The Parties to Which We Belong: John André and the Tragedy of Revolution

This chapter examines the ghostly afterlives of Major John André, arguing that “neutrality” may be usefully considered through André’s story as an ambiguous zone of multiple affiliations and queer yearning, particularly between men, that is traumatically bisected by liberal nationalist definitions of politics that disqualify the social world from political consideration. Drawing on theories of tragedy by Judith Butler, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Raymond Williams, I show how tragic conventions provide resources for protesting André’s sacrifice in accounts of his trial and execution: from Alexander Hamilton’s first-person testimony, to anecdotes of André’s capture, and Anna Seward’s Monody on Major André (1781). The chapter concludes with a discussion of William Dunlap’s André (1798), in which I argue that the affordances of tragedy work to preserve rather than exorcise the energies of loving and mourning across enemy lines. Dunlap’s play thus memorializes the Revolution as a site of uncompensated suffering, and its leaders as champions of inhumane ideals.