Mind-Munitions

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Propaganda in the Age of Revolutionary Warfare
for example, attributed the difficulties he experienced in recruiting
Canadians to his regiment partly ‘to the poison which the emissaries
of the rebels have thrown into their mind’.
With the die cast, American revolutionary propaganda blossomed,
from Liberty Songs to ballads, from paintings and poetry
to printed caricatures, from plays to pamphlets. ‘Yankee Doodle’,
originally a British army tune to deride the disorganized enemy, was
adopted by the colonial troops as a means of taunting the redcoats
in retreat and defeat, and it became an American rallying song. As
one British soldier commented: ‘After our rapid successes, we held
the Yankees in great contempt; but it was not a little mortifying to
hear them play this tune.’ Plays such as The Battle of Bunker’s Hill
and The Fall of British Tyranny, Or, American Liberty Triumphant:
The First Campaign were written to spread the merits of the
American cause through the medium of entertainment. Poets also
placed their services behind the cause; as one wrote, ‘this is not the
proper time for poetry unless it be such as Tyrtaeus wrote’ – by
which he meant the kind of rousing verse used to inspire the
Spartans to victory. Another poet, John Trumbull who was later
arrested, asserted:
The same ardour of ambition, the same greatness of thought, which
inspires the Warrior to brave danger in the conquering field, when
diffused among a people will call forth Genius in every station to life,
fire the imagination of the Artist, and raise to sublimity the aspiring Muse.
American propagandists were undoubtedly among the most
eloquent in history, as the extract from Washington’s leaflet has
already illustrated. In the Age of Reason, their appeal on behalf of
the Rights of Man struck a chord in the minds of all freedom-loving
people and retains its resonance even today. The Declaration of
Independence, proclaimed on 4 July 1776, is a classic illustration
of the fusion of ideology and propagandistic appeal and, although
well-known, is worthy of reiteration:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal;
that they are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights;
that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to
secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving
their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any
form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of
the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying