Content area
Full text
John Laurens and the American Revolution, by Gregory D. Massey. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2000. 327 pp. $34.95 cloth.
GREGORY MASSEY'S STUDY OF JOHN LAURENS could serve as a guide to the now outmoded concepts of chivalry, which Laurens embodied. According to Laurens's standards, true glory was achieved only by exceptional acts of valor for one's country. If that were true, then Laurens attained the virtue and glory he sought by his death in 1782, the irony arising from the fact that his was a totally unnecessary death, almost a year after the war had been won at Yorktown. The action itself at Chehaw Neck was so insignificant that George Washington termed it "a trifling skirmish in South Carolina, [while Laurens was] attempting to prevent the Enemy from plundering the Country of rice" (p. 230).
Laurens could be termed a glory hunter but instead after his death, his Southern compatriots turned him into a hero, following the lead of historian and physician David Ramsay, who married into the Laurens family. Held up as the epitome of the Southern gentleman by generations of Southerners who were determined to prove their society was more virtuous than that of Northern society, Laurens's admirers conveniently forgot his plan to free slaves. Perhaps this omission was in keeping with Laurens's own views on the slavery issue. Although he, unlike his father Henry, saw slaves primarily as human beings rather than as property, John was still capable of a callous disregard for the welfare and comfort of his own personal slaves. This contradictory attitude is typical of Laurens's career and...