Early U.S. History – 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.

Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America

Rice, James D. Tales from a Revolution: Bacon’s Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America. New Narratives in American History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012.

CATEGORIES: Early U.S. History, Colonial U.S., Native American History, Virginia and Maryland History, Insurrections, Bacon’s Rebellion, 1676.

PLACE: Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, New York.

TIME PERIOD: 1675-1725.

SUMMARY:

James D. Rice’s short revisionist narrative of Bacon’s Rebellion and the following decades provides a new but familiar thesis—he is unable to support, particularly in such a short book. The synthesis history of the rebellion itself is an enjoyable read, as is the aim of the “New Narratives in American History” series from Oxford University Press, but the entire second part of the book concerns an argument about anti-Catholic conspiracy, which seems strange to a colony known for its irreligion. While Rice builds on Morgan’s American Slavery, American Freedom, he omits pivotal facts from Morgan’s thesis to ultimately argue that were it not for those poor, racist white populists, Native Americans would be thriving in the United States today.

Rice explains in the Afterward that his narrative style precludes a traditional academic thesis, but has allowed him to write in a way that readers must think for themselves about events in order to discover the truth of his thesis, which he spells out at the end of the book. I recommend reading this at the beginning.

The Afterward begins with a valuable historiography that explains the various turns the narrative of Bacon’s Rebellion has taken, before a segue to the benefits and pitfalls of narrative history. Next he hits on a sub thesis, closely related to his main argument, which echoes loudly in 2022. Reliable information was hard to come by for 17th-century Virginians, who “made their choices in the absence of information, operating within what is often called the “fog of war—which, as the great Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz described it, “gives to things exaggerated dimensions and an unnatural appearance.” The unreliable stories of Sarah Grendon, Thomas Mathew, and Nathaniel Bacon indicate that “gossip, rumor, misinformation, and contending stories,” the “wild, irrational tales, full of paranoia, supernatural forces, superheated rhetoric, and outright misinformation” ruled the day (209). It’s telling that Rice does not include Berkeley in his list of unreliable narrators, for, while he concedes that Berkeley was corrupt and had little concern for the frontiersmen whose lives buffered the wealthy planters from the Indians, he believes that Berkeley was in the right. The belief in the supernatural was (and arguably still is, outside of academia, in all social classes) commonplace in this era was well established by historians such as David D. Hall.

The rebellion was caused by the settlers’ “fear, anger, and suspicious-mindedness; their paranoia and susceptibility to conspiracy theories; their vengefulness and malice; and their willingness to resort to violence, savagery, oppression, and cruelty when they felt threatened by Indians, governors, “Papists,” or anyone else outside their tribe.” Ah yes, those poor, tribal whites. Never mind the violence, savagery, oppression, and cruelty of the governors and the assemblies in their never-ending pursuit of profits. Never mind that poor, white indentured servants rebelled side-by-side with Black slaves. And never mind that the poor whites forced to the edges of the frontier by elites were frequently victims of Indians “violence, savagery, and cruelty” when the wealthy ruling class pushed them off their land.

To believe Rice’s argument requires forgetting, or ignoring, that Berkeley, long-known as an diplomat par excellence to his Indian trading allies, thirty years previous had forced the Powhatans off their land around Jamestown, killed their chief, and almost obliterated the tribe of over 10,000, by far the largest of the area. After subduing the tribe he engaged them in fur, skins, and Indian slave trade. Confusing a wish to protect his financial interests with a special concern for Indian rights is dubious and buys into a “good Indian, bad Indian” narrative (see Thornton). What his and other texts demonstrate is that white English elites used Indians when it served them and turned on them when it did not. That we are to believe that wealthy colonists did not take lands from the Indians when it suited them and when they could, that instead it was the fault of the “savage, superstitious, tribal” poor white populists is quite a fantastic thesis. But it does serve a certain political position and psychological viewpoint—that racism is the fault of racist, “tribal,” poor whites over there, rather than baked into the systems and psychology of the United States. As Morgan suggested, racism serves elites today as well as it did in 1676.

More welcome in Rice’s analysis is his inclusion of Indians’ experiences during this period. He details how English gentlemen pushed Indians westward and southward, as did the powerful Five Nations Iroquois of the mid-Atlantic region. Tribes that migrated had to negotiate with tribes already inhabiting those areas, who often used different languages. These negotiations often turned into wars, and larger tribes subsumed others as more and more Indians were dislocated.

In Part Two of the book, Rice argues that Bacon’s rebellion was not a short period of insurrection led by the notorious Bacon. Instead it was a series of rebellions caused by various political alliances and the displacement of Indians. In Rice’s telling, Bacon’s Rebellion was not against corrupt royal authority but against authority that would not remove frontier Indians’ from their lands. Rice suggests this is because of white tribal racism, ignoring the facts that the elites intentionally restricted freed servants’ access to land to decrease their power and increase the value of the elites’ land. Nor did the government seek to protect the poor whites on the frontiers who were often killed by Indians seeking revenge on actions taken by government officials. We are not asked to consider why, exactly, poor men brought, often by force, to settle and work in servitude in a faraway land with shocking morbidity rates, might be angry.

Instead we are told that the Baconites were summoned by a tract called “A Complaint from Heaven with a Huy and crye and a petition out of Virginia and Maryland ” written anonymously late in 1676, before the rebellion had been squashed. It called for a continuation of the rebellion due to Lord Baltimore’s mistreatment of his people through his alliances with Indians. He was against the people because he was a papist Catholic in alliance with Indians and the French in Canada, who were drawing closer and closer to Virginia. Bacon’s Rebellion, Rice argues, was not against royal authority but against Catholicism and the threat of Louis XIV. They continued to rebell in the 1680s and followed closely the Glorious Revolution, believing a Protestant king would serve their interests. Indeed, when William III claimed the throne in 1889 he placed Francis Nicholson as royal governor. Nicholson allegedly followed the desires of the Baconites and henceforth used broadstroke anti-Indian policies. It was not because trade with Indians for skins and Indian captives was, by the 1690s, no longer enticing for the elites, but because of the desires of the racist rabble.

The connections between Bacon’s Rebellion, the Glorious Revolution, and Coode’s Rebellion are unclear. Though Rice elaborates in his afterward, there is simply not enough evidence presented to make the connections believable. While his independent analyses carry weight, that they are all bound up together is problematic. While he asks at the end, “What if Bacon had died young?,” suggesting that perhaps Indians would have prospered under more Berkeleys and Baltimores, I was instead convinced that given the numerous uprisings before and after Bacon, and the elites’ need to control the exploited poor, and the shifts in Indian economies, these trends would have developed with or without that particular sorry rebel.

HISTORIOGRAPHY

Beverly Robert. History and Present State of Virginia, London: R. Parker, at the Unicorn, under the Piazza’s of the Royal-Exchange, 1705.

Morgan, Edmund S. American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2003.

Washburn, Wilcomb E. The Governor and the Rebel: A History of Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957.

Webb, Stephen Saunders. 1676, the End of American Independence. New York: Knopf, 1984.

Wertenbaker, Thomas Jefferson. Torchbearer of the Revolution: The Story of Bacon’s Rebellion and Its Leader. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1940.

Wilson, J. The History of Bacon’s and Ingram’s Rebellion in Virginia, in 1675 and 1676. Cambridge, Mass, J. Wilson Press, 1867.