Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era 0813936780, 9780813936789

Between Sovereignty and Anarchy considers the conceptual and political problem of violence in the early modern Anglo-Atl

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Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era
 0813936780, 9780813936789

Table of contents :
Cover
Title
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
“The Constant Snareof the Fear of Man
Destroying and Reforming Canaan
“Not by Force or Violence”
Government without Arms;Arms without Government
Stamps and Popes
Social Death and Slavery
Violence and the Limits of thePolitical Community inRevolutionary Pennsylvania
Whiskey Chaser
Escaping Insecurity
American Hercules
The Battle of Fallen Timbers
Epilogue
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Between Sovereignty and Anarchy

Jeffersonian America

Jan Ellen Lewis, Peter S. Onuf, and Andrew O’Shaughnessy Series Editors

BETWEEN

SOVEREIGNTY AND

ANARCHY The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era Edited by

Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, and Brian Schoen

university of virginia press Charlottesville and London

University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper First published 2015 isbn 978-0-8139-3678-9 (paper) isbn 978-0-8139-3679-6 (e-book) 135798642 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Preparation of this volume has been supported by the Thomas Jefferson Foundation.

For Michael Andrews and Pamela Edwards

Contents

Acknowledgmentsix Introduction1 Patric k Griffin “The Constant Snare of the Fear of Man”

Authority and Violence in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic

Andre w C ay ton

Destroying and Reforming Canaan Making America British

Patric k Griffin

21

40

“Not by Force or Violence”

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, and Rights of Conscience in the Early National United States

C hris Beneke

Government without Arms; Arms without Government

The Case of Pennsylvania

Je ssic a C hoppin Rone y

Stamps and Popes

Rethinking the Role of Violence in the Coming of the American Revolution

Peter C. Me sser

60

84

114

Social Death and Slavery

The Logic of Political Association and the Logic of Chattel Slavery in Revolutionary America

Peter Thomp son

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania K enneth Owen

139

165

Contents Whiskey Chaser

Democracy and Violence in the Debate over the Democratic-Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion

Jeffre y L . Pa sl e y

Escaping Insecurity

The American Founding and the Control of Violence

David C. H endric k son

187

216

American Hercules

Militant Sovereignty and Violence in the Democratic-Republican Imagination, 1793–1795

M at the w R ainb ow Hale

243

The Battle of Fallen Timbers

An Assertion of U.S. Sovereignty in the Atlantic World along the Banks of the Maumee River

J ohn C. Kotruc h

263

Epilogue Peter s. Onuf

285

List of Contributors Index

303 307

viii

Acknowledgments

Though about violence, this collection emerged out of friendships new and old and from the fruits of a quite lively but civil conference sponsored by the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions in April 2010. That conference, “Making Democracy: Violence and the American Revolution,” took place at Ohio University and was funded by the Ohio University Foundation’s 1804 Fund and the Jack Miller Center for Teaching America’s Founding Principles. We especially thank Mike Andrews and Pamela Edwards at the Jack Miller Center for their support of the conference and of the Washington Forum. Mariana Dantas and Jessica Roney were instrumental in helping to get the 1804 Fund grant that financed the conference and made this publication possible. We also wish to thank Gregory Nobles and anonymous readers of the manuscript whose helpful feedback substantively shaped its final form. The support of the University of Virginia Press and particularly Richard Holway, Ellen Satrom, Natasha Richter, and Morgan Myers was critical and much appreciated, as was the excellent job of copyediting done by Eva Jaunzems. Finally, special gratitude to our contributors, who no doubt ceded some personal sovereignty while devoting admirable diligence to this project.

ix

Between Sovereignty and Anarchy

• Introduction Pat r i c k G r i f f i n

For over a generation, the study of the American Revolution has hardly deviated from a preordained script. In 1966, Gordon Wood recognized that script, arguing that historians of the Revolution could be divided into two camps. Those he called “idealists” took the ideas and words of the revolutionaries at face value, did not concern themselves with “underlying determinants,” and construed the Revolution “as an intellectual movement,” believing that it more or less lived up to its liberating, albeit moderate, promise. Their Revolution took on a reasonable cast, and radicalism—the sort that defined, say, the French Revolution—did not animate what Wood called a “unique” American Revolution. The group Wood called “behaviorists” or “materialist-minded historians” argued that the ideas of the revolutionaries amounted to pretext and believed that the Revolution failed to live up to its vaunted promise. Any possibility of taking the road, for instance, that the French would a generation later was forestalled by elites. Unlike the idealists, this group of scholars viewed the ideas espoused by the founders with suspicion. Social reality, particularly class conflict, captured their attention and they sought “to explain the Revolution and the formation of the Constitution in terms of socio-economic relationships and interests rather than in terms of ideas.” Nonetheless, even though the idealists and behaviorists did not share the most basic assumptions and had created two distinctive or “unique” American Revolutions, Wood sensed that “we may be approaching a crucial juncture in our writing about the Revolution where idealism and behaviorism meet.”1 We still sit at that junction. Discussion has not veered far beyond these bounds when we try to capture the essence of what the Revolution meant and means. Ultimately, no matter the perspective, we get the Revolution we deserve, one woven into and from the American exceptionalist tale and suggest1

Patrick Griffin ing that America was and is either distinctively freeing or hypocritical. Even today, nearly fifty years after Wood’s analysis, some scholars still argue that if we study the ideas, especially those that animated the Revolution’s origins, we have to conclude that although all were not liberated at the time, the Revolution’s promise was effectively achieved. Wood’s subsequent work on the Revolution, fully realized with his The Radicalism of the American Revolution, took the idealist perspective to this logical conclusion. The Revolution may not have been as radical as, once again, France’s, but in a modest way, it transformed American society and culture.2 That said, when pressed, these scholars see no need to apologize for its supposed shortcomings. With and through time, its liberating logic will be vindicated. It would smack of presentism to have asked the founders to do anything differently. Asking the revolutionaries to have achieved more would be an exercise in anachronistic solipsism.3 Fair enough. But the idealist camp has become a closed shop, especially now that adherents to the republican synthesis seem to be claiming victory over devotees of the liberal consensus in the struggle to define what ideas lay at the heart of the Revolution.4 Behaviorist scholars have opened their tent beyond the category of class to include gender and race but argue that essentially the Revolution did not liberate many, certainly if we use the ideal of liberty as a measuring stick. After the Revolution, members of what had been marginalized groups still inhabited the margins of American society. The “sparks from the altar of 1776,” to use Gary Nash’s evocative phrase, did not set the world afire.5 The founders more or less extinguished them after the first promising years of revolutionary ignition. In this sense, certainly if we measure success or failure by how faithful the revolutionaries remained to the principles inscribed in the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution did not do all that it should and could have. If we compare it to France’s—certainly in its heady, most radical days—it pales in comparison.6 And so, much like the idealists, these scholars too lay out a narrative that does not deviate from a familiar pattern: a certain group is energized by the Revolution’s ideals but receives the proverbial half loaf or is written out of the story by elites intent on pushing said group back to the margins. We could label these two camps in any number of ways and break each down into smaller constituent subgroups. The behaviorists, as Al Young points out in extraordinary detail, would include the progressive historians, the neoprogressives, the new social historians, the old left, and the new left. The other side he calls counter-progressives (with subsets influenced by Edmund Morgan and Bernard Bailyn, as well as a Wood sub-subset).7 In the most recent iteration of the debate between the two camps, David Waldstreicher and Staughton 2

Introduction Lynd use the simple, comprehensive, and long-standing terms “neo-Whig” and “neo-Progressive.”8 The irony is that even if scholars disagree vehemently on what the Revolution meant and means and see the camps as mutually exclusive, they hope somehow to work them together, calling for synthesis or middle ground, mixing and merging the two or finding some longed-for interpretive space between them. So, just as Al Young, the standard bearer of the behaviorists, ­laments the division and asks us to find a new synthesis, so Gordon Wood, the champion of the idealists, noted in his 1966 essay something tragic about the divide between the two groups. He argued that the two approaches were like ships passing in the night—or better, two diametrically opposed poles—and called for a study of the American Revolution that would reconcile the two, suggesting that the broader story we have is somehow incomplete. Truth be told, despite Wood’s plea—and particularly because of the partiality of his own work—we have not moved beyond these poles. In fact, despite his call and that of Young as well, they seem downright magnetic, each repelling the other yet drawing all work toward his respective pole. True, some have followed Wood’s advice and tried to bring the two together, most notably T. H. Breen, but most have still worked within the paradigms Wood characterized, which in Breen’s case was the ­idealist-liberal tradition.9 To cite just one recent example of the law of the two poles, Waldstreicher and Staughton followed Young’s advice and tried to create a model for the Revolution that appropriated the best of each approach, but, as Michael McDonnell pointed out in a response to their attempt, they could not move beyond a neoprogressive critique of the limitations of the American Revolution.10 Almost like a Greek tragedy, these two schools of thought, rooted in distinctive notions of the relationship between the individual and society—and perhaps of human nature—have laid out the limits of the study of the Revolution, even as the scholarly devotees of each approach yearn for a new, liberating synthesis. This is of course understandable. The study of any nation’s revolution or its mythic moment of birth involves ideals central to that nation’s culture and identity. The American Revolution is no exception. Since the early nineteenth century the idea of the American Revolution has distilled the ways Americans conceive of themselves and shape debates about what they should aspire to be.11 It is not surprising then that popular and scholarly interpretations of the event have not veered much between or beyond the two poles laid out by Wood in 1966. As Wood seemed to suggest, American scholars were engaged, as much as the public, in weighing the success or failure of the Revolution and its enduring meaning for American culture. Because of this, historians have 3

Patrick Griffin been drawn to the poles time and time again. And both approaches—although producing rich and probing studies of groups and ideas—have not moved the study of the Revolution beyond the limits imposed by rhetoric and reality, certainly when it comes to producing a grand narrative of the event. The limits imposed by the poles have come with other less visible costs. Because of their gravitational pull, when we survey the whole of the Revolution, it is hard to imagine that the Revolution could be about anything more than discontinuities or fundamental shifts over what did occur or what should have occurred. Put another way, one cannot look beyond the narrative arc imposed by discontinuity.12 Of course, the Revolution, at its most basic level, involved a simple shift of identity from British subject to American citizen. But given the pull of the poles, while understanding the complexity of the British origins of the American Revolution and the limitations of American citizenship, we usually cannot draw the two categories together and view them as anything more than sometimes oversimplified mirror images one of the other. The reasons for the caesura are simple. Work on the Revolution is dominated by the study of origins (the purview of the idealists) and outcomes (the focus of the behaviorists). Because of this disjunction, it is difficult to gauge, or even entertain the idea that the Revolution failed to create something entirely new, however flawed, or that it could codify older dynamics, however deeply felt by contemporaries. What is the relationship between being British and being American? What endured? Neither the idealists—adept at looking back to the colonial period, nor the behaviorists—looking ahead to the nineteenth, can answer such questions. And because of the power of the discontinuity model, it proves difficult to find more to say about the Revolution. The script is already written. There’s another related, but telling cost of the reign of these master narratives. The middle has more or less been forgotten, as it does nothing for the either-or approach to the Revolution. Between the Scylla and Charybdis of historical interpretations, the violence, vacillation, adaptation, struggle, and the very process of revolution itself have gone missing; in other words, we have lost just those variables needed to explore change and continuity. We often forget about the role of violence in the founding in America, so focused are we on the War of Independence and the principles that guided it, on the one hand, and the question over constitutional legacies, on the other.13 So we remain more comfortable exploring ideological origins and flawed outcomes rather than process. And in many ways the revolutionary aspects of the Revolution are sanitized because of it. This is one reason why the American Revolution remains the founders’ revolution. Whether they worked as principled visionaries, conflicted proxies for the nation, or betrayers of the revolution’s true 4

Introduction principles, the American Revolution belongs to them, and in this mythic conception the messiness of violence has little place. In other words, because of the tales we have, as well as our need to retain them so that we may continue to consider ourselves exceptional, we have dwelt on one side of the eighteenth-century equation for social stability—­liberty or the lack thereof—and tended to neglect the other, darker aspect of that e­ quation—power.14 A revolutionary narrative that takes power into account must, after all, consider the role of the state in American society before and after the Revolution. It also must recognize the need to examine the coercive means people confronted or employed in the competition to remake societies in which governments had collapsed. So focused have we been on winners and losers in the cause of liberty that we have overlooked the fact that revolution is ultimately about states, institutions, and how cultures evolve in response to fundamental shifts in power and violence. These overlooked, ignored, or forgotten aspects of the American Revolution do not signal a crisis. But they do suggest that the master narratives imposed by the poles cannot explain all meaningful revolutionary experience, and certainly not the arc of the whole story from origins to outcomes. They also suggest how limited and how sterile our studies of the Revolution have become. In a sweeping survey of new scholarship on the Revolution, Gregory Nobles suggests that we are still at some sort of tipping point or crossroads. He certainly sees younger, more vital voices emerging of late and probing how certain groups were excluded from enjoying their rights, even as popular histories remain fixated on what he calls “founders chic.” But, as he would concede, taken together, the work he cites in a volume asking the question, “Whose American Revolution was it?” demonstrates that we are at an “intellectual sticking point” for crafting a new narrative of the Revolution.15 As long as we are stuck on finding middle ground, synthesizing, or asking who won and who lost, he is spot-on. The focus on dichotomies, either in terms of origins and outcomes or winners and losers, downplays contingency and—by taking the existence of the old or new regime for granted—ends up playing less-than-compelling variations on the American exceptionalist theme, either in its celebratory or critical guise. The two schools, therefore, more than mirror each other. At some level, ideological posturing aside, they are interchangeable. Tellingly, signs that the old narratives are somehow insufficient have become discernible of late. We see them once we escape the magnetic pull of the poles: transgressions, not in terms of recasting the meaning of the Revolution—the terrain of the two poles—but in the ways we approach parts of the subject, subtle and discrete shifts that allow us to think about new possibilities 5

Patrick Griffin for imagining the Revolution. The scholars who have authored these studies, it should be noted, have not written with the intent to move us beyond the two poles, but they suggest—if we study them not in isolation from one another but together—that another way to think about the American Revolution is beginning to come into focus. These new approaches—if we can call them that— have been emerging over the past decade or so. They are not unified. They do not represent a salvo against the status quo, or a program for change. But they signal new possibilities for thinking of a new narrative beyond the bounds of rhetoric and reality. Recently, American historians, especially those studying the eighteenth century—have encouraged us to think in Atlantic and global contexts. This represents an old way of thinking, of course, but there seems now a growing tendency to think of the years before the Revolution as something other than an American moment. For the past ten years, scholars studying religion, the economy, and political culture have been suggesting that over the course of the eighteenth century, with the integration and consolidation of the Atlantic system, Americans were becoming increasingly British. Think here of the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas that yoked Americans to Britain as never before. The years of settlement, the brutalizing work of establishing the English colonies, gave way to a period of social consolidation and the development of a consciously articulated sense of Britishness.16 This model was fostered by historians of provincial America, informed by new British scholarship but not necessarily focused on explaining the origins of the American Revolution. In other words, revolutionary historians did not come up with this story; rather, those historians whose specialty is the early eighteenth century have raised suggestive questions that revolutionary historians are just beginning to take on board.17 We are now on the cusp of recasting the crisis that led to revolution as part of a process of British state formation, an eighteenth-century version of the process that had gripped the British Isles a century earlier. The study of origins, therefore, is taking on a new light as the Britishization model begins to dominate the study of the eighteenth century.18 So too with endings. Again, over the past decade scholars have been increasingly exploring the history of the new republic as a period with its own integrity, divorced from the questions that have transfixed revolutionary historians. Scholars looking not backward to the Revolution but ahead to the early nineteenth century have begun to study the period after the Constitutional Convention as one in which Americans were involved in a process of state formation. How would Americans create a state that could stand among other ­nation-​states in a competitive world? How did they create a federal government that could address the complex tensions Americans grappled with in the 6

Introduction early nineteenth century? How did they adapt frameworks of governance that on the face of it seemed designed to curtail the use of power so as to handle that same power elegantly? Focusing less on the winners and losers of a struggle that had just ended, they place emphasis instead on the period that was just coming to be, particularly on the role the state would play in that period.19 These two new tendencies, both rooted in state formation, have not led to a reconsideration of the Revolution. Rather, the former has looked backwards to the provincial period and across the ocean to the British Isles for inspiration, while the latter has looked ahead to the nineteenth century and inward to the politics of the fledgling American nation-state for a sense of scholarly purpose. However much both camps are concerned with state power and the process of constructing the state, scholars in neither camp see their work as part of a broader project of recovering the history of the American Revolution. In other words, they offer, perhaps, a means of creating a coherent story of America’s Revolution that revolves around the idea of continuity, but they cannot meet in the middle. There are exceptions, of course. One such is Jack Greene’s recent Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution, which explores the process of state formation before the American Revolution and gestures toward the end of the Revolution as it does so. John Murrin has also recently cast the Revolution’s origins as a “crisis of imperial integration.” But as François Furstenberg points out in a review, Murrin is less interested in characterizing the long-term implications for an American sense of nationhood, because he does not portray the postrevolutionary period in the same fashion as the prerevolutionary period.20 By telling the story of the endgame of American state power without conscious reference to the story of the failure of British state formation at the Revolution’s origins, or vice versa, even these scholars—cognizant of questions of state power though they may be—do not see, and indeed cannot see, the continuation of a singular process across the divide of the revolutionary crucible. Lost, therefore, are possibilities for construing an overarching process animated by distinctive cultural content on either side of that divide. Nonetheless, the period between the two has been receiving some renewed attention from a younger group of scholars who have grown disenchanted with the limitations imposed by the two poles of rhetoric and reality. Lately these scholars, who consciously label themselves revolutionary historians, have been looking at questions of mobilization and political culture that explore the Revo­lution apart from the idealist and behaviorist poles, raising the sorts of issues that are not likely to define the nature of the Revolution as a whole, but that do shed light on how men and women negotiated processes beyond their powers of control. We could consider this tendency, then, almost biographical for younger scholars. Because of the all-encompassing nature of the mas7

Patrick Griffin ter narratives, a younger generation is carving out niches that do not consider the whole but rather discrete aspects of experience that gauge how individuals navigated powerful forces. To a great extent, this approach—if we can call it that—­appropriates the virtues of both the idealist and behaviorist camps in that younger historians are exploring how individuals deployed ideas to make sense of the troubling limitations or new opportunities afforded by a broad social reality. Political culture, the newly ascendant realm of study, has emerged as a way of studying revolution without expounding upon the merits of the grand narrative, while yet recognizing that men and women—as actors—did construct their lives against the backdrop of that grand narrative. Standing ­almost as a small protest movement, though without a conscious agenda, these scholars have been examining the ways communities worked to make sense of dramatic changes, how elites mobilized the masses, and how older ideas of political belonging were adapted to new challenges. In considering the Revolution, these scholars have, then, focused on discrete experiences and communities, offering micro studies by eschewing the stultifying macro questions that have led to scholarly dead ends. Think here of the fine work done on urban centers or on the frontier. Young historians have written exciting studies about what was happening in local communities as men and women struggled with the disorienting effects of revolution.21 How did they take older notions of rule and adapt them to communities in flux or on the move? Moreover, work in recent decades has given us a bird’s eye view—or better, a worm’s eye view—of what was happening in region after region during the revolutionary period. If we bring these studies together, we almost gain a kaleidoscopic view of a Revolution and War of Independence that appeared differently in different regions. The essays of this volume demonstrate that these three tendencies are becoming new points of reference for studying the period of the American Revolution. In April 2010, Ohio University’s George Washington Forum sponsored a conference entitled “Making Democracy: Violence, Politics and the American Founding” at which it was becoming clear that we as a profession were moving beyond rhetoric and reality. In the conference, the participants demonstrated, singly, how these three approaches—origins tied to Atlantic state formation, a middle defined by negotiation, and state-centered outcomes—were starting to reshape the field. Take the first set of essays in this volume. The essays by ­Andrew Cayton and Patrick Griffin suggest how powerful the Atlantic paradigm has become. Of course we know, as David Armitage argues, that we are “all Atlanticists now,” but Griffin and Cayton point to the fact that what was happening in America in the eighteenth century was one expression of a “British” Atlantic dynamic, emphasizing how the ways in which the British state came into being affected how Americans conceived of themselves and their 8

Introduction status in the eighteenth century. This is good, old-fashioned provincial history, but told in such a way that complexity and regional variation play out against a backdrop of a common set of discourses. Cayton and Griffin employ a broad British Atlantic framework to demonstrate how America’s revolutionaries, and other Britons, visited violence on their neighbors even as they enlisted discourses that called violence and savagery into question. Cayton points out a fundamental contradiction that animated British America in the eighteenth century: for a people who dominated and violated those of different races, violence had become a problem. Americans, like other Britons, came to conceive violence and the fear it engendered as the greatest threat to civilization. Even as British Americans used bloodshed to construct an empire and a civilization, they stood in awe of it, knowing that it could destroy a culture. The revolutionary years, Cayton suggests, began just as men agreed that consent should trump coercion, and slavery yield to liberty. In North America, the rhetoric and reality of violence vied with one another every bit as much vehemently as Americans vied with Britons. Griffin explores a similar paradox. How, he asks, could a revolution so measured and reasonable in some regions produce appalling violence in others? He finds his answers in British ideologies. While a rights discourse animated the ways that subjects from the coastal and Caribbean colonies were or were not incorporated into the state, a discourse of civility determined how regions on the edges would be comprehended. Civility underscored a Janus-faced approach to subject peoples. Drawing from the history of Britain’s marchlands, Griffin finds a twopronged process of reform and conquest that lay at the heart of British—and by extension American—understandings of legitimate violence. A common British heritage allowed for violence, rationalizing it as a civilizing necessity even as it shuddered at bloodshed. But both suggest through their interpretations a new way of thinking about the Revolution’s origins. Cayton’s essay shows that in terms of discourse, Americans also made sense of the world through Britishness. The old tropes that had defined the British seventeenth century—in fact, the creation of Britain itself— were powerful markers through which Americans defined their lives. This, of course, we know.22 But Cayton challenges us to rethink the particularities of American experience within the broader British whole, in the process forcing us to rethink the cultural parameters of empire. In America, social tensions differed from those encountered in places like England, and even other marchland provinces like Scotland and Ireland, largely because of America’s distinctive settlement process and the vexing issue of race. America was peopled by Indians along the frontiers and by Africans on plantations. White Americans made sense of these threats to their perceived security and rationalized systemic vio9

Patrick Griffin lence by putting into play the ideas that had animated the British seventeenth century. Taking a closer look at the history of the frontier, Griffin finds that events in America—as far as contemporaries were concerned—mapped all too nicely onto British seventeenth-century history, leading Americans to create a marchland pattern of British state formation. Starting from the perspective of the new Atlantic history and the new British history, again with its emphasis on British state formation, Cayton and Griffin demonstrate that although the ideas Americans employed to make sense of their world were the same ideas as those that Britons had fashioned in the course of their own state formation, with even interpretations of broad processes resembling one another, Americans nonetheless applied shared discourses to different places in distinctive ways. Perhaps, as they suggest, the Revolution’s origins stemmed from just these sorts of transatlantic disjunctions. Although British, America was still, well, American. And therein lies the crux of the crisis that was brewing. Reminding us of the idea that the American Revolution did not devolve into a world of all against all, Chris Beneke explains that the ideas that Britons used in the seventeenth century during their crises over sovereignty, when employed in America a century later, could have unintended results. Beneke asks the simple question: How did Americans avoid religious violence at the time of the Revolution? Raised with folk memories of English and European early-modern religious violence, Americans decided, it would seem, that religiously inspired bloodshed had to be avoided at all costs. Their status as Britons had taught them as much. With vivid images in mind of what happened to a society once God became a rationale to kill, they strove to avoid the mistakes of their forefathers. Because they proved successful in curtailing such bloodshed during the Revolution, the ideal of religious toleration could be extended in a postrevolutionary world to include even those who had perpetrated such violence in the past: namely, Catholics.23 And therein lies one of the transatlantic ironies—again a disjunction—that the new British approach to early America suggests. Beneke’s essay does not only place origins in a British context, it also points us to the crucible, the murky middle of accommodation and vacillation, the overlooked period that falls between the gaps in the reigning master narratives. His essay demonstrates how Americans used British ideals to make sense of a moment of competition as they struggled to rework older ways in troubling contexts. During this moment when the sureties of sovereignty and identity were in question, old forms were brought into service and challenged. Some withstood the furies. Others collapsed and failed. But again and again, Americans turned to what they knew in the face of daunting change. All negotiation entailed continuities in the face of sovereign challenges. All occurred in a world 10

Introduction shaped by the threat of violence or the mobilization to perpetuate violence. Ironically, the ideas that had underscored British state formation were used by Americans to navigate British state collapse in America. But, of course, the middle was defined by other dynamics as well, dynamics our authors point to. How was the violence of revolution ordered? How were men and women mobilized to fight or resist? Jessica Roney finds that contradictions brought about by the disjunction between continuities of discourse and the discontinuity of context animated revolutionary Pennsylvania. In fact she sees a similar borrowing of older ideas to mobilize for violence in her study of the 1775 Pennsylvania militia bill. The question that captures her imagination concerns the ways in which people used the ideas at their disposal to make sense of wrenching change. In fact, she goes further, demonstrating how creative and adaptable people had to be in the midst of a crisis that threatened to overwhelm. Political culture for her—and for her generation of historians—is less about principle or power struggles and more focused on how people tried to hold onto the familiar amid dramatic change. She discovers that in fact they were able to marshal resources in ways they could not have imagined. Paradox defined their search for order. Pennsylvania for Roney offers a case study of how violent means could be entertained in a colony hitherto dominated by Quaker sensibilities. The answers for her lay, partially at least, in the past, even as they pointed towards the future. Quaker pacifism forced others to create associations that played extralegal roles in society during times of war. Raising the militia could be countenanced so long as it was done through voluntary channels, effectively giving sanction to this means of providing defense. The upshot for Roney is that by 1775, Pennsylvania, known as a place of “moderation,” could mobilize for violence quickly but without succumbing to mob violence.24 Associational life allowed those with grievances to find outlets for the deployment of violence in quasi-sovereign, perhaps even quasi-democratic, institutions like militias. Similarly, Peter Messer explores how these British ideas were challenged in the years of crisis. He shows how they channeled and shaped violence, how men and women used some of the very ideas that underscored the nature of the state to make sense of collapsing sovereignty. Violence, the sort that we associate with revolutions, was mediated by the peculiar pasts of each American society. Massachusetts, for example, did indeed have its mobs, but they were mobs that drew rituals from English traditions that defined the parameters of violence, showing what could and what could not be countenanced. Anti-​­Catholic imagery, too, furnished blueprints for understanding the present crisis, giving violence a menacing edge but also an ideological focus. In the process, as Messer suggests, men and women shaped broader dynamics. 11

Patrick Griffin By trying to fit social reality into older formulae, the struggle for continuities could foster change. Peter Thompson’s essay, in particular, is a model of the seeming contradictions between the forces of change and continuity that arise in studying revolutionary political culture. He forces us to consider how violent pasts structured the threat of coercion during the Revolution, explaining that violent legacies and sensibilities aimed toward a marginalized group explain how America’s ostensibly sensible revolutionaries could countenance violent means to coerce the Tories in their midst. Slavery, but especially the violence that underscored it, made it legitimate for those we would come to know as the founders to employ violence against their neighbors. Racialized understandings of coercion created space between blacks and whites that tempered the ways in which Americans could conceive of and alienate the “other.” Like Jan Gross’s study of the Polish Holocaust, Thompson’s essay reminds us that only through templates previously deployed can a people imagine violence against their neighbors.25 Coercion, the sort that was employed to keep slaves in place and that created the psychic distance necessary to kill or maim, gave sanction to the violent actions of men who championed their rights to be Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free in historically and racially canonized ways.26 Revolution, Ken Owen reminds us, not only occasioned such ambivalence but was fueled by it. Creating a revolutionary political culture that afforded give-and-take in a world defined by instability and violence was not a straightforward process and had many unanticipated consequences. Owen asks if bloodshed could be used as an expression of public opinion in a revolutionary period defined by popular sovereignty. He answers, well . . . ​yes and no. Throughout the period—and he explores a number of episodes in revolutionary and postrevolutionary Pennsylvania—men and women used violent means to air grievances. After the revolution, by and large, violence was still legitimated both because it had revolutionary, and thus cultural, bona fides and because it had proved so effective in securing immediate redress. Even the mere threat of violence could move government to act. Thus Americans of all stripes, Owen argues, did and did not see violence as a legitimate political act. In much the same way as Beneke’s essay bridges the gap between origins and revolutionary process, Owen moves us from process—and the political culture that sustained it—to outcomes. Looking forward, rather than backward like Beneke, Owen suggests that a period of ambivalence, of creative adaptation, shaped the politics of what was to come. We are left with a question, once again, about the nature of revolution that our two reigning master narratives do not wrestle with: How do we reconcile change and continuity? Jeff Pasley asks us to consider this question head-on by exploring the en12

Introduction during meanings of the categories of violence and nonviolence in American culture. As he reminds us, Americans never know quite how to make sense of violence, and because of this the two categories are entangled in mutually stimulating ways. The bloodshed of revolution, he notes, went hand in hand with early national democracy. The nation, of course, as this volume attests, was born through violence. But its democratic institutions and its ethos, decidedly nonviolent in mandating democratic participation, were then flanked by the threat of state violence. Similarly, coercion set the limits of who was in and who was out as a citizen. Even if not deployed, the violence the state could potentially mobilize was legitimated by the myth that it emerged from the people, was part and parcel of the process of revolution. This myth was, of course, rooted in revolutionary realities, in how people made use of the ideas inherited from their past to adapt to the troubling changes wrought by revolution. The new state that was just emerging from the violence of revolution was in fact something modern in its capacity and willingness to resort to violence. True democrats, such as members of the Democratic-Republican societies, operated on the premise that the fledgling regime was legitimate and lawful. As a result, they disavowed the methods of what they called western “rebels” and participated in the suppression of that group through the coercive power of the state, even as they conceded that the “rebels” were threatening violence in order to achieve more democratic ends. The state, as Pasley argues, used this newfound ability and sensibility to overawe frontiersmen who, incensed by an excise on distilled spirits, were resorting to traditional means of contesting authority. They never stood a chance against a state employing violent means justified by a democratic revolution, which itself took shape as people tried to negotiate the difficult transition from subject to citizen. These were the means by which Americans made sense of a world beyond sovereignty. As authority collapsed around them, they used a legacy of British ideals to confront issues of race, popular mobilization, and even religious difference. These essays suggest that as they navigated the difficulties of the period, Americans found the wherewithal to mobilize on their own. They made what use they could of older British ideas, worked out a precarious balance between change and continuity, and in the process created “the people.” As there was no state actor with the authority to restore order, they struggled ultimately with questions of power and in the end struggled to define the parameters of a new basis of state power. Out of this crucible, the new state emerged, or better, the potential and limits of American state formation were refined. The question is how much this moment of state formation, in its postcolonial guise, resembled the Atlantic-wide process that initiated revolution.27 And how, or if, it fit social reality more effectively. In short order, Americans were able to cre13

Patrick Griffin ate a state that had the capacity to restore order, to protect its borders, and to take its place in a world of nation-states. But accomplishing these tasks meant consigning certain aspects of the past to oblivion. David Hendrickson tries to understand how Americans, newly emerged from revolution, went about taming the idea of violence. Less concerned with revolutionary legacies per se than with what revolutionary outcomes portended for the nineteenth century, Hendrickson asks how a fledgling state that had been created through a mobilization aimed at perpetuating violence could transform itself into a state that could in an orderly fashion provide for the common defense and promote the general welfare. It did so, Hendrickson concludes, by leaving the past behind, but only incidentally. Power, of course, still mattered, as it had before the revolution. And Americans again found themselves engaged in a process of state formation using the materials of their past—only now that past was the memory of America’s eighteenth-century revolution rather than Britain’s seventeenth-century revolutions. The need to restore order after the period of violence and adaptation required new narratives in which violence would play a diminished role. In the new republic, power had to be re-rationalized. Surrounded by warring powers in the international arena, belligerent Indians in the West, and slaveholders in the South who used coercion to keep people in chains, statesmen imagined a less violent world, free of the fear and insecurity that marred the present. The imperative to sustain a union between so many distinctive states led them to believe that independence too had to be fostered. Violence was the way of despots, and only a constitution affirming unity and independence could hold it in check. A democratic republic, bound through a union, offered the best means to escape the war paradigm that animated European states. Hopes of securing the union so as to sustain peace thus laid the groundwork for consensus in an America otherwise divided politically. It also became a cornerstone of Americans’ understanding of their place in the world during the period of the early republic. The final essays in this volume explore revolutionary legacies by probing the disjunction between the myths of state powerlessness and the reality of state power. This paradox created tensions that rose to the surface of American political culture in unpredictable ways after the Revolution. Matthew Hale recovers an ideology that should not have been: the Democratic-Republican attraction to militant sovereignty sustained by violence. This group feared the idea of power in much the same way as most others did during the Revolution. But while Federalists embraced an active state that could use coercion to achieve its ends, Jefferson and his followers held to revolutionary fears of power and violence. Hale turns this standard interpretation on its head, argu14

Introduction ing that Democratic-Republicans embraced French revolutionary discourse— a discourse that, as we know, was more at home with violence—to argue that peaceful ends could be achieved through bloodshed. Hale reminds us once more that paradox prevailed when revolutionary Americans grappled with the idea of violence: for Democrats claimed sanction to destroy “Aristocracy.” Violence, of course, was not limited to discourse or imagery in the 1790s. The so-called Indian Wars of the Old Northwest proved as bloody as the frontier clashes that took place before and during the Revolution. These, however, were not defensive campaigns intent on clearing the land of belligerent Indians. Nor were they merely animated by angry frontiersmen bent on acquiring land and rights. They were, John Kotruch reminds us, centered upon securing a place among nations in a Hobbesian international order. To mobilize the state’s decision to employ violence, the confederation needed to focus its capacity. The United States under the Constitution proved much more able in this regard, and, as Kotruch demonstrates, the bloody Battle of Fallen Timbers proved as successful from the American perspective as it did because the state now could mobilize men and resources to protect its borders. The state, supposedly born through a reasonable (and not-so-violent) revolution waged by what was almost an anti-state, was well able to coerce. This volume, mainly the work of younger scholars, shows that the study of the American Revolution is moving in each of these three directions, beyond the study of rhetoric and reality. More to the point, what they offer together is an exploration of the possibilities for drawing these scholarly tendencies together into a coherent whole, and in the process, suggesting a new way to think about a very old subject. In other words, the fascinating thing about these ­essays—all rooted in the newest approaches of their increasingly unrelated respective subfields—is that they point us toward a new narrative that is greater than the sum of the parts. If we say that the Revolution began and ended with the state, the middle ground would seem to consist in a moment of contestation and negotiation aimed at remaking sovereignty. The transition, then, was literally—and not simply formulaically—one from British subject to American citizen, with an emphasis on both modifier and category. Yet the shift contained continuities rooted in processes of state formation, suggesting the critical significance of formalized power and individual responses to it. In the wake of the Seven Years’ War, Americans, now increasingly British, came face-to-face with British notions of sovereignty. The extension of the British state into British American provinces defined the experience of those living in Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Virginia, South Carolina, and Jamaica. And they responded as other provincial Britons had done in earlier periods when the state extended its power to the marches: they employed ideas that under15

Patrick Griffin scored their British birthright to speak to their distinctively American—but fully British—­societies. The revolutionary crisis, therefore, was really more a crisis in the process of British state formation, a dynamic that had gripped the archipelago in the seventeenth century, played out now across the Atlantic Ocean. The languages of the British seventeenth century belonged to Americans as well. The period thereafter was one of collapsing sovereignty, as the crisis strained the Atlantic system and also the assumptions that underscored rule and authority. It seems that communities broke down along distinctive lines, lines tied into their history and their social cleavages. The ways in which those from, say, Massachusetts struggled with the sovereignty crisis differed from the way that Pennsylvanians addressed the question of authority. Some areas devolved into violence. Others, especially those with some tradition of selfgovernance and autonomy, were able to keep the lid on bloodshed. Moreover, all peoples participated in this troubling, yet liberating moment. Women, ­African Americans, Indians, and poorer settlers were not only specters of disorder that frightened elites intent on maintaining their grip in a society reeling from uncertainty. These people too used the collapse of authority as a means, within prescribed bounds, to push for a greater share of rights. What is fascinating is that—as our authors point out—a number of British pasts played a central role in how all people negotiated the transatlantic process of British state formation. They did not create new ideas as much as struggle to retrofit old ideas to address novel problems. Again, the story of political culture centers on adaptability. Upheaval was followed by a return to order, one that could only be guaranteed by an efficacious state. American state formation, just like the failed British experiment, grew from the challenges of creating a model of sovereignty that cohered to systemic imperatives. The British had to manage a consolidating Atlantic system through a vision of empire that ultimately strained and collapsed because it could not adapt to reality. The American process of state formation succeeded where the British program failed, because its framers ­recognized the constraints that faced them and designed a new and much more flexible system. In fact, the difficult process of struggling with change in the 1770s prepared Americans for the tumultuous changes that were to come after the Revolution. A federal form of government and the ambiguous notion of sovereignty that went along with it recognized American realities of popular sovereignty in a revolutionary setting, the distinctive experiences of different sections of the United States, and the historic autonomy of different states. All the while, a state came into being that was designed for the use of power, and as power was applied on the frontiers and along the littoral, its efficacy only in16

Introduction creased, even as people convinced themselves that the state was not equipped for power.28 These essays, then, though they neither point toward a broader construction singly, nor embody every approach to violence or the Revolution, together gesture toward these new ways of conceiving the American Revolution. Call it the “sovereignty revolution.” Of course, the American Revolution still revolved around ideas about rights that were part and parcel of a broader Enlightenment discourse. Americans knew their Locke, Trenchard and Gordon, and Hobbes. They had at their disposal powerful ideas of a “state of nature” that reflected both how they saw their world and how they viewed the Furies they were confronting with the collapse of British sovereignty. The American Revolution was also animated by social tensions that seemed to explode in the years after the Seven Years’ War. There is no doubt that race, class, and gender were meaningful categories during the war years, and for some became the lenses through which they saw the events of the day. Yet ideas and social tensions—rhetoric and reality—became elements of a process that began and ended with sovereignty and state formation and that tested the ability of men and women to create new ideas of politics, mobilization, and participation out of older British ideas. Men and women articulated the hopes, aspirations, and fears that they confronted as sovereign authority collapsed and as all were involved in negotiations to reconstruct sovereignty. The American Revolution these scholars together seem to be groping toward is one of continuities punctuated by a period of profound unsettledness and, in some regions, violence. In other words, the state—our missing actor in the poles of rhetoric and reality—binds the whole period together and marks the beginning and end of process. The challenge these men and women faced was creating a state that had the capacity to stand up amid other nations, to keep tensions in check, to police the frontier, and to ensure order in the cities. It needed all the more capacity—and legitimacy—to achieve these goals in a period that followed on heated conflict. Between the two—the period of statelessness in a crucible of revolutionary uncertainty and violence—was a time characterized by both insecurity and possibility, an unsettled moment when people could reimagine new roles by deploying old ideas, when they struggled to make sense of a troubling collapse of authority, and fought and killed as a means achieving their ends. The conclusion of this moment marks the end of revolution, when the moment of discontinuity came to an end and a form of sovereignty was crafted that suited a landscape changed by the period of statelessness, the realities of the broader system the new state found itself working within, and the historic autonomy of the sometimes not-so-united states. Put another way, the Revolution was not so much a contest between lib17

Patrick Griffin erty and power—rhetoric and reality in their eighteenth-century guises—as between sovereignty and anarchy. Resolving the tension between these poles required an extraordinary amount of creativity, as men and women had devised new definitions of the state and of the ideas that animated it. In an always potentially anarchic world, they fastened onto mediating institutions that could speak to global realities and also to the realities of a revolutionary past in which crowds were mobilized for violence. In this way, these scholars point us toward an American Revolution that appears more like France’s than we are usually comfortable acknowledging. They suggest that, just as in the French case, revolution began when an old regime intent on reforming and extending its rule proved incapable of addressing the troubling social realities of the world system after the Seven Years’ War. When authority collapsed, men and women used the ideas of the day to make sense of their plight and to push for rights they had not enjoyed before. And ultimately, only a new source of authority, one that drew its legitimacy from the idea of the nation or the people, could reestablish order. That ideal of sovereignty reflected both the constraints of the world system and the distinctive experience of revolution.

