CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Print Culture, 18th and 19th Century U.S. history, Publishing History, Press and Politics, Book Industries, Book Trade, and Reading, American Studies.
PLACE: United States
TIME PERIOD: 1770-1870, especially 1770-1800 and 1830-1850.
SUMMARY: Trish Loughran interrogates the much-loved belief that the identity of an Andersonian American “imagined community” was formed in the late-eighteenth century. Because print distribution was localized and fragmented rather than simultaneous and national, no national vision of America was shared in print or public space. This is contra most historians, including Breen. She argues that Paine’s “Common Sense” and “The Federalist Papers” were not actually widely circulated. Rather, locally printed and read materials were.
The Revolution and the ratification of the Constitution actually depended on this fragmented public sphere and print network. If one existed, Loughran posits, it would have better resisted a Federal state.
By the 1830s, when the national infrastructures came to be and print became nationally distributed, the nation fractured rather than rallying together in imagined community. Regionalism and local loyalties that were forced into public national discourse ignited the Civil War.
Loughran uses material culture studies to examine various cultural items as she traces the movement from the theory of a nation-state, the Constitution, to the actual institutions of nation-state. Using the campaigns of the national abolitionist organization, the American Anti-Slavery Society’s (AASS), she argues that mass distribution of print revealed how deeply region the young nation was, which acted to split the US apart.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Colonial U.S., Capitalism, American Revolution, 18th-century Economic History, Material Culture, Marketplace Revolution
PLACE: Early United States
TIME PERIOD: 1740-1774
TAKEAWAY: The consumer revolution of mid-17th century American formed a common cause amongst the diverse and geographically dispersed US colonists as they came together in a trusting “imagined community” (per Benedict Anderson) to revolt against the British Empire.
SUMMARY:
T.H. Breen extensively documents the material culture of the American colonies in the decades before the Revolution to argue that the new consumer marketplace created an imagined community of consumers who rebelled against the English. The unjust taxes that the Crown imposed, in the 1760s and 1770s, on the colonists’ new and beloved consumer goods cause rebellions that came to define them as political individuals. Rather than Bailyn’s ideological revolution, Breen offers a movement based on the marketplace, the common man and quotidian life. The book “explores how a very large number of ordinary Americans came to the striking conclusion that it was preferable to risk their lives and property against a powerful British armed force than to endure further political oppression.”
Breen answers this oft-explored question by arguing that it was through a new language of shared consumer experience. People of different classes and genders developed radical methods of resistance, particularly through the boycott. They would suffer together the deprivation of English manufactures, sacrificing for the common cause of revolution. Similar groups in different colonies found common ground and transformed politics and society through the popular press and collective imagination.
PART ONE: AN EMPIRE OF GOODS
The American colonies, by 1750, had become an “empire of goods.” From Georgia to Maine, “even the most humble” Americans bought similar consumer items which connected them in an imagined community. They discovered a shared experience in personal choice, which Breen believes did not exist before the marketplace revolution.
PART TWO: A COMMERCIAL PLAN OF POLITICAL SALVATION
Breen dismisses Christian virtue and republican virtue for liberal consumer virtue, or “bourgeois virtue.” “When ‘A Farmer’ praised the ‘honest man,’ he had in mind a person able to exercise self-restraint when tempted by a brilliant array of imported British goods” in the consumer marketplace. It was someone with honor and character who would deny himself “private pleasures” for the public good. Too much personal debt was a danger to the common good, and this concerned the virtuous man. This bourgeois virtue did not require one hold property (at least not much) or title—only that she or he could buy goods, something literally any free person could do.
This shared experience gave them the resources to develop resistance grounded in the marketplace—particularly the boycott. Breen argues that American colonists were the first to organize mass political boycotts, just visited in Linda Kerber’s Women of the Republic. If we recall John K. Thornton, American Indians used trading boycotts against the English, and Jill Lepore discussed the abolitionist Quaker Benjamin Lay’s political refusal of slave-made goods in These Truths. However, Breen argues that private consumption was transformed into intentional public and communitarian acts of resistance after the Stamp and Townshend Acts. The latter taxed indirectly English commodities like tea, paper, lead, glass, and paint. The boycotts that followed allowed ordinary people a voice in politics never before experienced.
