Meet AAS Fellow Cole Jones

Past is Present: Will you describe your current project for us?

Trenton Cole Jones: Certainly. My book project, which is a revised version of my doctoral dissertation, is entitled Captives of Liberty: Prisoners of War and the Radicalization of the American Revolution. This project investigates how Revolutionary Americans treated their captured enemies. I originally came to this project in 2008 when the treatment, or mistreatment, of prisoners captured during the “War on Terror” was a hot button issue politically. At the time, politicians and pundits delighted in contrasting the treatment of enemy captives under the Bush administration with what they claimed was the humanitarian way of war practiced by our founding fathers during the War for Independence. Prominent historians followed this trend by emphasizing the flagrant prisoner abuses committed by the British armed forces, while largely neglecting the practices of the Revolutionaries. But as I dug deeper into the question, a much more complicated picture emerged. I uncovered a process of radicalization that transformed the conduct of the war and imperiled prisoners on both sides. My project analyzes this process by examining prisoner treatment over the course of the conflict within the context of the contemporary European culture of war. I conclude that the American Revolution was far more violent than scholars have appreciated, and that the experience of the war and its violence played a significant role in the social and political transformations of the Revolutionary era. In short, by examining how the American treatment of enemy prisoners changed over the course of the period, my book positions the war at the forefront of our narratives about the American Revolution.

 

Past is Present: Which historians have inspired you?

Cole: That is a very difficult question because my intellectual debts are so many. Any young scholar of the American Revolution stands on the shoulders of giants: Bernard Bailyn, Gordon Wood, Gary Nash, Alfred Young, and John Shy to name but a few who have profoundly influenced my thinking. So I will answer the question another way, by pointing to two historians who have most influenced the way I write history. I first encountered Edmund Morgan’s 1975 American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia as an undergraduate. This book, more than any other, inspired me to take up the study of early America. His magisterial narrative recreates the evolving world of colonial Virginia with evocative detail and elegant simplicity. But it is the powerful argument skillfully embedded within his narrative that continues to inspire me, even as more recent works have nuanced and revised his central thesis. Morgan’s ability to seamlessly blend argument and analysis into a compelling, fast-paced, and approachable narrative is a model I strive to emulate, however inadequately.

The other historian is a scholar of Old Regime and Revolutionary France. David Bell’s work on the culture of war in Europe during the age of revolutions, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It, is an example of the historian’s craft at its finest. Timely, provocative, deeply-researched, and beautifully constructed, The First Total War inspired me to investigate the complex interplay of wartime ideas and actions in my own period of study. While scholars may quibble with its ambitious title, none can deny that Bell has given us the best explanation for how one of the bloodiest wars in human history arose out of the Enlightenment’s quest for peace in perpetuity. Perhaps I am a little biased; David was one of graduate school mentors. Nonetheless, both Bell and Morgan have given me models for the type of historian I aspire to be. While historiographic intervention and rigorous analysis will always be the foundation of professional history writing, our books would be dull stuff indeed if they did not come wrapped in a good story.

 

Past is Present: What does the fellowship mean to you?

Cole: I consider myself extremely fortunate to hold the Hench Post-Dissertation Fellowship here at the AAS. This fellowship has allowed me to concentrate full-time on my research, writing, and career development. As I revise my dissertation, I have found the AAS’s resources to be immensely helpful. Whenever I need to check a citation or locate the latest monograph in the field, the AAS invariably has a copy in its collections. But my time has not all been spent writing and revising. I have also combed through numerous manuscript collections, making several important finds. I discovered that during the Revolution, Worcester was used as a depot for confining suspected New York loyalists. With a British army ensconced in New York City and another army marching south from Canada in 1777, New York authorities chose to send their suspected loyalists to Worcester for safe-keeping. The New Yorkers promised to reimburse Worcester’s committee of safety for the prisoners’ expenses, but years later the debt had still not been settled. Documents like these shed light on just how disorganized and decentralized prisoner administration was during the conflict, as well as driving home the fact that the War for Independence was also a civil war.

 

Past is Present: What would be your ideal find here at AAS?

Cole: As for my ideal find, I still dream of coming across a detailed roster of prisoners held in one of the main American prison camps, such as the Rutland camp located near Worcester. It would make my life much easier if I had good information on the identities of the prisoners held in these camps and some information about the length of their captivity and their rates of mortality and morbidity. The Revolutionaries were pretty bad at keeping these types of records, and I have only found a few isolated rosters for prisons in Pennsylvania. I have had to rely on British records to fill in the blanks. These documents, however, are somewhat unreliable as the administrators who compiled the lists were operating from second-hand information. Thus they might suggest a soldier was in American custody when he had in fact deserted or died. Nonetheless, these records do give us some idea of the total number of prisoners taken by the Americans during the eight-year war: over sixteen thousand men.

