Seventy-Six is a historical fiction novel by American writer John Neal. Published in Baltimore in 1823, it is the fourth novel written about the American Revolutionary War. Historically distinguished for its pioneering use of colloquial language, Yankee dialect, battle scene realism, high characterization, stream of consciousness narrative, profanity, and depictions of sex and romance, the novel foreshadowed and influenced later American writers. The narrative prose resembles spoken American English more than any other literature of its period. It was the first work of American fiction to use the phrase son-of-a-bitch.
The story is told by Continental Army soldier Jonathan Oadley and follows multiple love stories interweaving with battle scenes and the overall progress of the war. It explores male pain and self-loathing resulting from violent acts committed in war and duels. A response to James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1821) and inspired by Neal's own work on A History of the American Revolution (1819), the novel was written over twenty-seven days in early 1822. It was generally well received at publication, and increased Neal's nationwide fame to rival that of Cooper's. It is considered by some scholars as well as the author himself to be his best novel, though consensus among scholars is that the book is more of a failure in construction than it is a success in style. It was largely forgotten by the 20th century.
Plot The book is written in first-person perspective by narrator Jonathan Oadley as an old man remembering the American Revolutionary War. It opens with an expression of urgency he feels in recording his memories for posterity: "Yes, my children, I will no longer delay it." His story begins in New Jersey in the early winter of 1776, with residents fearing British and Hessian raiding parties following George Washington's retreat through the area. Twenty-two-year-old Jonathan and his twenty-year-old brother Archibald decide to join the Continental Army, along with their sixty-year-old father Jonathan senior, cousin Arthur Rodman, and neighbor Robert Arnauld. Arnauld's daughters Clara and Lucia become the brothers' love interests.
While the Oadley brothers recruit soldiers from the area, Colonel George R. Clinton arrives to train the new cavalry unit. Clinton vaguely brags of his connections to Washington, befriends Archibald, and awards him with a commission as captain. While the brothers are in training, the Oadley home is burned by Hessians, who wound the elder Jonathan and kidnap Arthur's love interest, Mary Austin. The characters all assume her to be killed. Soon after, the Oadleys stumble into their first battle, in which Archibald is wounded. He recovers in time for the three to fight in the Battle of Trenton, in which the elder Jonathan is killed.
While Jonathan, Archibald, Arthur, and Clinton participate in the New York and New Jersey campaign, multiple romantic stories unfold. Lucia courts and is courted by both Clinton and Archibald. Jonathan and Clara become romantically involved but Jonathan engages in a brief fling with her younger and more flirtatious cousin, Ellen Sampson. Mary Austin reappears and is reunited with Arthur in Philadelphia, but expresses romantic interest in the older Robert, whom Jonathan calls "a profligate—a voluptuary—a sensualist, perhaps". Archibald and Clinton compete for Lucia's affection, which leads to Archibald killing Clinton in a sword duel. Volume I ends with Archibald being arrested for the duel by military police.
Volume II opens with Washington pardoning Archibald for killing Clinton. The Oadleys get to know a Northern officer, Chester Copely, who is hated by the Virginia troops and kills a Major Ellis of Virginia in a pistol duel. Copely, Jonathan, Archibald, and Arthur participate in the Battle of Brandywine, Battle of Germantown, winter at Valley Forge, and Battle of Monmouth, at which Jonathan is wounded, loses a leg, and is sent home. Jonathan marries Clara, Copely marries Ellen, and Arthur marries Mary in a joint ceremony, but the story becomes focused on the courtship between Archibald and Lucia. With the narrator removed from the battlefield, news of the war continues to come from letters and visits from Archibald and Arthur, who are now serving in the Southern theater.
Archibald becomes disillusioned with war, contracts tuberculosis, and returns home. Jonathan and Clara then become occupied with convincing Archibald and Lucia to marry each other; they are both reluctant because of their own seemingly fatal illnesses. In the final chapter, Archibald confesses to Jonathan that he considers himself a murderer because of a neighbor he killed in a duel before the war. Archibald and Lucia finally consent to marriage and the ceremony concludes the story:
[Archibald] stood suddenly erect upon his feet; the light flashed over his face. It was the face of a dead man. He fell upon the floor: a loud shriek followed. Where were we? Where! We ran to him—we raised him up. It was too late! Almighty God! it was too late! HIS WIFE WAS A WIDOW.
Themes When writing Seventy-Six, Neal rejected the historical fiction convention of using narrative to impose coherent meaning upon human experience. The narrative style shifts markedly between battle scenes and discussions of the overarching course of the war to reinforce the separation between lived experience and the process of making meaning from those experiences by analyzing a course of events. The resulting disorderliness is so pervasive, it is one of the novel's key themes, being self-referenced throughout the book from the preface through multiple chapters. Neal's intention was to achieve a vivacious representation of lived action that a coherent theme and plot would in his view inhibit. "The reader becomes an eye-witness in spite of himself", he said in a self-review.