Those who consumed the boycotted goods were suspect, and people learned trust in their follow colonist near and far, sometimes disappointed, but always persevering. By the books close before the Revolution in 1774, this trust and community extended to shared liberties and rights of the common man. Thus, this was the first revolution “in recorded history to organize itself around the relation of ordinary people to manufactured consumer goods.” Breen believes that this resistance in the consumer marketplace was in fact a revolutionary politics of “pursuing happiness.” In Breen’s telling, stuff is the basis of American liberty, after all.
CATEGORIES: Cultural and Social History, Early U.S. History, Women’s History, American Revolution, Political History, Intellectual History, American Ideology, Property, Education, Coverture, Republican Motherhood
PLACE: Early United States
TIME PERIOD: 1768 to 1810
TAKEAWAY: Middle- and upper-class white women participated actively in the Revolutionary War and found their rights curtailed by the Revolution, contra to the ideology of the war. In response, they developed the “Republican Mother,” an active patriot who encouraged patriotism in her husband and children, especially sons. This allowed them a limited political role for which they must be educated. Women could maintain their private lives while still playing a role in the civic virtue of the republic.
SUMMARY:
While the ideology of freedom and natural rights was central to the American Revolution, Kerber argues in this 1980 classic, that these rights were restricted to men, and that the Revolution was conservative for white women, who saw rights curtailed.
Kerber offers an interesting and quick overview of Enlightenment thinkers on women in chapter one, “EMPIRE OF COMPLACENCY”: The Inheritance of the Enlightenment.” Civic virtue and patriotism were masculine. Women’s qualities, particularly “Luxury, effeminacy, and vice”” were to be avoided. Effeminacy meant timidity, luxury, and self-indulgence, qualities that threatened America’s new liberty.
During the war, however, women had participated fully as makers of American-spun clothing and blankets, boycotters of tea, grapes, and lettuce, political petitioners, policers of hoarding local merchants, home economists, cooks and carers of troops, nurses, and landlords of boarding houses who took in troops and prisoners. Their contributions were little recognized and ended abruptly after the war. These experiences were new for women, and faced with new ideologies of freedom and autonomy, they began to question why their old positions in society had not changed with the new ideology.
During the war, dowers and coverture laws came into sharp focus when women were expected to declare their loyalty to the Revolution instead of following loyalist husbands into exile. Women had to choose between their property and their husbands. Many were horrified by this prospect, and even revolutionaries usually preferred wives remain loyal to their husbands over loyalty to the Revolution.
Coverture continued after the Revolution and, contrary to Mary Beard, equity laws did not make up for the problems of coverture. Equity “eroded slowly and erratically” in the first fifty years of the United States and women’s property legislation was not a trend until the 1850s. After the Revolution, women’s property rights became more complex and access to equity courts was less common, and divorce was difficult to obtain, especially for women. Because American virtue and political participation was based on land ownership, women were fundamentally excluded. Kerber calls women’s lack of political rights an “accidental remnant of feudalism.” Demands for women’s property rights soon shifted into a demand for women’s access to republicanism.
Women’s education was the most successful aspect of “Republican Motherhood.” Educated women had been suspect and mocked, but after the Revolution, women pushed for their own education in the name of educating their sons. Women’s intellectual capacities were not challenged. Instead, reformers argued that a politically independent nation required literate women uninterested in fashion. Though she had no agency in politics, she was responsible for it through her mothering.
Dependent on her husband for income and political representation, she learned in the “service” of her family rather than for her own edification or use. Women did not push against the confined role of women in the home. Instead, they lifted her role to that of virtuous and educated mother.
The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution
CATEGORIES: Intellectual history, Political history, Constitution, Early U.S. History, Colonial U.S., democracy, U.S. Government., American Revolution
PLACE: American Colonies and England
TIME PERIOD: 1640-1800.
TAKEAWAY: “Study of the pamphlets confirmed my rather old- fashioned view that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of the society or the economy [contra Charles A. Beard].”
SUMMARY:
While Bernard Bailyn has received plenty of criticism for being a relic of his time, few academic history books stand up to half a century of discussion. The book is, first and foremost, an intellectual history, which very clearly defines its parameters in the 17th and 18th American centuries to that of privileged white men. Bailyn was a legendary historian, and one of the first to plug data into a computer to retrieve historical insights. It is interesting, clearly written, and won both the Pulitzer and Bancroft.