Although the research opportunities were what originally attracted me to this fellowship, I have found the intellectual community here at the AAS to be the most fulfilling and stimulating part of my fellowship so far. The library’s staff is deeply invested in the scholarly study of early America and all have been unflaggingly helpful and encouraging. The plethora of historians, literary scholars, artists and art historians, and poets and playwrights who have come through the fellowship program since I arrived have all contributed significantly to my thinking about my research project and early America in general. The formal fellows’ seminar has been immensely productive, but I have found some of the most invigorating discussions have occurred while making dinner or sipping coffee in the morning. It has been a privilege and a delight to get to know so many scholars with such diverse interests.

As a junior scholar, I have found the most rewarding aspect of the fellowship to be the mentorship provided by the senior scholars in residence: Steven Bullock, Richard and Claudia Bushman, Sean Moore, Melanie Kiechle, and Carl Keyes. Steve Bullock in particular has really taken me under his wing and has provided me countless hours of guidance, encouragement, and critique. Few postdoctoral fellowships can boast this type of personalized mentorship. I am extremely grateful for the collaboration and camaraderie of my fellow fellows at the AAS.

 

Past is Present: Here at AAS you are revising your dissertation. You say the dissertation is not a book…?

Cole: Yeah, the dissertation is not a book despite our best efforts at writing it like a book. Dissertations still have to conform to a certain model that’s been handed down for centuries, by contributing to scholarship in a very direct way, by engaging in very specific historiographic debates, and by paying your intellectual debts in a way that a book doesn’t have to do to the same extent. A lot of that can be relegated to footnotes. Your book is more about making a central thesis than contributing to a number of different small conversations and small debates, so that’s a lot of fat to trim.

 

Past is Present: What other challenges are you facing as you try to trim down the dissertation?

Cole: One of the hardest things to do (and my hat is off to the William and Mary Quarterly for insisting that their authors do this) is to lay out the argument of an individual chapter without saying, “This chapter will argue” or “Chapter three argues x, y, and z.” To be able to forcefully articulate an argument but embed that within a narrative is not easy.

 

Past is Present: Any tricks for how to do that? Just have a good, strong argument?

Cole: You have to own your claims in a way that graduate students–and this was certainly true for me when I was a graduate student–are less comfortable doing. Some of this may come with maturity or advancing within the profession. But if you can make a strong claim and stick by it, that’s going to be much more powerful than trying to pile nuance onto nuance. One thing I really tried to get out of my writing–it’s a tic that I developed in graduate school–was “This article seeks to” or “I will attempt to show.” Any language like that weakens your position.

 

Past is Present: Can you pinpoint the moment when you finally became comfortable with the argument you were making?

Cole: I’m still not entirely sure I am, to be honest with you. It’s an argument that has developed over time and operates on two separate levels. One is fairly straightforward about what my story of prisoners can tell us about the Revolutionary War, and on that front I’m very confident. I know the contribution that I’m making and it’s very straightforward. But I’m also trying to do more. I’m trying to integrate the history of the war itself within broader narratives of the social and political change of the Revolutionary era. How did early America tranform from a monarchical society to a democratic one? [It’s a question] every historian of the American Revolution has to wrestle with. Trying to integrate my story of prisoners within this narrative and make it a contribution has been a challenge. It’s been rewarding as well, but it has been a challenge.

 

Past is Present: Did Revolutionary War veterans have an effect on the way society was changing throughout the nineteenth-century, or is that something you don’t cover?

Cole: Towards the end of the project I’m looking at this, the legacies of the changes that I’ve been talking about. One of the things that happened after the war that was very important to my story was the federal Constitution of 1787. I see that as a moment when elites came together and realized that things had gotten out of control, realized that they had lost control over the popular forces during war. One of the things that the federal Constitution did very strongly was assert the federal government’s control over war; the federal government gains a complete monopoly on warfare under the Constitution. What it didn’t do is assert total control over or a total monopoly on violence itself. So allowing, through the Second Amendment for instance, the people to still maintain their arms degraded the government’s ability to control violence. But the federal goverment was able to control war, so you don’t see popular demands altering the practice of war to the same extent until you get to the Civil War, and that’s another can of worms.

