American Revolution – The Gymnosophists/history books

The Republic in Print

Trish Loughran. The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770-1870. New York; Chichester: Columbia University Press, 2007.

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.

The Marketplace of Revolution

T. H. Breen. The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence. Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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.

Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America

Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980.

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.

RELATED:

Bernard Bailyn. The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, 1967.