Notes 1. Gordon Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 23 (1966): 3–32. 2. Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1991). 3. The best example of the staying power would be Wood’s own work. See his introduction to Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different (New York: Penguin, 2006); as well as Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). 4. Without doubt, Louis Hartz was on the losing side in arguing that America’s origins were ultimately Lockean. See The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955). He was simply overwhelmed by the triumvirate of Bailyn, Wood, and J.G.A. Pocock. Joyce Appleby continued to fight a rearguard action for the liberal ideal, but by the ways in which the idea of republicanism was applied in so many contexts, it’s fair to say it had a better career. See Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); and Daniel Rodgers, “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 11–38. 5. On the sparks idea, as well as a brilliant introduction to the neoprogressive school of thought, see Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York: Viking, 2005). 6. A good example of the richness of the approach and its continuing vitality is Alfred

18

Introduction Young, Gary Nash, and Ray Raphael, eds., Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation (New York: Knopf, 2011). 7. See, for example, the comprehensive introduction to the historiography of the American Revolution in Alfred Young and Gregory Nobles, Whose American Revolution Was It?: Historians Interpret the Founding (New York: New York University Press, 2011). The introduction lays out the parameters of the problem. Young’s extended essay (“American Historians Confront ‘The Transforming Hand of Revolution’ ”) characterizes the historiography. 8. Staughton Lynd and David Waldstreicher, “Free Trade, Sovereignty, and Slavery: Toward an Economic Interpretation of American Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 68 (2011): 597–630. 9. See especially the work of T. H. Breen, including Tobacco Culture: The Mentality of Great Tidewater Planters on the Eve of Revolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); and Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). Both books try to use ideas—particularly liberal (Lockean) ideas—to explore how people adapted to material circumstances. 10. Michael McDonnell, “Men out of Time: Confronting History and Myth,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 68 (2011): 644–48. 11. See, for instance, Jill Lepore, The Whites of Their Eyes: The Tea Party’s Revolution and the Battle over American History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). 12. As a rule, French historians are better with continuities. See especially William Doyle, The Oxford History of the French Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 13. Again, as a rule, European historians are better at exploring the middle. See on this Arno Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 14. This is an old formulation, but one lately resurrected and enriched by Eran Shalev, Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 15. Gregory Nobles, “Historians Extend the Reach of the American Revolution,” and “Afterword,” in Young and Nobles, Whose American Revolution Was It? 16. For the periodization of processes Atlantic in scope, see Daniel Richter, Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Pasts (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2011). 17. Through the movement of peoples, goods, and ideas across the Atlantic, America was becoming British. On this vast literature, see Joyce Chaplin, “The British Atlantic,” in Nicholas Canny and Philip Morgan, The Oxford Handbook of the Atlantic World, 1450–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); and Patrick Griffin, “The Birth, Death, and Resurrection of the Provincial Dilemma,” History Compass 9 (2011): 134–46. 18. For just one example, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). 19. See especially, Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); and also Alison LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). For a penetrating examination of the idea of power in the period as it pertained to statecraft, see Peter Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007).

19

Patrick Griffin 20. Jack Greene, The Constitutional Origins of the American Revolution (New York: Cam­ bridge University Press, 2011); John Murrin, “1776: The Countercyclical Revolution,” in Revolutionary Currents: Nation Building in the Transatlantic World, eds. Michael Morrison and Melinda Zook (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004); Furstenberg’s review appeared as an H-Net Review in October, 2004 on H-Atlantic. 21. For just a taste of this sort of work, from a number of perspectives, see Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Michael McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Char­ lottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); and Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). 22. See, of course, Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1967). 23. The best explanation of this idea remains Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). 24. See Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (New York: Mariner Books, 2010). 25. Jan Gross, Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 26. In this way, David Armitage’s ideology takes on the role of an identity. For his distinction, see The Ideological Origins of British Empire (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 27. For an answer to this intriguing question, see P. J. Marshall, Remaking the British Atlantic: The United States and the British Empire after American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); or from the cultural perspective, Kariann Akemi Yokota, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). 28. On this, see Brian Balogh, A Government Out of Sight: The Mystery of National Authority in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

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• “The Constant Snare of the Fear of Man”

Authority and Violence in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic Andre w Cay ton

The fact that English-speaking people in the eighteenth century regularly killed, maimed, raped, enslaved, insulted, and generally injured each other as well as other people is not in and of itself remarkable. What is remarkable is that for many of them violence became a problem, a source of confusion and shame, a site of contested meaning and identity, a test of human nature and human agency. To ask why human beings were violent was to confront the nature of authority, to think about what constituted legitimate behavior and what did not. This inquiry was political as well as cultural, and its legacy is with us still. The Oxford English Dictionary’s leading definitions of violence highlight a sensibility that emerged in the long eighteenth century. Violence, we are told, is “the exercise of physical force so as to inflict injury on, or cause damage to, persons or property; action or conduct characterized by this; treatment or usage tending to cause bodily injury or forcibly interfering with personal freedom.” To do violence to another human being is to violate them. It is “undue constraint applied to some natural process, habit, etc., so as to prevent its free development or exercise.” Violence, in sum, is a form of power that negates liberty and denies another person’s humanity by abandoning persuasion for force, consent for coercion. In eighteenth-century language, violence amounted to an artificial interference with nature. Like all imperial peoples, eighteenth-century British and Americans embraced violence as an instrument of power. Violence created, sustained, and defined the British Empire in the long eighteenth century. Warfare, from the mid-seventeenth-century English Commonwealth to the decisive battles of New Orleans and Waterloo in 1815, drove the creation of the political and financial structures of empire.1 Imperial warfare with the Catholic French and 21

Andrew Cayton their European allies, English-speaking colonial rebels, and indigenous peoples around the Atlantic and in South Asia revised and refined those structures, contesting their purpose and meaning.2 Between 1649 and 1815, a second-rate divided polity, claiming sovereignty over a handful of colonies that provided more problems than profit, emerged as the greatest empire in the world, an island nation with influence, if not dominion, from Lima to Shanghai, Calcutta to Cairo, and Lisbon to Havana. To a considerable extent, this extraordinary success rested on the forced displacement, relocation, and exploitation of millions of human beings, most notably enslaved Africans and indigenous peoples in North America and India. One of the first things Thomas Thistlewood learned when he arrived in Jamaica in 1759 was “the extent to which white dominance rested on naked force.” Vastly outnumbered whites “acted brutally toward blacks because they knew only fierce, arbitrary, and instantaneous violence would keep blacks in check.”3 In Britain itself, under the terms of the notorious Black Act of 1723 and other statutes, the subjects of George I, II, and III suffered capital punishment in the form of public execution for an unusually long list of crimes against persons and property. Throughout the empire, deeply personal violence flourished in a variety of settings: neighbors and strangers fighting or attacking each other on the streets of London and Liverpool, settling scores in the borderland of the Ohio Valley, or wreaking vengeance in New Jersey and South Carolina during the American War for Independence. Pervasive, too, was gendered violence in which men engaged women, married or not, in coerced intercourse, unwanted handling of their bodies, physical abuse, and verbal insults and jokes. Language itself was a form of violence that English men and women raised to an art form, especially as they struggled to highlight their self-control by denigrating others’ lack of it. The conundrum for English-speaking peoples in the eighteenth century was that they saw the violence at the core of their empire as a direct contradiction of their image of themselves as agents of a culture that heralded the triumph of ­ fforts consent over coercion, liberty over tyranny, independence over slavery. E to manage violence were, therefore, ubiquitous. Interlocking networks of intellectuals, artists, clerics, statesmen, and growing numbers of middling readers and writers prided themselves on what they increasingly considered a peculiarly English form of civility. Their commitments to Protestant Christianity (as opposed to French Catholicism and South Asian Hinduism or Islam), to a historical tradition of balanced liberty (as opposed to French absolute monarchy and Native American primitivism), and to commerce rather than conquest as a means of expansion were hallmarks of their imperial identity.4 Great Britain stood for restrained freedom, measured justice, and reasonable toleration. 22

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic The explosion of print (and literacy) introduced tens of thousands of readers to evolving concepts of sensibility, humanitarianism, and the rights of man and woman, leading many to join in common cause against the evils of monarchy, superstition, slavery, and cruelty. Overriding all other concerns was the enshrinement of consent (broadly construed) as the sine qua non of British identity. English-speaking people were not tyrants; they did not coerce; and they ameliorated (through the practice of mercy and pity) the worst abuses of violent legal and social systems. Scholars tend to explain the contradiction between rhetoric and reality at the heart of the eighteenth-century British empire as an episode—a conflicted, messy transitional moment—in the long-term emergence of institutions and attitudes that aimed at controlling the baser instincts of human beings. They highlighted two major developments. The first was the growth of the modern nation-state on the Anglo-American model; that is, a polity with a constitution that facilitated some degree of consent, established a system of equal justice before the law, preferred commerce and diplomacy to military force, and justified warfare as a last resort exercise in self-defense and the protection of liberty. The second was the cultivation of what we might call a liberal sensibility about individual human beings and their bodies. As more and more people enjoyed a middle-class life, as they read, bought and sold, went to schools, and engaged with worlds beyond their communities and households, they became more empathetic. Heightened sensitivity to the pain and suffering of human bodies eventually provoked reform of what suddenly struck many people as callous disregard for individuals—emotionally, mentally, and physically.5 The most obvious example is slavery. British participation in the Atlantic slave trade, which peaked in the middle of the eighteenth century, came to an end at the beginning of the nineteenth century because of the concerted demands of outraged humanitarians who had mastered the legal and political instruments of the constitutional nation-state.6 In the aftermath of World War II, many scholars have reinterpreted this paradigm of human rights progress as a reconfiguration of structures that, in global terms, served the interests of the few at the expense of the many. If power is the ability to get people to do things they do not wish to do, and freedom is the ability to resist, revise, or claim exemption from power, then the development of constitutional nation-states, market-driven economies, and an ideology of liberalism empowered middle-class Western Europeans and North Americans to enjoy a freedom and prosperity founded on the lives, labor, and dispossession of Africans and indigenous Americans, Asians, and Australians. Middling sorts in Western Europe and North America arose from feather beds to make their toilet, wash their faces, dress themselves, and sit 23

Andrew Cayton down to a breakfast that increasingly consisted of coffee, sugar, chocolate, and other once-exotic foods whose presence on tables in The Hague and London was made possible by the dispossession of indigenous peoples in the Americas and the coerced labor of Africans.7 The sensibility of sympathy allowed the good citizens of Boston and Edin­ burgh to understand the protection of property and the rise of the law as a natural, inevitable, and universal progress that masked a constructed, contingent, and particular exercise of dominion. Previous histories of the progress of civilization had mimicked the stories the British and the Americans told themselves; they were the explanations of those who exercised power successfully, and they necessarily excluded or marginalized those peoples who claimed freedom from English-speaking avatars of freedom. Influenced by theorists who challenge any notion of cultural norms, many late-twentieth-century scholars put subalterns at the center of their work and developed contingent and contested stories of instability, hybridity, fluidity, constant negotiation, and ceaseless contradiction.8 Some argued that violence on the margins of empire (frontiers and islands), in the interstices of empire (borderlands and oceans), or in the networks of empire (trade, especially in human beings) most directly revealed the nature of power in the British Empire. Britons who valued their liberty and the rule of law in Britain were less polite in the Caribbean, precisely because they knew that enslaved Africans were capable of doing unto them as they did unto their monarchs. But I wonder if we have not let our preoccupation with the undeniably horrific outcomes of systematic violence obscure the preoccupation of many eighteenth-century Britons and Americans with the same problem. Perhaps we should take what they were saying seriously, for although their words may have masked their conquest and promoted a collective delusion about freedom, they nonetheless did regularly contest their own use of violence. The words of some English-speaking people, more often than not, enable our critique of all English-speaking people. Their endless fretting and self-analysis is also part of the birth of the modern, if we take that to mean “the unfolding set of relationships” that produced a widespread “conviction of historical difference.”9 For the eighteenth-century preoccupation with violence was about more than developing a veneer of civility and politesse to counter or hide brutality. It also testifies to an unease over what English-speaking people of the day recognized as the most serious challenge to the success of their imperial project: the very nature of human beings, their ability not only to control themselves but to empathize with others, to find some way collectively if not individually to manage their bodies and their instincts, and to accomplish this ambitious agenda largely disconnected from the institutions and assumptions that had governed Christian 24

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic Europe for centuries. Their major concern was that by doing violence to others they were above all doing violence to themselves. As narcissistic as this attitude was, it contained the germ of something worthwhile: an acceptance of human responsibility as well as human agency. For centuries Christianity had sanctioned violence as a legitimate form of power when deployed against infidels to preserve and extend the Gospel of Jesus Christ; it also sanctified the suffering of the body at the hands of the wicked or irreligious. But the religious and political underpinnings of violence as an instrument of civilization crumbled in the seventeenth century in what amounted to an extended crisis of authority. The power of monarchs (and their agents) who claimed legitimacy from God was everywhere in question. Rebellions and civil wars, assassinations and executions coincided with the collapse of Christian princes whose authority came from an increasingly distant and contested God. Authority itself splintered as major political, social, and religious institutions claimed each its share. So pervasive were violent assaults asserting or resisting power that people had no trouble imagining them even when they did not exist. Everywhere, from Ireland to South Carolina, individuals and groups of individuals sought to acquire and exercise power only to face not only physical opposition, but also demands to know by what right, by what authority, they aspired to govern. Their reply, as often as not, was to fling the same question back at their rivals.10 Few places have ever been nastier or more brutal than New England and Virginia in the 1670s. But violence at the margins of empire was an extension of violence at the center of empire. The pervasive instability no doubt had much to do with the emergence of a raft of writers, including Thomas Hobbes, John Milton, John Locke, and Baruch Spinoza, committed to thinking systematically about the origins of society, the role of government, and the relationship between human minds and human bodies. In Great Britain, the political response to the seventeenth-century crisis of authority was the Glorious Revolution of 1688–89. Borrowing heavily from the Dutch model of a modern regime founded on the existence of religious differences, the permanence of contested authority, and the importance of commerce, the English Revolution also recognized that cultural authority belonged to an urban bourgeoisie who “came to matter out of all proportion of their numbers.”11 Middle-class Britons were always contesting cultural authority, trying to figure out why human beings who saw themselves as more and more remote from God behaved as they did. They struggled with the fact that human life was what Daniel Defoe, writing as Robinson Crusoe, called an “uneven state.” “How strange a checker-work of Providence is the life of man!” exclaims Crusoe. “And by what secret differing springs are the affections hurried about, as differing circumstances present! Today we love what tomorrow 25

Andrew Cayton we hate; today we seek what tomorrow we shun; today we desire what tomorrow we fear; nay, even tremble at the apprehensions of.”12 The challenge was to construct persuasive meaning in an unstable and diverse world. Eventually, Crusoe exercises power over a society of three men: the converted Protestant Friday, Friday’s pagan and cannibal father, and a Roman Catholic Spaniard. “I was absolute lord and lawgiver; they all owed their lives to me, and were ready to lay down their lives, if there had been an occasion of it for me.” But Crusoe understands that his authority is fragile in part because it rests upon his acceptance of multiple perspectives on truth. With three subjects who are respectively Protestant, pagan, and papist, his choice to allow “liberty of conscience throughout [his] dominions” shows that he knows the limits of his power.13 So much of this scrutiny took place in the relatively new arena of reading and writing that we tend to think of it as egocentric, narcissistic, detached from concern with other human beings. But that appealing judgment misses its ultimate goal, which was to engage with others in efforts to establish authority through persuasion, by winning consent to a particular course of action. To reason and to feel were by definition social rather than solitary acts. To write was to conjure a companion (an audience), to invite a response, to prompt conversation. Novels, journals, and travel accounts were all about process. Narrative in particular highlighted personal decisions, turning points, and unanticipated consequences; it allowed for rumination on the fluidity of authority and the unreliability of human understanding; it granted human beings an unprecedented degree of agency in their own lives; but it also asked of them an unprecedented degree of responsibility. If writing and reading were private experiences, they had a social dimension critical to the construction of authority in a conflicted world.14 In 1688, the same year that William of Orange conquered England and drove James II into exile, the Englishwoman, Catholic, and Stuart partisan Aphra Behn not coincidentally published the novella Oroonoko, or The Royal Slave. This fictional tale reveals in broad outlines what was at stake in the eighteenth-century British Empire. Scholars have profitably studied it for what it says about race, gender, slavery, colonialism, English-Dutch rivalry, and the origins of the novel. But the book is also a fascinating exploration of the relationships between the individual and society and between the mind and the body, and it examines as well the nature of authority when constructed through persuasion. Narrated by the English daughter of the deputy-governor of Surinam, the novella recounts the lives of the African prince Oroonoko and his great love, Imoinda. Having incurred the wrath of Oroonoko’s grandfather, the king, they are both enslaved and transported to Surinam where they renew their romance 26

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic and eventually rebel against the English. The narrator insists that Oroonoko has an essential character. He possesses “an extreme good and graceful mien, and all the civility of a well-bred great man.”15 Men follow him naturally. In Surinam, which the English have taken from the Dutch, Oroonoko is received like “the King himself (God bless him).” Renamed Caesar, he is a slave who does not live like one because servility is not in his nature.16 Similarly, the nobility of Imoinda (now called “Clemene”) shames her new owner. “I have been ready to make use of those advantages of strength and force nature has given me,” he confesses to the narrator, “but oh! she disarms me with that modesty and weeping, so tender and so moving that I retire, and thank my stars she overcame me.”17 Authority is innate rather than earned. The rest of the novella chronicles an episode of reasonable violence. It is important to note that the incidents on Surinam take place in the 1640s when there was competition for authority among Europeans: Dutch versus English, supporters of the Commonwealth versus Royalists. When Imoinda becomes pregnant, Oroonoko leads enslaved Africans, including Imoinda who is armed with a bow and arrow, in a mutiny. The authority for this action lies in his character and in his need to protect himself and his family.18 The English also act to protect themselves. At one point, even the sympathetic narrator and her friends are “possessed with extreme fear, which no persuasions could ­dissipate, . . . ​that he would come down [at night] and cut all our throats.” Once captured, Oroonoko is held “in a very miserable and unexpressable condition” that arouses the admiration of the female narrator. When the republican governor and the “villains” on his council decide to make him “an example to all the negroes, to fright ’em from daring to threaten their masters, their lords and masters,” Oroonoko chooses to act against them because it makes him feel good.19 He pleases “his great heart with the fancied slaughter.”20 But there is reason as well as gratification at work. Speaking about why and how he should behave, he demonstrates that his mind will not act from impulse. He controls his fear through reason, which requires engagement with other people. Convinced that the English will rape and kill the pregnant Imoinda, Oro­ onoko decides to kill her himself. It is, reports the narrator, “a deed that (however horrid it first appeared to us all) when we had heard his reasons, we thought it brave and just.”21 Taking her for a walk, Oroonoko explains his plan so persuasively that Imoinda readily consents to her own murder. After he cuts her throat, Oroonoko roars “like some monster of the wood” but fights his impulse to commit suicide. “Since I have sacrificed Imoinda to my revenge, shall I lose that glory which I have purchased so dear, as the price of the fairest, dearest, softest creature that ever Nature made? No, no!”22 He buries her and stands guard over the spot for two days until a party of Englishmen finds him. 27

Andrew Cayton One exclaims: “O monster! Thou hast murdered thy wife.” Oroonoko refuses to answer such “impertinent Questions.” Pressed to surrender, he “rip[s] up his own belly, and [takes] his bowels and pull[s] ’em out” and kills a man who rushes him.23 Finally, he faints from his self-inflicted wound and is carried back to the plantation. We know what happened between Oroonoko and Imoinda because he tells the narrator when he recovers. The Englishwoman and the African have a conversation. She and her friends “talk[. . .] to him, and ask[. . .] him some questions about his wife, and the reasons why he killed her.”24 Persuaded by his explanation, they assure him he will survive; that is not a good idea, he replies, because he is dangerous. The governor knows that, too, and lures his protective owner away on a pretext. An Irish councillor, “a fellow of absolute barbarity,” has Oroonoko tied to a stake and tells “him he should die like a dog.” The African’s last request is for a pipe of tobacco. He puffs “as if nothing had touched him,” while they “cut off his members, and thr[o]w them into the fire,” then “with an ill-favored knife, . . . ​cut off his ears and his nose and burn[. . .] them,” and then “hack[. . .] one of his arms.” But he cannot endure the loss of his other arm. The pipe falls from his mouth and he dies “without a groan or a reproach.” The entreaties of English women cannot “save him; so rude and wild were the rabble, and so inhuman were the justices to who stood by to see the execution.” A civil (i.e., Royalist) neighbor declines to accept the gift of a quarter of the corpse, saying “he could govern his negroes without terrifying and grieving them with frightful spectacles of a mangled king,” an obvious reference to Charles I and perhaps James II.25 In Oroonoko, Behn considers the connection between mind and body, motivation and outcome, in a world where the traditional anchors of authority are no longer effective. Religion and the state are marginal to the story; what matters is the exchange of perspectives among very different people. ­Authority— the right to act—emerges through conversation, what amounts to a marketplace of perspectives in which meaning is fluid and constructed rather than fixed and given. In general, English-speaking peoples in the eighteenth century came to see violence as a legitimate instrument of power if it was deployed in self-defense, or more broadly, in the cause of civilization. Oroonoko killed Imoinda and rebelled against the republican English because it was the rational thing to do. But many Britons recognized that individuals alone could not establish legitimacy. Most violence, to one degree or another, was an act of self-preservation. No tyrant was more powerful than fear because it was naturally tyrannical. A human body sensing a threat to its existence would act immediately and instinctively. Experience—call it education—taught that impulsive behavior, in 28

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic which the mind surrenders to the body, is often counterproductive. Because the mind on its own was not able fight the body, it would require allies or interlocutors to help it decide what to do, in other words, to formulate a sensible course of action. Eighteenth-century English-speaking peoples were obsessed with the power of fear and its ability to override their efforts to resist it. Robinson Crusoe, when he famously spots a man’s footprint in the sand after fifteen years in solitude, finds his faith in God insufficient to control his anxiety. “As may be imagined by any who know what it is to live in the constant snare of the fear of man,” Crusoe’s “dread and terror of falling into the hands of savages and cannibals lay[s] so upon [his] spirits” that he cannot find solace even in religion. He cannot pray because prayer is “properly an act of the mind” and his brain is too afflicted to manage his body.26 So powerful is the anticipation of violence from others that it amounts to terror, something beyond the ken as well as the control of human beings. Fear, he realizes, is so powerful that it makes anticipation worse than reality. It “deprives [individuals] of the use of those means which reason offers for their relief.”27 Edmund Burke remarked in his enormously influential essay A Philosophical Inquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, “No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear. For fear being an apprehension of pain or death, operates in a manner that resembles actual pain.”28 For Burke, the proximate cause of fear was “obscurity.” “When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes.”29 Terror, in short, was a response to the mind’s inability to fathom what was happening, to see the bounds of an event or make sense of its meaning. Terror was something human beings experienced before they could reflect, before they could deploy their reason, before they had enough information to consent to the actions of their body. When individuals do not know what they face and conclude it constitutes a power greater than their own, “strength, violence, pain and terror, are ideas that rush in upon the mind together.”30 Fear intensifies a sense of vulnerability. Human beings are afraid because they do not understand why they are afraid. In such circumstances, the natural tendency is toward overreaction. We rightly stress the role of these assumptions about the operations of the mind and body in the development of representative government and courts of law, which in theory substituted collective wisdom for individual impulse. In the absence of unchallenged, unified divine authority, human beings had to accept the value of associating with others so that they would not exercise “the right everyone has by nature of avenging himself and of judging concerning ‘good and evil.’ ”31 Nothing was more commonplace in the British Empire than the idea that all people must consent to some degree of coercion in order to 29

Andrew Cayton protect their bodies and their property from unreasonable or impulsive violence committed by individuals in the thrall of fear. What we do not emphasize enough is that human beings knew they needed the state to protect them from violence committed by them as well as against them. John Locke gave the most influential statement of this position in his 1690 Treatise of Civil Government. An injured man should not “use a criminal . . . ​ according to the passionate heats or boundless extravagance of his own will; but only to retribute to him so far as calm reason and conscience dictate what is proportionate to his transgression, which is so much as may serve for reparation and restraint.”32 Free men have the right to punish those who interfere with their basic rights, usually by making them experience fear. The purpose of punishment, including capital punishment, was “to make an ill bargain to the offender, give him cause to repent, and terrify others from doing the like.”33 But violence to prevent violence was socially acceptable only if it was determined upon in a rational and predictable manner. It is reasonable for a threatened man to kill someone who makes war upon him “for the same reason that he may kill a wolf or a lion; because they are not under the ties of the common law of reason, have no other rule but that of force and violence.”34 The foundation of the rule of law was the avoidance of isolated and therefore impulsive actions. “For the end of civil society being to avoid and remedy those inconveniences of the state of nature which necessarily follow from every man’s being judge in his own case, by setting up a known authority to which every one of that society may appeal upon any injury received or controversy that may arise, and which every one of the society ought to obey.”35 Man’s dominion is “very uncertain, and constantly exposed to the invasions of others.” Because the world is “full of fears and continual dangers,” we require “an established, settled, known law, received and allowed by common consent.” For “men being partial to themselves, passion and revenge is very apt to carry them too far, and with too much heat in their own cases, as well as negligence and unconcernedness, to make them too remiss in other men.”36 Without rational, public violence to contain irrational, private violence—that is, without the rule of law—passionate men will use force to get what they want.37 In that endeavor, English-speaking people needed each other, because they needed to read, talk, dispute, and exchange ideas and perspectives in order develop a sense of civility and a measure of self-control. Reason, as eighteenthcentury English-speaking people developed the concept, was not the opposite of passion, the governor of the body, or a source of authority; it was a process of dynamic engagement with other people within the structures of a consensually constructed state, whose job was to facilitate orderly commerce among its citizens. The glory of commerce broadly understood was that it encouraged 30

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic human beings to preserve themselves by working with other self-interested people; it did so by helping them locate themselves in time and place, constructing their identity, or sense of themselves, through dynamic relationships, and recognizing the importance of free-floating social interaction.38 To deal with fear, argued Baruch Spinoza, “we must recount and frequently imagine the common dangers of life, and how they can be best avoided and overcome by presence of mind and strength of character.”39 Reason worked not by controlling passion but by mediating the relationship between mind and body in conjunction with other human beings, by encouraging people to act through consent rather than coercion, in response to persuasion rather than command. Again Robinson Crusoe provides an excellent example of the cultural dilemma created by the use of violence in an empire built by human beings who saw themselves as just and civilized. Discovering the violence of cannibalism on a part of the island he has never explored motivates Crusoe to prepare an elaborate plan for his defense. His anxiety about what will happen if barbaric people attack him prompts an immediate reaction. Fear animates Crusoe. But in time he begins with “cooler and calmer thoughts to consider what it was [he] was going to engage in.” By “what authority or call” does he “pretend to be judge and executioner upon these men as criminals,” when God has left them undisturbed in their savage practices for ages? Crusoe “debate[s] this very often with [him]self.” How is he to know what God thinks? Is the murder of prisoners captured in war or even cannibalism itself wrong if the practitioners do not know it is wrong? More important, Crusoe reasons, he is imagining a danger to himself that might not be real. After all, the cannibals have done him no wrong, have not even threatened him. In fact, they do not know he exists. To murder them would be to behave like Spaniards killing people they called barbarians who “were yet, as to the Spaniards, very innocent people.” It would amount to “a bloody and unnatural piece of cruelty, unjustifiable either to God or man.” As these “considerations” give him “a pause,” Crusoe decides he has been wrong to consider a preemptive strike. On the other hand, he argues with himself, if he does not eliminate them, they will most surely kill him. What to do? Crusoe ultimately decides to avoid the part of the island the cannibals frequent and leave justice to God.40 Historians have long explained how these assumptions informed the development of British political and legal institutions. More recently, literary critics and cultural historians have demonstrated how they shaped ordinary interactions among literate English-speaking men and women, especially in the realm of sociability. The primary advocate of the latter was the enormously influential Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, son of one of the major political figures in the late-seventeenth-century English crisis of authority and 31

Andrew Cayton a student of Locke. Unlike Spinoza, Shaftesbury believed human beings have an innate sense of right and wrong, a moral sense that when properly exercised in commerce with other human beings leads them to virtue, or benevolence. “All social love, friendship, gratitude, or whatever else is of this generous kind, does by its nature take place of the self-interesting passions, draws us out of ourselves, and makes us disregardful of our own convenience and safety.”41 Indeed, “every reasoning or reflecting creature is by his nature forced to endure the review of his own mind and actions, and to have representations of himself and his inward affairs constantly passing before him, obvious to him, and revolving in his mind.”42 Reason is a social rather than a solitary act. Shaftesbury directly addressed the problem of violence as a victory of the body over the mind. Despite the existence “in the heart [of ] a real sense of right and wrong, a real good affection towards the species or society, yet by the violence of rage, lust, or any other counter-working passion, this good affection may frequently be controlled and overcome.”43 Government and society encourage people to fight these impulses by punishing them for giving in to them, for indulging in antisocial behavior. But, according to Shaftesbury, the best defense against violence is an individual’s sense of guilt. A murderer feels guilt, experiences agony, “his hatred turned against himself.”44 We inhibit violence when we consider others: “There is hardly need we should explain how mischievous and self-destructive anger is, if it be what we commonly understand by that word: if it be such a passion as is rash and violent in the instant of provocation, or such as imprints itself deeply, and causes a settled revenge and an eager vindictive pursuit.”45 We must work toward the common good for that is what we were made to do, and ultimately that is what makes us happy. Shaftesbury’s notions of natural benevolence and the self-interested origins of politeness and empathy resonated with the growing numbers of literate people in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Popularized in newspapers and novels, the culture of sociability became one of the foundations of the Scottish Enlightenment with its insistence on the staged progress of all human beings toward a world of commerce and conversation. Throughout their emerging empire, the British confronted the challenge of acquiring and maintaining power while minimizing violence to others and to themselves. To do so, they cultivated a definition of impulsive violence as abnormal and criminal. It was acceptable to kill, insult, or violate another person or persons if the perpetrator could persuade others as well as himself that it was necessary to preserve not just his body but a civilization predicated on law, sociability, and liberty. When the mind and body worked together in society to fashion a persuasive reason for violence, then violence was not the impulsive 32

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic action of the body coercing the mind, acting, as it were, without its consent. Indeed, it was not violence at all; it was justice. By the end of the eighteenth century, large numbers of English-speaking people in North America as well as Great Britain were persuading themselves that the justification for an imperial dominion that virtually everyone else in the world experienced as violence lay in their commitment to liberty, commerce, and law. In their construction of themselves, they were besieged peoples who had to defend not only themselves but also a superior way of life, the last best hope of mankind. A common rhetorical flourish among the British and British Americans was the idea that they were always the victims rather than the perpetrators of violence.46 In the Declaration of Independence—an engagement with a candid world—Thomas Jefferson argued that violence was a reasoned response to unreasoned violence; the American rebels were upholding consent over coercion, the mind over the body, and reason over enthusiasm. As Jefferson put it a year earlier, sometimes it was necessary to take up arms. Posing a choice to die as free men rather than live as slaves may seem an emotional and exaggerated response to British imperial policy. But the fairness or accuracy of Jefferson’s accusations is not the point. The point, rather, is to see that the authors of the Declaration were, among many other things, educated and frightened men working within the structures of eighteenth-​ c­ entury British culture to justify behavior they would (and did) denounce in other circumstances. The expansion of empire, whether in Britain or America, was thus constructed as a rational act of collective self-preservation against hordes of savage barbarians. English-speakers (Protestants more than Catholics, men more than women, and on occasion, Americans more than British officials) constructed themselves as people who managed their actions in ways that other peoples could not. They were better equipped to lead the world not because they were essentially better, although that idea would become commonplace in the nineteenth century; not because they would eliminate violence and cruelty, although some hoped for that outcome; but because they were products of a culture designed to mitigate the instinctive antisocial behavior of all human beings by cultivating a sense of individual responsibility as well as agency within a community modeled on commerce. In a world in which authority followed from persuasion, men could argue for almost anything. In 1755, the Scotsman David Hume offered a defense of suicide as a social act. To commit violence on one’s own body was a good thing under the right circumstances. God “entrusted [men] to their own judgment and discretion in the various shocks of matter, and [they] may employ every faculty with which they are endowed, in order to provide for their ease, hap33