 

Past is Present: What kinds of advice would you give to younger people just starting out in a doctoral program or doing what you’re doing now (the fellowship, things you’ve learned from other senior scholars in the field about establishing yourself)?

Cole: The first thing, I suppose, is that you have to go into a graduate program in the humanities with your mind wide open to many different possibilities. And if you go into it dead-set on an academic career then I think that could lead to disappointment. Also, if you go into a graduate program, go fully funded. If you can secure funding, it’s important to realize that this is an unbelievable opportunity. Someone else is going to pay for you to expand your mind, to improve your critical reasoning, writing, and speaking skills. This is an opportunity that you should seize. But if you see it as a narrow process of professionalization towards an academic career, then you might be disappointed. That said, I also think you need to marry this quest for intellectual expansion with professionalization. You need to realize that very early on you need to be applying for fellowships, getting your work out there, going to conferences, publishing early and often. A lot of graduate students (and I certainly did this when I was younger) are insecure about their ideas and are terrified of the idea of putting their ideas out there into the public. But I think you have to do that very early on, in the second or third year of graduate school, I would say. And then just get to know people, and that’s why a place like the AAS is so amazing, because you have junior scholars coming and working on their initial dissertation research side by side with senior scholars who have published five books. Most scholars are extremely generous, they will sit around a table with you, have coffee, and informally workshop your ideas. Doing archival research can be exhausting. I always called it the archives circuit because I felt like I was in a different archive every month. But I met so many amazing people that way.

 

Past is Present: Have you been able to maintain contact with them?

Cole: Sure, sure. A lot of those people have become my professional network. When I need to put a panel together, I generally go to the people I know or have met through archives, and they might introduce me to someone else.

 

Past is Present: Advice for dealing with criticism of your work?

Cole: You have to develop a thick skin. I came into the PhD program at Johns Hopkins, which, before my time, was notorious for being very aggressive towards anyone. When you sat at that seminar table, you had to be prepared for people to come after you. So I suppose that helped me to develop something of a thick skin and to realize it’s not personal. The same people who would get red in the face and bang on the table and argue with me in the seminars would then go out, and we’d have a beer and talk it through and be friendly and amiable. I would say that criticism, through peer review, is the bedrock of this profession . If we’re trying to expand knowledge, the only way to do that is for you to contribute your ideas and other people to contribute theirs and revise them, and that makes for better scholarship. That doesn’t mean it’s always comfortable. I’ve received one or two readers’ reports for articles that I’ve sent out that I didn’t particularly care for. But I think it’s important to brace yourself for criticism and to realize that some of it is only going to help you in the end.

 

Past is Present: Do you ever feel like you’ll have a finished product?

Cole: I never believe it until I see it in print. But until then I’m always revising.

 

Past is Present: What were the locations of some of the prisons? What were the varying conditions of the prisons? Can you describe a typical prison?

Cole: The administration of prisoners of war during the Revolution is a hot mess. It is all over the place and it changes over time. It’s very decentralized, but it basically operates on two levels. There’s a continental level where the prisoners are administered by the Continental Commissary General of Prisoners, who is a civilian appointed by Congress to serve alongside General Washington with the main army. He has a handful of bureaucrats who work for him, deputy commissary generals, who try to see to the administration of British and Hessian prisoners, who are captured in the main theaters of war. They set up several camps, and the camps vary and move from time to time, but the primary sites of detention are central Pennsylvania, the Shenandoah Valley, and just outside of Boston–Cambridge and all the way out to Rutland near here in Worcester. They’re the primary sites of detention for British prisoners who are captured mostly at the large surrenders. There are two big surrenders during the war–the surrender of General Burgoyne’s army at Saratoga in October of 1777 and the surrender of Lord Cornwallis’s army at Yorktown in October of 1781. We’re talking about over five thousand men at each surrender. Those prisoners are sent to these camps. But prisoner administration also operates at a local level as well. Just about every community has a jail. You could say that most communities in early America have a church and a jail–you can pretty much depend on it. This is where they’re going to put anyone they see as disaffected, which is their word for someone who is not loyal to the American cause. This is anyone who could potentially be a British spy, an outspoken loyalist, someone who criticizes Congress or the states, someone who’s engaged in counterfeiting, someone who’s engaged in selling provisions to the British army could be put in these jails for various periods of time. Also, British deserters are often put there, escaped prisoners when they are captured are also sent there, into these jails as well. And then you have a two-part system that operates somewhere in between, and that is this concept of hiring prisoners out to local farmers and artisans. Very early on, the revolutionaries realized that it would be in their financial best interest to allow prisoners to go work for a living instead of keeping these guys cooped up where they have to be fed or might die of disease. You could have them rent out their labor to a local farmer, and remember this is a period where there are huge manpower shortages because lots of people have gone off to fight, so farmers need laborers. There are also skilled laborers, people who know a trade, among the prisoners. There are lots of tailors in the British army, shoemakers and whatnot who would go to work plying their trades. So that allows a large part of the prison population to be dispersed into the countryside. And then there are the prison ships, which are used specifically for the purpose of retaliation. Five American states use ships to punish recalcitrant prisoners–people who have run away or people they are holding as an act of retaliation for something the British have done. They’ll be put on prison ships where the conditions are just deplorable. There’s a real range, and it changes over time as well.