The novel also explores pain and self-loathing resulting from men killing one another in warfare and duels. Like Neal's novels Randolph and Errata (both published the same year), the hero of Seventy-Six successfully kills another in a duel and suffers the rest of his life in consequence. Neal portrays dueling as emasculating, rather than as an expression of masculinity. Archibald is haunted by violent nightmares, preternatural phenomena, and other Gothic story elements that he interprets as coming from his dueling victim, Clinton. Debates in Congress in the early 1820s about Revolutionary War soldier pensions exposed conflicts between official histories of the revolution and painful oral histories from veterans. Neal may have intended the novel's subtitle, "Our Country!—Right or Wrong", to be a timely criticism of what he believed the country had done wrong at that time.
Alongside the novel's war plot is a love story intertwining multiple characters. Here, Seventy-Six stands in contrast to its contemporaries by depicting romantic and sexual relationships more realistically. Both male and female characters are portrayed as actively feeling sexual attraction and seeking love, whereas American fiction from the period more predominantly depicted female characters as romantically passive. In this way, the relationship between Archibald and Lucia may have influenced the relationship between Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter.
Style
The narrative style of Seventy-Six is noteworthy for its pioneering transcriptions of Yankee dialect and experiments with colloquial language. Neal used contractions, stichomythic dialogue, short repetitive sentences, and long passionate sentences marked by the free use of dashes. He also used colloquial phrases like fight up, keep out of the way awhile, and put you out of the way. His use of profanity was heavy for the time and included phrases like damn it, what the devil, and the first use of son-of-a-bitch in American fiction. As narrator, Jonathan Oadley states, "My style may often offend you. I do not doubt that it will. I hope that it will. It will be remembered the better."
The narrator refers to his writing style as "talking on paper" and describes it as "the style of a soldier, plain and direct". It reads closer to spoken American English than that of any other author at the time. For Neal, narrowing the gap between spoken and written language was essential to developing a new and distinctly American style of writing. This style choice had little precedent and little following its footsteps until the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman starting in the 1840s, and Mark Twain starting in the 1870s, all of which are foreshadowed by Seventy-Six. Neal made similar experiments in his novels Randolph and Errata (written earlier but published later the same year), but they were less fully integrated into the novel.
Battle scenes in the novel are told using long sentences of multiple qualifiers to express the narrator's anxiety in a pioneering use of what would be called stream of consciousness a century later. The narrator describes it as "a fair chart of the rambling incoherent journeying of my thought for hours". The level of verisimilitude of these battle scenes foreshadows the work of Edgar Allan Poe years later. The way the reader's perspective is heavily distorted by the conditions of battle and soldiers' conflicting emotions are expressed were not replicated until The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane in 1895.
Scholars of literature consider Seventy-Six significant for its level of characterization, achieved in part by exploring the psychology of those characters. The novel is unique in its time for its emphasis on characters' feelings over their actions. Neal gave even the story's incidental characters a greater level of individualization than is typical for the period.
Background
Seventy-Six is a response to James Fenimore Cooper's first popular novel, The Spy, which was published in late 1821. Neal praised it as "exceedingly attractive" and "a capital novel", but dismissed its style as "without peculiarity—brilliancy, or force" and its plot as "rather too full of stage-tricks and clap-traps". He determined to outdo the fellow novelist.
Neal was already inspired by research and writing he had done years earlier. In 1818, Neal worked with fellow Delphian Club cofounder Tobias Watkins to write A History of the American Revolution (published 1819) based on primary sources collected by another Delphian, Paul Allen. Decades later he described the experience of inspiration:
I had got charged to the muzzle with the doings of our Revolutionary fathers, while writing my portion of "Allen's History," and wanted only the hint, or touch, that Cooper gave in passing, to go off like a Leyden jar, and empty myself at once of all the hoarded enthusiasm I had been bottling up, for three or four years.
Similarities between A History of the American Revolution and Seventy-Six indicate that Neal adapted passages from his earlier work into the novel. According to Neal, he wrote the 528-page novel with "marvellous rapidity" over twenty-seven days between February 16 and March 19, 1822. The pace was so rigorous, he said, that "I tumbled out of my chair" because "I had fainted, – swooned, – from overwork." He had already completed first draft manuscripts of Randolph and Errata, though those two novels were not published until later in 1823. Neal considered his 1822–1823 novels "a complete series; a course of experiment" in declamation (Logan), narrative (Seventy-Six), epistolary (Randolph), and colloquialism (Errata). He wrote all four between October 1821 and March 1822.
Publication history