Andrew Cayton piness, or preservation. What is the meaning then of the principle, that a man who tired of life, and hunted by pain and misery, bravely overcomes all the natural terrors of death, and makes his escape from this cruel scene . . . ​has incurred the indignation of his creator?”47 Suicide does not offend God because like all aspects of nature we live by universal laws. Why, Hume wondered, do we tolerate death caused by insect bites and valorize the sacrifice of life in battle as a heroic act when we will not accept suicide by “human prudence”?48 “A man who retires from life does no harm to society: He only ceases to do good; which, if it is an injury, is of the lowest kind. . . . ​Suppose that it is no longer in my power to promote the interest of society, suppose that I am a burden to it, suppose that my life hinders some person from being much more useful to society. In such cases, my resignation of life must not only be innocent, but laudable.”49 The key, as always, was to reach the decision in a deliberate, thoughtful manner. If suicide was a choice of the mind and not an act of the body, it ought not to be forbidden. It was not a casual decision. Hume believed “that no man ever threw away life, while it was worth keeping. For such is our natural horror of death, that small motives will never be able to reconcile us to it.”50 The ultimate proof of the rationality of suicide thus lay in the fact that it required the mind to override the body’s instinctive fear of pain and death. By the end of the eighteenth century, the logic of this and similar arguments was approaching a cultural dead end. There was a growing sense that violence was an intractable problem that human beings could not understand let alone control, in no small part because they could neither understand nor control themselves. Prompted in contemporary experience by French and Haitian revolutions as well as wars with native peoples in North America, the popularity of Gothic tales of human beings lost in dark and mysterious places, subject to forces beyond their ken, also reflected widespread exhaustion with the seemingly unresolvable struggle between mind and body. Like other Gothic novelists at the end of eighteenth century, the American Charles Brockden Brown explored this conundrum of human behavior that generations of philosophers and politicians had failed to resolve. His novel Edgar Huntly is a narrative of revenge that asks what compels human beings to violence, when if ever it is justifiable, and what if anything can be done about it? Early in the story, which revolves around Huntly’s quest to solve a murder, an immigrant named Clithero confesses to Huntly that he has killed a man. The murder was the reason he left Ireland and came to Pennsylvania, where he now works as a servant. Clithero mocks Huntly’s efforts to make sense of him. “You are unacquainted with the man before you,” Clithero tells him. But the “inferences which you have drawn, with regard to my designs and my conduct, are a tissue of destructive errors. You, like others, are blind to the most 34

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic momentous consequences of your own actions. You talk of imparting consolation. You boast the beneficence of your intentions. You set yourself up to do me a benefit. What are the effects of your misguided zeal and random efforts?”51 Nothing is what it seems; no one is who they appear to be. A bitter Clithero narrates the circumstances of his violent act to a shocked but sympathetic Huntly. As a child in Ireland, he had been virtually adopted by a wealthy woman with an evil brother named Arthur Wiatte, and a lovely daughter, Clarice, to whom Huntly is engaged. The brother reappeared after having been thought dead for years. Resenting Clithero’s usurpation of his position in the family, Wiatte accosted Cilthero in an alley and tried to shoot him. He missed his mark. Quickly, Clithero pulled out his pistol and killed Wiatte.52 But, he explains to Edgar Huntly, his reaction to the death of a man who would murder him was not relief or satisfaction but remorse. The successful destruction of a dangerous enemy saved his body, but it disturbed his mind and left him imprisoned in a web of guilt. “Now my liberty,” Clithero exclaims, “was at an end. I was fettered, confounded, smitten with excess of thought, and laid prostrate with wonder!”53 Declaring himself unworthy of society, Clithero lost control of his body altogether and gave in to fear and self-loathing. With his “fancy . . . ​infected with the errors of [his] understanding,” he attempted to kills his patroness so that she would not have to suffer the pain of knowing that he had betrayed her kindness and her trust by murdering her brother.54 Clithero’s narration of his actions contradicts any notion of the power of reason to manage the body. “The impulse,” he says, “was not to be resisted.”55 In the end, he was only barely prevented from murdering his fiancée, who was sleeping in her mother’s bed. A self-identified outcast, unworthy of love or respect, he fled to Pennsylvania. Worried about the impact of his story on Huntly, Clithero contemplates suicide. Having “consented to this, I have confided in you the history of my disasters. . . . ​I shall quickly set myself beyond the reach of human tribunals. I shall relieve the ministers of law from the trouble of punishing.”56 Huntly talks his acquaintance out of killing himself by arguing that he has done nothing wrong. He has committed no crime, has not behaved antisocially. “The death of Wiatte could not be censured,” contends Huntly. “The life of Clithero was unspeakably more valuable than that of his antagonist.” He acted to preserve himself, “in obedience to an impulse which he could not control nor resist. Shall we impute guilt where there is no design?” Are we guilty when we have no intention to do ill? Clithero’s “crime,” Huntly tells us, was “the fruit of a dreadful mistake. His interests were noble and compassionate.”57 That should not surprise us, for how “imperfect are the grounds of all our decisions.” The problem, or so it seems to Huntly, is not how to punish a murderer, to demand justice for an act of violence; rather it is how to rescue Clithero from 35

Andrew Cayton himself, from unwarranted despair. “How should I convince him that, since the death of Wiatte was not intended, the deed was without crime? that, if it had been deliberately concerted, it was still a virtue, since his own life could by no other means be preserved?”58 Here, it seems, Huntly mouths conventional eighteenth-century wisdom about violence as self-defense, as justice, an act that, like Hume’s suicide, serves the general interest of society. Understanding the role of Clithero’s story in establishing the cultural position on violence that Charles Brockden Brown intends to demolish helps us to consider a later, more famous episode in the novel. There Huntly himself kills eight Indian “assassins,” but his motives reveal as much or more about ­eighteenth-​century Anglo-American notions about psychology than about race. Unlike Clithero’s, Huntly’s murders are multiple and long delayed. He kills the men he suspects murdered his parents some years earlier. He argues to himself that his resort to violence is an act of self-defense, although the first Indian he kills is unaware of his presence. Unlike Crusoe, Huntly’s conversation with himself does not persuade him to eschew violence, in no small part because Brown has less confidence in his ability to manage himself than does Crusoe. If he perceived himself to be in mortal danger, how “otherwise could I act? The danger that impended aimed at nothing less than my life. To take the life of another was the only method of averting it. The means were in my hand, and they were used. In an extremity like this, my muscles would have acted almost in defiance of my will.”59 Still, Huntly is surprised and more than a little mystified by his ability to kill another human being, which he understands as a manifestation of the power of his physical instinct for preservation and revenge. “I was not governed by the soul which usually regulates my conduct. I had imbibed, from the unparalleled events which had lately happened, a spirit vengeful, unrelenting, and ferocious.”60 He then goes on to justify his violence as a social act against violence. But both the character and his creator are clearly not persuaded by the argument. And indeed, they can find no resolution other than awe (or fear) of “the deeds which perverse nature compels thousands of rational beings to perform and to witness!”61 Edgar Huntly is a well-intentioned man at the edge of an American republican empire immersed in the culture of the eighteenth-century British Empire. He is a self-aware man who kills ultimately out of an unmanageable desire for revenge, a frightened man who offers little more than terror as a response to terror. In my reading of the novel, his failure to find a way through his personal dilemma underscores a larger cultural failure. Eighteenth-century Englishspeaking peoples had declared violence a problem. They had developed strategies for dealing with that problem. And still they could not prevent—indeed, many actively encouraged—a virtual orgy of global violence between 1793 and 36

Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic 1815, much of it state-sponsored, on a scale unimaginable a century earlier. They were imperial peoples who conquered, exploited, and murdered countless human beings even as they developed the sensibility, language, and institutions with which they expressed outrage at their own behavior. No wonder their legacy is so conflicted and our discussions of it so volatile.

Notes 1. John Brewer, The Sinews of Empire: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). 2. P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 3. Trevor Burnard, Mastery, Tyranny and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 3, 6. See also Marcus Rediker, The Slave Ship: A Human History (New York: Viking, 2007). 4. Linda Colley, Britons, Forging a Nation, 1707–1832 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009 [1992]); Eliga Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 5. Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-​­American Culture,” American Historical Review 100 (1995): 303–34. See the classic statements in Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); and John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods (New York: Routledge, 1993). 6. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). See also, Alexandra Shepard, “Review Article: Violence and Civility in Early Modern Europe,” Historical Journal 49 (2006): 593– 603; Michael Meranze, “Cultivation and Governance: Reflections on the Cultural History of Eighteenth-Century British America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 65 (October 2008): 713–44; and, as always, E. P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The Origin of the Black Act (New York: Pantheon, 1975), 219–69. 7. Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 32; C. A. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004), 49–55. 8. Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 17. See also, Wilson, “Introduction: Histories, Empires, Modernities,” in Wilson, ed., A New Imperial History: Culture, Identity, and Modernity in Britain and the Empire, 1660–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 1–26. 9. Wilson, “Introduction,” 8. 10. Noeleen McIlvenna explores a vivid example of the larger process in A Very Mutinous People: The Struggle for North Carolina, 1660–1713 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 11. Steve Pincus, 1688: The First Modern Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 485.

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Andrew Cayton 124.

12. Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (New York: Penguin, 2001 [1719]),

13. Ibid., 190. 14. See Andrew Cayton, “The Authority of the Imagination in an Age of Wonder,” Journal of the Early Republic 33 (Winter 2013): 1–27; and Cayton, Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). See, among many influential works, Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel, 1600–1740 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002 [1987]); and Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 15. Aphra Behn, Oroonoko; or, The Royal Slave, ed. Joanna Lipking (New York: Norton, 1997 [1688]), 13. See Janet Todd, The Secret Life of Aphra Benn (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 1997). 17. Ibid., 38. 16. Ibid., 37. 19. Ibid., 58–59. 18. Ibid., 51–54. 21. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 60. 23. Ibid., 62–63. 22. Ibid., 61. 25. Ibid., 64. 24. Ibid., 63. 27. Ibid., 126. 26. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 129. 28. Edmund Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful,” in Isaac Kramnick, ed., The Portable Edmund Burke (New York: Penguin, 1999), 64. See Tsang Lap-chuen, The Sublime: Groundwork towards a Theory (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1998); Philip Shaw, The Sublime: The New Critical Idiom (London: Routledge, 2006). 29. Burke, “A Philosophical Inquiry,” 65. 30. Ibid., 69. 31. Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 238. 32. John Locke, “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government,” in Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Charles L. Sherman (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1965 [1690]), 7. 33. Ibid., 10. 34. Ibid., 13. 35. Ibid., 58. 36. Ibid., 83. 37. Ibid., 85. 38. Among many others, see Emma Rothschild, Economic Sentiments: Adam Smith, Condorcet, and the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001); and Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in EighteenthCentury England (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 39. Spinoza quoted in Israel, Radical Enlightenment, 239. 40. Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, 134–37. 41. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, etc., ed. John Mackinnon Robertson (London: Grant Richards, 1900 [1711]), 281. On the influence of these ideas, see G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility:

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Authority and Violence in the British Atlantic Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Lawrence Klein, “Politeness and the Interpretation of the British Eighteenth Century,” Historical Journal 45 (December 2002): 869–98; Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan, Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Nicole Eustace, Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); and Sarah Knott, Sensibility and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 42. Cooper, Characteristics, 305. 43. Ibid., 270. 44. Ibid., 307. 45. Ibid., 320. 46. See Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Pantheon, 2003). 47. David Hume, Essays on Suicide and the Immortality of the Soul (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 4. 48. Ibid., 5. 49. Ibid., 7, 8. 50. Ibid., 8. 51. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly, or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (Stilwell, KS: Digireads, 2007), 18–19. See Paul Downes, “Sleepwalking out of the Revolution: Brown’s Edgar Huntly,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29 (January 1996): 413–31; and Philip Barnard, Mark Kamrath and Stephen Shapiro, eds., Revising Charles Brockden Brown: Culture, Politics and Sexuality in the Early Republic (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2004). 53. Ibid., 37. 52. Brown, Edgar Huntly, 36. 55. Ibid., 42. 54. Ibid., 39. 57. Ibid., 46. 56. Ibid., 45. 59. Ibid., 90. 58. Ibid., 56. 61. Ibid., 102. 60. Ibid., 97.

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• Destroying and Reforming Canaan Making America British Pat r i c k G r i f f i n

During the American Revolution, the bloodiest theater of war lay furthest from center stage. While muted or forgotten in other areas of America, violence defined the frontier War of Independence, and the nature of that bloodshed differed from the violence in other regions where ideas or class tensions animated revolutionary ferment. Gruesome warfare, an “American” way of warfare, which included “savage” behavior and torture rituals, with whites outstripping Indians in their ferocity, proved the rule and not the exception. The nature of the bloodshed and of the racial tensions associated with it became defining hallmarks of western processes. Indian removal had its origins, some would argue, in ethnic cleansing on the frontier around the time of the Revolution.1 Yet, if the violence proved exceptional, the West did not. On the contrary, it was an Americanizing crucible, and it became a place where American exceptionalist attitudes were laid bare. This was, as Frederick Jackson Turner believed and as historians still suggest, the place where Europeans became American. Some also argue that the Revolution and the frontier were, respectively, the moment and the place in which white Americans became American, when and where they learned to patch up differences at the expense of the Indians. Frontier forms of revolutionary-era violence do not confound historians. After all, however marginal to the eastern revolution, it was the war on the frontier that in some ways made us who we were; or, as some would say, who we are still. Even lately scholars have produced some first-rate books on this theme. And even those we would regard as coming from contending camps seem to agree that reckoning with Indian-hating offers a glimpse of a broader political culture that was centered on eastern regions. Whether we believe in middle grounds or not, “Indian killers” were American, and Indian killing made America.2 40

Making America British While we hold on to such an introspective point of view on the West, the literature on the American Revolution has been pushing our gaze in outward directions. Scholars now place the Revolution in “new” British, Atlantic, and global contexts. Today we grapple with questions of how the colonies were becoming British over the course of the eighteenth century, how they resembled other Atlantic colonial societies, how the Revolution proved a variation on a common Atlantic revolutionary rule, or even how the American Revolution fit into a worldwide age of ferment.3 For, far from being an exclusively American event, revolution in America comprised part of something larger. Indeed, the most pressing questions historians of the Revolution now confront is how and why colonists, who had become increasingly and self-consciously British over the course of the eighteenth century, decided to rebel against British authority.4 In this essay, I would like to adjust the American revolutionary focus in two ways: by drawing our gaze to the margins and by extending our perspective across the Atlantic. Once we adopt this broader outlook, it becomes apparent that anti-Indian violence around the period of the Revolution was not an exceptionally American dynamic. The violence seen on the American frontier appears instead a great deal like the violence at the margins of the Atlantic archipelago, in Ireland and Scotland. The forms of violence that English soldiers and settlers meted out to the native people in these outlying regions of the British imperial state appear eerily similar to the violence animating the American frontier. More interestingly, justifications for the violence were exactly the same. Humanistic ideals rediscovered at the time of the Renaissance and applied to the indigenous peoples in question drove not only predominant views of natives and how to reform them, but also rationalized violence. The idea of civility, in a word, justified both reform and slaughter. Examining the discourse of the period also reveals the broader strategies employed to make sense of natives in the British Atlantic world. We see violence used as one means, alongside plantation and reform, to coerce recalcitrant natives. The ideas brought to bear, the interests at stake, and the strategies employed to make sense of natives on the margins, in other words, were not distinctive to any region. The same goes for process. The ebb and flow between conflict and conciliation—as well as the ideas that underscored each—are nearly identical at the margins of Britain and America. Shifting our focus to the revolutionary Atlantic margins not only allows us to appreciate the American frontier, and its violence, in new ways; it also offers a paradigm for the intersection of local contexts with broader dynamics that explains the revolutionary experience of men and women in different British and American regions as variations on common Atlantic themes. 41

Patrick Griffin

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Let us start with something prototypically American: scalping. Euro-American settlers, we know, transformed a native practice into a macabre tool of terror. They demonized Indians for doing something they regarded as unnatural, then adopted the practice themselves to overawe their enemies.5 Frontier Americans, however, be they natives or newcomers, held no monopoly on taking and displaying grisly trophies. Sir Humphrey Gilbert made a science of it. This English humanist par excellence, a man who hoped to find honor and glory throughout the Atlantic world, knew that people had to be reduced to civility if they were to become good subjects—even if this meant killing them. Intent on making a name for himself in the rebellious Ireland of the late sixteenth century, Gilbert initiated what we would regard as terror tactics. “The stiff necked,” he believed, “must be made to stoupe.” Gilbert massacred men, women, and children to instill “universall feare and terrour” among the people of the province of Munster. He “spoiled, wasted, and burned, by the grounde all that he might.” The killing of women, in particular, “was the waie to kill the menn of warre by famine.”6 As the story goes, Gilbert adopted the rituals practices of his Irish adversaries, mutilating the bodies of the dead and displaying the heads of men his soldiers had killed as a warning to those who resisted his efforts to reform Irish society. Those seeking to parley with him in his tent had to “passe through a lane of heddes” of sons, brothers, and fathers. By resorting to such means, “he reformed the whole Countrey of Munster.”7 He was not alone. His half-brother, Walter Raleigh, who would devise plantation schemes for the New World, shared Gilbert’s vision. As a memorialist argued after Raleigh’s death, he “was a man of great Courage and Industry, but of equal Severity of Temper, which he particularly exercised towards the Irish.”8 This simple story holds deeper truths. For one thing, what happened in Ireland, even in the early modern period, not only served as a precursor to what would happen in America—a story we already know—but also as a parallel. For another, the edges of empires comprised parts of broader systems, and violence became the trademark of such regions. As Nicholas Canny argues, in many ways the ideologies that led to the conquest of Ireland did not grow from Irish, English, or British sources, contexts, or events, but from more broadly European ideas. Britishness represented a regional variation of a European humanist discourse, especially violent when applied in Ireland. It did not emerge from modern or scientific ideas. It was not a Protestant discourse. It did not stem from the disorder of Irish society. The early modern history of Canny’s Ireland would be defined by engagement with the English state and this bloody variant of the civilizing ideal, but it was not an exceptional outpost.9 It was 42

Making America British part of the fabric of Europe. The architects of terror policies in Ireland, men like Gilbert and Edmund Spenser—and, later, men like Cromwell—justified conquest, cruelty, and all manner of atrocities by embracing an older European discourse of civility, one that, as Anthony Pagden and J. H. Elliott argue, would have been familiar to the Romans.10 It was a discourse inflected with anti-​­Catholicism and Anglocentric norms of civility, to be sure. But it was not especially designed for the Irish. Violence of this sort lay at the heart of the process of making the kingdom British. This process defined the Irish seventeenth century. Soldiers and settlers killed natives in appalling ways, irrespective of European conventions of war. Natives did the same. This was the rule and not the exception on the marches. In fact, the seventeenth century reads like a litany of brutality. Think of the names, dates, and events: 1641, Cromwell, the Glorious Revolution. At key moments in the century, English settlers, soldiers, statesmen, and clerics cast the Irish as irredeemably alien and inferior. In 1641, Gaelic Irish warlords staged a brutal rebellion throughout the kingdom against foreign Protestants who had confiscated lands. The uprising begot massacres perpetrated by both Catholic and Protestant. In one notable instance, an Indian named John Fortune who had settled in Ireland and become “a Christian” was mistaken for an English Protestant and robbed of his cattle and sheep.11 Fortune was lucky. Many “poore protestant prisoners,” as one deponent declared, were led “like sheepe to the slaughter.”12 For the next generation, the “Irish”—a term increasingly encompassing both the “mere” Irish and Catholic English palesmen—would try to reclaim the kingdom from the increasingly aggressive and Protestant En­ glish state. An English memorialist named John Booker, in his 1640 Almanack, declared, “It is just the State and Condition of Ireland as then of Canaan; and they must looke for the like measure of punishment by the English and Scotish Nation, as Canaan did by the Israelites.”13 These so-called Catholics had the manners of savages, wood’s dwellers, or at best, barbarians, uncivilized people whose economy was based on cattle. They spoke a language, like barbarians, of gibberish. But there was something else amiss. As Cromwell said, at times the Irish had to die because “nits make lice.” During periods of profound tension, English settlers and English officials tended to see the “mere,” or Gaelic Irish, as irredeemably inferior. “It may very well be said of Ireland, Bona Terra, malu Gens [good land, evil people],” was Booker’s judgment. “But when that wicked Generation of men have drunke their fill of the bloud of the Saints: then shall they as deepely drinke of the Cup of Gods wrath,” he predicted. Booker placed the Irish beside blacks on the ladder of humanity, as they too were “descended from Ham.” In his estimation, “they are now a people farre exceeding the most barbarous Caniballs, and 43

Patrick Griffin inhumane and bloudy men that ever I read of in any History.”14 This racialized understanding then justified appalling violence. Plantation and isolating the Irish followed logically from this vision. In the wake of mid-seventeenth century conquests, an act passed by Parliament declared that, “for the better security of all those parts of Ireland which are now intended to be planted with English and Protestants,” Catholics had to “remove and transplant themselves into the Province of Connaught, and the county of Clare.” Those who transgressed the line of the River Shannon could be considered spies and summarily executed.15 While the rest of the country would be brutally anglicized, here would be a world beyond the pale, where the barbarous Irish could continue to exist. Men conceived Ireland as a place in need of settlers, and from which the Irish would have to be evicted. One of the architects of confiscation, Sir William Petty, urged the English government to dilute and eventually destroy the Catholic Church in Ireland “by transporting a million people to England.” Prefiguring arguments for the Union of 1801 between Britain and Ireland, Petty reasoned that if Protestants predominated on each side of the Irish Sea, Catholicism would wither away, and with it the barbarous manners of the people.16 Plantation might also drive a wedge between two integrated and uncivilized regions: a Gaelic Scotland and a Gaelic Ireland. Establishing a colony of English and Scottish settlers would, as a promoter put it, “bring wealth . . . ​ [and] true religion,” while keeping out “the Highland men of Scotland.” Indeed, “recovery and reformation thereof will bring far greater good to the nation and to these tymes than the planting of tenn tymes as much land in Verginia.”17 In less than one generation, tens of thousands of English and Scottish Protestants left Britain to confiscate the lands of the Irish. Plantation provided opportunities and served as a safety valve for an overpopulated England. More critically for our purposes, such programs were rationalized or justified by racialization. These Canaanites should be savaged. When moving the Irish off the land proved more difficult than first envisioned, officials added a justification of “reform”: to confiscate land and to change Irish manners. If not banished, the Irish could and should be remade.18 Instability remained even after the Restoration. There was nothing glorious about the Glorious Revolution in Ireland. Whole swaths of the country were laid waste. Armies tromped through towns and countryside. Rebels were hunted down, and the Irish once again were demonized as fundamentally inferior, like animals. Reports of atrocities focused upon Ulster. Settlers, Protestant and Catholic, used the period of instability as a means of settling old scores. They did so through violence, intimidation, and ritual humiliation—for instance forcing women to walk naked through the streets. More than sixty 44

Making America British thousand troops fought in Ireland, equaling the number of people who lived in Dublin at the time.19 Violence followed the armies. Visitors commented that some regions, around the city of Derry for example, looked like scenes from an apocalypse.20 In a seventeenth-century Irish context, violence does not seem surprising. What is amazing is that after such grisly episodes, people learned to get along. The eighteenth century was defined by relative accommodation, albeit oppressive accommodation. Penal laws attempted to destroy the power of Catholics, aiming particularly at religious practices and land holding, but measures of this sort were put in place to reform the population, as another way to make them more British. It was a strategy appreciated by landlords who realized that the conquered were going to be living on their lands. Protestant missionaries tried to learn the Irish language to pull the natives away from Rome. Schemes were put in place for the natives to spin yarn for the growing linen industry. Ireland was to be cleansed of its barbarous past through gentry-led programs. Even Ulster’s Presbyterians advocated such policies, using Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians from the reformed Highlands to preach to Irish speakers.21 Finally, men and women of what had been warring confessional traditions crossed confessional lines. Catholic priests married Presbyterian couples. Catholics converted. To be sure, Ireland was an occupied nation throughout the eighteenth century, with garrisons all over the kingdom. Yet, under garrison rule, and as the Ascendancy became more comfortable with its reformist mission, Ireland experienced what historian Ian McBride calls the “Long Peace.” The Irish case presents a pattern. The kingdom/colony ebbed and flowed between essentialist hate and attempts at reforming the manners of the people, two attitudes that were in fact flip sides of the same coin. English ideas of Ireland and programs for either reforming it or killing its people centered on the idea of civility, an old discourse to be sure, but one that had a tenacious hold in Ireland. And it endured. In fact, it lived on well into the eighteenth century, only loosening its grip a bit during the rebellion of 1798, when rebels from Wexford were again characterized and treated as essentially inferior and animal-like.22 The violence that followed, of course, was necessarily appalling. A call for a union of the kingdoms in the wake of horrific bloodshed followed and was premised on reform. What happened in Ireland did not prove exceptional. The Irish were not, as some are wont to say, the only Western European people who were brutalized in this manner. The Scots, specifically the Highlanders, did not fare much better. In some ways, of course, they were the same people as the Gaelic Irish. Around the time of Humphrey Gilbert, certainly, they saw themselves as such. Queen Elizabeth called the people in Ireland and the Highlands collectively 45

Patrick Griffin the “Scotch Irish.”23 Indeed, language, custom, and family ties united the two “barbarous” fringes. And English officials throughout the seventeenth century employed the same strategies as they or their predecessors had applied in Ireland. As in Ireland, officials tried plantation, especially in the Highland regions, by means of Cromwellian confiscations. Cromwell sent troops to ferret out Catholic rebels. He garrisoned the regions around centers of Gaelic culture, such as Inverness, and his troops were also given lands in those areas of the Highlands deemed most Catholic.24 And the Scottish story, as a British marchland narrative, revolved around the same two attitudes as propelled the Irish narrative. Making the Highlands British also involved bloodshed and essentialist hate on the one hand, and reform and Anglocentric conceptions of culture on the other. Scotland’s moment of becoming British reached its apogee in 1745 and ’46, when Jacobite clans united to restore Stuart rule in the British Isles. For supporting the “lost cause,” more than two thousand Scots were massacred at Culloden, most of whom were not killed in battle. The Duke of Cumberland, the King’s son, commanded the forces and, as a report at the time put it, “made great Slaughter.”25 Troops cut down a broadsword charge of Highlanders with volleys of grapeshot. Cumberland then oversaw the hunting down of those who fled. The man known as “the Butcher” led an officer corps that likened the rebels to “vermin” and wild beasts, a subhuman species that merited no quarter.26 As one witness to the slaughter put it, replicating characterizations of the Irish, “the late victory had obtain’d over the Clans of the Canaanites, a sort of Highland Army . . . ​or a Banditti of Robbers, that were left to prove Israel.”27 Troops burned oats, destroyed homes, killed cattle, summarily executed men, and raped women. They did what they could not only to crush rebellion, but also to overawe the people.28 This scorched earth policy centered of—as Jim Smyth points out— “extirpation.” “The Hearts of these People,” one critic of Scottish culture declared, “like the rocky Highlands they inhabit, are a Soil that will not bear any Culture. The good Seed of Instruction is thrown away upon them, and at best can only sprout forth a little green in Promise, but will certainly deceive us if we expect any Harvest of Sincerity and Loyalty.”29 Others, applying the humanistic ideas of civility, saw the Scots as barbarians, a people from a less developed culture, one that needed violent amending. The area around Inverness was devastated, and for weeks the roads were filled with corpses. This was the price to be paid for a rebellion that was, or so the victors argued, French-inspired and fueled by Catholicism. Savages, after all, could not have put forth so concerted an effort on their own. As historian Michael Lynch observed, what happened in the Highlands in the wake of the ’45 resembled what had happened to Ireland 46

Making America British in the seventeenth century. In putting down a rebellion, it was not necessary to follow the conventions of war. But atrocity was another matter. It was supposed to be beyond the pale for the civilized English to perpetrate atrocities, but when confronting a people they saw as somewhere between barbarians and enraged animals, even they flouted this rule.30 The massacre of Highlanders was followed by a policy of reform that some hoped would “breed them up loyal Subjects and Industrious Citizens.” Reformers advocated schools to undermine the Gaelic language, outlawing Highland clothing (including the kilt), and clearing men and women off the land to enable more productive agriculture. After all, “the same Temper prevails among the Highland Scots that was anciently among the Wild Irish.”31 The Highlands would be civilized and anglicized, with all that these terms connoted. In 1746, the House of Lords passed an “Act for the more effectual disarming the Highlands in Scotland; and for the more effectually securing the Peace of the said Highlands; and for restraining the Use of the Highland Dress.”32 These measures amounted to Scotland’s penal laws. At first, unsure of what could be accomplished in the north, calls came for colonization and plantation. Scotland would only flourish, one writer put it, if some left and others were “mix’d with People who are industrious.” Migration to the colonies and the Highland clearances were rationalized on these grounds.33 In addition, Cumberland’s army became a garrison force after it had savaged the regions around Inverness. He in fact saw the army as an agent of Highland reform. In other words, pacified Scotland was treated much like Ireland of the “Long Peace.” The reform tendency inspired all sorts of debates—Should the Gaelic language be exterminated? for example—but the advocates of different approaches had the same aim in mind: to civilize a barbarous population in the marches. And garrison government would hold sway in the Highlands as new forts were constructed to police the conquered provinces. The process used in making the marchlands British also took hold on America’s frontier. Indeed, the American frontier may well have been the most British region in America. America’s British moment began in the decades before the Seven Years’ War. At that time, settlers—and eventually soldiers—confronted a world eerily similar to Ireland and Scotland on the eve of violent episodes. As in the marches, settlers moving to frontier regions saw indigenous people as inferior. But, more significant, although they regarded the Indians as inferior, here it was cultural development—in this case, religion—and not race that distinguished superiority and inferiority. Frontiersmen did not view Indians as the English had their Gaelic opponents during the bloody rising of 1641, the Glorious Revolution, or at Culloden. Indians complained of settlers squatting on 47

Patrick Griffin their land, time and time again, but when officials complained of their taking land that belonged to Indians, the settlers insisted that “it was against the laws of God and Nature that so much land should lie idle, while so many Christians wanted it to labor on and raise their bread.”34 To these settlers, “savage” Indians did not improve the land, and therefore the land was forfeit to Christians, who had achieved a higher degree of civility. But the obverse was also true. If the Indians dropped their ways, they could be considered relatively civilized. In 1737, the Pennsylvania Gazette carried a letter from a migrant to his countrymen. The unnamed writer was Presbyterian, and he extolled the virtues of America. “This is a bonny country,” he gushed, but he also wanted to assure his countrymen that the Indians were not a threat. “There is a great wheen of native folks of the country turned Christian,” he asserted. “They sing songs bonnily, and appear to be religious, and give their minister plenty of skins for his stipend.” He lied of course. But the lie is telling. In his world—and by extension in the world of his readers—there was a place for Indians at the table of humanity.35 The period of eighteenth-century migration did not represent a golden age of intercultural harmony. Settlers at times treated Indians cruelly, took their land, and plied them with alcohol. They saw Indians as inferior, but they acknowledged that they were human. The Indians were “savages,” “heathens,” and “brutes.” But they were redeemable. These terms were used over and over again, suggesting that the framework for understanding human difference was rooted in the concept of civility.36 In New England and Virginia, we find a similar situation. The terms or idioms of difference were, just as in Ireland and Scotland during periods of peace, based in a culture of civility.37 Historians regard this period along this extended frontier on the eastern edge of the Appalachians as the “Long Peace”; in fact this term was borrowed by Irish historians from Americanists. Many things sustained this peace: concord between the Iroquois and French-allied Indians; the so-called covenant chain, linking the colonies out east to the policing power of the Iroquois and their influence over subordinate tribes; available land not held by Indians (in Virginia, for example), much of it ceded by the Iroquois at the expense of these subordinates; and the fact that even the poorest could find land down the Great Wagon Road. All of these factors kept tensions from erupting into bloodshed.38 Such periods were, however, punctuated by spasms of intense violence, that when prolonged were defined by essentialist ideas, much as they had been in Ireland and Scotland. Here again, the sort of ebb and flow witnessed on the fringes of the British Isles defined the nature of relations between natives and settlers. Humanist ideals were used to justify violence, and a mixing of essentialist and cultural understandings of human difference characterized settlers’ 48

Making America British views of natives. Unsurprisingly, Indians were compared to the Scots and Irish. And they were certainly treated as such. The Seven Years’ War unleashed marchland-like violence on the borders of America, and British officials found themselves uncertain whether to regard Indians as essentially savage or culturally so. Indeed, they struggled to square this circle throughout the war. They allied with Indians, fought Indians, viewed them with contempt, and tried to treat with them. Their ambivalence was expressed in the ways commanders dealt with Indians. At first, they saw the recruitment of Indians as beneath them. Indians could not, in their eyes, stand up against European troops. Soon the British learned how wrong they were, and they began to rely on Indians and to treat some of them as allies. The Cherokees were one such group. But after the Seven Years’ War, those who had fought with the British returned to their homelands only to find them peopled by white settlers. They then fought and raided to take back what had been theirs. British troops restored order by doing exactly what English soldiers had done at Culloden. They pursued the rebellious Indians, burned settlements, and destroyed crops. This, the British had learned, was how to deal with savagery.39 The best example of this approach in treating savages like the rebels on Britain’s marches was offered by Sir Jeffrey Amherst. The British commander of North America as the French and Indian War was coming to an end, Amherst instituted policies that were meant to reform in fundamental ways how the British would deal with Indians. Unlike the French, who had sought to create a middle ground between European and Native American ways, the British under Amherst determined that they would dictate the terms of peace. The French had regarded Indians as partners. The British would not, and it was Amherst who would cram British sovereignty down their throats. Troops would remain in western garrisons, and he would negotiate only along British lines. Moreover, the Indians would be allowed little freedom to trade and would have to do so under rigid British terms. Most gallingly, they would be considered dependents. While patronizing, these measures reflected what had worked in Ireland and Scotland in the wake of warfare.40 Throughout the West, Indians rose to contest these measures, undertaking a masterful campaign known as Pontiac’s War. Here again older prejudices showed their hand. At the time of Pontiac’s War, British leaders could not imagine that Indians were capable of acting in a concerted manner. Savages could not devise worthy strategies. The French had to be behind it. As the “rebellion” against established authority unfolded, some argued that only stern measures could “reduce the Savages to Reason.”41 Amherst called for the most pernicious means of all. Infamously, he proposed that “Blankets and an Hand49

Patrick Griffin kerchief ” infected with smallpox be sent as a “present” to Indians besieging a British fort, proclaiming, “I hope it will have the desired effect.”42 In short, any means was legitimate “to Extirpate this Execrable Race,” including genocide.43 Indians merited no mercy. “I shall only say,” he warned, “that it behove the whole race of Indians to beware (for I fear the best of them have in some measure been privy to and concerned in the late mischief ).” He therefore encouraged his subordinates to take measures that could “put a most effectual stop to their very being.”44 Amherst here advocated the same methods for dealing with people on the marches as had been used in the Highlands and beyond the pale in Ireland. Savages, like barbarians, had to be conquered.45 No doubt, Amherst proved himself a monster. But he was not an exceptional monster. Calling for Indians as a race to be “extirpated” echoed the approach of Cromwell and Cumberland. He was not, as some would argue, the person who would epitomize the American understanding on Indians. He tried to treat the Indians exactly as British leaders insisted the Catholic Irish and Highland Scots should be handled, in the one tried and true way of dealing with savage rebellion: no quarter and scorched earth, followed by garrison government. In fact, Amherst had had some of his formative training as a soldier in the Highlands. He had participated in the massacre at Culloden.46 Scotland and Ireland did not only serve as precursors to what would happen in America; they also fit into a broader British Atlantic marchland pattern. Essentialist hate was not the only factor in play. In fact, at the very moment that Amherst was ascendant, the reformist paradigm was also taking shape. Officials appointed two men to serve as superintendents for Indian affairs and act as mediators between the British and Native American groups. One was an Irishman, Sir William Johnson, the other a Scot, John Stuart. Both had experience with subject peoples—in Johnson’s case the Iroquois, in Stuart’s the Cherokee. Perhaps just as critically, both had lived for some time beyond the pale of Britishness: Johnson was born a Catholic, and Stuart a Highlander. But both had embraced the markers of Britishness since. Each had become a civilized, loyal, Protestant subject.47 They would serve as exemplars for an American West that would be reformed by being cordoned off from the East. In the midst of Amherst’s war, officials in London had decided to draw up a plan dividing America in two. The royal proclamation that established the Line mandated that settlers were not to move to the west of it. “We do hereby strictly forbid,” it read, “on Pain of Our Displeasure, all Our loving Subjects from making any Purchases or Settlements” west of the Line. Nor could speculators claim land there. Indians, although under the sovereign authority of the British Crown, were to live unmolested on the land.48 Officials did not do this for what we might call enlightened 50

