British Army

The British Army appears in The Scarlet Letter not as a direct actor in the narrative's seventeenth-century events but as a historical force whose movements shaped the documentary record and as a reference point for military honor embodied by a nineteenth-century veteran. Its most consequential appearance is indirect: the flight of the British Army from Boston during the evacuation of King's officials at the outbreak of the American Revolution caused the removal of the earlier Custom-House archives to Halifax, leaving a dearth of records from the period prior to the Revolution. This loss is lamented by the narrator, who speculates that those papers, dating back perhaps to the days of the Protectorate, would have contained valuable references to forgotten men and antique customs, much like the Indian arrow-heads he once picked up near the Old Manse.

The British Army and the Custom-House

The British Army's historical departure from Boston is directly linked to the narrator's discovery of the scarlet letter. Because the earlier official documents were carried off, the package containing Surveyor Pue's manuscript and the scarlet letter itself—left behind as being of no public concern—remained unopened in the Custom-House for generations. This chain of events, set in motion by the army's retreat, allowed the narrator to eventually lay his hands on the relic and the explanatory papers that form the basis of the tale. The army's action thus inadvertently preserved the very evidence of Hester Prynne's story that the narrator would later bring to light.

The British Army and Military Service

The British Army is also invoked through the figure of General Miller, the Collector of the Salem Custom-House, who had served with distinction in the War of 1812. The narrator describes him as "New England's most distinguished soldier," a man who had led bayonets at Chippewa and Fort Erie, and whose military record had kept the Custom-House out of the whirlpool of political vicissitude for over twenty years. The General's presence in the Custom-House is a constant reminder of a martial past that stands in stark contrast to the mundane commercial and bureaucratic life of the port. The narrator reflects on the General's famous words, "I'll try, Sir," spoken on the verge of a desperate and heroic enterprise, as breathing the soul and spirit of New England hardihood.

The British Army in the Puritan Context

Within the historical setting of the novel, the British Army is not present as an occupying force, but its shadow is cast by the military trappings of the colonial militia. During the Election Day procession, a military company forms the honorary escort, composed of gentlemen who felt the stirrings of martial impulse and sought to establish a kind of College of Arms. These men, clad in burnished steel with plumage nodding over their bright morions, are described as having a brilliancy of effect that no modern display can equal. The narrator notes that some of them had fairly won their title to soldiership by their services in the Low Countries and on other fields of European warfare, implicitly linking their martial bearing to the broader traditions of the British Army. The Puritan elders, in their black cloaks and steeple-crowned hats, smile not unbenignantly at the clamour of the seafaring men, but the military escort itself represents a formal, disciplined power that contrasts with the unruly energy of the sailors and the grim rigidity of the Puritan magistrates.

The British Army and the Theme of Authority

The British Army serves as a foil to the civil authority of the Puritan colony. The narrator contrasts the "hangdog look of a republican official" with the dignity of a royal official like Surveyor Pue, who was "illuminated by a ray of the splendour that shone so dazzlingly about the throne." This implicit comparison extends to the military: the British Army represents a distant, monarchical power whose authority is absolute and inherited, while the Puritan militia is a citizen force, its authority derived from the community and its religious covenant. The narrator's own experience with the Whig victory in the Presidential election of General Taylor further underscores the difference between the stable, life-lease tenure of a royal office and the precarious, politically-driven existence of a republican appointee. The British Army, as an institution of the old world, thus becomes a symbol of a fixed, hierarchical order that the new world has both rejected and, in its own way, sought to replicate through its own forms of martial and civil dignity.