Articulating the trauma of war. A trauma studies analysis of Crèvecoeur’s war letters

This paper re-examines the American War of Independence through the lesser-known wartime writings of Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, arguing that his epistolary narratives offer a powerful counter-history to the dominant narrative of patriotic triumph and liberty. While historiography has often framed the Revolution as a noble and necessary fight for independence, Crèvecoeur’s letters-particularly “Distresses of a Frontier Man,” “The History of Mrs. B.,” and “The Frontier Woman”-depict the war as a catastrophic rupture of social, moral, and psychological order. Drawing from Letters from an American Farmer (1792) and Sketches of Eighteenth Century America (1925), this study foregrounds how these texts portray ordinary white colonists not as revolutionaries, but as victims of a war that brought fear, displacement, and spiritual crisis. Crèvecoeur’s use of first-person female and male narrators provides an intimate lens on how the war invaded domestic spaces, shattered familial roles, and destabilized frontier communities. In each case, the war erodes identity, community, and belief in the ideals it claims to protect. These letters represent an early literary form of anti-war testimony—marked by trauma, ambiguity, and disillusionment—and deserve recognition as foundational texts in the genealogy of American crisis literature. Ultimately, this paper challenges the celebratory tone of traditional Revolutionary historiography by amplifying the voices of those who suffered in silence. Crèvecoeur’s elegiac mode anticipates later trauma narratives and forces a reconsideration of the cost of American independence, not just in political terms, but in human lives and fractured meanings.