Making America British reasons; rather, they were intent on managing the West as cheaply as possible. It was understood that this was a region in which subjects could not live. It was to be beyond government, a place more like a state of nature. Without government, civility could not flourish. Indians, therefore, were to be subject to British authority but were not to be subjects. They would, in effect, be equivalents of the barbarous Wild Irish and Scottish Highlanders. The Proclamation Line was to be America’s Shannon or Highland fault, dividing the metaphorical pale from savage regions.49 Selecting Johnson and Stuart as superintendents, therefore, made a great deal of sense. Along with the considerable experience both brought to their tasks, as well as their connections with Indians, they also had made the transition from barbarism to civility. In other words, they had firsthand experience with the marchland blueprint of Britishization that had guided the incorporation of Irish Catholics and Highlanders and was now being applied in the West. And each hoped that, with time, Indians too could be pacified and reformed. But until that time came, their land was not to be settled. In theory at least. Johnson advocated “a Steady, Uniform, and friendly Conduct, and behavior towards them.” The emissaries of reform and civility, traders and missionaries, “would tend greatly to the Civilizing [of ] even the worst of them, after which they could be easily managed.” Even on the marches, plans could be put in place for creating a people Protestant, maritime, and free, in the wake of conquest. In the meantime, the Line ensured peace. In Stuart’s words, “the fixing and ascertaining a distinct Boundary between the Indians and all the Provinces is essential to the Tranquility of this district.” Allowing in settlers who paid no heed to the reformist mission would “expose us to perpetual Broils.”50 Did officials, and people like Johnson and Stuart, really believe this reasoning? It is impossible to say. But this much is clear. Reform, not conquest, underscored the new policy.51 In other words, British officials now urged a model of imperial governance that had been used in Ireland and Scotland: barbarous or savage regions would be garrisoned and set off from civil regions, so that these backwards areas could have time to develop and their people to reform in a climate of peace. To make the system work, Johnson, Stuart, and their deputies would have to keep the Indians peaceful, and they were to use their connections and leverage to encourage responsible trade and to promote the work of missionaries among the Indians. The Lords of Trade also ordered small numbers of troops to be stationed at key points in the West to keep an eye out for French intrigue, make British sovereignty manifest, and warn off the kinds of people—settlers, squatters, and speculators—who could imperil the arrangement. Their job, therefore, was to keep the West quiet. 51

Patrick Griffin While men on the ground, such as Johnson, argued that the West should be left unmolested so that Indians societies could simply develop over time, officials in London began to adopt the more elevated language of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers to rationalize the American West and the place of Indians in it. Embracing ideas espoused by “stadial” theory or “conjectural” history, the chief architects of the Proclamation Line argued that, if left alone, Indian societies would eventually emerge from their savage state, move through a ­barbarous/pastoral age, and then graduate to a level of civility commensurate with a fully-developed culture. The Proclamation Line, along with the garrisoning of forts, therefore amounted to an American variation of the scheme of Britishization through reform. Distance and expenditure did not allow the British to occupy western America as they had occupied Ireland and Scotland, and Johnson’s reformist policies reflected these realities. Johnson famously would also make plans for what we could call the plantation of lands west of the Appalachians. Others had argued for such a policy, most notably Benjamin Franklin. Johnson brought it to new ideological heights. He made the point, repeatedly, that Indians had to be surrounded by good influences: traders and missionaries, who could, with time, civilize the Indians. Once that day came, the Indians would become subjects, and their lands would be open to settlement. Indeed, they would welcome civilization. No doubt, he made this argument to justify his avarice. Johnson was, after all, an investor in western land schemes. And in 1768, he would oversee a series of treaty negotiations at Fort Stanwix that would cede much of the Kentucky country to white plantation, while safeguarding his influence with the Iroquois. However selfserving, he justified such actions through reformist rhetoric, maintaining that tensions had to be kept in check through a cession of land, so as to underwrite broader stability in the West.52 In other words, the West was still British America, with an emphasis on “British.” Consider a series of incidents that historians point to as the most quintessentially “American” of the period immediately after the French and Indian War, the watershed moment when American racist sensibilities emerged in full and awful strength: namely, the raid and march of the Paxton Boys.53 During the wars, the government in Philadelphia sent little aid to the backcountry. Unable to do anything against Indian raiders, a group of men from a settlement near a place called Paxton, which had been attacked a number of times in the preceding years, took their revenge on a group of innocent Indians. In December 1763, the so-called Paxton Boys traveled to Conestoga Manor, an area from which squatters had earlier been evicted while Indians were per­ mitted to stay. Ostensibly, they were after an Indian who was rumored to have given information about local settlements to western Indian raiders. They did 52

Making America British not find him, but they did find six peaceful Conestogoes, all with Christian names and all known to the Paxton Boys. These the Paxton Boys butchered. The rest of the Indians from Conestoga were herded into the Lancaster workhouse for safekeeping. Undeterred, the Paxton Boys rode to Lancaster where they killed fourteen more Indians. They hacked off arms and legs, scalped, smashed in skulls, and blew heads to smithereens. They even mutilated two three-year-old boys.54 Colonial officials were aghast at what had happened. How could these men kill men, women, and children whom everyone knew were innocents? The Paxton Boys themselves had no remorse. These Indians were, in their words, “perfidious.” The “vilest race of savages” is how one put it. The most famous apologist for their butchery, an Irish-born minister named Thomas Barton, summed up the logic that gripped the backcountry enclaves who supported the Paxtons. According to Barton, nine-tenths of the frontier folk approved their actions as the justifiable slaughter of “perfidious villains.” These Indians were “cruel monsters,” a parcel of “treacherous, faithless, rascally” savages and “idle vagabonds” who gloried in “inhuman Butcheries.”55 Barton even likened them to the Catholic Irish and Scottish Highlanders. He was not alone. Echoing characterizations of the Irish and of the Scots, the frontier rioters declared that the Indians “were the Canaanites, who by God’s commandment were to be destroyed; and that this not having been done by them at the time, the present war might be considered as a just punishment from God for their disobedience.”56 About this time, colonists realized they had nothing in common with Indians. Perhaps a true vein of racism deep beneath the surface erupted.57 Maybe, as some have recently argued, settlers discovered their whiteness and longed for “lines” between them and all Indians. Insecure about their position in American society or in the broader British Empire, they projected their inner unease onto the Indian peoples as a whole. Liminality created anxiety, which spurred a retreat to the refuge of whiteness. Whatever the dynamic, skin color now came to determine human difference.58 Alongside this shift in self-​­perception, settlers also began to ignore all they had in common with Indians, thus helping to create a violent frontier world of red versus white. In other words, what we witnessed at Culloden, we can see now in Pennsylvania. In fact, we can observe the same blurring of categories. Indians are both culturally uncivilized and essentially inferior. The Paxton Boys and their apologists agreed with the old humanist idea that Indians could be redeemed. But settlers could not wait; they did not have that luxury. And so they killed. The Paxton episode suggests that this frightening variation on the old civility model would be most likely to emerge in these backcountry regions during 53

Patrick Griffin times of profound stress, war, and demographic shifts, providing settlers with what they regarded as a justification for killing that would at least be condoned, if not endorsed, by others. In troubled times, settlers were apt to give open expression to the dark, evil side of the early modern sensibility that allowed “superior” cultures to obliterate those they deems “backwards.” Such moments proved horrifying, but they were not exceptional. The Revolution did not change things, but it did amplify the dynamic. Practically it did so because violence continued for a prolonged period of time. The Paxton Boys were followed by a string of other Indian killers, each group as appalling as the last, and each following a similar pattern. From the mid-1760s until the mid-1790s, men and women in frontier regions, Indians and settlers, wealthy and poor, lived through a prolonged period of uncertainty, fear, and chaos. Government officials—British, American, Virginian, Pennsylvanian— paid scant attention to western grievances, allowing disorder and violence to define the whole period. The years after the Seven Years’ War, therefore, formed but one part of a broader pattern of ebb and flow. War was followed by oppression and attempts at reform. Then war and uncertainty followed again. And throughout the period, characterizations of Indians shifted and re-shifted, transitioning from humanist understandings to essentialist hate—and often to a blurring the two. What made the period of the Revolution exceptional was the duration of hostilities. In some regions, men and women—both Indians and settlers—dealt with the specter of violence for upwards of forty years. In these instances, the older civility model, with its sensibility of understanding human difference, was straining. Indeed, it would crack in epic proportions.59 One infamous incident stands above all others. It happened at a place called Gnadenhütten on the Muskingum River in Ohio, where Moravian missionaries ministered to a flourishing community of Delaware Indians. These Indians had remained neutral throughout the Revolutionary War and were by all accounts Christians who had adopted “civilized” ways. In 1782, a body of militia from Washington County, Pennsylvania, entered the mission town and condemned the Indians to death. Their crime? They possessed goods appropriate only to “Whites,” things like clothing, teakettles, and axes. The men from Washington County reasoned that the Gnadenhütten Delawares must have plundered these from whites they had killed, for Indians would have no use for such items. The condemned sang psalms throughout the night, and were executed in brutal fashion the following morning. Ninety men, women, and children, whose crime was that they were not white, were murdered with tomahawks and wooden mallets, in cold blood. We know that common people up and down the backcountry shared the views of the killers. Massacres, even on this scale were, alas, not new. But note the rationale. Settlers killed Indians 54

Making America British because they were incapable of using the types of things that a white person would use. Race was at stake here, of course. But so was civility. To be civil was to be white. Again, the murderers were mixing metaphors. But along the margins of the broader British Atlantic, this proved the rule.60 The blurring of categories was a defining characteristic of the years of the Revolution on the frontier. In fact, during this period, Indians, regulars, American Tories, and common settlers all indulged in the British way of war. They all treated one another brutally, adopting customs and methods that would not be allowed by European military convention, such as scalping. Innocents died on all sides, and torture was nothing out of the ordinary. Indeed, the British complained that American militiamen had developed into savage killers, and the accused responded that their whiteness was enough to confer civility. At the most basic level, then, what happened on the American frontier during the Revolution resembled what happened on Britain’s marches not only in the early seventeenth century, but also throughout the eighteenth. The ideals advanced to justify making Ireland British, massacring the Scottish Highlanders, and killing or reforming Indians were part of the same long lineage. Even during the Revolution, in terms of discourse and patterns of violence, America comprised part of the larger British Atlantic world. Of course, frontiers tend to be violent, whether we are talking about Inver­ ness, Munster, or Kentucky. But all of these places became violent in a similar way as they became British. Common discourses gave a British unity to the process, thanks to a shared language of savagery, barbarism, and civility. A common process also animated the history each region: each frontier ebbed and flowed between cultural accommodation and reformist impulses on the one hand, and racialized and essentialist conflict on the other hand. Life along the marchlands of Britain, on both sides of the ocean, reeled under the impact of a common logic of violence, one rooted in European humanist thought tinged with a distinctive British ideology (particularly anti-Catholicism), and animated by confrontations between peoples with different cultures contending over land and sovereignty. This tale reminds us that the American Revolution still belongs in the context of British and Atlantic history, and this in more than just a limited constitutional or ideological sense. The origins of the Revolution can of course only make sense within a British setting. We know this. But so too does the process of revolution. What happened on the margins was just one aspect of a common process and a common experience of violence. In regard to violence, the American frontier cleaves to the British marchland model. To understand the violence of distinctive regions of America during the complex event of revolution means standing at the intersection where local tensions and interests 55

Patrick Griffin meet broad discourses. America, and its revolution, comprised a number of places that were distinctive but part of a broader British whole. To understand these regions and the nature of the violent process of revolution in each means going deeply into them while at the same time we stand above them, looking down from the British Atlantic perspective. Places like Boston, Lexington and Concord, Philadelphia, King’s Mountain, and Charleston all had their own tensions, be these rooted in race, class, or status. And during the Revolution, violence occurred in each of these places. But understanding that violence—and why it was amplified or muted—means exploring distinctive local tensions in light of broad, shared British discourses of natural rights and republican virtue, languages that defined political culture both in the metropole and in those provincial areas tied most closely to it. Civility served as the language of the marchlands; the lowlands, the pale, and the American East negotiated conflict and the meanings of Britishness with another British discourse.

Notes 1. John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 2. On this phenomenon, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Also see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997); James Merrell, Into the American Woods: Negotiations on the Pennsylvania Frontier (New York: Norton, 1999); and Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008). 3. See, for instance, David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–1840 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009); Patrick Griffin, America’s Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 4. Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 5. James Axtell and William Sturtevant, “The Unkindest Cut, or Who Invented Scalping,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 37 (1980): 451–72. 6. Thomas Churchyard, A Gennerall Rehearsall of Warres Called Churchyardes Choise (London, 1579). Also see Rory Rapple’s entry for “Gilbert” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. My thanks to Rapple for help with this reference. 7. Thomas Churchyard, A Generall Rehearsall. 8. “The Life of Sir Walter Raleigh,” n.d., Add. Ms. 4231, v–vi, British Library. 9. Nicholas Canny, Making Ireland British, 1580–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001). For a study that explores the precedent/parallel debate—or really creates one—

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Making America British see Audrey Horning, Ireland in the Virginia Sea: Colonialism in the British Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013). 10. Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. 1500–c. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); J. H. Elliott, The Old World and the New: 1492–1650 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 11. Depositions concerning Murders and Robberies committed in the Queen’s County, 1641 Depositions, Trinity College Dublin, MS. 815, f. 85, 322. See also Nicholas Canny, “En­gland’s New World and Old,” in The Origins of Empire, ed., Nicholas Canny (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 161. 12. Deposition of Richard Newberrie, MS 836, f. 60–61, 27 June 1642. These depositions are now available at http://1641.eneclann.ie/index.php. 13. John Booker, A Bloody Irish Almanack, or, Rebellious and Bloody Ireland (London, 1646), 7, 11. 14. Booker, A Bloody Irish Almanack, 7, 11. 15. “An Act for the Satisfaction of the Adventurers for Lands in Ireland, 1653,” in The History of the Survey of Ireland, ed. T. A. Larkom (Dublin: Irish Archeological Society, 1851), 378–79. 16. Sir William Petty, “A Treatise of Ireland, 1687,” in Economic Writings of Sir William Petty, John Graunt, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1899), vol. 2, 551. 17. “Certyn Notes and Observations Touching the Deducing and Planting of Colonies,” n.d., Cotton Mss., Titus BX, f. 402, British Library. 18. On this dynamic, see William Smyth, Map-Making, Landscapes, and Memory: A Geography of Colonial and Early Modern Ireland, c. 1530–1750 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006). 19. Ian McBride, Eighteenth-Century Ireland (London: Gill and Macmillan, 2009). 20. Patrick Griffin, The People with No Name: Ireland’s Ulster Scots, America’s Scots Irish, and the Creation of a British Atlantic World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001). 21. Roger Blaney, Presbyterians and the Irish Language (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1996). 22. Kevin Whelan, Tree of Liberty: Radicalism, Catholicism, and the Construction of Irish Identity, 1760–1830 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997). 23. James Leyburn, The Scotch Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989). 24. Geoffrey Plank, Rebellion and Savagery: The Jacobite Rising of 1745 and the British Empire (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 25. An Authentick Account of the Battle Fought between the Army under His Royal Highness the Duke of Cumberland and the Rebels (London, 1746). 26. Jim Smyth, “ ‘A Victory Best Forgotten’?: Constructing Culloden” (unpublished paper). See also Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland’s Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creation of an Anglo-British Identity, 1689–c. 1830 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Geoffrey Plank, Rebellion and Savagery; Allan I. Macinnes, Clanship, Commerce, and the House of Stuart, 1603–1788 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 1996). 27. Ebenezer Latham, Great Britain’s Thanks to God; to Her Governours, and the People, that Offer’d Themselves Willingly in Defence of Their Dear Country, against the Late Attempt by France and Rome (Derby, 1746), 4.

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Patrick Griffin 28. Plank, Rebellion and Savagery. 29. “Letter to the editor,” Westminster Journal, or, New Weekly Miscellany, 26 July 1746. 30. Michael Lynch, Scotland: A New History (London: Pimlico, 1999). 31. “Letter to the editor,” Westminster Journal, or, New Weekly Miscellany, 26 July 1746. 32. An Act for the More Effectual Disarming of the Highlands in Scotland (London, 1746). 33. “Letter to the editor,” General Advertisor, 6 May 1746; “Extract from a letter to the Duke of Newcastle,” General Advertisor, 29 May 1746. 34. James Logan to      , 13 June 1729, Logan Papers, III, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 304. 35. Pennsylvania Gazette, 27 October 1737. 36. On this theme, see Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), chs. 1 and 2. 37. See John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730– 1830 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006). 38. Andrew Cayton and Fred Anderson, The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000 (New York: Viking, 2005); Daniel Richter, The Ordeal of the Longhouse: The Peoples of the Iroquois League in the Era of European Colonization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Richter and James Merrell, eds., Beyond the Covenant Chain: The Iroquois and Their Neighbors in Indian North America, 1600–1800 (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2003). 39. John Oliphant, Peace and War on the Anglo-Cherokee Frontier, 1756–63 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2001). 40. Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Knopf, 2000); Gregory Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Dowd, War under Heaven: Pontiac, the Indian Nations, and the British Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004). 41. Thomas Gage to Henry Bouquet, 15 October 1764, in The Papers of Henry Bouquet, ed. Louis Waddell (Harrisburg: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1994), vol. 6, 663. 42. William Trent’s Journal at Fort Pitt, June 24, 1763, Mississippi Valley Historical Review 11 (1924): 400. On this episode, see Elizabeth Fenn, Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775–82 (New York: Hill and Wang, 2001). 43. Jeffrey Amherst Memorandum, 16 July 1763, Papers of Henry Bouquet, vol. 6, 315. 44. Jeffrey Amherst to Sir William Johnson, 27 August 1763, Pennsylvania Archives, 2nd ser. (Harrisburg, 1877), 587. 45. On the ways the British approach differed from the French, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Also see Eric Hinderaker, Elusive Empires: Constructing Colonialism in the Ohio Valley, 1673–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the similar ways the English considered Scots and Indians, see Colin Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 46. Plank, Rebellion and Savagery. 47. On these themes, and as they pertain to Johnson and Stuart, see Fintan O’Toole,

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Making America British White Savage: William Johnson and the Invention of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005); and Linda Colley, Captives: Britain, Empire, and the World, 1600–1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 2002). 48. By the King, a Proclamation (London, 1763). 49. Colin Calloway, White People, Indians, and Highlanders; Margaret Connell Szasz, Scottish Highlanders and Native Americans: Indigenous Education in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2007). 50. William Johnson to Jeffrey Amherst, 12 February 1761, The Papers of Sir William Johnson (Albany: The University of the State of New York, 1921), vol. 3, 330–31; John Stuart to John Pownall, 24 August 1765, Colonial and State Records of North Carolina, vol. 7, ed. William Laurence Saunders (Raleigh, 1886), 108–11. 51. The region was “terra nullius.” On this see Eliga Gould, Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 52. See Daniel Richter’s entry for “Johnson” in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. 53. See, for instance, Daniel Richter, Facing East from Indian Country: A Native History of Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 54. The literature on the massacre is vast. For a good summary, see Silver, Our Savage Neighbors. 55. Barton to the Secretary, 16 November 1764, in Historical Collections relating to the American Colonial Church, vol. 2, ed. W. S. Perry (New York, 1871), 369; Barton, The Conduct of the Paxton-Men, Impartially Represented (Philadelphia, 1764), 6, 8, 14, 29. 56. Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 201–2. 57. This dynamic is suggested in Merrell, Into the American Woods. 58. Jane Merritt, At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic Frontier, 1700–63 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 59. A number of scholars now view what used to be seen as discrete episodes on the frontier as part of a much longer struggle that would last for decades. On this, see Cayton and Anderson, The Dominion of War. 60. The savagery of the massacre is captured in Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 75–78; and Richter, Facing East from Indian Country, 221–23.

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• “Not by Force or Violence” Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, and Rights of Conscience in the Early National United States Chris Beneke

That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore, all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practice Christian forbearance, love, and charity, towards each other. —Article XVI, The Virginia Declaration of Rights, 1776 The constitutional ferment that accompanied the American Revolution uprooted colonial religious establishments and delivered substantive bundles of religious rights to believers of many kinds. In states across the Union, new laws detached civil liberties from religious affiliation, eliminated inequitable taxes on religious minorities, and extended privileges of incorporation to churches that had never been legally recognized.1 These changes were neither simultaneous nor universal. In addition to the suppression of African American and Native Americans faiths, non-Protestant whites still faced considerable constraints. Yet amid the clutter of discriminatory laws, preferential taxes, moral regulations, and office-holding requirements that remained, the principle of religious liberty was firmly entrenched. An early and especially influential example of its hold on the revolutionary U.S. was Virginia’s 1776 Declaration of Rights, which stated that “all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion” and that religious faith and practice should be “directed only by reason and conviction.” Over the ensuing years, state after state moved in the same direction. Like Virginia, most eschewed the restricted 60

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience rights known as “toleration” for more robust protections that guaranteed the “the free exercise of religion.” The Virginia Declaration of Rights included another stipulation that usually goes unremarked: that religion “not” be directed “by force or violence.”2 This negative construction of the maxim that religion could be legitimately directed only by reason and conviction might have been a rhetorical flourish, or it might reveal something significant about the dangers from which late ­eighteenth-​ century constitutional provisions were intended to shield citizens. Because we have little understanding of the contemporary relationship between the apprehension of religious violence (defined at the time as an extreme form of “force”) and the budding tradition of religious liberty, we cannot say with any assurance. In a pioneering work on U.S. church–state relations first published in 1955, Leo Pfeffer concluded that the “religious wars which plagued Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were a matter of history when America declared its independence from the Old World, but their memory was still vivid in the minds of the Constitutional Fathers.”3 That is more or less where the discussion ended. Never decisively confirmed and rarely denied, the assumption that religious violence was in some fundamental way responsible for the First Amendment and similar state measures has floated in the historiographical ether for several decades. The interpretive vacuum is complicated by the difficulty of measuring the impact of collective memory. As Pfeffer noted, those who framed early U.S. provisions protecting conscience and prohibiting exclusive church establishments were clearly acquainted with the history of European and early colonial religious conflict and persecution. At the same time, they enjoyed more than three generations of historical distance from the age of martyrs and the worst of sectarian strife. What—to put it in plain terms—could they have been thinking? This essay maintains that the sixteenth and seventeenth-century wars of religion, as well as the periodic hangings, burnings, and disembowelings of heretics, did provide a lush and useful ideological backdrop to the revolutionary era. It argues too that the specter of religious violence—especially Catholic violence—and the resulting suffering was critical to the early modern case for toleration, but not to the development of a more expansive understanding of rights of conscience. As state and federal constitutions were framed, religious violence, though still vividly recalled, was yet safely ensconced in the distant past. Late eighteenth-century partisans of religious rights treated religious violence as the defining characteristic of a regrettable era that all reasonable and sympathetic people would want to avoid reliving. They seldom treated it as an imminent threat. This approach to a sanguinary and increasingly remote history was integral to a new legal and cultural framework in which broad rights 61

Chris Beneke of conscience were secured, anti-Catholicism slackened, and less corporal understandings of religious faith took hold. A notable thing about religious violence in the early national era was how limited it was. Between 1776 and the ratification of the First Amendment, inter­religious hostilities were subdued, severe state persecution was largely unknown, and the structures and symbols of traditional faiths survived mostly intact. Given that the free white population was well armed and committed to a wide range of (mainly Protestant) faiths, and given the growing intensity of evangelical proselytizing, this was far from an inconsequential achievement. Of course, blood flowed abundantly in revolutionary America, and sometimes for reasons directly related to matters of faith. Conscientious objectors, including Pennsylvania Quakers and the newly arrived sect known as Shakers, bore the brunt of revolutionary religious violence. Religious groups suspected of complicity with the enemy, or even just neutrality, such as the Anglicans whose churches were vandalized by patriots and the Presbyterians whose churches were burned by British soldiers, also suffered.4 But identifiably religious violence paled in comparison with other forms of contemporary violence. And though it is always difficult to tease out religion from other aspects of culture, it was clearly political—and not religious—dissenters, who were the chief victims of popular and state violence in the 1770s and 1780s.5 The dearth of revolutionary and founding era religious violence represented a continuation of colonial patterns. The list of bloody religious episodes in colonial America is well known and blessedly short. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the colonies witnessed the hanging of Massachusetts Quakers, dramatic whippings of Virginia Baptists, and occasional mob assaults on Catholics and Jews. In addition, Native Americans were subjected to repeated and brutal colonial attacks that were often justified on religious grounds. However, by comparison with early modern Europe, British colonial America was characterized by what Susan Juster terms a “scarcity” of conventional religious violence. “The starkest and most brutal forms of persecution,” she writes, “the burning of heretics, wholesale destruction of sacred places and objects, the forced expulsion and enslavement of outsiders such as Jews and Huguenots—were noticeably absent from the British colonies.”6 Extended periods of peaceful coexistence had not been unknown across northwestern Europe during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.7 Still, from the beginning of the Protestant Reformation in the early sixteenth century through the English Civil War in the mid-seventeenth century, Europe endured frequent and occasionally stunning instances of religiously motivated conflict and 62

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience corporal punishment. This was simply not what colonial or revolutionary-era Americans experienced. The relative absence of religious violence in colonial and revolutionary America has been overlooked in historical explanations of early national church-​ state provisions.8 Like Pfeffer, leading historical and legal interpretations of the nation’s founding have periodically pointed to the threat of religious conflict and severe persecution as a critical source of antiestablishment sentiment. There is good evidence, as Edwin S. Gaustad has observed, that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison “came to understand much of western European history as needlessly besmirched and tragically bloodied by the heavy hand of despotic religion.”9 Making the case for Jefferson’s bill establishing religious freedom in Virginia (which expanded provisions made in the Declaration of Rights), for instance, Madison recalled the “Torrents of blood” that had spilled in Europe because of attempts to eliminate religious divisions and quash religious dissent.10 Interpretive troubles arise, however, when the leap is made from the fact of seventeenth-century religious violence to the framing of the religious clauses of in 1789. This tendency manifested itself in the landmark Supreme Court case of Everson v. Board of Education (1947). The majority justified its separationist reading of the First Amendment here on the  grounds that early modern Europe was characterized by “efforts to force loyalty to whatever religious group happened to be on top and in league with the government of a particular time and place.” The result was that “men and women had been fined, cast in jail, cruelly tortured, and killed.”11 There is surely a solid kernel of truth here, but no indication as to why any of it should have mattered to those who framed a Constitution a century after and an ocean apart. In a later dissent, and with no evident concern for distinguishing European wars from the conditions that prevailed in the eighteenth-century colonies, Justice Hugo Black elaborated in a still less illuminating way: It was precisely because Eighteenth Century Americans were a religious people divided into many fighting sects that we were given the constitutional mandate to keep Church and State completely separate. Colonial history had already shown that, here as elsewhere zealous sectarians entrusted with governmental power to further their causes would sometimes torture, maim and kill those they branded “heretics,” “atheists” or “agnostics.” The First Amendment [would] insure that no one powerful sect or combination of sects could use political or governmental power to punish dissenters whom they could not convert to their faith.12 63

Chris Beneke Church-state jurisprudence has advanced considerably since Justice Black ruminated on these matters in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Nonetheless, the idea that the First Amendment was born in fear of imminent religious violence resonated in the decades that followed the court’s early attempts to decipher the meaning of the First Amendment.13 Justice Black’s gloss on early modern history is not the only way to mis­ apprehend the relationship between religious violence and the origins of American religious liberty. The strain of historical interpretation that traces a direct line from the brutality of the Inquisition and the European religious wars to the First Amendment makes a revealing contrast with the argument advanced by historian Lynn Hunt in her much praised Inventing Human Rights: A History (2007). Hunt’s book offers a very different and equally problematic account of the relationship between the representation of suffering and rights. Inventing Human Rights makes the case that novel reading was integral to the rise of “imagined empathy,” as well as the discomfort with torture and the blossoming of human rights sentiment that followed in the wake of empathy’s ascendance. It is a compelling hypothesis, but Hunt is strangely averse to credit the most graphic and widely read early modern portraits of human suffering—namely, accounts of religious martyrdom and religious cruelty—with more than nominal efficacy. One would not know from Hunt’s work that John Foxe’s veritable encyclopedia of Protestant martyrs, the Acts and Monuments (better known as the Book of Martyrs), was one of the best selling and most widely referenced works in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century England and America. Foxe’s grisly tome receives not even passing mention in Inventing Human Rights. This is a noteworthy omission, because well before novel reading swept England and colonial America, there were already evocative accounts of human pain and suffering in some of the great works on human liberty. Among them was the seminal 1644 tract on religious liberty by the irreverent founder of Rhode Island, Roger Williams, which opened by reminding the English Parliament “of Bodies impoverished, imprisoned, &c. for their soules beliefe, yea slaughtered on heapes for Religions [sic] controversies in the Warres of present and former Ages.”14 Notwithstanding Hunt’s inattention to this strain of early human rights justifications, the tradition of depicting toleration and religious liberty as salutary alternatives to the suffering produced by religious violence carried into the eighteenth century. As Juster notes, “British colonies were ‘awash’ in martyr literature.” A woodcut of Protestant convert John Rogers’ 1555 burning for heresy, together with the stirring consolation that he allegedly offered his own wife and nine children, was featured in the New England Primer and recited by New England schoolchildren for decades. Prominent appeals for rights of 64

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience conscience swelled as visceral accounts of the punishments inflicted upon dissenters and heretics spread. Voltaire’s chapter on toleration in his renowned Philosophical Dictionary is replete with affecting examples of bloodshed and torture. Voltaire’s compendium also included his essay on torture, wherein he asserted that among the reforms undertaken by Catherine the Great of Russia, the abolition of torture was the second greatest, the greatest being “universal toleration.”15 People did not have to read sentimental novels to forge an emotive connection between violence, suffering, and the most revered of early modern rights—those that sheltered conscience.16 In short, neither the compressed narrative of the Everson decision, which proceeds hurriedly from religious war to the First Amendment’s establishment clause, nor Hunt’s narrative of empathy-derived human rights, which neglects the connection between religious suffering and religious rights, offers a satisfying description of how religious violence was connected to the history of religious liberty in the early national U.S. Nor do these narratives account for the fact that late eighteenth-century Americans had little direct contact with the sort of violence on which traditional justifications of religious toleration had been premised. So tenuous had the memory become that the vigorous Baptist chronicler of religious persecution and inveterate advocate of religious liberty, Rev. John Leland, could improbably remark in 1790 that “Virginia soil has never been stained with vital blood for conscience sake.”17 The dearth of discernibly religious violence through the revolutionary era stood in decided contrast to the contemporary profusion of civil violence. Neither of these circumstances could have done much to foster the collective memory of religious wars and brutal forms of religious persecution, nor to reinforce their connection to rights of conscience. Some of the more egregious examples of religious violence (for example, repeated mob attacks on Mother Ann Lee and her fellow Shakers) do not seem to have figured at all in late ­eighteenth-century campaigns for religious liberty. Likewise, the widespread and brutal violence inflicted upon African Americans and Native Americans by their white Christian masters and neighbors continued well past the American Revolution. But such violence was probably too remote from contemporary understandings of religious rights and too entangled with other forms of oppression to have a decisive impact on the legal provisions made for dissent, or their justification.18 Yet, if Justice Black’s Everson narrative compresses history between the European wars of religion and the First Amendment’s establishment clause, at least it establishes a plausible chain of causality. In colonial and revolutionary America, arguments for rights of conscience drew intellectual and emotive sustenance from the well-known European experience of religious violence. 65

Chris Beneke On both sides of the Atlantic, the most important early appeals for toleration were anchored in the assumption that if dissenters were to escape the horrors of bodily torment and sectarian warfare, they must be left alone to worship according to the dictates of their own consciences.19 Maryland’s famous 1649 Act of Toleration, enacted the same year as England’s Charles I was executed, offered generous protections for the beliefs and practices of Trinitarian Christians on the grounds that religious compulsion “hath frequently fallen out to be of dangerous Consequence in those commonwealthes where it hath been p ­ racticed . . . ​.” That the pursuit of religious uniformity might lead to war, popular violence, or state-induced corporal punishment was an idea shared by some of the leading seventeenth-century proponents of liberty of conscience, including Roger Williams, Pierre Bayle, and John Locke. Their efforts were focused on protecting Protestant dissenters from the physical pain and crippling financial oppression inflicted by persecuting civil states, as well as the hardship caused by interdenominational conflict. The great seventeenth-century proponents of toleration also ascribed the tendency to use violence as an instrument of faith to what the founder of the famously tolerant colony of Pennsylvania, William Penn, referred to as “Violent Popery”—or, as one of Penn’s sons and gubernatorial successors put it, “the bloody Religion of France and Spain”—that is, Roman Catholicism.20 ­Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Protestants derided Catholics for their alleged idolatry, superstition, corruption, and attachment to hierarchy as well. But the advocates of religious liberty reserved special scorn for the Church’s penchant for torturing and killing those who believed differently. In an influential 1744 pamphlet, Connecticut legislator and clergyman Elisha Williams lamented the way in which a callous indifference to rights of conscience among both clergy and civil rulers had oppressed “the Consciences of Men,” a process that continued “’till it produced the most detestable Monster the Earth ever had upon it, the Pope, who has deluged the earth with the Blood of Christians.”21 Such reasoning was particularly conspicuous at the outset of the American Revolution. The series of measures passed in the summer and fall of 1774 and known collectively as the Coercive Acts, expanded rights for Canadian Roman Catholics (the Quebec Act), closed the port of Boston, severely constrained representative government in Massachusetts, and invigorated collective memories of Catholic rule and religious violence. In response, the prerevolutionary Continental Congress denied that the British Parliament was “authorized to . . . ​ establish a religion fraught with sanguinary and impious tenets,” “a religion that has deluged your island in blood, and dispersed impiety, bigotry, persecution, murder, and rebellion, through every part of the world. . . .”22 At roughly the same time, in Newburyport, Massachusetts, Nathaniel Niles conjured the 66

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience image of a Catholic military state where Protestant children would be “dashed against the wall, and their pious parents put to the rack for the religion of Jesus.”23 And as independence (and the Virginia Declaration of Rights) neared, Rev. Samuel Sherwood reminded his listeners of the “Rivers of blood” shed by saints and martyrs over centuries, especially during Queen Mary’s reign, which had presented “a most tragical scene of bloodshed and slaughter.” These colonies had once seemed “a safe retreat from the relentless fury and shocking cruelty” of Catholic- inspired “oppression, tyranny, and persecution.” But British tyranny now threatened to bring that pacific era to a brutal end.24 This pronounced strain of Anglo-American Protestant thought, which identified Catholicism with the brutality of the Inquisition, proved useful to those who advocated religious “toleration,” a limited form of religious rights. Tolerationist policies enacted intermittently across Europe and colonial America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries protected law-abiding dissenters from physically destructive and financially ruinous punishments. However, these rudimentary protections for life, liberty, and property did not preclude religious establishments or the preferential treatment that was usually accorded to one or more favored churches. Locke’s position that all believers were entitled to toleration, except Catholics and atheists, was also widely shared on both sides of the Anglo-American world through the early years of the American Revolution. Toleration in its seventeenth- and early eighteenthcentury Anglo-American forms was thus both a means of protecting the rights of Protestant dissent and of curbing the threat of Catholic-inspired violence. The constellation of ideological predispositions (anti-Catholicism, the rejection of religious violence, and support for toleration coupled with accommodation to religious establishments) that held sway prior to the American Revolution glimmered in the 1776 essay “Worcestriensis” published by an anonymous Massachusetts writer who lamented the “rivers of blood” that had already been shed in past religious conflict. The author noted a peculiar fact about humanity: “However strange it may appear, yet indubitable facts prove that mankind [is] naturally compassionate [toward] those who are subjected to pains and hardships for the sake of their religion, and very frequently join with them and espouse their cause, raise sedition and faction, and endanger the public peace.”25 Examples of religious persecution and suffering could be found in German and Papal histories (here, revealingly, he referred to the Catholic church as “the mother of harlots”) “in a manner and degree sufficient to shock any one who is not destitute of every spark of humanity.” Along with the religious hypocrisy that state imposed-religion produced, the author contended that these facts were sufficient to dissuade any feeling person from forcing believers to embrace state-sanctioned doctrines. At the same time, maintaining a 67

Chris Beneke system of state funding for qualifying churches via a Protestant religious establishment, was perfectly acceptable to him.26 The argument from religious violence, and the suffering it caused, did not go away. It may not even have declined in frequency. Nonetheless, by the end of the revolutionary era, the bloodletting spawned by the Inquisition and the early modern European religious wars was no longer a vital referent in the defense of toleration and religious liberty. Nor were anti-Catholic justifications central. This change occurred alongside a larger revolution in the early national cultural environment, within which a new conception of religious rights was forged. The first component of this transformation involved the substitution of religious liberty for what contemporaries sometimes called “mere toleration.” Whereas toleration provided for limited and private rights, protecting against severe persecution and violence against dissenters, religious liberty provided for expansive and public rights, protecting against the more mundane structures of religious oppression, such as restrictions on movement, marriage, exclusive incorporation laws, and inequitable taxation. It was very hard to be religiously martyred during the revolutionary and founding periods. Neither those with power nor those without it had the stomach to either inflict or endure anything like it. However, it was still possible to be humiliated, badly inconvenienced, and generally discriminated against. Religious liberty freed most believers (and, to a lesser degree nonbelievers) from these more prosaic forms of oppression. Its tools were the legal instruments that we now refer to as due process and equal protection, and the language of universal natural rights. A second, more subtle change took place during the revolutionary era, one that was intimately bound up with both the waning of arguments from religious violence and the rise of religious liberty as a constitutional and statutory phenomenon. The late eighteenth century witnessed a shift—of much longer duration, but concentrated in this period—in the conceptual defense of rights of conscience. There was a move from the protection of the body as the primary locus of religious experience, contestation, and oppression toward the protection of the mind as an autonomous source of feeling and understanding. Leading figures in the European Enlightenment aimed to free the mind from both the compulsions of the body and the external forces that acted upon it, a relationship that Protestants often framed in explicitly anti-Catholic terms. Elisha Williams, for example, contrasted “a Christian State, . . . ​where the sacred Scriptures lie open to the People” to a “Popish State, where People’s Eyes being put out, they are more easily induced to follow their Leaders.” Likewise, the early eighteenth-century Whig radicals, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, whose ideas gained significant traction in British America, excoriated Catholicism on the grounds that “when people are taught to reverence butchers, rob68

