum published A Short History of the Slocums, Slocumbs and Slocombs of America. Ordinarily such family histories are credulous toward sources that offer information and reflect well on members of the clan. But Dr. Slocum wrote of the Authentic Narrative:

This little book—of which but few copies can now be found—is written in a style interesting to the young, but it is open to criticism in some of its references to contemporaneous history.

In other words, don’t believe a word of it.

TOMORROW: The arrival of Washington through Slocum eyes.