The Indispensables by Patrick O'Donnell

The Indispensables: The Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware
By Patrick O’Donnell
Atlantic Monthly Press, 2021

The soldier-mariners mentioned in the 2000-word subtitle to historian Patrick O’Donnell’s new book The Indispensables: The Diverse Soldier-Mariners Who Shaped the Country, Formed the Navy, and Rowed Washington Across the Delaware were not actually all that diverse. The three principal figures in most of this narrative, Azor Orne, John Glover, and Elbridge Gerry, were all born within a decade of each other, had some very similar life experiences, took virtually identical political stances, and so on. 

Far closer to a justification for the current buzzword “diverse” is O’Donnell’s observation that the seaport town of Marblehead in the 18th century showed a greater mixture of races and ethnicities, a congregation that fits O’Donnell’s narrative of the Marblehead Regiment very neatly: “Over 150 years before their time,” he writes, “this group of men of various races and socioeconomic conditions came together to defeat one of the greatest armies on the globe and confront the most powerful navy in the world.” 

The similarities of these Marblehead men were far more important than their differences, as O’Donnell and all of his sources make clear throughout the book. Most of these men had been since childhood hardened to some of the harshest conditions any of their nascent countrymen could readily imagine, and it had bread in them a rough egalitarianism that as little room for cooperation as it did for timidity:

The challenges presented by this hostile lifestyle instilled a distinct character into the inhabitants of the town. “Life at sea encouraged risk taking and a numbness to tremendous danger, overcoming daily hazards forged through hard work, teamwork and enterprise. A spirit of general equality of condition and common wants prevented any claim of superiority, and produced a social feel, which united most of them in one great family,” noted one contemporary observer. 

And since the American Revolution was not only a very desperate affair but also a very aquatic one, with all kinds of minor and major enemy encounters happening on rivers, bays, and the open sea lanes, the conflict immediately found many uses fighting men who were as comfortable and competent on water as on land. O’Donnell’s account of Revolution-era Marblehead - its prosperous merchant families, its touchy relations with ‘the mainland’ of Massachusetts, etc. - is textured and oddly modular in its feeling, like it could be easily dislodged from the rest of the book, which broadens the story to include the familiar itinerary of George Washington’s early successes and failures. 

O’Donnell’s prose line almost always registers somewhere between “vivid” and “purple,” which, providentially, is also pretty much where most of the prose of the time period also fell. This makes for gripping reading even when the subject matter has been written up countless times by countless historians, as in Washington’s thrill-packed surprise attack on the Hessian encampment at Trenton:

The small band of Americans surged forward, long knives, tomahawks, and muskets in hand. Freezing sleet pelted their faces. In the ensuing hand-to-hand melee, Captain William Washington went down with serious wounds in both hands. Monroe took over and led the mixed corpse of Virginians and New Englanders, retaking the guns. In the fracas, a musket ball pierced Monroe’s chest and ruptured an artery. Doctor Riker, a stranger whom Monroe had encountered only hours earlier on the road to Trenton, saved the life of the future fifth president of the United States by clamping the artery as crimson blood fountained from his chest.

The attempt to give The Indispensables a Marblehead focus often gives the book the awkward feeling of a monograph trapped inside a melodrama, but even so: for sheer energy, this is the season’s stand-out Revolutionary Era title. It would have flown off the shelves of Marblehead’s dear old Spirit of ‘76 Bookstore.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and The American Conservative. He writes regularly for The National, The Vineyard Gazette, and The Christian Science Monitor. His website is http://www.stevedonoghue.com.