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience bers, and tyrants, under the reverend name of rulers, to adore the names and persons of men, though their actions be the actions of devils: Then here is a conformed and accomplished servitude, the servitude of the body, secured by the servitude of the mind, oppression fortified by delusion. . . . ​By this, the Turk and the Pope reign.”27 Yet even in Trenchard and Gordon’s early eighteenth-century world, belief was well on its way to becoming one of many forms of “opinion.”28 Leading advocates of rights of conscience during the Revolutionary and founding eras placed still greater emphasis on the importance of freeing the mind from the constraints of politics, society, and the law, rather than the direct physical coercion that had once seemed to present such an overriding threat to such rights. The work of liberating the body from direct physical compulsion was an increasingly distant collective memory. The convergence of these ideological changes—away from toleration, antiCatholic justifications for religious liberties, and a focus on bodily suffering—is evident in the development of the Virginia Declaration of Rights, which moved that state decisively away from religious inequality and begrudging toleration and toward a policy of equal religious liberty. In the decades preceding the American Revolution, colonial Virginia maintained an exclusive Anglican establishment with provisions for toleration that were murky at best, negligible at worst. Members of the colonial legislature made repeated efforts to pass a toleration bill. Each failed. As independence neared, however, a new constitution was framed, preceded by a Declaration of Rights. The sixteenth and last section of this declaration provided for rights of conscience. The draft, principally authored by George Mason, read: “That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; . . . ​therefore, that all men should enjoy the fullest toleration in the exercise of religion.” A young James Madison famously revised Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776, replacing Mason’s phrase “the fullest toleration” with his own: the “free exercise of religion.” This was a momentous change that inaugurated an unambiguous turn away from toleration and toward religious liberty. Less famously, Madison suggested another revision: the substitution of the phrase “violence or compulsion” for the phrase “force or violence.” Unlike the substitution of “free exercise” for “toleration,” this change was rejected. The difference may seem inconsequential, but as church-state historian Daniel Dreisbach notes, in provisionally replacing “force” with “compulsion,” “Madison was expanding the protection afforded religious citizens to include a prohibition on all pressure or interference by the civil state in matters of conscience.”29 The proposed 69

Chris Beneke revision would have better corresponded to the switch from toleration to equal free exercise, as well as the elimination of civil support for religion, which Madison also proposed. Madison’s substitution of “compulsion” for “force” suggests too that he regarded the term “force” as a close correlate of “violence,” and therefore expendable. His proposal would have put violence at one end of a wide spectrum of illegitimate constraints on conscience that ran from mere inconveniences to severe physical cruelty. It would have nudged the commonwealth toward protecting individuals from the mundane infringements of the state, while also sapping the singular poignancy of the conventional argument from violence. But it did not pass. Whatever Madison intended by this proposed revision, the Declaration of Rights was adopted at a particularly rich moment in the semantic history of “violence.” Violence was an elastic term in the eighteenth century. It was formally defined as an extreme manifestation of “force,” and both force and violence were considered incompatible with sincere belief and the so-called “divine right of private judgment.” As the Boston Congregationalist Charles Chauncy had put it in 1739, “The Use of Force, in Matters of Religion and Conscience, is not only contrary to the Example of Christ, and the Precepts of his Gospel; but to the Nature and Reason of Things. ’Tis in it self a Method altogether unsuted [sic] to Work upon the Minds of Men. For whatever Influence it may have upon their Bodies, it can have none on their Souls.”30 Though the term “violence” had long been used in multiple senses, its exploitation was particularly acute during the years immediately preceding the Virginia Declaration of Rights. Amid the controversy over proposals to establish an American Anglican episcopate in the 1760s and early 1770s, for instance, “violence” served a multitude of functions, characterizing everything from strong rhetoric to state executions (sometimes by the very same writers).31 One Virginia Anglican suggested that if given the chance, his dissenting opponents would stop “appeal[ing] to Argument,” and turn “to Violence, or to one of the severest Methods of Persecution, namely, that of letting loose the inflamed Mob . . . ​.”32 Another overheated pro-bishop apologist complained that “the Papists would burn us for being Protestants, and the Presbyterians and Independents would demolish us another way for being Papists!”33 Nearly every eighteenth-century individual or group advocating toleration had their own narrative of religious violence and suffering, some more plausible than others. Conservative Anglicans (among the least likely targets of religious violence) dwelled on the beheading of Charles I, whom they called “the martyr,” at the hands of Oliver Cromwell and his Presbyterian allies. For their part, Presbyterians and Congregationalists capitalized on a long tradition 70

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience of sometimes severe Anglican persecution to advance their own campaigns against the Church of England. Even in the prerevolutionary era, the invocation of religious violence was mainly a polemical strategy, serving as a foil against which consensus could be built and denominational unity maintained, rather than a description of contemporary reality. Nonetheless, it spoke to the long association between the terrors of religious violence and the need to protect tender consciences from it. James Madison’s own interest in the effects of religious force, compulsion, and violence went beyond the merely semantic, or anything that he might have taken from the contemporary bishop controversy. The recent Princeton graduate defended local Baptist preachers who, in the early 1770s, were subject to beatings, whippings, and harrowing imprisonments for preaching without a license and disturbing the peace.34 If witnessing these sights was insufficient to evoke the fires at Smithfield or the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, its impact on Madison has to be considered. This was religious violence as early tolerationists would have understood it, and it had a discernible impact on him. And yet Madison’s position on rights of conscience was shaped by a new set of assumptions and expectations. As part of the campaign to defeat a bill that would have established Christianity in Virginia (what passed instead was Jefferson’s liberal bill for religious freedom), Madison wrote that state-funded religion “degrades from the equal rank of Citizens all those whose opinions in Religion do not bend to those of the Legislative authority. Distant as it may be in its present form from the Inquisition, it differs from it only in degree. The one is the first step, the other the last in the career of intolerance.” Madison was not maintaining here, as had the authors of a series of anti-episcopate essays written in the late 1760s, that religious establishments generate “pride” that “easily proceed[s] to inquisitions, tortures, and death.”35 For him, as for the tens of thousands of ordinary Virginians who signed petitions against state-supported religion in the 1780s, the burning issue was neither Catholic bloodletting, nor the suffering of martyrs, nor sectarian strife—nor, importantly, the imminence of any of them. It was instead the challenge of securing the most unassuming of liberties, such as the right to be married by your own clergyman, the right to preach without having to obtain a license from unsympathetic authorities, and the right to worship freely without enduring the many humiliations, small and large, that accompanied nonconforming status. Madison’s focus was on providing protection from the everyday inconveniences and injustices that established religions perpetuated, and not from wars of religion or unjust executions. For him, compulsion and violence were part of the same continuum of coercion, infringing in a fundamental way on every believer’s inalienable free71

Chris Beneke dom to speak and worship according to the dictates of conscience. In Madison’s understanding, genuine religious liberty had its beginning in the suppression of violence, but now it meant a great deal more than that. In the year after the Virginia Declaration of Rights passed, a leading Congregationalist (formerly Presbyterian) proponent of religious liberty, William Tennent of Charleston, South Carolina, developed a similar logic in making the case against religious establishments. Defending a 1777 petition on behalf of South Carolina’s dissenters, Tennent distinguished between different forms of establishment and the varieties of injustice for which they were responsible. First, there were the traditional establishments and the “savage cruelty” they inflicted—“fines, imprisonment, and death”—on dissenters. Such regimes, he suggested, could only be viewed “with horror” by his fellow South Carolinians. There were other forms of establishment “of the same nature, though differing somewhat in the degree of their cruelty . . . ​which incapacitate good subjects who differ from the speculative opinions of the State.” And then there was South Carolina’s establishment, which did not inflict physical harm or deprive citizens of fundamental rights of conscience, but instead maintained a monopoly of financial and legal privileges. This was the religious establishment that Massachusetts’ “Worcestriensis” had recently defended. It was neither overtly cruel nor systematically violent.36 It “molest[ed]” neither body nor soul. And precisely for those reasons, South Carolina Anglicans wondered how anyone could object to it. Having already acknowledged the distinction between regimes that maintained uniformity through “savage cruelty” and those that employed less extreme measures, Tennent attacked the social and political discrimination that lay at the heart of the current regime, asking whether his Anglican brethren would be satisfied with bare toleration, and whether the citizens of “a free State that expect[ed] to gain its liberties by the sword” would fight for such paltry protections. Surely the assembly, “now unfettered by British violence, will not permit the continuance of such a monument of inequality.”37 The traditional terms of tolerationist apologetics were here. Their use and their context, however, were new, as was the conception of religious rights that Tennent was advancing. Despite the efforts of Madison and Tennent, religious establishments persisted for another decade in Virginia, and for yet a few more years in South Carolina. In Virginia, the Statute for Religious Freedom effectively ended the debate. Drafted by Thomas Jefferson in 1777 and finally ushered into law by Madison in January 1786, this law helped shape the cultural environment in which the First Amendment was conceived. Its preamble opened with a presumed consensus: “Well aware that Almighty God hath created the mind free; that all attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens, or by 72

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience civil incapacitations tend only to beget habits of hypocrisy and meanness, and are a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, who being Lord, both of body and mind yet chose not to propagate it by coercions on either. . . .” The text advanced from this premise to the conclusion that civil and religious authorities cannot thereby establish “their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavor to impose them on others,” before moving on to assert “that our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”38 Readers of the Virginia Statute are often struck by Jefferson’s stark assertion of the mind’s rightful independence from external forces and by his equation of religious belief with other forms of “opinion.” The preamble seemed to offer an unapologetic justification for the inviolability of religious belief and simultaneously to undermine its distinctive gravity as a mode of belief. After all, in Jefferson’s estimation, religious “opinion” was no more intimately connected to civil rights than an individual’s views on science. Jefferson’s justification, and the legal provisions against establishment that followed, reflected a decisive break with the relatively limited provisions for dissenters that had been made in the colonial past. The statute is distinguished by the unprecedented latitude that it gave to the mind from “temporal punishments,” “burdens,” and “civil incapacitations”—all of the accoutrements of religious establishment. It was also distinguished by its application, which was universal. No form of belief (or unbelief ) was proscribed; nor did the law single out specific victims or perpetrators of religious persecution. The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom and its preamble expanded upon the sentiments in that state’s Declaration of Rights and in similar measures passed by several other newly independent states. We can get a better sense of how rights of conscience were unhinged from an earlier framework that relied upon the specter of religious violence, the trope of anti-Catholicism, and the primacy of bodily experience, by comparing the Virginia law with a less well known argument advanced forty years earlier—in a thanksgiving sermon before Maryland’s governor that also championed the duty to preserve the autonomy of the mind and the body. The author, Anglican minister John Gordon, was a recent emigrant from Scotland.39 The address was delivered shortly after the slaughter of Scottish Highlanders by British forces at Culloden in April 1746, which had brought the most recent Jacobite uprising to a brutal conclusion. For Gordon, the mind could not be swayed, nor should anyone attempt to sway it by “torment[ing] and punish[ing] the Body.” How, he asked, “can you think to inform Mens Minds by putting their Bodies to Torture? Is it not evident that the Understanding cannot be compelled to the Belief of any Thing by outward Force?” Gordon thought that if “Priests” (and by this, he clearly meant 73

Chris Beneke Catholic priests) were so confident in their religious doctrines, they should not fear objective investigation into them. He went on to ask in extended, ­exclamation-​laden passages whether those “who delight in Torture and Bloodshed” could number among Christ’s true followers, and then to lament that a “pretended Zeal” to glorify God could lead some “to torment and butcher their Fellow Creatures, ’til Cruelty itself is weary of persecuting!” Gordon concluded this particular rhetorical flourish with a gesture toward Great Britain’s “happy State” under a Protestant king who protected every individual in his religious belief, and ruled over a land where there are “no bloody Inquisitions, no Statutes for burning of Heretics, no Padlocks upon Mens Understandings, no Persecution for the Sake of private Judgment and Difference of Opinion.”40 There, “by the Blessing of a good Government, the ravenous, persecuting Spirit of Popery has nothing to devour.” Gordon’s language was obviously more graphic in its depiction of religious violence and religious suffering than Jefferson’s. It was also considerably more specific in its identification of the perpetrators and victims of religious violence: the latter were Protestants, the former Catholics. Some important contextual caveats need to be acknowledged: Gordon’s 1746 thanksgiving address was composed following an extended, internecine conflict in Scotland and England, in which Catholic-led Jacobite forces attempted to overthrow the Protestant Hanoverian regime. By contrast, Jefferson’s statute was composed amid a Revolutionary War effort that depended on French Catholic support and enacted at the end of a tough, albeit peaceful, battle over religious establishment in Virginia. Gordon was a devoted minister; Jefferson an infamous freethinker. There is also the fact that Jefferson’s preamble was just that—a preamble to a legislative act, and that such texts tend toward the understated and the consensual. Political sermons were generally not quite as constrained. Yet there was an opportunity in Jefferson’s extended preamble to recapitulate the long, unhappy history of Catholic, or Catholicinspired, religious violence. The 1777 New York Constitution had done so in justifying its protections for religious liberty, which, it purported, were necessary “to guard against that spiritual oppression and intolerance wherewith the bigotry and ambition of weak and wicked priests and princes have scourged mankind.”41 In his Notes on the State of Virginia, composed earlier in that decade, Jefferson himself had steered closer to Gordon’s rhetoric, recalling a long train of violence perpetrated against the unorthodox in the pursuit of religious uniformity, and asserting that “millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, ­imprisoned . . . ​.” Yet notably there too Jefferson neglected to cite recent examples or identify culprits.42 Instead, he offered a free-floating indictment of coercion in matters of faith. 74

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience The ideological gulf between Gordon’s 1746 thanksgiving address and Jefferson’s 1786 legislation corresponds to a shift away from anti-Catholicism that marked the revolutionary era. This shift was one facet of a broader trend that saw advocates of rights of conscience turning away from the repulsive specter of state torture for religious dissent and other forms of religious conflict, and toward an appeal for protections from the more prosaic and less conspicuous burdens imposed by religious establishment.43 It also signals a shift in emphasis by advocates of rights of conscience from the repulsive specter of state torture for religious dissent and the spectacular violence of religious conflict, and toward an appeal for protections from the more prosaic burdens and less conspicuous pressures imposed by religious establishment. Religious violence, whether vividly remembered or tremulously anticipated, might have been critical in building a case for toleration. But the religious liberty that most revolutionaries sought required a subtler kind of justification. The liberal provisions made for free exercise during the founding period were gratuitous if it was only protection against bodily harm or sectarian conflict that was sought. Whatever the causal chain and precise chronological sequence may have been, we have this correlation: the rhetoric of anti-Catholicism and invocations of religious bloodletting were at least partially displaced as appeals for religious liberty became more expansive. Historians have long puzzled over the noticeable turn away from anti-​ ­Catholicism during the revolutionary years. The trajectory sketched here sheds some light on that change. The break was by no means unambiguous, and some advocates of religious liberty (such as William Tennent) willingly acceded to, or even promoted, early state constitutional provisions that excluded Catholics from public office. Nonetheless, appreciating the longstanding prejudice of anti-Catholicism as part of a larger network of assumptions and antinomies whereby rights of conscience were invoked to protect the body from inquisitorial torment, makes it possible to understand the revolutionaryera decline of anti-Catholicism as the unintended victim of a broader transformation. Once claims for religious liberty were oriented toward the prosaic and away from the terrible, anti-Catholicism became a dispensable appendage of the campaign for religious liberty. The need for Catholic troops and French ships, as well as a budding cultural disposition toward religious civility, were obviously important as well. Still, it is notable that the revolutionary establishment of religious liberty in a largely Protestant country was not animated by lurid accounts of Catholic atrocities—real or alleged. Instead, contemporary religious culture was rhetorically insulated and logically differentiated from the terrors that had occurred in very different times and places. Madison’s use of the phrase “torrents of blood” 75

Chris Beneke in his defense of Jefferson’s bill for religious freedom and President George Washington’s reference to the “horrors of spiritual tyranny” in his response to the United Baptists of Virginia functioned as conceptual capsules—condensed, enclosed evocations of a collective past. They persisted throughout the debate over religious postrevolutionary establishments but had little evident relation to contemporary events (a similar pattern is discernible in Peter Messer’s insightful chapter in this volume on anti–Stamp Act rituals as appropriations of traditional anti-Catholic forms).44 Like the reference in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia to the “millions” brutally treated in pursuit of religious uniformity over the centuries, these references to religious violence were neither specific nor sustained.45 Nor were they bound up with the mechanics of belief; they did not have anything to say about how one moved from the experiences of the body to the imperatives of the mind. In contrast to the “heapes” of slaughtered bodies that the seventeenth-century New England Baptist Roger Williams had invoked in his revealingly titled defense of rights of conscience, The Bloody Tenent of Persecution (1644), the late eighteenth-century New En­ gland Baptist John Leland sought to protect the autonomy of the “mind” in his own The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, and Therefore Religious Opinions Not Cognizable by Law (1791).46 If encounters with inquisitorial methods, or even the shadows of the Inquisition were distant collective memories in the early national period, there were now living, breathing, and sometimes vocal Roman Catholic citizens to answer to. These included the feisty Irish emigrant and publisher Mathew Carey. Carey would not countenance conventional Protestant slurs on Catholicism, especially the longstanding hyperbole regarding papal indulgences. But as combative as he could be on issues involving the Church, Carey was willing to admit that it had gravely erred in its past treatment of religious dissent. In 1792, in the process of making a larger defense of the Church in Philadelphia’s newspapers, Carey championed “mutual forgiveness” for the religious violence of the past. “Much is to be pardoned on all sides,” he wrote. Nearly every sect had committed some atrocity during its history. Whether it was “the horrible massacre of St. Bartholomew” or the “butcheries . . . ​of the Catholics under Elizabeth,” the sin of religious violence was widely distributed among religious groups.47 Carey’s was not a one-sided admission of guilt. A few years earlier, the ecumenical Massachusetts Congregationalist David Osgood published a sermon that held both Protestants and Catholics responsible for early modern religious bloodletting: “The contending parties whether papists or protestants, and the different sects among each of these, however opposed in other respects, yet, all agreed in this one horrible point, ‘that it was lawful to extirpate by fire and sword the enemies of the true religion, and such they reciprocally 76

Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience appeared to be in each other’s eyes.’ ”48 Though this ignominious approach to religious differences had originated with “popery,” Osgood concluded that both Catholics and Protestants would benefit from Christ’s rebuke in Luke 9:56 to the disciples who failed to appreciate that he was there to save lives rather than destroy them. There was of course something else happening in the 1770s and 1780s that weighed against the old calculus: an extended civil rebellion against British rule. One perhaps unsurprising consequence was that actual contemporary violence was frequently discussed without reference to religious differences. In revolutionary rhetoric (and imagery), blood was less upon the hands of Catholic inquisitors than it was upon the hands of British officers and soldiers, and the King himself—“the cruel, bloody, and unnatural tyranny of George the Third. . . .”49 A very different kind of martyr—the patriot martyr—was making an appearance on the battlefields of North America. Dissenters and nondissenters now suffered together in a war for broadly applied freedoms and against a common civil enemy. This point was made by both Protestants and Catholics. In building his case for the rights of South Carolina’s dissenting Protestants, William Tennent asked if his audience could “imagine, that the numerous Dissenters who venture their all in support of American Freedom, would be fond of shedding their blood in this cause if they did not with confidence expect, that they should have justice done them, and that they should stand upon the same footing with their brethren?”50 Similarly decrying the remaining restrictions on Catholic religious liberty and office-holding in the early state constitutions, Carey noted that—at the very same moment—“American soil was drinking up the best blood of Catholics, shed in defence of her freedom.” He thought the contradiction worthy of tears.51 Powerful confirmation that the antinomy of violence and rights had shifted from the religious to the civil sphere came with Thomas Jefferson’s first inaugural address (1801). “Having banished from our land that religious intolerance under which mankind so long bled and suffered,” the new president cautioned, “we have yet gained little if we countenance a political intolerance as despotic, as wicked, and capable of as bitter and bloody persecutions.”52 The revulsion that religious conflict and religious cruelty inspired (and the corresponding identification with its victims) does much to explain the early rise of toleration in England and the North American colonies. If we want to identify a link between torture, empathy, and the early history of human rights, it is hard to imagine a path more direct than the one that leads through the tradition of (limited) rights of conscience. But this does not, as some churchstate analysis might suggest, get us to Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom and the First Amendment. Because along the way, there is John Gordon 77

Chris Beneke and his exuberant anti-Catholicism. Gordon’s excoriation of religious violence and his identification of such violence with French and Spanish popery was in keeping with the custom of early tolerationist antipathy toward a practice that seemed peculiarly popish. By contrast, Jefferson’s statute was neither a defense of toleration nor an anti-Catholic screed. Nor was it in any way explicitly about violence. Instead, it is an especially luminous example of the winding, but discernible drift away from the framework in which appeals for rights of conscience had generally been made. Securing an expansive conception of such liberties required more than an elaboration of the individual’s right to believe and worship as he or she pleased; the social, political, and linguistic context had to change as well. The issue of religious violence made provisions for religious rights possible. The full rights-building enterprise, however, required less grisly material.

Notes I am grateful to Pauline Maier and to the members of the Boston-area American Religious History Seminar, particularly Clifford Putney and Owen Stanwood, for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. 1. A list of leading works on church-state history would include Thomas Buckley, Church and State in Revolutionary Virginia, 1776–1787 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1977); Thomas Curry, The First Freedoms: Church and State in America to the Passage of the First Amendment (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Derek Davis, Religion and the Continental Congress, 1774–1789: Contributions to Original Intent (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Daniel Dreisbach, Thomas Jefferson and the Wall of Separation Between Church and State (New York: New York University Press, 2002); Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore, The Godless Constitution: The Case Against Religious Correctness (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997); Leonard Levy, The Establishment Clause: Religion and the First Amendment, 2nd rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994); Mark McGarvie, One Nation Under Law: America’s Early National Struggles to Separate Church and State (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2004); William McLoughlin, New England Dissent, 1630–1833: The Baptists and the Separation of Church and State, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Vincent Muñoz, God and the Founders: Madison, Washington, and Jefferson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and Leo Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom, rev. ed. (Boston: Beacon Press, 1967). 2. This same phrase, together with most of Article XVI, would later be proposed as language for the federal protection of religious liberties by North Carolina, Rhode Island, and Virginia. See The Complete Bill of Rights: The Drafts, Debates, Sources, and Origins, ed. Neil Cogan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12–13. 3. Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom, 29. The original publication date was 1955. 4. For a concise account of violence against Shakers in the revolutionary period, see John Corrigan and Lynn Neal, Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (Chapel

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Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 109–10; also, Adam Jortner, “The Political Threat of a Female Christ: Ann Lee, Morality, and Religious Freedom in the United States, 1780–1819,” Early American Studies 7 (2009): 179–204; and, Stephen Stein, The Shaker Experience in America: A History of the United Society of Believers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). On the revolutionary destruction of churches and religious symbols, see Susan Juster, “Iconoclasm without Icons? The Destruction of Sacred Objects in Colonial North America,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, eds. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 236. For attacks on Anglicans and Anglican symbols, see Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 296–300. 5. There were exceptions to this rule. Among them was the vicious official and unofficial intimidation of Baptists in Pepperell, Massachusetts, in 1778, which the leading Baptist proponent of religious liberty, Isaac Backus, detailed and used to illustrate his argument in Government and Liberty Described and Ecclesiastical Tyranny Exposed (Boston, 1778), 15–20. Also see William McLoughlin, Soul Liberty: The Baptists’ Struggle in New England, 1630–1833 (Hanover: Brown University Press, 1991), 191–92, 196–209. 6. Susan Juster, “What’s ‘Sacred’ about Violence in Early America? Killing, and Dying, in the Name of God in the New World,” Common-place 6:1 (October 2005). Accessed at: http:// www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-01/juster/. Also see Juster, “ Iconoclasm without Icons?,” 216–37. John Corrigan has demonstrated how biblical language and concepts, particularly those used to enjoin the Hebrews to exterminate the Amalekite tribe (in body and in memory), justified early American religious violence. See Corrigan, “Amalek and the Rhetoric of Extermination” in The First Prejudice, eds. Chris Beneke and Christopher Grenda (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 53–72. The claim here is that the violence that would have been recognized at the time as religious violence was relatively scarce. 7. Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2007). 8. William Cavanaugh points out that “there was virtually no significant interdenominational violence in the American colonies.” “Undoubtedly,” he adds, “the Establishment Clause was wise policy. What is dubious is the idea that the Establishment Clause put an end to a war of all sects against all.” See Cavanaugh, The Myth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideology and the Roots of Modern Conflict (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 136. 9. Edwin Gaustad, Faith of Our Fathers: Religion and the New Nation (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1987), 36–37. 10. “Madison’s Remonstrance” in Charles James, Documentary History of the Struggle for Religious Liberty in Virginia (New York: Da Capo Press, 1971), 260. 11. Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, 330 U.S. 1 (1947). Revealingly, Pfeffer cited these lines—and not much else—in making the connection between the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century religious wars and the First Amendment. See Pfeffer, Church, State, and Freedom, 30. 12. Justice Black’s dissent in Zorach v. Clauson, 343 U.S. 306 (1952), 318–19. 13. Along these same lines of interpretation, the iconic church historian Sidney Mead wrote regarding American constitutional provisions for religious liberty: “As a consequence [of the European wars of religion] there developed a sheer weariness with divisions, a repug-

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Chris Beneke nance toward wars of extermination, and a widespread positive desire for peace and unity. And underneath it all was the growing suspicion that formal theological and liturgical differences were probably not of ultimate importance, and perhaps not even important enough to fight over.” See Sidney Mead, “American Protestantism during the Revolutionary Epoch,” Church History 22 (December 1953): 279. More recently, discussing the founders’ approach to religious liberty, the philosopher and legal scholar Michael Sandel remarked: “We do not live on the brink of the wars of religion that gave toleration its first occasion.” This was obviously true in the early 1990s when Sandel wrote that sentence. However, it would have also been true for someone writing about religious liberty in the United States during the 1770s and 1780s. Sandel would no doubt agree with this point. What is important about his brief and otherwise innocuous remark here is the tendency toward historical condensation that it emblematizes. See Michael Sandel, “Freedom of Conscience, or Freedom of Choice?” in James Hunter, Articles of Faith, Articles of Peace: The Religious Liberty Clauses and the American Public Philosophy (Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1990), 86. In an important 1985 First Amendment case, Justice John Paul Stevens recalled the powerful language of the 1943 majority opinion in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette: “Those who begin coercive elimination of dissent soon find themselves exterminating dissenters. Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” Majority opinion delivered by Justice Jackson in West Virginia State Board of Education v. Barnette, 319 U.S. 624 (1943). This passage was quoted in Wallace v. Jaffree, 472 U.S. 38 (1985), n39. 14. Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenent of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, ed. Samuel L. Caldwell, 1st Series, vol. 3 (Providence: Narragansett Club, 1867), 7. The leading seventeenth-century advocate of natural rights, John Locke, wrote in his Letter Concerning Toleration, that “it will be very difficult to persuade men of sense, that he, who with dry eyes, and satisfaction of mind, can deliver his brother unto the executioner, to be burnt alive, does sincerely and heartily concern himself to save that brother from the flames of hell in the world to come.” (Locke, “Letter Concerning Toleration,” in John Locke: Political Writings, ed. David Wootton [Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003], 405). 15. Voltaire, Philosophical Dictionary, Theodore Besterman, trans. (New York: Penguin, 1972), 396. 16. Early tolerationists count as the first “liberals,” in the opinion of the political philosopher Judith Shklar, in that they “put cruelty first.” See Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First,” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (Summer 1982): 17–27. On the association between religious violence, cruelty, and religious toleration in England, see Scott Grinsell, The Idea of Religious Toleration and the Memory of the English Civil War, 1720–1776 (Diss., Oxford University, 2006); and Philippe Rosenberg, The Moral Order of Violence: The Meanings of Cruelty in Early Modern England, 1648–1685. (Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, 2000). I am grateful to Dr. Grinsell for sharing a personal copy of his thesis with me. 17. John Leland, The Virginia Chronicle (Norfolk, 1790), 23. 18. One exception was the 1772 Virginia bill for toleration. See Jon Sensbach, “Slaves to Intolerance: African American Christianity and Religious Freedom in Early America,” in The First Prejudice, 214. 19. For seventeenth-century tolerationists, the virtue of protections for nonconformists was not simply that it protected tender consciences; toleration possessed the additional virtue, it was repeatedly stated, of protecting the polity from the violence of the persecuted

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Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience nonconformist. See, for instance, Pierre Bayle, A Philosophical Commentary on These Words of the Gospel, Luke 14.23: “Compel them to come in, that My house may be full” (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), 57. 20. William Penn, “An Address to Protestants of All Perswasions” (1679) in William Penn, The Political Writings of William Penn (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2002), 204. The Scottish philosopher David Hume described the era of Roman Catholic dominance of England as one of “violent persecutions, or what was worse, a stupid and abject credulity” (Hume, The History of England from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688, 6 vols. [Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983], vol. 3, 136). It should be noted that even after the American Revolution, Thomas Paine was among those who still equated religious persecution (he called it “intoleration”) with “the pope, armed with fire and faggot.” See Thomas Paine, The Thomas Paine Reader, eds. Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick (New York: Penguin Books, 1987), 231. 21. Elisha Williams, The Essential Rights and Liberties of Protestants: A Seasonable Plea for the Liberty of Conscience and the Right of Private Judgment in Matters of Religion (Boston, 1744), 44–45. 22. John Jay, “Address to the People of Great Britain” in The Correspondence and Public Papers of John Jay, ed. Henry P. Johnston (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1890–93), vol. 1 (1763–81). Available at: http://oll.libertyfund.org. On the relationship between the development of English conceptions of liberty and anti-Catholicism, see Clement Fatovic, “The Anti-Catholic Roots of Liberal and Republican Conceptions of Freedom in English Political Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66 (January 2005): 37–58. 23. Nathaniel Niles, Two Discourses on Liberty (Newburyport, 1774), 38. Niles’s sermons were given in June 1774, too early for him to have learned of the Quebec Act, though he may have known of it when preparing his sermons for publication. His language does suggest that he had such a measure in mind, if not the precise act itself. 24. Samuel Sherwood, “The Church’s Flight into the Wilderness” (1776) in Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730–1805, ed. Ellis Sandoz, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Press, 1991), vol. 1, 519, 508. 25. “Worcestriensis” 4 (September 4, 1776). This essay appeared in the Massachusetts Spy. It is reprinted in Dreisbach and Hall, eds., The Sacred Rights of Conscience: Selected Readings on Religious Liberty and Church-State Relations in the American Founding (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2009), 274. 26. “Worcestriensis” favored what John Adams would later describe as the new state’s “most mild and equitable establishment of religion,” which preserved (in Adams’s words) “the tender consciences of the people of Massachusetts,” who felt duty-bound to sustain public displays of religion. For this quote from Adams, see John Witte Jr., “ ‘A Most Mild and Equitable Establishment of Religion’: John Adams and the Massachusetts Experiment,” in Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America, ed. James Hutson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2000), 2. 27. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, or, Essays on Liberty, Civil and Religious, and Other Important Subjects, ed. Ronald Hamoway, 2 vols. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1995), vol. 2, 678. On this, as on other matters, their views were echoed by the mid-eighteenth-century New York publicist William Livingston who wrote that a “religious Tyrant, is, of all the Tyrants in the World, the most untameable and sanguinary: He punishes you for your own Good; pains your Body, for the Health of your Soul; and breaks your Head,

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Chris Beneke to illuminate your Mind.” See “The Watch-Tower,” no. 18, New-York Mercury, 24 March 1755. 28. On growing concern with the protection of opinion, see J.G.A. Pocock, “Religious Freedom and the Desacralization of Politics: From the English Civil Wars to the Virginia Statute,” in The Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom: Its Evolution and Consequences in American History, eds. Merrill D. Peterson and Robert C. Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). 29. Daniel Dreisbach, “George Mason’s Pursuit of Religious Liberty in Revolutionary Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 108 (2000): 15. 30. Charles Chauncy, The Only Compulsion Proper to Be Made Use of in the Affairs of Conscience and Religion (Boston: 1739), 9. 31. An Address to the Merchants, Freeholders and All Other The Inhabitants of the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1768), B. 32. Virginia Gazette, 15 August 1771 [Purdie and Dixon]. 33. “To the Anatomist” in A Collection of Tracts from the Late Newspapers (New York, 1769), 41. 34. For a detailed popular account, see Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom in America, 1st ed. (New York: Random House, 2008), 101–6. 35. Centinel 3 (7 April 1768) in The Centinel: Warning of a Revolution, ed. Elizabeth Nybakken (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1980), 102. 36. William Tennent, Mr. Tennent’s Speech on the Dissenting Petition (Charleston, 1777), 7–9. 37. Ibid., 14. 38. The only oblique reference to violence was Jefferson’s assertion that Truth had “nothing to fear from conflict” with error, unless she was “disarmed of her natural weapons, free argument and debate.” 39. Gordon was a Scottish-born clergyman who was later elected the first Episcopal bishop of Maryland, though never consecrated. See Mary Starin, “The Reverend Doctor John Gordon,” Maryland Historical Magazine 75 (September 1980): 167–91. 40. John Gordon, A Sermon on the Suppression of the Late Unnatural Rebellion (Annapolis, 1746), 13–17. 41. Constitution of New York, 20 April 1777. 42. Jefferson also wrote: “At the common law, heresy was a capital offence, punishable by burning” and “Galileo was sent to the inquisition for affirming that the earth was a sphere: the government had declared it to be as flat as a trencher, and Galileo was obliged to abjure his error.” See Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 158. 43. On the history of colonial and revolutionary anti-Catholicism, see Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995); Charles Hanson, Necessary Virtue: The Pragmatic Origins of Religious Liberty in New England (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998); and Owen Stanwood, “Catholics, Protestants, and the Clash of Civilizations in Early America,” in The First Prejudice, 218–40.

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Religious Violence, Anti-Catholicism, Rights of Conscience 44. For the quotation from Washington, see Robert Baylor Semple, A History of the Rise and Progress of the Baptists in Virginia (Richmond, VA: Pitt and Dickinson, 1894), 488. 45. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. David Waldstreicher (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 193. 46. John Leland, The Rights of Conscience Inalienable, and Therefore Religious Opinions Not Cognizable by Law, or, The High-Flying Churchman, Stript of His Legal Robe, Appears a Yaho (New London, 1791), 7–8. 47. Verax [Mathew Carey], The Calumnies of Verus or, Catholics Vindicated, from Certain Old Slanders Lately Revived in a Series of Letters, Published in Different Gazettes at Philadelphia (Philadelphia, 1792), 20. For a helpful discussion of this controversy, see Michael S. Carter, “ ‘What Shall We Say to this Liberal Age?’: Catholic-Protestant Controversy in the Early National Capital,” U.S. Catholic Historian 26 (Spring 2008): 79–95. It is worth noting that Carey was still fending off charges of Catholic persecution three decades later, as well as offering counter-charges himself, appealing for “the divine doctrine of mutual forgiveness and forgetfulness of the crimes of ages of barbarous ignorance, insatiate rapacity, blind bigotry, infuriated fanaticism, and blood-thirsty cruelty.” (The original pamphlet appeared in 1817; the quotation comes from the 1826 dedication.) For a discussion of this text and its appeal for forgiveness, see Margaret Abruzzo, “Apologetics of Harmony: Mathew Carey and the Rhetoric of Religious Liberty,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 134 (January 2010), 23–24. 48. David Osgood, A Sermon, Preached at the Request of the Ancient and Honourable Artillery Company, in Boston, June 2, 1788 ([Boston], 1788), 13. [Osgood was quoting here from Joseph Priestley, An History of The Corruptions of Christianity, 2 vols. (Birmingham, 1782), vol. 2, 191.] 49. The Crisis, no. 22. As reprinted in The New-England Chronicle 13: 375 (June 17, 1775), 1. 50. Tennent, Speech on the Dissenting Petition, 17. Sarah Purcell observes that the American Revolution created a surfeit of martyrs for liberty. See Sarah Purcell, Sealed with Blood: War, Sacrifice, and Memory in Revolutionary America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), esp. 22–23. For a vivid use of civil martyrology, see [David Daggett], An Oration, Pronounced in the Brick Meeting-House (New Haven, [1787]), 17–18. 51. Carey, Calumnies of Verus, 10. 52. Thomas Jefferson, “First Inaugural Address,” (4 March 1801) in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 493–95.

