Across American literature, soldiers may be seen as heroes, everymen, or criminals, traditions created at different historical moments and lingering in the American imagination in complex ways. This essay explores representations of soldiers at different moments in American literary history, focusing on how literary movements have affected and been affected by wars, including the aesthetics of sentimentalism, realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism as they influence representations of soldiers. It looks at the tension in American ideology between a primacy on the individual and the responsibilities of community. The essay also examines the relation between soldiering and gender, a relation about to be complicated by the formal entrance of women into combat roles.

During the First World War some of the most prominent Americans who aided France through their writing and charity work were expatriate women, many finding creative freedom and economic opportunities there that they lacked in the United States. Mildred Aldrich, Edith Wharton, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Atherton, and Dorothy Canfield Fisher advocated on behalf of France, believing that fuller American support for France might help relieve the human suffering they saw before them and, more idealistically, preserve the civilization they found represented in France. These women wrote journalism, propaganda, academic studies, and sentimental prose, none of which are easily disentangled from each other as all are meant to convince, educate, or persuade readers to a particular point of view. They take as their subjects the wide variety of human issues that circulated around war, its impact on civilian life, the effects of invasion and occupation, injury and loss of life, and larger questions about inherited values and human responsibility in the face of suffering.

Unaware that people in the United States fought for freedom before the French brewed their Revolution, Gabriel uses the knowledge that violence can facilitate a better future to lead his fellows in an uprising intended to change the legal and social order of slave-holding Virginia. Near the end of the novel, however, an unnamed character, a veteran of Toussaint’s uprising in Haiti, watches the captured Gabriel pass through the streets and meditates on the costs of war: he knows that “words like freedom and liberty drip blood” (196, emphasis in original). In American ideology, freedom demands sacrifices, including dying, seeing comrades die, and living with the act of killing. As Bontemps suggests, the full consequences of violent conflict may be apparent only after the event. Further, while Bontemps’ novel reaches back to explore a forgotten historical moment, Black Thunder also spoke to its contemporary context: in the 1930s, as fascism flourished overseas, Bontemps was keenly aware of oppression against blacks across the diaspora – and of movements to unite and resist. Thus this representation of an aborted skirmish in a war that took another sixty-one years to be declared shows how imaginative renderings of one conflict may in fact have much to do with another.