If Billy Lee was the invisible man, Joseph Plumb Martin was the Zelig of the American Revolution. He keeps popping up in almost every dramatic scene, from the debacle on Long Island in 1776 to the trenches at Yorktown in 1781, where he comes face-to-face with Washington crawling through the mud.
His memoir, published fifty years after the fact in 1830, entitled Private Yankee Doodle, has struck some historians as too good to be true, meaning that his story has so many memorable details of so many crucial moments that no single person could have experienced them all. He must have had several published histories at the elbow as he wrote, so the critics say, and inserted himself as an eyewitness.
On the other hand, his account has all the earmarks of a true war story. He never exaggerates his own significance, never glorifies battle, and pokes fun at his own youthful foibles. In his own unassuming way, Martin provides a Tolstoyan view of war, a recovery of the authentic emotional experience of the ordinary soldier at the ground level.
Martin’s memoir, then, is a meditation on the importance of the ordinary, which focuses on the day-by-day struggle for survival. For Martin, that struggle took the form of foraging for food, which becomes a running joke throughout his story. The major theme is not bravery, but resilience, both his own and the Continental Army’s, to endure despite hardships that subsequent generations could not possibly comprehend, and apparently preferred to forget.
Joseph Plumb Martin and his wife, Lucy Clewley Martin, date unknown.
By the time he wrote, the enforced amnesia about the essential role of the Continental Army had become received wisdom. What Martin called “the myth of the militia” dominated the folklore, making Minutemen rather than regulars like Martin the heroes of the story. As one of the few surviving continentals, he felt a special obligation to challenge that slanted version of history:
It has been said by some that the Revolutionary Army was needless; that the Militia was competent for all that the crisis required. But I still insist that they would not have answered the end as well as regular soldiers, who were there, and there obliged to be, and could not go away when we pleased.
After the war, Martin settled in what is now Stockton Springs, Maine, married, raised a family, worked a small farm, and apparently became a local character known for his dry wit. Late in the game, in the 1820s, he began receiving an annual pension of $96. He still had his hair and a bemused smile in the only visual rendering, done shortly before he died at eighty-nine in 1850.