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• Government without Arms; Arms without Government The Case of Pennsylvania

J e s s i c a C h o pp i n R o n e y

By spring of 1775, Philadelphia was a city on the brink. One observer warned the governor of a neighboring colony that “all ranks of Men were exasperated,” a dangerous situation made still worse by a stagnating economy and the designs of “needy, desperate Men . . . ​endeavoring to Blow up the Coal of Confusion.” And, “You know,” the letter-writer added direfully, “the Consequence of such Men among the lower sort of the Community.” From his perspective, things looked very, very bad. Philadelphia had become a hub attracting “all Men . . . ​ willing to enter into Measures of the most Violent sort.” Finally, on April 25, in response to news of the “Butchery” at Lexington, the collective rage of the people came to a head. An unprecedented crowd converged upon the State House demanding immediate action. Supporters calculated there to be eight thousand in the throng—fully a third of the population of Philadelphia.1 The massing crowd, however, was not a mob. It was an orderly meeting “pursuant to public notice” to consider measures in response to the deepening crisis with Britain. Within days Philadelphia volunteers had formed themselves into the “Military Associators” and begun recruiting companies, electing officers, and drilling. A mere month later, after watching a review of over two thousand of the Associators, John Adams wrote home excitedly to Abigail that “so sudden a formation of an Army never took Place any where.”2 But Adams was wrong. “So sudden a formation of an Army” had in fact taken place multiple times in the history of Philadelphia alone, and in each case it had done so almost entirely outside the parameters of formal government. Unlike all other British mainland colonies, and because it was founded upon Quaker principles, Pennsylvania’s provincial government would neither organize military defense nor compel any of its citizens to bear arms. From the province’s earliest days this stance caused profound political and social disrup84

Government without Arms; Arms without Government tion. However, Pennsylvania’s unique institutional setting also facilitated creative civic adaptations leading up to and including extralegal militias. The earliest attempt, during Queen Anne’s War in 1702, failed to mobilize more than a few Anglicans; but in 1747, during King George’s War, as much as half the adult white male population of Philadelphia joined the extralegal Defense Association. Again in 1756, as many as one-third of the eligible men in the city shouldered arms in either the government-sanctioned Association or the extralegal Independent Companies. In each of these cases the militias sprang up rapidly and out of necessity, in response to an immediate perceived threat. Lacking a standing structure for military preparedness, Pennsylvanians had to improvise a different response to military threats. In 1775 when political radicals wanted to mobilize and militarize, they had a ready-made pattern upon which to draw.3 Historians of colonial America have painted the political participation of most urban dwellers as restricted primarily to a growing “public sphere” of spirited discourse on one the hand, and popular or “mob” actions on the other. In neither case did urban Americans engage in sustained political organization. They voted for their social betters, they voiced their opinions in taverns, and on occasion they rioted. The Revolution, therefore, was a transformative moment for the social and political organization of cities and the political engagement of shopkeepers, artisans, and laborers. In Philadelphia, for example, one scholar concludes the Military Association formed so enthusiastically that April of 1775 functioned as a “school of political democracy,” and “the first step in the transition from crowd activity to organized politics” for lower-class Philadelphians.4 Previous scholarship, however, has overlooked the deep roots of the 1775 Association. Through its series of voluntary militias, Philadelphia had evolved over decades a mechanism with the power to channel reflexive plebeian crowd response into something quite different: organized, sustained, civic engagement. In 1775–76 proponents of independence used that civic engagement as the platform upon which to base an entirely new government, creating the most radical constitution of the American Revolution.5 The crucial factor that made this transformation possible was the creative stress produced in a community in which the state refused to provide for defense, even when the majority clamored for it. The failure of a government, otherwise characterized by popular freedoms and programs, to respond to the wishes of the majority on defense created impasse. No other political faction could muster an electoral campaign to compete with the religious freedoms, hands-off government, low taxes, and productive economic climate facilitated by Quaker government; no Quaker government could ever entirely overcome 85

Jessica Choppin Roney popular dissatisfaction with its pacifist stance, especially after the start of the Seven Years’ War in 1754. The resulting compromise—occasional extralegal, voluntary militias—was cobbled together out of necessity, but at tremendous long-term political cost to the existing system. The culture of extralegal, voluntary militias bifurcated authority and the civil basis for that authority. Ultimately, it provided a competing framework for governance that toppled the old elites and established a new government. Because Pennsylvania never developed a state mechanism to protect its citizens from the threat or reality of violence, the civic institutions and engagements of its citizens evolved differently than in other British colonies. Voluntary martial activity facilitated both the institutional framework and the civic culture that in the American Revolution led Pennsylvania to its extreme commitment to republican governance.6 The strife Pennsylvanians endured through their provincial history in balancing the needs of defense against the principles of pacifism, created not only the mechanism that would undermine their government, but the means of rebuilding it. The formal state abdicated responsibility for a major aspect of public life—defense—and ceded that power to extralegal combinations of men who thereby became well versed in civic organization, coalition building, and the negotiation of power. In addition to the skills they acquired, these combinations of men articulated an institutional basis for their own legitimacy in shaping events and even policy. Ironically, because of these improvisations, historically pacifist Pennsylvania found itself as prepared if not more prepared than many other colonies for military defense. The extralegal, voluntary military culture that it had fostered smoothed the transition to a new government and helped ensure that the new constitution would be the most radical of any adopted in the American Revolution. The second to last British colony founded in mainland North America, Pennsylvania established itself relatively rapidly as both stable and prosperous. Its Quaker frame of government veered sharply from mainstream English political theory and civil institutions, divorcing state from church, stressing freedom of conscience, encouraging broad participation from the people, welcoming immigrants of many faiths and ethnicities, establishing friendly diplomatic relations with Indians, and reforming the penal code. In its early years Pennsylvania’s government also moved proactively to enhance the economic productivity of its rich agricultural lands through sound fiscal policy, relatively equitable land distribution, and careful regulation of the quality of flour, its main export. As a result, the colony received a steady stream of immigrants, attracted by religious freedom, political liberties, and economic opportunity.7 Within thirty years of its first settlement, Quakers were outnumbered. 86

Government without Arms; Arms without Government Quaker leaders, however, hoped they would be able to assimilate the newcomers into the tenets of “civil Quakerism,” if not into the Quaker faith. By the second quarter of the eighteenth century they could consider themselves highly successful; the Quaker-dominated government inspired the political loyalty of large segments of the population, whatever their religious beliefs. But one problem plagued the province from its very inception: the Quaker insistence on pacifism, even in cases of self-defense. Pennsylvania politician James Logan summarized the difficulty of governance without military protection succinctly: “Government without arms,” he expostulated, “is an inconsistency.” That “inconsistency” was troubling on at least three levels.8 First, it undermined the very basis of citizenship as understood by most contemporary Englishmen, and called into question precisely what it was that cemented political community in Pennsylvania. Theorists agreed that militias served a vital political function: protecting the people from the tyrannical overreach of government at the expense of the liberties of the people. Moreover, militias proved the individual and collective virtue of male citizens willing to take up arms in defense of their community. Early American militias thus played a central role in defining a man’s full civic participation in a community. As an institution, it served as a centralizing force, one that drew a community together. By the eighteenth century in many places, although the military utility of militias had declined, musters continued to serve important social functions, knitting together the community. But in Pennsylvania, without a militia, and with a large Quaker population explicitly opposed to martial activity, Pennsylvanians had no similar outlet for expressing civic virtue or a collective identity. To be sure, the Quaker founders offered other routes to civic involvement, but the enthusiastic response of Pennsylvania men (including many Quakers) to extralegal militias suggests that those avenues were not entirely satisfactory.9 Indeed, Pennsylvania had few institutions of the kind that might promote a sense of shared community or civic identity. The province was characterized by very limited government activity. The Assembly had the highest ratio of inhabitants to legislators of any provincial assembly, passed the fewest laws, and heard the fewest petitions. Moreover, with the exception of Philadelphia, local townships had very little power or autonomy. The newer “backcountry” counties to the north and west lacked much of the basic infrastructure of the older counties. One historian concludes, “perhaps the most striking fact of government in Pennsylvania—particularly at the provincial level—is how little active governance actually occurred.” The refusal to maintain a militia precluded one way of engaging Pennsylvania’s male citizens in the corporate project of governance.10 87

Jessica Choppin Roney Second, the refusal of the government to organize military defense abdicated one of the core responsibilities of the state to its inhabitants: defense of life and protection of property. Frustrated by Quaker intransigence on defense, Benjamin Franklin, who was otherwise a stalwart political ally of the Quaker political elite, articulated the stance of many Pennsylvanians when he declared: “Protection is as truly due from the Government to the People, as Obedience from the People to the Government.” In Pennsylvania the government not only failed, it actually refused to live up to its obligations. That being the case, Franklin and others concluded that Pennsylvanians not only retained the right, but were impelled by duty to act on their own.11 Finally, the “inconsistency” of a government without arms placed Pennsylvania in a precarious position vis-à-vis the British Empire, which on multiple occasions considered imposing fundamental changes to its constitution, either to bring the colony under royal control or to bar pacifists from holding government office. William Penn himself concluded that in order to protect the political sovereignty of the colony, Quakers must compromise on the matter of a militia—advice his fractious colonists declined to take. As long as Pennsylvania had no provision for military defense, it stood out not only against its own citizens, as Franklin pointed out, but also imperiled its position in an empire engaged in frequent imperial contests and bent on territorial expansion.12 In short, by the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the stability and relative harmony that characterized Pennsylvania masked deep-rooted problems. What civic roles could or would inhabitants play? What loyalty could be expected of an ethnically, linguistically, and religiously diverse population touched only lightly by government and without strong institutions to draw them together? What responsibilities did the government owe to its founding principles, its current population, its parent empire? And would the increasingly non-Quaker population be content to let Quaker legislators decide these matters on their own? These questions took on terrible urgency in 1747, during King George’s War, as reports circulated that French and Spanish privateers were prowling up the Delaware River, burning farmsteads, harassing Philadelphia’s shipping, and threatening even the rich port city itself. The inhabitants of Philadelphia demanded immediate and decisive action. The majority of Quaker legislators were not unmoved by the danger at hand, but they held their religious beliefs to be absolutely inseparable from their political responsibilities. For strict Quakers, quite simply, government and religious duty could not be separated. Over and above any temporal concerns—even approaching pirates—they must “seek unto God,” and remain true to the core tenets of their beliefs. To act otherwise would be to betray not only their faith but also the founding principles of the 88

Government without Arms; Arms without Government colony; and more serious, it would jeopardize the consciences of all the Quakers in the colony.13 The Assembly’s decision did not coincide with the wishes of most Pennsylvanians, and, in the words of one Anglican, raised in Philadelphia general “indignation against a Quaker government.” The Assembly, however, refused to reconsider its position. Pennsylvania had been founded on the basis of the Quaker belief that power resides with the people and that all the people were bound both to participate in and contribute to the harmonious development of the entire community. However, as the colony grew, Quaker legislators lost sight of that formulation and chose to limit the political voice of the new counties extending north and west of the original southeastern core. The original three counties and Philadelphia had a total of twenty-six seats in the Assembly, while the five newer counties shared only eleven between them. The result was a “paradox of popular and oligarchic political behavior,” in which annual elections and a relatively widespread franchise were counteracted by a gerry­ mandered system that gave disproportionate weight and power to Quaker demographic strongholds.14 In this critical moment, with privateers threatening to descend on the defenseless city at any moment, the Quakers’ political ally Benjamin Franklin hatched what seemed the perfect solution. He published Plain Truth, a pamphlet calling on “the middling People, the Farmers, Shopkeepers and Tradesmen of this City and Country” to stop relying on either the intransigent Assembly or the “Great and rich Men, Merchants and others,” who had both failed to lead in this time of crisis. Instead, he urged the common men, the “first movers” to unite into an extralegal militia. His call resonated profoundly. Within weeks between a thousand and twelve hundred Philadelphians—fully half the adult white male population of the city—had joined and begun drilling in the streets of the city. Defense Association leaders organized a lottery to raise funds, carried on negotiations with neighboring governors for the loan or sale of cannon, and began constructing two forts on the banks of the Delaware River. The counties enthusiastically followed suit, forming at least fifty-three companies.15 The Assembly did nothing to hinder the Association’s activities, but rather voted itself into recess during the height of preparations. Meanwhile, the acting governor supported the militia but made no attempt to direct it. It remained from first to last an armed, extralegal body. “Where a Government takes proper Measures to protect the People under its Care,” Franklin asserted, the Defense Association would have been “unnecessary and unjustifiable.” In Pennsylvania, however, “and perhaps if you search the World through, you will find it in our [province] only,” the government refused point-blank to defend its 89

Jessica Choppin Roney citizens from attack. By reneging on that responsibility, the government ceded to its citizens the right to act. It also allowed a dangerous precedent to be set.16 The Defense Association could now claim better to represent the people than did the Assembly; it derived its authority not from government but directly from the people, and to a greater degree than did the Assembly. Half the able-bodied white men of Philadelphia volunteered in the Defense Association in 1747, a far greater proportion than voted in formal elections. Ten years earlier not even fifteen percent of adult white men in Philadelphia had voted; in 1751, the next year for which election returns have survived, just over a third voted. On average, slightly less than a quarter of eligible voters turned out each year between 1725 and 1775. Both by percentage and by numbers, more men mobilized to serve in the Defense Association than went to the polls.17 Indeed, many of the men who volunteered for the Association probably were not eligible to vote. In Pennsylvania, a man had to own either fifty acres of land or an estate worth £50 in order to vote—a difficult standard to achieve, especially in Philadelphia. Even in the absence of muster rolls, it is clear that many Associators were men of limited economic means. When they volunteered, they agreed to provide themselves with their own firearms and a small supply of cartridges. However, Franklin explicitly noted that fundraising would enable them to supply “arms for the poor,” indicating that some Associators did not already own and were unable to purchase their own arms. The Defense Association not only allowed but encouraged men who had rarely or never participated in the formal political processes of their community now to assume responsibility for one of the most critical functions of the state. They publicly signed their names to “Forms of Association,” they voted for their officers, and they served in a coherent, organized militia for a period of many months. The Defense Association extended political participation both in terms of the men who could avail themselves of it, and the time period during which they exercised the right.18 Support for the Defense Association penetrated deeply through the community in other ways as well. Residents, including women and even many Quakers, supported its activities by purchasing tickets in two different lotteries designed to raise money for it. Framed as voluntary and patriotic, the first lottery was extremely successful. It filled within seven weeks, well short of the several months a lottery usually took. Several publicly minded citizens forbore to collect their prizes, thus transforming their winnings into outright donations. The second lottery raised over £600 in this way. Opening the two lotteries to the widest possible constituency expanded the mandate of the Association by bringing in numbers of supporters in addition to the volunteers.19 Thus, when the ballot box failed to provide Philadelphians with defense 90

Government without Arms; Arms without Government in 1747, they voted with their feet, their arms, and their pocketbooks, creating an extralegal, democratic military force that acted outside the bounds of formal government. In the short term, Pennsylvania had found a solution to the immediate problem of defense, but in the longer-term it had set itself up for unexpected problems by creating two competing democratic institutions with rival visions of political sovereignty and the duties of government to its constituents. By negotiating peace early in 1748, European diplomats rescued Pennsylvanians from the inherent contradiction of two popularly created democratic institutions, each acting without recognizing or answering to the other. Peace abruptly ended the need for the Defense Association, and within two years it had faded away entirely. However, the two batteries on the Delaware remained, physical reminders of the precedent that had been set. When the formally constituted government failed to act, the people retained the right to organize, even if that meant mustering an extralegal militia—which, armed and dangerous, presented a clear potential threat to government.20 The Defense Association never explicitly challenged the state, but acted instead to fill a critical gap left by it. Franklin, as one of the leaders, was always careful to cultivate support on all sides and to blunt critiques of either the Quaker Assembly or elite supporters of the Proprietary family. The point, as he and other leaders saw it, was not to apportion blame or to bring down a government that in most cases worked well, but to defend the city until the danger passed. Still, the Defense Association transformed Philadelphia civil society and contained an implicit threat to the state. Over a period of many months, an institution completely divorced from Pennsylvania’s representative government had mustered a larger proportion of the urban population than had ever before mobilized. Thomas Penn, the Proprietor of the colony, who was following events from England, identified the threat immediately. “I am sure,” he remarked, that “the people of America are too often ready to act in defiance of the Government they live in without associating themselves for that purpose.” The Association did not defy government, but it set up the groundwork for those who one day would.21 That day was less than a decade away. When the Seven Years’ War erupted in western Pennsylvania in 1754, engulfing the backcountry settlements in terrified mayhem, Pennsylvania was still unprepared to defend its population. Indeed, political tensions had progressed to make the defense question even more difficult than in 1747. The fault lines no longer lay simply between pacifists and those who wanted to defend Pennsylvania. To the great misfortune of the settlers in the line of fire, the war came at a time when the elected Assembly and the colony’s hereditary Proprietor, Thomas Penn, were locked in a contest 91

Jessica Choppin Roney for political dominance. The Assembly remained unwilling to take explicit military measures, but in the midst of crisis it did pass legislation that would have made available funds for military purposes. Determined to assert more control over “his” colony, however, Penn instructed his governor to veto all money bills—even those providing money for defense—until the Assembly ceded to his demands. While Penn and the Assembly bickered, the frontier burned.22 Franklin saw a way forward: the same stratagem that had succeeded in 1747, a voluntary militia. This time, however, Proprietary supporters refused to countenance an extralegal force. Sensing an opportunity to embarrass their political enemies and drive them from office, they demanded a formal militia law they believed the “quaking Assembly” could never produce. They had underestimated the ingenuity and political dexterity of Benjamin Franklin.23 Now an Assemblyman himself, Franklin in November of 1755 introduced and got passed Pennsylvania’s first and only colonial militia bill. In framing the Militia Bill, Franklin drew upon the institutional and cultural patterns forged in 1747. The central provision of the bill was that military service would be voluntary, not mandatory as was the norm in every other colony, thus exempting Quakers from having to participate against their consciences. As in 1747, volunteers would elect their own officers, and even more, they would have a voice in drawing up a military code of conduct and would only be asked to commit to serve if they agreed to the terms of that code. In its structure, then, the legal militia reflected its earlier extralegal parent. It took as a given as well that some men would serve while others would not.24 Pennsylvania’s first and only colonial legal militia would not effectively unify the population. Because it was not compulsory, it would invest those patriotic men who volunteered with enhanced status and civic responsibility. Conversely, those who for reasons of conscience or otherwise did not volunteer, would lose political and social standing. Detractors might characterize them as selfish or even as opposed to the good of the whole—dangerous enemies within. The form of association worked out in 1747 and codified in 1755 dangerously split the civil community of men into those who would and those who would not serve—investing many who had not previously held much status with newfound importance and undermining many who had been accustomed to power and prestige.25 As in 1747, the voluntary militia quickly drew many volunteers. Within weeks of the passage of the Militia Act, companies had formed, drilled, and elected officers. By February 1756, Philadelphia’s “City Regiment” marched in review through the city streets with great pageantry and discipline. Supporters claimed that one thousand men in the city alone had joined, including a substantial German contingent. Critics sneered that the Philadelphia militia 92

Government without Arms; Arms without Government consisted rather of “between 6 and 700 Men and Boys, a great part of who had never appeared at any former Muster.”26 Franklin’s strategy worked, but not entirely. The Militia Bill had been designed to find a compromise that would satisfy both Quakers and those urging militarization. However, it failed to satisfy vocal elements in both camps. Strict Quakers adamantly refused any legal sanction to a militia. Proprietary supporters were even more outraged. The grounds of their scorn rested primarily on the very fact that the law was voluntary. Opponents to the Militia Bill believed that “no Man would willingly bind himself while his Neighbours are free.” Critics complained that “not one fiftieth Part of the people can be brought to act” under the Militia. “The very Spirit” of the plan was “odious” because it put those who did volunteer on an “unequal and slavish Footing” with all those free-riders who did not serve. They railed against the “iniquitous Exception of ye Quakers” implicit in the bill. They saw Franklin and the Assembly’s compromise as dangerous. Drawing on republican notions of citizenship, they argued that where the good or the defense of the whole community was at stake, all men ought to serve. Civil society and civic duty should not—could not—be divided between those who did all the work and those who reaped all the advantage. Arguing that it was “highly unjust to think that the Burden of Defence should fall upon a few Individuals,” they bluntly refused to participate. Their opposition stemmed from motives other than high-minded republican spirit, however. Siding with the Proprietor in his fight with the Assembly, the Proprietary faction wished to eject Quakers from government, and even petitioned the King to bar them from serving in office. They could hardly support a measure like the Militia Bill that might help the Assembly.27 Unable to prevent the “iniquitous” Militia Bill from coming into operation, Proprietary supporters organized on two fronts to combat it. In England they petitioned the Privy Council, the final arbiter of all colonial legislation, to disallow the law. And in Pennsylvania pro-Proprietary critics took advantage of the very element of the law they found most offensive—that military service was voluntary—and in the winter of 1756 decided to form their own extralegal militia, outside both the parameters of the Militia Law and the Assembly. Four or five extralegal “Independent Companies” quickly formed in the city, and another nine in the surrounding countryside. Unfortunately, no muster rolls survive, so it is impossible to gauge how this militia’s numbers compared to the one thousand who had joined the legal militia in Philadelphia. The Governor, although technically bound to support the legal “City Regiment,” instead encouraged the Independent Companies in their defiance of the Assembly and its militia.28 Franklin and others urged the extralegal Associators instead to add their 93

Jessica Choppin Roney energies to the legal militia, arguing that the Independent Companies split and therefore weakened the defensive posture of the colony, and, moreover, “affront[ed] in express Terms the Laws and Legislature of their Country.” The members of the Independent Companies defended their right to organize extra­ legally. The law might legalize one form of militia, “yet it no where says that it shall be illegal to follow any other Mode.” The Independent Companies might act without law, but that clearly was different, as they pointed out, from “acting contrary to positive Law.” The appropriate functions and boundaries of sovereign power in Pennsylvania had splintered. They belonged not only to the state, but also to private individuals, who, the Independent Companies argued, retained the right to undertake any activity that was not explicitly prohibited.29 In 1747 Philadelphians had argued that when government failed to meet its responsibilities, citizens retained the right to act on their own. But in 1756 the government had acted. It had passed a Militia Bill that provided for a legal, albeit voluntary, force to protect the colony. However, one vocal political faction found the new law reprehensible and refused to serve under it. They successfully argued that they had the right to organize extralegally, even when government did take action, if it acted in a way to which a vocal contingent objected. Fundamentally, Pennsylvanians appear to have agreed. Even the strongest opponents of the Independent Companies never charged that they acted illegally (only unwisely) and never moved to prevent them from organizing on their own. Collectively, then, proponents and critics alike affirmed the right of individuals to act extralegally, outside, and even against the wishes of the government (though not in direct opposition or hindrance to it). The Independent Companies of 1756 extended the bounds of activity that might be taken by private individuals beyond the limits established by the Association of 1747. Thomas Penn’s fear that Pennsylvanians associating on their own might lead to defiance of government had come one step closer to realization. Like the Association of 1747, however, both the legal City Regiment and the extralegal Independent Companies were short-lived. The Privy Council in En­ gland, partly at the urging of Thomas Penn, disallowed the Militia Act that had created the City Regiment. The king’s councilors deemed the law “improper and inadequate” and thought it seemed “rather calculated to exempt persons from Military Services, than to encourage and promote them.” The Privy Council’s action revoking the law took place in July 1757, but the news did not reach Philadelphia until the fall, shortly before the Act was set to expire anyway. The militia quietly disbanded, having done little more than drill and parade around the city since its inception the year before. The Independent Companies were in no way bound by the law and therefore were unaffected by the Militia Act’s disallowance. However, they too promptly set aside all their assertions of right 94

Government without Arms; Arms without Government and civic duty and, like the militia, quietly faded away. Two years later William Allen lamented that “we have no Militia, nor like to have any.”30 The City Regiment and Independent Companies contributed to the evolution of the structure and culture of civic organizing in Philadelphia in four ways. First, they further reified the institutional pattern set in 1747 of neighborhood companies of volunteers who elected their own officers. Second, by raising seriously the argument that where all are in danger, all must serve, and by trying to undermine the Quaker Assembly, the critics of the Militia Bill politicized as never before the decision to volunteer (or not). Given Pennsylvania’s history and demography, a mandatory militia was never going to be politically feasible; its military forces—however structured—would always have to be voluntary. That very fact gave volunteers potential standing, because it meant that their service could be seen as a marker of civic virtue and patriotic concern for the community. Conversely, for the first time, those who did not volunteer came under suspicion for selfishness or worse. Potentially they stood outside (or even opposed to) civil society. Third, the Independent Companies expanded the political space in which private individuals could organize—not only when there was a gap to be filled, as in 1747, but now even when there was not a gap. Pennsylvanians retained the right to act when they disagreed with government actions. And the independent militia was not the only organization through which citizens asserted this right. Beginning in 1756, a group of Quakers upset with the direction of Pennsylvania policies toward Indians and diplomacy, formed themselves into an organization called the Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians and began inserting themselves into Indian conferences they had no legal right to attend. The culture of allowing extralegal civic participation, however, combined with the governor’s inability to bar the Friendly Association (and, indeed, his reliance on the gifts they brought to grease negotiations with the Indians), allowed them a seat at the table. After the 1750s, the precedent had been established that Pennsylvanians could organize on their own against the policies of the state as long as they did not outright oppose or work against the state.31 Finally, the Independent Companies laid bare the tensions between the rights of Associators and the rights of everyone else. On one hand, the Independent Companies, like the earlier Defense Association of 1747, demonstrated the vigor of democratic culture in Philadelphia. Men were able to collect together and act for themselves in the way they saw fit—the ultimate expression of their own democratic agency. On the other hand, the Independent Companies represented a shutting down of the democratic process for everyone who was not a member. The companies acted outside the law, which in a republican 95

Jessica Choppin Roney system had to be understood as acting against the will of the people as expressed through and by their chosen representatives. Answerable only to its own constituents, the independent militia operated without any checks, such as public elections. It could take actions that had ramifications for members of the community beyond its own membership, but it never had to answer to them or consider their wishes as a democratic government had ideally to do. The same had been true of the Defense Association of 1747 as well, of course. Indeed, its independence of action was the wellspring of its efficiency. It could mobilize like-minded men only and ignore the concerns of men who disagreed. The minority of strict Quakers who opposed its activities were left powerless to stop the Association because the militia did not answer either to them, or to the elected Assembly, or indeed to anyone else. The same tensions were present, then, for the Defense Association as for the Independent Companies. However, the much broader consensus enjoyed by the Association in 1747–48 masked the ways in which it acted to undercut the democratic process for others, because only a minority sincerely opposed its activities. The Independent Companies in 1755–56 differed only in degree. They sparked virulent and vocal opposition, exposed and contributed to a greater rift in the community, and acted in direct opposition to a legally constituted group (as opposed to the Defense Association, which acted against a vacuum of government response. Before 1775, then, a disconnect between the public demand for defense and state intransigence had twice led to creative accommodations that ultimately expanded the civic horizons of ordinary white men and fragmented the popular basis for state sovereignty between the ballot box and the muster roll. In 1747 the Defense Association had not worked against formal government, but rather preserved the Assembly’s political power by fulfilling the one need its Quaker legislators could not. In 1756 the extralegal militia formed explicitly to protest and embarrass the Assembly, but, again, it offered no threat to the government. The earliest forms of Pennsylvania’s extralegal militia had expanded the participation of ordinary men, but had done so within the preexisting structure of government and civil Quakerism, which left great latitude for independent action. In 1775 the last extralegal militia of the colonial period would take the final step of acting in defiance of government, dismantling the Quaker-inflected constitution that had held sway for almost a century. Philadelphia remained relatively calm through the upheavals that wracked other colonies in the 1760s, but by the 1770s popular opinion began to push for more explicit protest and tangible steps toward military defense. One observer hoped the city would soon “catch some of that martial spirit that is kindled all around it.” Unfortunately, the Assembly remained staunchly in the hands of conservatives, despite Patriots’ attempts to capture control of the legislature, 96

Government without Arms; Arms without Government even as late as April 1776. By the spring of 1775, in response to the occupation of Boston and (unfounded) rumors of violence the previous fall, an increasingly vocal group of Philadelphians called for a system of defense to be put in place. The Assembly met in March, and many hoped at last it would take measures to arm the colony, but “so great an opposition” manifested inside the State House that the legislature contented itself with “a few harmless resolves,” and let the matter rest. “It is happy for us,” remarked one disappointed Patriot, “that we have Boston in the front & Virginia in the rear to defend us: we are placed where Cowards ought to be placed, in the middle.”32 Then the news of Lexington and Concord burst upon Pennsylvania, and “the face of things & Men underwent an immediate change.” Militant Patriots seized the moment to call for the militia they could not get through legal channels. They capitalized upon two necessary conditions: the outrage in the aftermath of the shocking news, and the long-existing division of sovereignty that over three decades had allowed militias and other private groups to assume governmental powers and operate outside of formal government. Patriots had no need to innovate here but instead built confidently upon a well-established pattern.33 Just as in 1747, the first step was a mass meeting. A crowd eight thousand strong gathered on April 25, 1775 “to consider the measures to be pursued in the present critical affairs of America.” The next week Associators met in their respective neighborhoods (wards) to form militia companies and elect officers in the manner established in 1747 and reiterated in 1755. As in earlier militias, more men could exercise the right to vote for militia officers than could vote for representatives in legislative elections. Even companies of Quakers formed: some into actual militia companies and others in a support capacity, as volunteers who would not actually fight but would put out fires, ferry civilians, and engage in other similar tasks. Soon more than one-third of Philadelphia’s white, adult men had associated. Outside the city, companies formed just as quickly. By June reports came that more than three thousand men had mustered in Lancaster alone. Within the city itself, one patriot lauded the “surprizing unanimity [that] prevails here”—unconsciously echoing the exact words used by Benjamin Franklin to describe the effect of the first Defense Association back in 1747.34 The “Military Association,” as it was called, differed however from the structure of the original 1747 Defense Association in two crucial ways. Whereas the Defense Association had carefully organized its own funding, relying almost entirely on individual contributions and public lotteries, the Military Association in 1775 made no clear provision for how it would pay for its activities or material. Moreover, the rhetoric around the militia had changed. In 1747 men 97

Jessica Choppin Roney had volunteered their time and energy, without any discussion of payment. In 1775, not only did the volunteers believe they should be compensated, especially if they did indeed have to put themselves in harm’s way, but they also believed that those who did not volunteer ought to pay an extra tax “equivalent to the Expence and Loss of Time incurred by the Associators.” On the surface, both conditions had to do with money; at a deeper level, they dealt with what kind of relationship the militia would or should have with the polity and the state.35 Unlike earlier extralegal militias, the 1775 Associators did not want or intend to form a voluntary association. Instead, they conceived of their role as protecting the liberties, lives, and property of the entire community. Given this position, they could not—indeed, should not—function as a mere voluntary club, one of many civic projects competing for the loyalty and energies of the people. Rather, they had to create an institution powerful enough to elicit or, if necessary, compel the support of the entire community, for all stood equally to gain or lose based on the success or failure of their endeavors. In short, the Military Association needed the powers and scope of a government. Beginning as a self-created, extralegal militia, with officers chosen by the volunteers, not by the government, the Military Association demanded first state recognition, then substantial monetary support, and finally the power to compel all white, male Pennsylvanians to participate or pay a fine.36 Associators began by lobbying the government that already existed. They argued that their activities “promote[d] the public Security and Welfare,” and insisted that the legislature—the same legislature they had willfully bypassed in forming their militia—ought to shoulder its cost. But money was only part of what the Associators wanted. Again and again they reiterated that “where the Liberty of all is at Stake, every Man should assist in its Support.” To allow anyone to dodge this supreme civic duty—the defense of liberty and community— would be absolutely fatal both to the collective virtue and the practical strength of the whole. In the first place, those committed to military organization believed that very few were sincerely opposed to defense on grounds of religious conscience. A steep tax for “Non-Associators” would flush out such shirkers. But even in the case of those of “tender conscience” who could not bear arms, common justice demanded that they contribute something to a cause for which others were willing to risk their lives. Any tax or penalty, no matter how high, would always fall short of the supreme sacrifice of those who had joined the Association.37 The Assembly slowly acceded to many of these demands. It took two months to recognize the extralegal militia, but from that point on the Assembly began to appropriate and then print money for defense, and even began to 98

Government without Arms; Arms without Government “recommend” to conscientious objectors that they contribute to the cause— though the Assembly was not yet ready to compel them to do so as the Associators demanded. However, the cooperation of the legislature came with a price: some degree of oversight. The Assembly appointed a twenty-five-member “Committee of Safety” that would become in essence the executive branch of government for the remaining months of Pennsylvania’s provincial existence.38 The Assembly tasked the Committee of Safety with making defensive preparations, acquiring, manufacturing sufficient war material, and overseeing the Military Association, giving the Committee the power to “call forth” the militia in time of need. Though the membership of the Committee reflected the growing strength of moderates and radicals over conservatives (several prominent Patriots, including Benjamin Franklin, had been appointed), it would nevertheless find its work hampered by financial and logistical concerns, and also by the recalcitrance of the Associators themselves who guarded jealously their own autonomy.39 Associators pushed and even bullied the Assembly to provide a plan of defense that would knit together the resources of the entire colony, but they had no intention of ceding to the legislature the right to direct their militia. “The associators,” observed one Philadelphian, “are much alarmed . . . ​by the power granted to what is Called the Committee of Safety.” The Military Association had been formed independently and its volunteers wished it to remain under the control of the men who had organized and joined it. It wanted the extensive powers of government, particularly in financing and compelling military support, but it did not want accountability to the legislature or the voting public. Like the Association of 1747 and the Independent Companies in 1756, they intended to stand accountable only to their volunteers and officers.40 The Committee of Safety began by trying to finance the defensive preparations underway and by making “earnest” recommendations to the Associators and the larger community. But soon they moved beyond these tentative first steps and began to assert more control over the militia. On July 31, for example, the Committee of Safety approved the language by which officers would be commissioned, instructing them to “observe and follow such orders and directions as you shall receive from the Assembly . . . ​or from this . . . ​Committee of Safety . . . ​or any other your Superior Officers.” In August the Committee passed and published “Articles of Association” for the Military Association. Benjamin Franklin, author of two similar documents in 1747 and 1755, respectively, helped draft the articles, which dealt primarily with discipline, providing standards of conduct for soldiers and officers, and a mechanism for redress of grievances, courts-martial, and similar matters.41 To the surprise and consternation of the Committee of Safety, the soldiers 99

Jessica Choppin Roney of the Association reacted with outrage. They refused point-blank to sign the articles. Instead, they redoubled their clout by forming a second body within the Military Association, a double layer of organization. By mid-September a Committee of Privates, consisting of three representatives elected from more than thirty of the companies in the city and environs, was meeting regularly. The Committee of Privates refused to accept the Articles of Association promulgated by the Committee of Safety and issued an Address listing their objections. The crux of their protest centered on the fact that the articles exempted Non-Associators from service or financial burden in the defense of Pennsylvania. “We conceive it to be contrary to the true end and intention of legislation,” they declared, “for any body of men, claiming legislative authority, to make any laws which shall” place a burden on one part of the community and not on another. Such an unequal law was, they concluded, “destructive of the end and design of civil society.” They perceived a devious plot at work, whereby the Assembly would rest all the responsibility of defense on the shoulders of the volunteers and never ask any sacrifice from men who shared equally in the dangers and benefits of provincial defense. They demanded, once more, a general militia law that would force all “effective men” to serve or pay.42 Moreover, the soldiers rejected outright the idea that the Committee of Safety could make rules for them. “The gentlemen who made the rules,” they sneered, “seem to claim to themselves the right of calling out any or all of the present Associators.” However, “we know of no right which our Assembly has to invest any body of men with legislative authority, this being an unalienable essential right belonging to the whole body of freemen of which society is constituted.” The Committee of Safety had far overreached its authority, exercising “a new and unheard of exertion of power, inconsistent with the trust reposed in them by their constituents, and erecting a dangerous precedent as the body thus Invested is not subject to the controul of, or liable to be called to an account by, the people.” That similar objections could be made about the Military Association seems not to have occurred to the authors of the Address. The Associators vowed that if the Assembly would pass a military law that applied equally to all white adult men with stiff penalties for Non-Associators, then they would serve in a militia under the control of the government. But until the rules extended to all Pennsylvanians, they would volunteer their time only to an organization they themselves controlled.43 The officers quickly fell in line with the Committee of Privates, presenting their subordinates’ “Address” to the Assembly and adding their own call for proper legislation (rather than committee pronouncements) that would oblige all Pennsylvanians to enter militia service or pay punitive fines and taxes. The 100