Bailyn examined the pamphlet literature, which best expressed the forming thoughts of the era, of revolutionary writers to understand the ideas behind the revolution. These privileged white men were not philosophers or literary writers (in fact, often the writing was quite rudimentary), nor were they removed from the realities of daily American life. They were merchants, plantation owners, lawyers, politicians, and preachers who were interested in keeping and expanding their power, which the flexible forms of government in the early American colonies had permitted them the 17th century, particularly when the English Crown began to crack down and limit these liberties in the 18th century, largely for the profit of the motherland.
Should be working but…snow day needs.
As they considered and, importantly, used, the ideas they had inherited from Greek antiquity, English common law, the Enlightenment philosophers, Puritan covenant theologians, and crucially for Bailyn, the English commonwealth thinkers, the “country men” and radical Whigs who challenged the monarchy in the 17th century English Civil War. The writers of Cato’s Letters, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, were particularly admired and quoted.
These pamphlet-writing merchants, lawyers, and other landed men, alarmed by corruption in English and political dangers in the colonies, concluded that they must “destroy” the political and constitutional system that governed them and create something new. This new state would recapture their progressive ideals and the “public life of separate states” with “no claims to the powers of nation-states. Finally, they would create a federal government that would rule over the states only in the crisis of war. The process of creating this nation-state threatened their ideological revolution, which forced them to rethink the original principles that led them to victory, modernize and refine them, and reapply them to their federal state. “In the end they found themselves fulfilling their original goals by creating power, on new principles, not by destroying it” through “natural endowments of humanity based on the principles of reason and justice.” While the ideology of the revolution and constitution were abundant in England and elsewhere, the way these men put the ideas into action was distinctly American. America’s special place in the eyes of God was a part of this ideology.
The disposition of power was central to the colonists’ political theory, which John Adams described as dominion. “Power to them meant the dominion of some men over others, the human control of human life: ultimately force, compulsion.” Those who held it had a tendency to push past “legitimate boundaries” and tread on power’s “natural prey, its necessary victim…liberty, or law, or right.” Power is on one side, liberty and rights on the other. Power is “brutal, ceaselessly active, and heedless” while liberty and rights are “delicate, passive, and sensitive.” How fascinating that these qualities are associated with the masculine and feminine. Hence Lady Liberty?
Power was not essentially evil but natural and necessary. If its foundations were “in compact and mutual consent” with restrictions that virtuous men understand and accept as necessary to the public good, this allows society to grow “from a state of nature and create government to serve as trustee and custodian.” What made power problematic was not the nature of power but of man. “his susceptibility to corruption and his lust for self-aggrandizement.” To contain the power of men in government, the people must have checks on their power through a constitution of government systematized for the good of the whole community. As such, the vigilance and morals of the people were utmost. Industrious, Protestant and Saxon people were ideal for this task. While these concepts were English in origin, the English at home had fallen under the sway of corruption and had forgotten their ideals since the English Civil War, when the English standing army turned against their own.
The English system of checks and balances, the separation of government, became problematic: “If, particularly, the agencies of power— the prerogative, administration—managed, by corrupt practices, to insinuate their will into the assembly of the commons and to manipulate it at pleasure, liberty would be endangered.” These issues intensified for the colonists after 1763 when English raised taxes to pay for the Seven Years War (French and Indian War). Taxation without representation and the arrival of an English standing army in Boston to enforce the unjust taxation increased the alarm of the pamphleteers, who spun these actions, their hatred of corruption, and yearning for liberty into fears of various conspiracies by the English.
After the Revolution the (elite) phampleteers discovered that idealism in practice could be dangerous, as in slavery and religion, two institutions that challenge these notions of liberty. So was “democracy,” as clearly commoners could not be considered virtuous or capable of understanding the common good (according to Bailyn). As such, “stability” (or status quo) won over democracy. These issues were debated by the pamphleteers.
Through his reading of pamphlets, which had previously been viewed by historians as propaganda, Bailyn wove a groundbreaking thesis of ideological revolution in America. He broke with the prevailing theories of social and economic causes to argue for an intellectual reading of the U.S. Revolution.
HISTORIOGRAPHY:
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. New York: Penguin Books, 1963.