 

Past is Present: Are you able to trace any of the British prisoners who were hired out?

Cole: Here it varies again if they were British or Hessian, from the Germanic states. The Germans are much more likely to stay in America after the war than their British counterparts, partly because the Americans very early on realized that the Germans were not invested in the British cause so they could be persuaded to fight in the Continental Army or simply to desert the British and live as farmers in the Pennsylvania countryside, for instance. It happens with some British prisoners as well, although oftentimes British prisoners will use that as an excuse, the hiring out system, going out to work with a farmer, to run away, to run back to British lines. I have one prisoner who ran away twice. He was actually captured at Saratoga and managed to escape and was recaptured at Yorktown. I think one of the things that’s very interesting is just how loyal the British soldiers were, specifically to their regiments and their friends and comrades.

 

Past is Present: Do you think you’ve been able to make some kind of intervention or correction to the way people thought about the Founding Fathers when you started your project and the way people historicized the holding of prisoners at places like Guantanamo Bay?

Cole: That was certainly the context when I entered this project, and it was in the middle of a period that scholars have derided as the era of Founders chic. This is the era of David McCullough, beginning with his biography of John Adams famously, but numerous other scholars as well wrote triumphalist biographies of the Founding Fathers. From that vantage point, many of them (David Hackett Fischer famously) positioned Washington and the Founding Fathers in direct opposition to the current American foreign policy and military practice in the Middle East. What I found is that it’s much more complicated than that. They would argue that there’s almost something intrinsically American about the idea of humanity in warfare, that this goes to the heart of what it means to be American and that human rights are central to American identity and that somehow the Bush administration lost touch with that. What I discovered is that the Founding Fathers’ ideas about war and ideas about how prisoners should be treated and how war should be conducted were conditioned entirely by European ideas about the culture of the Enlightenment and the humanitarian revolution. I was surprised to uncover just how easily those ideas devolved, how easily those principles were abandoned in the face of British atrocities and most importantly in the face of popular demands. So someone like Thomas Jefferson will enumerate the British abuses of prisoners and the British violations of what he understood as the norms of war at the time in the Declaration of Independence, but three or four years later, when he’s governor of Virginia, he is calling for gruesome retaliatory policies against British prisoners and treating them deplorably. Just how easily the commitment to the humane treatment of prisoners was degraded under the conditions of the war itself really surprised me.

 

Past is Present: Would you say you’re part of the camp that worships the Founding Fathers?

Cole: I neither worship nor detest the Founding Fathers. It’s interesting that on the one hand you have social historians who claim to be doing history from below. These historians oftentimes valorize the common tradesmen, artisans, Sons of Liberty who wanted more out of the Revolution than simply getting rid of monarchy. But that valorization of these ordinary Americans has blinded them to the violence that accompanied the democratization of American society. So on the one hand I am critical of that, but I can also look at someone like Thomas Jefferson and see him as a very conflicted individual. Brilliant, but the capacity for inhumanity lurked underneath all of this Enlightenment rhetoric. Someone like George Washington I think is maybe the exception that proves the rule. Throughout the conflict he was so concerned with appearing like a European officer that he did everything in his power to maintain European customs. I wasn’t particularly impressed by Washington when I started this project, but I’m more and more impressed by him actually. He’s somewhat derided as the Founding Father without any brains, that he was all brawn and no intellect. He’s not one of the popular Founding Fathers among academics in the way Jefferson and Adams have been. He’s seen as uninteresting. But he’s incredibly well-read and his correspondence demonstrates that. He’s deeply, deeply concerned with creating a narrative of American civilization, the idea that this new nation deserves to be treated like a European power. He’s frustrated when Congress and the American people don’t go along with what he wants.