Government without Arms; Arms without Government Committee of Safety conceded the point, and added its voice to those petitioning the Assembly for a more effectual military law. Given the disdain with which their original “Articles” had been met, their caution that this was the only way “likely to give general Satisfaction” had particular resonance.44 The Assembly had now been presented baldly with the conundrum that had dogged the legislature for almost one hundred years: the need for militarization in a colony founded in and committed to peace. The Assembly had tried to dodge the issue, had even created a subordinate Committee of Safety that might prevent it from having to deal directly with military preparations. But after the September demands by the Committee of Privates and the supporting chorus from officers, Committee of Safety, and other prominent citizens, the issue would not go away. It became the central question in the October Assembly elections, the most hard-fought political contest in a decade. Ultimately, though resistance-minded legislators gained ground in the House, the Assembly remained in the hands of moderates, with a substantial conservative minority and a bloc of swing voters.45 Finally, in November, the new House passed several laws to meet the demands of the Committee of Privates and their supporters. First it passed legislation to emit (print) £80,000. A week later it passed “Rules and Regulations” for the Military Association, as well as “Articles of Association” for all volunteers to sign. These laws charged a fine against any able-bodied white man who failed to show up for the mandatory twenty muster days. At the same time it passed a bill assessing an annual fine of two and a half pounds against Non-Associators. This legislation still fell short of what the Privates wanted: a steep tax against the estates of Non-Associators, thus taxing the wealthy most heavily. Though the fines the Assembly had mandated were stiff, they came nowhere near the sacrifices of the men who volunteered their time and risked their lives. But the legislation represented a tremendous step forward for the Assembly, the first time in its history it compelled military service or a fine.46 The Committee of Privates grudgingly accepted the new laws, even though they felt them still to be too lenient against non-Associators and insufficient for the province’s defense. Moreover, the laws finally assigned oversight of the militia to the Assembly and its appointed Committee of Safety. Despite these objections, the Committee of Privates recommended to the Associators that they sign the new Articles as “the best thing which can be done at present,” but it also vowed to work for change. Already a voluntary association within a voluntary association, the Committee of Privates now appointed a Committee of Correspondence to facilitate “friendly correspondence” throughout the provincial armed forces. They intended to submit amendments to the House 101

Jessica Choppin Roney and wanted as best as possible to “express the desires of the whole body of Associators.” In short, despite the new legislation, the direction of the militia remained contested.47 Through its spring legislative session, the Assembly labored to improve the militia law, raising the annual fine against Non-Associators by one pound, but none of the measures it took went far enough in the eyes of the Associators. Meanwhile, in the months after the publication of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, an increasing number of Pennsylvanians were willing to countenance if not outright demand independence. In the face of this rising tide, the Assembly remained firm, refusing to allow its delegates to the Continental Congress to vote for any measures that would sever its relationship with the Crown.48 Those advocating independence met with legal and structural obstacles. They did not have the votes to change the composition of the Assembly, and they could not force it to move beyond at most a moderate stance, even a year after blood had been shed in Massachusetts. Unsuccessful at effecting change through the ballot box, Patriots began to decide that the Assembly itself had to go. One author argued that it had overreached itself: “Their authority is truly unconstitutional, being self created,” rather than being based upon the will of the people. The committees, on the other hand, were “the only constitutional bodies at present in this province, and that for the following reason; they were duly elected by the people.” Having built an autonomous militia and local committee system, independence-minded radicals had a strong base from which to challenge and gradually supplant the Assembly altogether.49 The Continental Congress, meeting in Philadelphia, was itself edging toward a resolution for independence, and on May 10, Congress gave radical Pennsylvanians support in their plans to unseat the Assembly by recommending that “where no government sufficient to the exingencies of their affairs have been hitherto established,” the colonies should “adopt such government as shall, in the opinion of the representatives of the people, best conduce to the happiness and safety of their constituents in particular, and America in general.”50 Armed with this pronouncement, a group of radical Pennsylvanians called for a convention “to protest against the present Assembly’s doing any business in their House until the sense of the Province was taken.” Accordingly, around four thousand Pennsylvanians gathered on May 20 in the State House yard in the pouring rain. They agreed that their sitting government was inadequate to their needs, and that the Assembly could not legally create a government that would be. Therefore, they voted for a convention to draw up a new constitution.51 102

Government without Arms; Arms without Government Militant patriots had thus used the bifurcation of sovereignty and state power to their advantage. The Assembly, even though it derived its authority from annual elections, had lost its legitimacy through its unwillingness to produce a militia law in line with the repeated demands of the Military Associators, by its “treasonable” resistance to independence, and because its charter had been granted by, “our mortal enemy the King of Great Britain.” If the Assembly was bad, its creation, the Committee of Safety, was even worse. While the old Assembly had been “in some measure accountable to their constituents,” the “the Committee of Safety . . . ​[had] the privilege of secrecy, and the time of their duration [was] unlimited.” Not all the men on those Committees, many began to conclude, were worthy of such trust. By contrast, the officers of the militia, elected by their men, publicly available and known, represented no such threat. “The public seems fully satisfied, and have a clear confidence” in the militia.52 The militia, therefore, would become the foundation for the legitimacy of the Constitutional Convention, and by extension, of the new government. One influential author argued that “the Militia is the natural support of a government, founded on the authority of the people only.” Another argued that the new legislators ought themselves to be militiamen. Militant patriots moreover appealed to the militia volunteers to take the lead in selecting the framers of the new Constitution. The stakes were enormous. “On the Judiciousness of the Choice which you . . . ​make,” one leader exhorted them “depends the Happiness of Millions.”53 Beginning in 1747, the militia had extended to all privates the right to vote for officers; now the volunteers would play a crucial role in electing the men who would write the new constitution. For many, this was the first time they had participated in, let alone shaped, electoral politics at the provincial level. Days before the election, militiamen were reminded that “you are to risk your lives . . . ​[for] a government which will be derived from yourselves, and which will have for its object not the enrollment of one man, or class of men only, but the safety, liberty, and happiness of every individual in the community.” The militia itself should in fact provide the pattern for the new government. Just as “Officers of the Militia should be chosen by the Militia,” one author argued, “No Officer of Government should hold his Commission but by the free Voice of the People, annually expressed.” The expanded franchise that characterized the militia became the principle upon which patriots determined who could vote for the Convention. In framing the Constitution, it was then a short step to accord the franchise to all men. Pennsylvania, so behind in radical activity through the 1760s and early 1770s, thus sprinted ahead of all the other new 103

Jessica Choppin Roney states to write what was regarded then—and still is today—as the most radical new constitution of the Revolutionary era. The basis for that radicalism lay in the Military Association.54 Military preparations had served as the catalyst for comprehensive political change, removing one government and providing the basis for building a new one. Historians have painted this as a profoundly transformative moment, the sweeping aside of an elite political caste and the rise of the lower sorts and especially the middling sorts to political power. But in fact, as dramatic as the change in political elites might have been, the transfer of power itself was not. The revolution in authority in Pennsylvania was not accompanied by systematic threats, violence, or destruction of property. The transfer of power came gradually, overwhelmingly peacefully, and in an orderly fashion. Neighboring Virginia, by contrast was not so fortunate. Virginia had a tradition of a state-directed militia, which had, however, fallen into disuse by the 1770s. In the confused lead-up to Independence, large planters and smallholders had separate economic and political interests. The smallholders sporadically began their own independent militia companies and then refused to allow the elite planters to dictate how those companies would be run, who would lead them, or what their objectives would be. As a result Virginia ended up, in one scholar’s assessment, “at war almost as much with itself as with Britain,” as elites and the middle class both tried to assert their authority.55 The province of Pennsylvania had a long tradition of extralegal militias and the division of authority in wartime. In 1775, therefore, the formation of the Military Association raised no serious concerns, either politically or socially.56 Gradually, from the spring of 1775 to the spring of 1776, the Association acquired increasing political legitimacy through the participation of thousands of ordinary men, many of whom were not eligible to vote in provincial elections because they did not meet property requirements. Then it parlayed that popular authority into an assertive stance vis-à-vis the Assembly on the most important policy matters of the day. When the Assembly refused to enact the policies the Associators wanted in regards to a militia law and independence from Britain, the Association, with an assist from the Continental Congress, claimed superior authority to speak for the people and called a convention to build a new government. Of course neither the Pennsylvania Constitution nor the process leading up to it had in fact included all Pennsylvanian men. By definition, only men who agreed with Independence participated in creating and running the new government. Men ranging from moderates to Loyalists to Quakers were left out. In this respect too, the Military Association and the government it did so much to legitimize built upon the precedent of the extralegal militias of 1747 104

Government without Arms; Arms without Government and 1756, and on Pennsylvania’s culture of civic association, which had shown the efficacy of ignoring all but their own members. Voluntary organizations answered only to their own constituencies, giving them a unity, flexibility, and efficiency that might not have been otherwise possible. They did so, however, at the cost of shutting out everyone else. Pennsylvania’s voluntary associations must thus be understood as dramatically expanding political culture at the same time as they silenced the political voice of nonmembers. The Military Association and Constitution of 1776 simultaneously opened up and shut down democratic participation. If the new government did not follow through on one writer’s threat that “the rude custom of Tarring and Feathering” ought to “give way to the severer punishment of the gibbet,” it did act to curtail the rights of the minority. The new government confiscated arms from Non-Associators and taxed them for their refusal to serve. Then, in 1777, it arrested and deported several, confining them in Virginia without warrant or trial. The Patriots, perhaps by necessity in the midst of a civil war, had learned the lesson previous Philadelphia associations offered them: cohesion sometimes works best through the exclusion of nonsupporters.57 The profound irony of the creation of an extralegal voluntary military tradition in Pennsylvania was twofold. First, the split authority, facilitated by government on the one hand and militia on the other, led eventually to the downfall of the state that the militia had first been created in 1747 to protect and preserve. Originally an expedient to defend against privateer attack without challenging the otherwise popular Quaker government, by 1776 the extralegal militia had evolved to recognize and assert its own popular basis of authority—and to use it “in defiance,” as Thomas Penn had long ago predicted—“of government.” Second and perhaps most ironic of all, the development over decades of an extralegal voluntary military culture meant that when the Revolution began, officially pacifist Pennsylvania, unlike many other colonies, not only had a working militia structure to call upon, but that structure actually smoothed the transition from province to state. True to its pacifist history, however, Pennsylvania managed a nonviolent overthrow of its old government and political elites. The Military Association was the key institution pushing the Assembly to military preparations in 1775, and then it was the basis in 1776 for supplanting the Assembly altogether. Because the extralegal militias themselves had always relied on universal suffrage among their membership—a necessary expedient to attract volunteers and ensure their continued service—a government constructed on the foundations of the Military Association would also find itself committed to universal suffrage. This move was seen at the time and has since been interpreted as “radical,” but in fact it built on an infrastructure 105

Jessica Choppin Roney Pennsylvania had long evolved for incorporating the voices of ordinary men— starting with letting them elect their own officers in 1747. Long without a single institution to bind citizens into a united corporate identity, Pennsylvania used its extralegal militia tradition to fill that void, creating a basis for citizenship rooted in military service. Unfortunately, by 1776 the association between service and citizenship implied that those who did not serve surrendered at least some voice in community decisions. Pennsylvania’s Quaker foundations had accorded profound respect to traditions of dissent, but these fell by the wayside during the Revolution. Non-Associators found themselves first subject to taxes many felt to be morally repugnant and then in the summer of 1776 forced by legislative fiat to surrender their firearms to the government. Many faced official and unofficial persecution throughout the war for adhering to their beliefs or voicing disagreement with the war or government. The rise of popular sovereignty championed by the Military Association, in short, was neither universal nor without costs.58 In 1776 Pennsylvania adopted what scholars and contemporaries alike regarded as the most radical constitution of the American revolutionary period. Pennsylvania’s Frame of 1776 made government as directly responsive to the people as possible, with provisions mandating a unicameral legislature, annual elections, and open-door legislative sessions, and abolishing all property qualifications in voting, the first state ever to do so. However, as Kenneth Owen demonstrates in this volume, there were times when the newly constituted Assembly failed adequately to respond to the concerns of ordinary Pennsylvanians, prompting continued use in Philadelphia and the more distant counties of ad hoc crowds, militias, and the threat or use of violence to compel legislative attention and policy changes.59 Pennsylvania’s was America’s first—and for as long as half a century, only— democratic revolution. The American Revolution contributed to radical political and social changes on a national scale that would find fuller expression in the nineteenth century when the common man, but more particularly the middle-class man would drive American politics. But these changes took decades to come to full fluorescence, and they would come, moreover, in tandem with profound economic, social, and religious changes facilitated by western expansion, the Second Great Awakening, and industrialization. Pennsylvania experimented much earlier than other parts of the newly formed Union with the expansion of the franchise to include all white men. Even when the radical constitution of 1776 was replaced by a more conservative document in 1790, this central element remained largely untouched.60 Pennsylvania, then, stands outside the traditional narrative of American Whig political evolution. As Gordon Wood uncomfortably noted in his study of the state constitutions, it was 106

Government without Arms; Arms without Government “the great exception” in many regards, but it has nevertheless been lumped into a larger narrative of American revolutionary and constitutional development. In fact, Pennsylvania’s march to independence and creation of a new government was unique and stemmed not from Whig doctrine or ideology—a political language, in any case, that it shared with all the other rebelling colonies— but from the practical and political accommodations necessitated by defense in a Quaker colony committed to peace. Pennsylvania’s revolution was long in the making.61

Notes 1. George Cuthbert to Lieutenant-Governor John Dalling of Jamaica, 1775, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 61 (1942): 206–9 (henceforth PMHB). Christopher Marshall, Extracts from the Diary of Christopher Marshall . . . ​During the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Albany, 1877), 17. Pennsylvania Evening Post, 2 May 1775. For Philadelphia’s population, see Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 407–8. The size of the crowd on April 25 was almost double the number of adult, white men living in the city, which means the crowd must have included a broad variety of participants. 2. Pennsylvania Evening Post, 2 May 1775. John Adams to Abigail Adams, June 10, 1775. [electronic edition] Adams Family Papers, An Electronic Archive. The Massachusetts Historical Society. 3. John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010), 190. Nathan Ross Kozuskanich, “ ‘For the Security and Protection of the Community’: The Frontier and the Makings of Pennsylvania Constitutionalism” (PhD diss., Ohio State University, 2005), 25–26. Robert Davidson, War Comes to Quaker Pennsylvania: 1682–1756 (New York: Temple University Publications by Columbia University Press, 1957). Jessica Choppin Roney, “ ‘Ready to act in defiance of the Government’: Philadelphia Voluntary Associations and the Defense Association of 1747–48,” Early American Studies 8, no. 2 (May 2010): 358–85. 4. Quote from Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (London: Oxford University Press, 1976), 64. Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence: Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revolution (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1975). Richard Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978). See also David Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” in Stanley Katz, ed., Colonial America: Essays in Politics and Social Development, 2nd ed. (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1976), 423–54; Thomas Slaughter, “Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,” PMHB 115 (January 1991): 3–34; Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For a discussion of the public sphere, see Craig Calhoun, “Introduction: Habermas and the Public Sphere,” in Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA:

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Jessica Choppin Roney MIT Press, 1992), 1–48; and John Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Jeffrey Pasley et al., eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 207–50. 5. Gordon Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 226. In fact, the 1776 Constitution built on Pennsylvania’s 1701 Charter, which also provided for a broad franchise and a strong unicameral legislature. The innovation in 1776 was to provide for more equitable representation among the original counties and the newer counties to the west. 6. John Smolenski, Friends and Strangers: The Making of a Creole Culture in Colonial Pennsylvania, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Alan Tully, Forming American Politics: Ideals, Interests, and Institutions in Colonial New York and Pennsylvania (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). Mary Schweitzer, Custom and Contract: Household, Government, and the Economy in Colonial Pennsylvania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987). Richard Bauman, For the Reputation of Truth: Politics, Religion, and Conflict among the Pennsylvania Quakers, 1750–1800 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1971). Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008). 7. Jane Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism and the Political Thought of John Dickinson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 2009), 10–11; Smolenski, Friends and Neighbors, 70–80; Schweitzer, Custom and Contract. 8. Tully, Forming American Politics, 257–58, 300; Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism, 55; Smolenski, Friends and Neighbors, 65. James Logan to Benjamin Franklin, 3 December 1747, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Leonard Labaree (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961), vol. 3, 219. 9. J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975); Tully, Forming American Politics, 301; Smolenski, Friends and Neighbors, 116, 119; John Shy, “A New Look at Colonial Militia,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 20 (April 1963): 175–85. John Smolenski suggests that in Pennsylvania’s first decades the courts were the most effective institution for engaging Pennsylvanians in a common civic project, though the power of those forms declined over time; Smolenski, 129. 10. Richard Beeman, The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 204–16; quote on 212. 11. Benjamin Franklin, Plain Truth: Or, Serious Considerations On the Present State of the City of Philadelphia And Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1747), 15. Kozuskanich, “For the Security and Protection of the Community.” 12. Smolenski, Friends and Neighbors, 189; Gary Nash, Quakers and Politics: Pennsylvania, 1681–1726 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, [1968], 1993); Tully, Forming American Politics. 13. Pennsylvania Archives (Philadelphia, 1852) vol. 1, 759–60, 763; John Smith, The doctrine of Christianity, as held by the people called Quakers, vindicated: in answer to Gilbert Tennent’s sermon on the lawfulness of war (Philadelphia, 1748). John Churchman, “Journal of John Churchman,” Friends Library (Philadelphia, 1837–50), 6: 200–202. Churchman truly believed that faith in God—not armed resistance—would deliver the province from all foes.

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Government without Arms; Arms without Government His contemporary William Reckitt explained the Quaker adherence to pacifism by arguing that “the weapons of the primitive believers were not carnal, but spiritual, and mighty through God.” “Life of William Reckitt,” Friends Library (Philadelphia, 1837–50), 9: 55; Bauman, For the Reputation of Truth, 15. 14. John Swift to John White, 13 July 1747, John Swift Letterbook, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (henceforth HSP). Calvert, Quaker Constitutionalism, 10–11; Tully, Forming American Politics, 321; quote from Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, 204. 15. Plain Truth, 18; Leonard Labaree et al., eds., The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 183; Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 29 November 1747, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1961) vol. 3, 214–18. In 1749 James Logan wrote to Thomas Penn that in the first flush of organizing, “ten Companies of near one hundred men each in Philadelphia and above one hundred companies in the Province and Counties” had been formed. Davidson, War Comes to Quaker Pennsylvania, 52–53; James Logan to Thomas Penn, 24 November 1749, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 185; Pennsylvania Gazette, 1 March 1748. For a succinct chronology of the events surrounding the genesis of the Defense Association, see Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 180–88, 220–22, 225, 280. 16. Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 1 February 1747/48, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 4, no. 89, HSP. Franklin, Plain Truth, 15. In the winter of 1747–48 the previous governor had left and the incoming governor had not yet arrived, so the president of the provincial council acted in the stead of a governor. 17. Robert Dinkin, Voting in Provincial America: A Study of Elections in the thirteen Colonies, 1689–1776 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977), 38, 39, 159; Tully, Forming American Politics, 329. 18. Benjamin Franklin to James Logan, 7 December 1747 in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 224; “Form of Association,. Provincial Secretary Richard Peters wrote to Proprietor Thomas Penn that “Small Arms are exceedingly wanted,” suggesting that Penn send some as a gift. Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 1 February 1747/48, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 4, no. 89, HSP. 19. Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 1 February 1747/48, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 4, no. 89, HSP; Pennsylvania Gazette, 19 January 1748; John Swift to John White, April 12, 1748: John Swift Letterbook, HSP; Pennsylvania Gazette, 2 June 1748; Philadelphia Lottery Accounts (Philadelphia, 1752); The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 220–21. Full records for the first lottery have not survived. 20. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle was finally signed in October 1748. The Associators continued to muster through 1748, but by 1749 Franklin remembered that “peace being concluded the Association Business . . . ​[was] at an End.” The Association never fired a shot at an enemy attacker, but contemporaries believed that its very formation had convinced the privateers not to attack. Leonard W. Labaree, et al., eds., Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, 2nd ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 192; Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 13 June 1748, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 4, no. 95–97, HSP. 21. James Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 2006), 76–98. Labaree, ed., Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 186. 22. Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, 40–45. Penn insisted the Assembly share with him joint control over all appropriations and exempt the extensive lands owned by the Proprietary

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Jessica Choppin Roney family from any tax levies. The Assembly defended its long-held legislative prerogative and refused to comply on either point. Tully, Forming American Politics, 109–10, 149–50. 23. Robert Hunter Morris to General Bradock, 4 June 1755, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 4, no. 47, HSP. 24. “An ACT for the better Ordering and Regulating such as are willing and desirous to be united for Military Purposes within this Province,” The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, From 1682 to 1801 (Pennsylvania, 1898), vol. 5, 197–201. 25. See Silver, Our Savage Neighbors, for further discussion on the evolving fear of “enemies within” during the French and Indian War. 26. Robert Hunter Morris to Sir Charles Hardy, 27 November 1755, Pennsylvania Archives, 1st ser. (Philadelphia, 1853), vol. 2, 526. Richard Peters to Thomas Penn, 17 February 1756; Pennsylvania Gazette, 18 December 1755, 25 December 1755, 4 March 1756, 25 March 1756; Pennsylvania Journal, 11 March 1756. 27. Critics also argued that the degree of self-determination accorded the militia volunteers was dangerous. “Representation of Citizens to the Assembly,” Pennsylvania Journal, 20 November 1755 and 11 March 1756; William Peters to Thomas Penn, 4 January 1756, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 8, no. 3, HSP; William Peters to Thomas Penn, 24 December 1755, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 4, no. 201, HSP; William Smith, A Brief State of the Province of Pennsylvania (London, 1755); Tully, Forming American Politics, 107. 28. Pennsylvania Gazette, 1 January 1756; The happiness of rewarding the enemies of our religion and liberty, represented, in a sermon preached in Philadelphia, Feb. 17, 1756, to Captain Vanderspiegel’s independent company of volunteers, at the request of their officers (Philadelphia, 1756), 28, 27; Pennsylvania Journal, 11 March 1756; Pennsylvania Gazette, 25 March 1756; Certified Election Returns for Militia Officers, 2 April 1756, Conarroe Papers, vol. 10, 61, HSP. 29. Pennsylvania Gazette, 4 March 1756; Pennsylvania Journal, 11 March 1756. 30. James Munro et al., eds., Acts of the Privy Council of England. Colonial Series, vol. 4, A.D. 1745–1766 (Hereford: Hereford Times Ltd., 1911), 337–39; William Allen to Rev. Dr. Chandler, 4 February 1758, MSS Penn Official Correspondence, vol. 9, no. 5, 57, HSP. After 1757, the governor commissioned officers to lead paid provincial enlistees, serving for short periods of time and subject to British rules of discipline. Tully, Forming American Politics, 293. 31. A full discussion of the Friendly Association is beyond the purview of this paper. For more, see Bauman, For the Reputation of Truth, 77–101. The Paxton Boys, who marched on Philadelphia in 1764, clearly overstepped this boundary. 32. William Bradford to James Madison, 4 January 1775, 3–6 March 1775, in William Hutchinson et al., eds., The Papers of James Madison, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 131–32, 138–39. Thomas Pryor to Thomas Mifflin, 13 April 1775, Papers of Jonathan Potts, vol. 1, 46, HSP. Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun. 33. George Cuthbert to Lieutenant-Governor John Dalling of Jamaica, 1775, PMHB 61 (1942): 207. 34. At least three hundred Quakers joined the militia. Christopher Marshall to Peter Barker, 24 June, 1775. Christopher Marshall Letterbook, 1773–78, HSP, 25 April 1775, 3 May 1775, 4 May 1775; Extracts from the Diary of Christopher Marshall . . . ​During the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Albany, 1877), 17, 22; Pennsylvania Evening Post, 2 May 1775; Propos-

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Government without Arms; Arms without Government als for a Militia, n.d. Franklin MSS. 5: 31–32, HSP; Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun, 119–21; William Bradford to James Madison, 2 June 1775, in Hutchinson, ed., The Papers of James Madison, vol. 1, 149. In 1747 Franklin remarked on the “surpizing unanimity in all ranks”: Benjamin Franklin to James Logan, 7 December 1747, in Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 3, 224–25. 35. June 30, 1775. Minutes of the Council of Safety in Assembly. Pennsylvania Archives, Colonial Records, vol. 10, 279–82 (hereafter Minutes of the Council of Safety); Pennsylvania Gazette, 28 July 1775; “Articles of Association, Passed by the Committee of Safety, August 19, 1775,” Pennsylvania Archives, 5th ser. (Harrisburg, PA, 1906), vol. 5, 8–12. Votes and Proceedings of the House of Representatives of the Province of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Archives, Ser. 8, vol. 8, 7237–40, 7260–63 (hereafter Votes and Proceedings). 36. For more on the parallels between the 1747 Defense Association and voluntary associations, see Roney, “Ready to Act in Defiance of Government.” 37. Votes and Proceedings, vol. 8, 7245, 7258–63, 7323–25, 7358–61; Extracts from the Diary of Christopher Marshall, 23; Votes and Proceedings, vol. 8, 7258–60, 7262, 7333–43. 38. Governor John Penn, sensing the direction local politics was going, made himself scarce and never addressed the imperial crisis after May 1775. “Contenting himself with performing his usual executive functions on every occasion the House afforded him, he simply ignored the legislators’ unconstitutional seizure of extraordinary executive powers”: Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun, 119. 39. The Assembly authorized the emission of £35,000 in late June to pay for defense, and when that still proved inadequate, another £80,000 in November. These money bills technically provided that taxes would retire the emitted bills, but in essence, the Assembly was printing money. Many worried about inflation, and some refused to accept the currency, provoking accusations of inadequate patriotism. Votes and Proceedings, vol. 8, 7245, 7247, 7258–63, 7323–25, 7358–61, 7363, 7365; Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun, 122–24. 40. Quote from Christopher Marshall to S.H., 30 September 1775, Christopher Marshall Letterbook, 1773–78, HSP. The Associators had petitioned the legislature for a “Committee of Safety and Defence,” but they envisioned its activities as restricted to raising and expending public funds on behalf of defense. Votes and Proceedings, 7239–40. 41. Minutes of the Council of Safety, 30 June 1775, 19; 26 August 1775, 279–82, 308–12, 318–20. 42. Pennsylvania Evening Post, 14, 19, 28 September 1775; Votes and Proceedings, 7258–60. 43. Pennsylvania Evening Post, 28 September 1775. 44. Votes and Proceedings, 7258–63. 45. Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun, 135–38, 143. 46. The house was peppered by petitions in October and early November. Most demanded a military bill, but the Quakers submitted a petition asserting that by the terms of Pennsylvania’s Constitution and William Penn’s promises, the legislature could not compel its citizens either to bear arms or pay taxes for measures that went against their religious beliefs. Votes and Proceedings, 7311–13, 7323–30, 7333–44, 7348–50; Pennsylvania Gazette, 1 November 1775. For the November legislation, see Votes and Proceedings, vol. 8, 7351–52, 7358–61, 7369–84. 47. “To the Privates of the Military Association belonging to the Province of Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 7 February 1776; Votes and Proceedings, vol. 8, 7412–13. The Com-

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Jessica Choppin Roney mittee of Safety itself petitioned the Assembly, calling for immediate change to the militia law because of the “general sentiments” it confronted that the law was “partial and unequal.” Minutes of the Council of Safety, 22 February 1776, 492. 48. Pennsylvania Gazette, 6 March 1776, 3 April 1776. 49. Responding at last to generations of protest, the House had voted in March to add seventeen seats to the house, giving the western counties and the city of Philadelphia more equal representation. A special by-election on May 1, however, had still failed to put the Assembly in the hands of those calling for independence. Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun, 173; Pennsylvania Gazette, 24 April 1776. 50. Journals of the Continental Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington DC, 1906), vol. 4, 342. 51. Extracts from the Diary of Christopher Marshall . . . ​During the American Revolution, 1774–1781 (Albany, 1877), 71; The Alarm: or, an Address to the People of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1776); Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 May 1776. 52. Pennsylvania Gazette, 22 May 1776; “To the Honorable the conference of the several committees of the province of Pennsylvania . . . ​,” Pennsylvania Evening Post, 22 June 1776. 53. Demophilus, The Genuine Principles of the Ancient Saxon, or English Constitution (Philadelphia, 1776), 23; Four Letters on Interesting Subjects (Philadelphia, 1776), 23; James Cannon, To the several battalions of military associators in the Province of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1776). 54. “Address of the Committee of Conference to the Associators of Pennsylvania, June 25, 1776,” Pennsylvania Archives, Ser. 5 (Harrisburg, PA, 1906), vol. 5, 15; Cannon, To the several battalions; Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 226. 55. Michael McDonnell, The Politics of War: Race, Class, and Conflict in Revolutionary Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 5. See also, Woody Holton, Forced Founders: Indians, Debtors, Slaves and the Making of the American Revolution in Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). 56. Quakers, to be sure, opposed this militia as they had opposed its forebears in 1747 and 1755, but they did not worry about its activities in the hysterical terms that the Virginia elite further south did. 57. Four Letters, 3; “Ordinance for disarming Non-Associators,” 19 July 1776, in American Archives, ed. Peter Force (Washington DC, 1837–53), vol. 2, 6; Pennsylvania Gazette, 18 September 1776; “Resolutions directing the Mode of Levying Taxes on Non-Associators in Pennsylvania,” Votes and Proceedings, vol. 8, 7380–84; “An Act for the Further Security of the Government,” 1 April 1778, The Statutes at Large of Pennsylvania, From 1682 to 1801 (Pennsylvania, 1898), vol. 9, 238–45; Robert Oaks, “Philadelphians in Exile: The Problem of Loyalty during the American Revolution,” PMHB 96 (1972): 298–325; Jack Marietta, The Reformation of American Quakerism, 1748–1783 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984), 222–47. For the experiences of a non-Quaker Loyalist through the events leading up to the Revolution, see also, the Diary of James Allen, HSP. 58. See note 57. On the continuing association between militia service and full citizenship, see Kenneth Owen, “Violence and the Limits of the Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania,” this volume. 59. The Constitution of the Common-wealth of Pennsylvania, As Established by the General Convention Elected for that Purpose, And Held at Philadelphia, July 15, 1776 (Philadel-

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Government without Arms; Arms without Government phia, 1776); Wood, Creation of the American Revolution, 226; Owen, “Violence and the Limits of the Political Community,” below. 60. Gordon Wood, Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991). The 1790 Constitution extended suffrage to all freemen over 21 who had been resident for at least two years and had paid a state or county tax within six months of the election (and also to their adult sons, even if the sons had not themselves paid taxes). This put a moderate property requirement on suffrage, but it remained within reach for the majority of adult men. “Constitution of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1790,” Pennsylvania Archives, 3rd ser. (1890), vol. 10, 735–52. 61. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 226.

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• Stamps and Popes

Rethinking the Role of Violence in the Coming of the American Revolution Peter C. Messer

On August 14, 1765, an elaborate pageant hung from a large elm tree on the principal road connecting Boston with the surrounding countryside. It consisted of an effigy of a man with a boot slung over its shoulder, out of which peered a devil. Such displays were a common feature of Pope’s Day pageants in the city, during which Boston’s laboring population, with the half-hearted approval of the middling and better sorts, commemorated England’s deliverance from a Catholic conspiracy. This pageant, however, was different. Instead of depicting the Pope, as it usually did, the display featured Andrew Oliver, the colonial secretary and, allegedly, the newly appointed distributor of the stamped paper that Parliament was to require all colonists to use for their legal and commercial transactions. Other elements were more familiar, notably the devil whispering in the ear of Oliver’s effigy and the labels explaining that the Secretary had taken his new job in a quest for money and power. The pageantry hung for the rest of the day, and its guardians encouraged all those who passed by to have their commercial or legal documents stamped by the effigy. In the evening a crowd assembled around the elm, took down the pageantry, paraded it through the town, stopping to pull down a building believed to be the future stamp office, and then burned it in a bonfire kindled with wood taken from the demolished building. The crowd then turned its attention to Oliver’s house, destroying his fence, a carriage, several windows, his casements, and the finest looking glass in North America before departing. The next day the crowd again assembled around bonfires, prompting Oliver to send a note to them announcing his resignation as Stamp distributor. On hearing this news, the crowd departed to have a word with Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson about his alleged support for the Stamp Act, but finding him not at home they 114

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution dispersed. On August 26 the crowd assembled once again around a bonfire before returning to demolish Hutchinson’s house.1 This long Stamp Riot that unfolded over the course of August 14, 15, and 26 illustrates the complicated and underappreciated role that violence played in creating the innovative political practices and ideals that underpinned the American Revolution. Over the course of these three evenings, Bostonians engaged in a halting and violent conversation over the desirability of the Stamp Act and the nature of their community and the relationships among its members. The organizers of the August 14 pageantry initiated this conversation by framing their protest against the Stamp Act in the ritual language of anti-​ ­Catholicism. In an effort to mobilize the laboring people of Boston to intimidate Oliver into resigning his post, the Loyal Nine, a group of middling and relatively prosperous artisans and merchants, created a ritual context that allowed those people to ask pointed questions about the nature of their community and the behavior of some of its more prominent members.2 Empowered in this way, the crowds that assembled on the three August evenings did exactly that. When the dust settled over the ruins of Hutchinson’s house, the people of Boston appear to have worked out an understanding of sorts. What had begun as a narrow protest over an unconstitutional tax had turned into a forceful reminder of rulers’ responsibilities to the ruled and of the right of the people to violently correct leaders who had strayed from that ideal. In affirming that principle, Bostonians had also laid the foundation for a new style of politics founded on the rough equality of Boston’s free white male population. The pageantry the Loyal Nine had displayed on the first night set the tone for the events that followed by offering an artful blend of political commentary and popular anti-Catholicism. The effigy itself evoked those that Boston’s Pope’s Day companies—informal collections of laborers, sailors, apprentices, and youths—carted around the city to commemorate the 1605 Gunpowder Plot and warn Bostonians of the ever-present danger of Catholic corruption.3 The “boot hung up with the Devil Crawling out with a pitchfork in his hand” added a contemporary tone, connecting the Stamp Act to George III’s unpopular minister and suspected Catholic the Earl of Bute.4 The devil was a standard feature in these Pope’s Day pageantries, usually depicted as he was here, offering money to seduce men such as Oliver into betraying their communities in pursuit of wealth.5 To illustrate this last point, the label pinned to Oliver’s effigy explained: “Fair Freedoms glorious Cause I meanly Quitted / betrayed my Country for the sake of Pay / But at Length the Devil has me outwitted / Instead of stamping others have hang’d myself.”6 Most of Boston, in other words, would have seen the display as both a warning about the effects of the Stamp Act on 115

Peter C. Messer their liberties and an appeal to their Protestant sensibilities against the threat of Catholicism. The self-styled patriots’ decision to blend anti-Catholicism with political commentary should come as no surprise. In doing so they were imitating radical English Whigs who had long sponsored politically timely Pope’s Day pageantries as a way of propagating their political message against the corrupting influences of Tory rule.7 In placing Andrew Oliver in a similar position, the Loyal Nine merely followed the more pragmatic part of the Whig political agenda informing their political ideology. The theme of anti-Catholicism would have proved particularly powerful in New England, where many people saw themselves as members of a decidedly Protestant empire confronting the forces of the anti-Christ in the form of the Catholic powers of France and Spain. Such beliefs had crescendoed during the recently ended French and Indian War, in which ministers took to their pulpits to outline the threat Catholic France posed to New Englanders’ liberties and souls. With the conclusion of the war, the rise of an influential Scottish faction, notably Lord Bute, around George III raised concerns that the much-hated Stuarts had launched a plan to achieve by subversion what they had repeatedly failed to secure by force of arms. The growing prominence of the Church of England in the formerly Calvinist stronghold of New England only added to these fears, offering proof of the subtle ways in which dangerous Catholic principles could slowly creep into a community almost entirely devoid of actual Catholics.8 Despite the power of anti-Catholic symbols to illustrate the dangers posed by the Stamp Act, invoking its rituals by assembling a Pope’s Day pageant carried risks for its patriot sponsors. While most Bostonians would have professed to believe that Catholicism, in the abstract, threatened their community, various groups would have defined that threat in different ways. Over the course of the middle of eighteenth century, Boston and much of colonial British America underwent a dramatic political and economic transformation: trade dramatically expanded, consumer goods became more available, imperial officials became more attentive to colonists’ actions, and local politics erupted into a vibrant competition among elites.9 One hallmark of this change was the rise of new and conflicting visions of community and authority, each with its own distinctive vision of anti-Catholicism. One group, consisting mostly of elites and aspiring members of the middling sorts, had come to see the empire and their communities as composed of competing groups struggling for control of the levers of political and economic power. Unsurprisingly, they saw corruption and danger in the accumulation of power in the hands of too few people, and insisted on a strict compliance with the principles of the English constitution as a safeguard for individual and collective liberty.10 Members of 116

