Tales Too Horrible for Belief: Atrocity Narratives and Peripheral Subjects in Hezekiah Niles’ Reporting on the Greek Revolution

ABSTRACT

From 1821 to 1830, Americans took an intense interest in the Greek Revolution. Their experiences of the revolution were, with very few exceptions, entirely textually mediated. In this context, nationally prominent editors such as Hezikiah Niles of Baltimore exercised an outsized influence over how people understood the war. Niles’s reporting on the conflict revolved around atrocity narratives in which “monstrous” Turks slaughtered innocent, “civilized” Greek Christians before an uncaring world. In his writing, Eastern barbarity and European conspiracy combined to present a stark case of American moral exceptionalism, which has long been a normative assumption of public understandings of foreign policy. I argue that Niles’s atrocity narratives hinged on the figure of “peripheral subjects,” or onlookers to atrocities who bear a moral responsibility for their melioration. By focusing on the in/actions of European peripheral subjects, philhellenes used the excessive violence in Greece as a means of denouncing America’s rival powers and thereby creating rhetorical space for an exceptional American national identity.

KEYWORDS:

• American exceptionalism
• atrocity narratives
• Greek Revolution
• Hezekiah Niles
• humanitarianism
• nineteenth-century newspapers
• philhellenism
• witnessing

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For more on US American perceptions of Islam in the Early Republic, see: Robert J. Allison, The Crescent Obscured: The United States and the Muslim World 1776–1815; David Dzurec, “‘A Speedy Release of Our Suffering Captive Brethren in Algiers’: Captives, Debate, and Public Opinion in the Early American Republic”; Timothy Marr, The Cultural Roots of American Islamicism; Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East 1776 to the Present; Lawrence A. Peskin, Captives and Countrymen: Barbary Slavery and the American Public, 1785–1816; Davide Rodogno, Against Massacre: Humanitarian Interventions in the Ottoman Empire, 1815–1914; Karine V. Walther, Sacred Interests: The United States and the Islamic World, 1821–1921.

² For some examples of Niles’s characterization of the Ottomans, see: “Greece” 9 October 1824; “Later” 17 August 1822; “Russians, Turks and Greeks” 1822; “The Greeks” 17 August 1822; “Turkey” 1 June 1822; “Turkey” 10 August 1822; “Turkey” 17 August 1822; “Turkey” 7 September 1822.