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution this group embraced a political variant of anti-Catholicism that viewed the Catholic threat through the prism of the English constitution and the dynastic struggles of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution. Catholicism stood for the Stuart kings and their absolutist view of government that would undermine the delicate balance between Crown and Parliament, which they saw as the bulwark of the subjects’ liberties under the English constitution.11 Not all of Boston subscribed to this way of thinking. The laboring people and many of the middling sorts viewed the rapid economic and political changes with great concern. They persisted in an older view of community, in which members were bound together by shared interests and a commitment to fairness, particularly in economic matters. In this view, ordinary people deferred to their betters in matters of governance, but expected them to use their power and influence to protect their more vulnerable neighbors, and to acknowledge the community’s role in determining its interests and the policies that would best promote them. These colonists viewed with tremendous concern any evidence that political leaders or socially prominent individuals had begun to depart from this sense of shared community and thus to compromise the principles of fairness and opportunity pursued to the benefit of all.12 This traditional or popular variant of anti-Catholicism located the threat to the community in the desire to accumulate wealth and the trappings of luxury, which, this belief held, invariably led to the neglect of the common good as individuals pursued their own interests without regard for their effects on their neighbors. Consequently, adherents to this tradition viewed any attempt by socially or politically prominent individuals to aggrandize their fortunes at the expense of their neighbors, or to fail to show an appropriate concern for their neighbors’ views and interests as evidence of a Catholic conspiracy.13 Pope’s Day played a vital role in this vision of anti-Catholicism. It represented an opportunity to offer a political and social commentary that would warn their betters of the dangers of an unbridled pursuit of wealth and remind them of their neighborly responsibilities, while celebrating membership in a broader community. Ordinary Bostonians celebrated the latter by taking to the streets in military-like companies to burn effigies of common menaces: the Pope and the Pretender. They underscored the former by taking collections from their better-off neighbors to pay for the companies’ entertainment, reminding them that economic prosperity should be shared and not hoarded, and underscoring the need for unity across economic and social lines.14 Perhaps unsurprisingly, these displays had become a point of contention in Boston as elites sought to stamp out what they saw as evidence of the disruptive licentiousness of the lower sorts. Participants responded by performing their rituals with even greater enthusiasm.15 The summer of 1765 was a moment ideally calculated to bring out both 117

Peter C. Messer the political and popular strains of anti-Catholicism and to initiate a conversation about how to reconcile differing visions of authority and community. The Stamp Act represented the imperial government’s most recent attempt to exert greater control over the colonies, while showing little apparent concern for the limitations that colonists believed the English constitution placed on parliamentary power.16 At the same time, the gap between the wealthy and other elements of the population had been steadily increasing over the course of the eighteenth century. Many of those who benefitted most in these unstable times did so as a result of their close ties to the imperial government. They could often be found not only championing limits on local political autonomy, but also defending restrictions on trade and manufacturing that harmed Boston’s laborers.17 Oliver and his kinsman Thomas Hutchinson symbolized the fears of those concerned about Boston’s constitutional and communal health. These men had achieved political power and economic success in no small part through their ability to monopolize political offices; Oliver, for example, would be the stamp officer and was the colonial secretary. Hutchinson was the lieutenant-governor, a member of the council, and chief justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Court. Both men had chosen to accentuate their positions by building lavish houses and embracing an ostentatious lifestyle, quite unlike that of their fellow townsmen.18 When Parliament implemented its new regime of imperial taxation, in other words, Boston found itself in a situation that fit into the anti-Catholic narratives of both the elite and aspiring middling sorts, as well as the more traditionally minded middling sorts and their laboring neighbors. Consequently, the time was ripe for a wide-ranging social and political commentary on the state of the community. To appreciate the social and political commentary that followed from the Stamp Act protests, the popular anti-Catholic traditions of Pope’s Day need to be seen within their ritual context. The actions associated with this variant of anti-Catholic protest did more than simply register discontent with a particular person or policy. They constituted part of a symbolic language that empowered those who invoked it to undertake ritually appropriate actions.19 In the Anglo-Atlantic world popular anti-Catholicism represented one of many rituals of inversion in which ordinary subjects deputized themselves to mete out punishment to those who violated community norms. These occasions unfolded according to a recognized sequence of events in which all parties— the plebian enforcers of community norms, their victims, and the community who observed the proceedings—had carefully prescribed roles to play, each of which guided the unfolding ritual toward a resolution of the problem it had been invoked to redress.20 Several factors, however, set anti-Catholic rituals 118

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution apart from others. Once invoked, for example, the ritual forms of popular antiCatholic protest gave the middling and lower sorts not simply the power to comment on the actions of their betters, but to confront them directly, and to demand a face-to-face accounting for their unsocial behavior. Crowds traditionally exercised these prerogatives by confronting their betters in areas from which they usually would have been excluded, notably the homes of their elite targets. Any attempt to disrupt or interfere with the ritual gave the crowd license to escalate the level of violence as a way of asserting its prerogative to correct deviance and comment on the behavior of rulers. The crowd’s powers, of course, were not unbounded. Its ability to deliver social and political commentary hinged on the broader community’s willingness to turn a blind eye to its violent and destructive acts, an immunity that the community could withdraw if the crowd exceeded its proper bounds.21 When the Loyal Nine framed their protest in the symbols and language of anti-Catholicism, in other words, they invoked a ritual that granted the crowd certain powers, placed implicit limits on their actions, and demanded certain indulgences from the community at large. The ritual nature of popular anti-Catholicism provides an essential link in explaining the influence of the Stamp Act riot in shaping larger attitudes about community and authority in general and the practice of politics in particular in revolutionary America. In the first place, because it forces us to look beyond what people said and wrote and to place those words in the larger context of the actions and reactions that surrounded them. When seen as words on a page, as we shall see, condemnations of the destruction of Thomas Hutchinson’s house reveal the shock of crowd action gone too far; but when seen as utterances that appeared after a specific series of ritually correct events, they take on another meaning altogether. Such an approach made sense in the largely oral world of the eighteenth century, when written words were meant to be understood in the context of the sounds and presentation styles and locations that accompanied them or in which they appeared.22 It also allows us to enrich our understanding of the interplay between plebian or ordinary Bostonians and the aspiring middling sorts and elites who were the self-styled patriots behind the Stamp Act protests. Ultimately, ritual conveyed legitimacy, and it did so without reference to any of the traditional markers of status—­education, wealth, political office, or legal foundation—creating a more level playing field where participants could approach each other as equals, at least to the degree sanctioned by the ritual. Consequently, moments such as the Stamp Riot that historians have traditionally portrayed as revealing the frustrations of both the crowd, who felt they had no other choice, and the aspiring middling sorts and 119

Peter C. Messer elites, who felt threatened by the implications, can take on different meanings.23 Here, this approach underscores how a ritually correct violent outburst could provide the catalyst for new ways of thinking about the practice of politics. The Stamp Riot began in the way that, in all probability, its organizers had intended, as a reminder of the burdens the act would impose on colonists and the public hostility to it, but it quickly escalated into something more. The crowd ensured that “not a Person was suffered to pass down to the Market, let him have what he should for sale, till he stopp’d and got his Articles stamped by the Effigy,” providing a graphic illustration of the inconvenience and annoyance of Parliament’s new tax.24 The crowd’s actions also constituted the first step in a process of ritual inversion licensed by the traditions of popular anti-​ C ­ atholicism that the pageantry invoked. By appropriating for themselves the role of mock tax collector or Stamp Officer, the crowd took on the symbolic role of government. The parodying of its unpopular tax underscored the failing of imperial officials, notably local ones such as Oliver, to fulfill the proper role of men of influence and standing to protect the interests of the entire community. This process of appropriation and inversion became complete when, as the sun set, the crowd cut the effigy down and “proceeded with it along the Main Street of the Town-House.”25 This route brought them by the houses of government, offering any who cared to look and listen a sense of how the people felt about the new tax. At the same time, by passing Boston’s major public buildings and taking the pageantry along the route followed by criminals on their way to execution, the crowd symbolically appropriated the authority of the men in those buildings to hand out punishment to those who offended community sensibilities.26 With the streets appropriated for their ritual purposes, the crowd proceeded to offer its powerful rebuke of the politics and culture behind the Stamp Act. After proceeding past the public buildings, the crowd “continued their Rout thro’ Kilby Street to Oliver’s Dock, where there was a new Brick Building just finished; and they imagining it to be designed for a Stamp Office, instantly set about demolishing it, which they thoroughly effected in about half an Hour.” From there the “Multitude approached Fort-Hill contiguous” to ­Andrew Oliver’s House “in order to burn the Effigy, together with the timber and other Wood work of the House they had demolished.”27 The destruction of the reputed stamp office and the effigy viscerally demonstrated the community’s view of the Stamp Act and those who supported it, ending with Oliver’s symbolic excommunication from the community for his role in encouraging the tax.28 At this point, having delivered their message of communal disapprobation, the “disguised gentlemen” who had organized the pageant “departed.”29 The departure of the crowd’s gentlemen managers, however, did not end 120

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution the protest. The invocation of popular anti-Catholic ritual to mobilize plebian Boston in opposition to the Stamp Act provided the Loyal Nine with a powerful means of intimidating Oliver into resigning, but it also gave the crowd license to offer its own commentary on the subject. They did not waste the opportunity.30 As the Loyal Nine and their representatives withdrew, the Pope’s Day companies they had assembled remained. In keeping with the popular antiCatholic rituals that shaped their protest, they set about destroying the symbols of wealth and luxury that, to the crowd’s mind, explained Oliver’s Catholic-like decision to accept an office that would allow him to advance his own economic interests at the expense of his fellow Bostonians. When the original bonfire “fuel fail’d” the crowd “immediately fell upon the Stamp Masters Garden fence took it up stamp’d it and burn’d it . . . ​not contented with this they proceeded to his Coach house took off the doors stampd ’em & burnt ’em.”31 When Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson arrived to disperse the crowd, its resolve to complete the message they had begun to send only deepened. When the “Sheriff began to read the proclamation for the mob to withdraw,” they pelted both Hutchinson and the sheriff with stones and forced them to leave. Still guided by the rituals of anti-Catholic protest, the crowd responded to this unwarranted attempt to prematurely end their public commentary by escalating the scale of their assault on Oliver’s property, particularly on the conspicuous signs of his pursuit of wealth. The crowd “fell upon the Stamp Masters dwelling house broke glass Casements & all; also broke open the doors entered the house & bespoil’d good part of the house & furniture, braking the looking glasses.” After the house had been attacked, “the Coach & boobyputt [a booby-hut or hooded sleigh common in New England] were drag’d up the Hill & would have been stamp’d & burnt had not some gentlemen approch’d it & with much difficulty they prevented it.”32 With their message sent, the crowd eventually withdrew. The ritual, however, had not ended. Pope’s Day celebrations came to a conclusion with the destruction of the pageantry, but popular anti-Catholic protests directed at individuals only ended when the accused stood before the accusers and answered their accusations or submitted to their authority.33 Oliver had left the house as the crowd approached the second time, and, consequently, this essential expectation remained unfulfilled. The importance that the crowd placed on the completion of the ritual became apparent the following day. The Loyal Nine had intended the burning of the pageantry and the appearance of the crowd to intimidate Oliver into resigning his office. While they did not anticipate the further scrum initiated by the crowd, they could nonetheless content themselves with the knowledge that their plan had worked. The following day the beleaguered suspected Stamp Officer “sent a Card to several Gentlemen, acquainting them that he 121

Peter C. Messer had absolutely declined having any Concern in that Office.” With their goal accomplished, these Gentlemen had Oliver’s resignation “publically read upon ’Change,” with which “it was thought all Uneasiness would subside.” The crowd, however, had other ideas. That evening they “again assembled, erected a Number of Stages with Tar-Barrels, &c. in the form of a Pyramid, in the Centre of which was a Flag-Staff, and a union Flag hoisted.”34 The previous day’s pageantry and effi­gies reflected the limited anti-Catholicism of Pope’s Day, in which symbols stood in for real people and the crowd offered a theatrical reminder of the dangers posed by subversive Catholicism. The stages, bonfires, and flags the crowd displayed here reflected a more vigorous variant of popular anti-Catholicism, in which the crowd assembled prior to confronting the individual accused of subverting the community in order to demand an apology or, if none came, to enact the ritually appropriate punishment.35 The protest, in other words, was no longer about whether or not the Stamp Act would be enforced in Massachusetts, but whether Oliver would acknowledge the crowd’s concern that his pursuit of wealth and luxury had dangerously distanced him from his fellow subjects. The Stamp Officer seemed to grasp the crowd’s expectations, and as word of its assembling spread, he directly addressed them in “a letter with the aforementioned Resolution of Non-acceptance, and Assurance of Endeavours to serve the Province &c. Upon which they thought proper to demolish the Bonfire and retire.”36 After Oliver’s second resignation, the ritual could have come to an end. He had admitted the error of his ways and promised to behave better in the future. Furthermore, in addressing that response directly to the crowd, he affirmed their right to assemble and hold him accountable for actions that contravened the sense of the community. The events of the previous evening, however, meant the crowd had one further piece of business that needed their attention. Once it had left Oliver’s house on Fort Hill, the crowd proceeded “down to his H–r the L———t G———r’s, with whom they said they wanted to have a Talk.”37 That the crowd should turn its attention to Hutchinson was hardly surprising. The day before some members of the council had warned Governor Francis Bernard that “making an opposition” to the pageant “without power to support the Opposition would only inflame the people and be a means of extending the mischief to persons not at present Objects of it.”38 Hutchinson had clearly “made an opposition” to the protest and inflamed the people, and they now sought to extend their “mischief ” to him as well. Hutchinson’s misguided attempt the previous evening to suppress the protest at Oliver’s house was only the most recent of a long string of actions that marked him as a potential enemy of his community. Over the previous two decades he had used his political connections to amass a considerable fortune, while championing 122

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution a tight monetary policy that many of the middling and lower sorts saw as the cause of the colony’s economic troubles. Moreover, he had advocated unpopular measures to increase imperial authority—trying to limit the authority of the town meeting or authorizing writs of assistance for custom officers—while expressing disdain for the idea that he should be accountable to the town and its people. To add insult to injury, he had even taken advantage of a fire that left many Bostonians destitute to channel money and resources to his political allies.39 Consequently, in the context of the ritual invoked the previous evening, Hutchinson’s ill-advised attempt to end the riot gave the crowd both the opportunity and license to discover more about his feelings concerning the Stamp Act and his attitudes about society and politics in general. The assembled crowd, according to the papers, was disappointed, and “not finding him at Home, they concluded the Business of the Night by loud Acclamations in every Quarter of the Town.”40 More happened at Hutchinson’s house, however, than the published report revealed. Most importantly, the lieutenant governor was home, but he simply refused to acknowledge the crowd’s presence. Hutchinson explained that when the crowd arrived at his house they promised “to do no damage they only wanted to speak to me or if I would come and declare to them I had never wrote to England in favor of the stamp act they would not hurt a hair on my head.” He refused to address them, however, because “if I had been obliged to answer their questions I must either have enraged them or else given them a handle to justify they extravagant behavior.”41 Hutchinson’s framing of the matter as a lose/lose proposition suggests that he realized that the crowd’s real objectives were no longer related to the impending implementation of the Stamp Act, as the Loyal Nine had originally intended. Hutchinson had made no secret of his belief that in a well-ordered community educated men such as himself should rule without reference to popular opinion or the crowd. His account recognized that the crowd had come to see how far he would pursue that sentiment.42 If he had addressed the crowd, Hutchinson could truthfully have told them that he had opposed the Stamp Act, so he had nothing to fear. But doing so, as he explained, would implicitly license the crowd’s behavior in coercing Oliver’s resignation, refusing his order the previous night to disband, and demanding that he submit his political opinions for their approval. The alternative would have been to speak directly to the issue of the crowd’s demand that he share his political views with them, which, in addition to being yet another admission of his responsibility to address the crowd, would have enraged them further. Hutchinson’s only possible course of action, consequently, was to ignore the crowd, and thus remind them that, as, a tradesman outside of his house informed the crowd, “it was unreasonable in them to expect, if I was at 123

Peter C. Messer home that I should be accountable to them.” To underscore this last point, the following morning Hutchinson, “to shew some resentment” over the crowd’s behavior, moved his family out to his country house in Milton, “where I intend to remain a few days.”43 Remain there he did, for ten days, until August 26 when he and the crowd would renew the discussion they had begun on the 15th.44 Neither Hutchinson’s departure nor that of the crowd signaled an end to the ritual originally invoked on August 14. The crowd made this point with their departure from Hutchinson’s house, proceeding through Boston making “loud Acclamations in every quarter of the town.”45 The mood of the town certainly remained tense. Bernard reported that since the riot at Oliver’s, if “a gentleman in common Conversation signifies his disapprobation of this insurrection, his person is immediately in Danger.” Similarly, when word spread that a man was willing to “accept of the Stamp Office, a day was fixed for pulling down his house, & it was prevented not without Difficulty.” Finally, a “minister of the Church of England” who “condemned” the riot against Oliver had “been threatened with the resentment of the people.”46 If the crowd did not replay the riot of the 14th, it nonetheless continued to claim the control of the streets to which the ritual invoked on that occasion had entitled it. It also, under the guidance of the Loyal Nine and its appointed captain, Ebenezer McIntosh, carefully remained within the boundaries of what the community would accept.47 Property and persons might be threatened, but so long as attempts to enforce the Stamp Act remained potential rather than real, the crowd remained in check. The unknown factor, of course, was what would happen when Hutchinson returned and the crowd sought to complete the ritual it had initiated on the 14th and 15th. Bernard, for one, sensed the tension beneath this uneasy calm, fearing, as he told the Earl of Halifax on August 22, that “much worse is to come.”48 Bernard’s fear proved prophetic on August 26, when Thomas Hutchinson returned to Boston after ten days in the country. That evening “a Number of Rude Fellows were gathered upon the exchange, [where] they quickly became very noisy and their numbers increased.” They then “erected a Pile in King street and made a Bonfire, which however they themselves extinguished thro’ the Persuasion of some Gentlemen present—the Fire served further to increase their Numbers, ’till they soon made a very formidable Appearance.” The noise in the street and the fire literally revived the anti-Catholic ritual first invoked on the morning of the 14th and resurrected on the evening of the 15th. Again, this potent sign of community and of purification summoned people to exercise their prerogative to demand accountability from their leaders, whose fondness for wealth and power had obscured their responsibility to the community.49 Once assembled, the crowd proceeded first to attack the houses of two customs officials, William Story and Benjamin Hallowell. This preliminary 124

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution work completed, the crowd then proceeded to Hutchinson’s house, where “the Devils let loose, they totally ruin’d the House, and destroy’d or carried off every thing in it.” After a brief move towards the house of Charles Paxton, the comptroller of customs, at the “Intreaties of the Inhabitants, and perhaps as it may well reasonably be thought, having spent all the Rage that the human breast is capable of, they retired without further mischief.”50 Hutchinson appears to have understood the real intentions of the crowd on the 15th and styled a rebuke intended to remind them of their place, gambling, apparently, that they would not persist in their challenge to his authority. He had now clearly lost his bet, and did not repeat his mistake. As Jonathan Mayhew observed, the day following the riot “being the time for opening the Superior Court,” Hutchinson took his place and “declared solemnly in Court that he never had written in favor of the Stamp Act, and enquir’d what he had done to deserve this treatment.”51 Hutchinson’s public statements on August 27 brought the first phase of the Stamp Riot to a close, but they also initiated a second phase in which the crowd and their erstwhile sponsors, the Loyal Nine, set about constructing an alliance around the riot’s consequences. In the broadest sense the crowd had achieved its immediate objective; Hutchinson’s tone remained defiant, but he also conspicuously addressed the crowd’s request from the night of August 15, affirming the principle that if he claimed social and political authority he should consider himself accountable to the crowd. On the other hand, the Loyal Nine had lost control of the protest they had initiated. The Stamp Act was now effectively a dead letter in Massachusetts, but the crowd had reduced them to minor players in the effort to define the principal issues arising from the recent changes in imperial policy. If the Loyal Nine were to regain control of this conversation, they would have to shift the crowd’s, and community’s, focus back to the unconstitutionality of the Stamp Act and away from the broader social, economic, and political changes affecting Boston, as symbolized by the conduct of men such as Oliver and Hutchinson. The conduct of the crowd the evening before, however, had made it clear that any such reorientation would need to take place within the expectations about community and authority that the crowd had just forcefully outlined. In order to walk the fine line between appeasing the crowd and redefining its objectives, the Loyal Nine embraced the ritual lessons of the Stamp Riot and set about fashioning a new style of politics out of the rituals of popular anti-Catholicism. The first step, ironically, lay in publically repudiating the attack on Hutchinson’s house. On September 2, the Boston Gazette reported: “Most people seem dispos’d to determine between the Assembly of the 14th of the Month and their Transactions, and the unbridled Licentiousness of this mob [on the 26th]; judging them to proceed from very different Motives as their Conduct was most ev125

Peter C. Messer idently different.”52 This confident assertion of the difference between the two riots in all probability better described how the Loyal Nine wanted their fellow townsmen to see the events of the fourteenth and the twenty-sixth than how they actually saw those events. What it did do, however, was take advantage of the ritual logic of the attack on Hutchinson and his reluctant affirmation of the principles behind it to claim their position as leaders of both the crowd and of the opposition to the Stamp Act. To appreciate the ritual significance of the Gazette’s disavowal of any connection between the three nights of rioting, we need to take a closer look at how the community reacted to the destruction of Hutchinson’s house. In all likelihood, members of the population astute to the ritual significance of riot would not have noticed much difference in either the composition of the crowd or its motives on the two evenings; if anything, they would have seen the makeup of the crowd that attacked Hutchinson’s house as evidence of continuity between the two events. John Tudor, among others, recalled, “Twas suppos’d that several Contrey fellows & saylors was concerned in this Mob,” as well as “a number of Boys.”53 While probably an accurate description of the “Rude Fellows” the Gazette described as initiating the riot, these groups were also those most pointedly associated with violent anti-Catholic rituals. Sailors had brought Pope’s Day celebrations to New England and, within the Anglo-Atlantic world, were seen as the appropriate authors and performers of anti-Catholic ritual. Boys were similarly ubiquitous in these events, and their presence was noted on the fourteenth as well as the twenty-sixth.54 The presence of boys at the destruction of Hutchinson’s house would have particularly marked the crowd as one engaged in rituals of inversion intended to instruct prominent individuals who had lost touch with the people.55 Observers may have seen the rough fellows and boys to which the Gazette referred assaulting Hutchinson’s house, but far from only seeing a threatening mob, they would also have seen the people they would have expected to see handing out ritually sanctioned punishment to a prominent individual whose desire for economic gain had led him to forget his responsibility to the community. Circumstantial evidence also suggests that the town understood the crowd, implicitly sanctioned its violent actions, and limited their extent. Tudor observed that as the crowd attacked Hutchinson’s house “there was some hundred of people looking on as spectators,” enough so that “had they known each others minds they mite have prevented the mischief done at the Lieut. Governors.”56 Even the skeptical Boston Gazette had reported the presence of enough gentlemen of consequence to first convince the crowd to dismantle their bonfire and then persuade them, after demolishing Hutchinson’s house, to depart.57 The presence of an audience was an essential component of rituals 126

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution of misrule, providing, by their observation of the crowd’s action, an implicit sanction for what followed, even if they did not participate.58 The presence of a large, diverse gathering of spectators at the destruction of Hutchinson’s house and their judicious intervention to limit the damage, in other words, suggests they accepted their assigned role as members of a community in the handing out of ritually sanctioned punishment. Contemporary reactions to riot also suggest that the town saw the crowd’s actions on the 26th as an extension of those of the 14th. Ebenezer Parkman explained that the “sting” was a result of “uneasiness among the pp in Boston,” occasioned by Hutchinson’s alleged support of the Stamp Act.59 Similarly, William Cooper noted that “the pretext [of the attack] was that he was a friend to or had wrote in favor of the Stamp Act & that Mr. Hallowell and Mr. Story had done the same, which they were notwithstanding mistaken if public declarations are to be credited.”60 Tudor confirmed these recollections, adding that the crowd thought “he had some hand in the Stamp Act, but it was soon known that he was not only innocent, but had protested against it.”61 Cooper’s and Tudor’s concluding reflections, that subsequent developments revealed the crowd’s error in assuming Hutchinson supported the Stamp Act, stand out in light of the Lieutenant-Governor’s own recollection that the crowd had called on him on the 15th so he might put these concerns to rest. The emphasis on the subsequent discovery of Hutchinson’s real sentiments highlighted the missed opportunity of the 15th, thus transforming the destruction of his house into a legitimate rebuke in light of his pointed refusal to address the question when it had been put to him ten days before. What Tudor and Cooper implied, a correspondent to the New York Journal made clear: “Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson of Boston owed his late misfortunes,” the author observed, “to the want of a little condescension, in refusing to exculpate himself from being a favourer or promoter of the Stamp Act, of which he was suspected.”62 The final piece of evidence that people would have seen as marking the ritual connection between the events of the fourteenth and twenty-sixth appears in the targets of the crowd’s ire. The Gazette was correct that the destruction at Hutchinson’s far exceeded anything done ten days before. The crowd, “not content with tearing off the wainscot and hangings and splitting the doors . . . ​ beat down the partition walls and . . . ​cut down the cupola or lanthern and they began to take slate and boards from the roof.” The “garden fence was laid flat and all my trees &c. broke down to the ground.” Finally, his “plate and family pictures house hold furniture of every kind” his “children’s and servants’ apparel” and “about £900” was destroyed or carried off.63 The crowd, however, sought out and destroyed exactly the same sort of items as were targeted at Oliver’s ten days previously—-items evidencing the pursuit of wealth and dis127

Peter C. Messer tinction that the crowd believed threatened their liberties and religion and also lay behind Hutchinson’s alleged support for the Stamp Act.64 To be sure, the destruction exceeded that imposed on Oliver, but the circumstances surrounding the ritual destruction of Hutchinson’s house differed as well. Hutchinson had publically rebuked the crowd by refusing to address them on the night of the fifteenth, an act of overt defiance that sanctioned the crowd’s resorting to ever-greater levels of violence. Moreover, Hutchinson was a serial offender who had neglected popular opinion and used political offices to advance his own material interests, making a particularly exemplary punishment necessary as well legitimate. In light of the community’s implicit acknowledgment of the ritual connections between the riots of the fourteenth and the twenty-sixth and their tacit affirmation of the principles that inspired them, why did the Gazette strenuously separate them? The answer lies in the same ritual logic that justified the destruction of Hutchinson’s house. The participants in these protests did not so much seek to upend the existing order as to remind wayward leaders that they had gone astray and to restore order and harmony.65 Anti-Catholicism in particular was intended to alert people to the dangers they faced as a community, and to foster a sense of unity against those threats.66 With Hutchinson’s house destroyed and his acknowledgment of his error made, the Loyal Nine’s post facto condemnation of the riot offered a place to start restoring the sense of order and unity that the riot had disturbed. It also offered the Loyal Nine a way to reassert their control over the Stamp Act protests that would acknowledge the broader conversation about power and authority the crowd had initiated, while also redirecting it towards their particular ends. That the condemnation functioned in this ritually specific way appears from the careful sequencing of events that most contemporary observers made in their disavowal of the riot of the 26th. Hutchinson publicly acknowledged he opposed the Stamp Act, and then regret at and sympathy for his misfortune flowed forth. Tudor, for example, recalled that “a full Town Meeting . . . ​ voted Unanimously their utter detestation of the violent proceedings of the Mob.” He added that “had the minds of the people & the Innocence of Governor Hutchinson been known before as it was at this meeting the mischief at his House mite easely [sic] have been prevented.”67 Similarly, the New York Journal’s correspondent reported that “after the affair was over” and Hutchinson had proven he had “been always a strenuous opposer of that odious and oppressive Act,” he “was heartily pitied, and his case deplored, even by those who were supposed to have contributed to his misfortune.”68 The clear connection between Hutchinson’s complying with the crowd’s demands that he publically state his opinion of the Stamp Act and his emergence as a figure of sympathy 128

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution suggests the sort of quid pro quo–based rehabilitation that anti-Catholic ritual encouraged. Now that Hutchinson had shown himself aware of the dangers of failing to demonstrate sufficient condescension to the reasonable desires of his fellow townsmen, they would denounce the actions of the crowd and seek redress for the Lieutenant-Governor. The ability to turn that ritual of rehabilitation to the advantage of the Loyal Nine in a way that accommodated the crowd’s vindication of its sense of community and authority, as well as their own political agenda, appears in the decidedly mixed enforcement of it. Immediately following Hutchinson’s appearance in the Court, the town took measures that suggested some teeth lay behind their condemnation of the crowd’s actions. They called out the militia and established citizen patrols that kept the peace and prevented further outrages for many weeks following.69 Despite this show of force, neither the town nor the province ever made a meaningful effort to capture or punish the rioters. Few of those known to be involved in the attack on Hutchinson’s house were ever arrested, and those who were, including the crowd’s leader, Ebenezer Mackintosh, never faced trial or punishment. In fact when several rioters held in the town jail escaped, the community reacted with decided indifference.70 The town had good reason to go easy on the suspects because, as Hutchinson observed about the attack on his house, “revenge in this way is detested except by the mob themselves,” and bringing them to justice would undoubtedly anger this powerful constituency.71 At the same time, in the face-to-face world of Boston’s waterfront, merchants and prosperous artisans had enough control over jobs and pay to punish members of the crowd if they had felt truly threatened by its actions.72 The Loyal Nine’s condemnation of the riot, in other words, served more as a reminder of what they might do to those who carried their program of chastisement too far, and thus as an inducement for the crowd to accept a ritually correct reconciliation with Hutchinson under their leadership. Somewhat ironically, the Loyal Nine’s condemnation of the riot was not so much a repudiation of it or its goals as it was the first step in an effort to “harmonize” the crowd’s vision of authority and community with their own. If the Loyal Nine’s first step toward regaining control over the meaning of the threat posed by the Stamp Act rested on a repudiation of the means the crowd used to demonstrate its resentment of Hutchinson, their subsequent steps rested on a new style of politics that showed considerable condescension to the principles behind the crowd’s action. Prior to the Stamp Riot the middling and better sort avoided plebian rituals such as Pope’s Day unless, as on the fourteenth, they appeared in disguise. In the aftermath of the attack on Hutchinson’s house, they showed no such reticence. Governor Bernard reported that on November 1 when the crowd assembled to mark the beginning 129

Peter C. Messer of the Stamp Act, “one of the Council, Col. Brattle, walked . . . ​arm in arm,” with the crowd’s leader Ebenezer McIntosh and “complimented him on the order he kept & told him his Post was one of the highest in the government.”73 Similarly, when the crowds from the North End and South End paraded towards a unified Pope’s Day celebration, they were accompanied by “a great Number of persons in Rank.”74 Finally, on February 21 when Boston again assembled to burn the effigies of Bute and Grenville, carefully avoiding implicating anyone in town, there were “a Number of Gentlemen” present in the crowd.75 The public appearance of so many gentlemen at these functions suggests that they cultivated the sort of condescension that Hutchinson conspicuously lacked in order to further their own claim to authority and power. In contrast to their more distant and aloof opponents, the Loyal Nine and their allies appeared openly among their plebian neighbors and joined with them in their rituals of protest in order to voice their shared political sentiments. To be sure, their presence reflected an effort to exert what control over the crowd they could, but it also reflected the ritual lessons of the Stamp Riot and tacitly affirmed the vision of community that the crowd had so powerfully asserted. To a certain degree the Loyal Nine’s embrace of a political style that reflected the crowd’s desire to minimize the distance between rulers and ruled, led the crowd to focus their public performances more closely on the objectives of their aspiring leaders. The Pope’s Day celebrations of 1765 reveal a crowd much more sensitive to the vision of society and politics of their betters. On the urging of “several gentlemen,” the “Commander of the South entered into a Treaty with the Commander of the North” in which “they reciprocally engaged in a union” and “with their Assistants engaged upon their Honor no Mischief should arise by their Means, and that they would prevent any Disorder.” Their efforts were successful, as “Spectators filled the Streets; not a Club was seen among the whole, nor was any Negro allowed to approach the Stages,” and after the customary “Conflagration, the Populace retired and the Town remained the whole Night better Order’d than it had ever been on this Occasion.”76 It was not only the behavior that changed, but also the message, for the architects of the traditional Pope’s Day celebration incorporated a commentary on the Stamp Act into pageants that had traditionally steered clear of contemporary political commentary.77 In this case, the organizers, “thinking our deliverance from the Stamp Act somewhat analogous in its consequences to the escape from the Popish Plot,” thought it “necessary . . . ​to increase the Pope’s retinue by adding thereto in effigy a number of the friends of slavery and arbitrary power, and in particular, some of the advocates of the late Stamp Act.”78 Plebian Boston met the more condescending tone of the middling and better sorts by 130

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution modifying their anti-Catholic rituals to reflect the more secular and political objectives and perspectives of their new allies. The two groups had fashioned a new style of politics, one ideologically committed to confronting threats to the constitution, but performed in a manner that accentuated the shared interests of the entire community and the responsibilities of its members to one another. It was not simply in matters of politics that the crowd managed to extract concessions from the elite, and vice versa. In the days that followed the pageants of November 5, opponents of the Stamp Act in Boston—-elite, middling, and plebian alike—-joined in a celebratory feast. The dinner had its origins when “Many Gentlemen seeing” the Pope’s Day pageantry “so well conducted, contributed to make up a handsome Purse to entertain those that carried it on.”79 On receiving this token of generosity, Bernard reported, “The two Captains [of the crowd] agreed to make a public Entertainment at a Tavern,” to which they invited “many of the Principal gentlemen.” In all “above 200 persons attended of all sorts; at the head of the table, sat the two Captains having the two Gentlemen, who reconciled them on each side; several others (not many) Gentlemen of Fashion were there.”80 In another nod to the popular traditions of Pope’s Day, the celebration of communal delivery from treason became an occasion to display generosity and hospitality, not merely by making the usual reluctant voluntary contribution, but in an open acknowledgement of fellowship.81 Though hardly a call for social leveling, such gestures underscored the principle that the shared bonds of community should be cultivated across the economic spectrum, and that the elite had the responsibility to use their wealth to facilitate that process. The Loyal Nine’s willingness to compromise with the crowd on matters of authority and community undoubtedly reflected their political ambitions, but it also suggests their recognition that the town had implicitly sanctioned the Stamp Riot. The willingness of some of the most ardent opponents of the crowd and their pageants to follow, if not embrace, the ritual lessons of the riot underscores the degree to which community pressure as well as expediency explain the changed political tone. In the months that followed, for example, neither Hutchinson nor Oliver repeated the mistake alluded to in the New York Journal of failing to condescend to offer his thoughts on matters of public interest to the people. When Oliver quibbled with the crowd over its attempt to get him to repeat his resignation as stamp officer in December of 1765, he carefully added that if they found his proposals unacceptable he would “come up, as was first proposed, and give them all the satisfaction they can desire.” When the crowd insisted he appear at Liberty Tree to resign his office, he did, assuring the audience that “I shall always think myself very happy to serve this People, 131

Peter C. Messer when it shall lie in my Power.”82 Similarly, when Hutchinson stood accused of exceeding his authority in council and rumors of another mob began to circulate, the council “ordered a vote to be published declaring the falsehood of the account” in Boston’s newspapers. While this approach did not entirely satisfy Hutchinson, who would have preferred to prosecute his accusers for libel, he admitted that this condescension did have a “tendency to appease the rage of the rabble against me.”83 A similar pattern emerged in regard to the crowd’s implied concern that the pursuit of wealth and luxury had left men such as Hutchinson and Oliver dangerously disconnected from their neighbors. When the crowd assembled to celebrate Pope’s Day, for example, the usually tepid and disdainful elite found themselves indulging the crowd in its celebratory pageants. Bernard explained, “It has been usual upon this occasion to collect a good deal of Money; but at this time the Collection exceeded all expectation: many contributed from affection, much more from fear.” The governor himself “was obliged to consent that my People should give money to the Pageants, when they halled [sic] before my door.”84 Regardless of how the town felt about the riot, it did seem to recognize the message it contained, with middling and better sorts comporting themselves, for a while at least, in a way that suggests they had understood the ritual’s message and would abide by it. The Boston crowd’s success in commandeering and redirecting the debate over the Stamp Act to their concerns with community and authority, and the Loyal Nine’s dexterous response in devising a style of politics to reflect those views, shows the creative potential of violent protest in the American Revolution. As Al Young and Dirk Hoerder, among others, have suggested, ordinary Bostonians in the crowd took the opportunity provided by the imperial crisis to exert pressure on elites and aspiring members of the middling sort to recognize their aspirations and needs and to craft their strategy of resistance accordingly.85 In this case, however, they did more. The invocation of anti-Catholic ritual provided a forum that allowed Bostonians alienated by the political and economic changes of the era to voice their discontent. The town legitimated the crowd’s insistence that the Stamp Act be considered in light of ordinary Bostonians’ broader concerns about these changes by conspicuously playing the role assigned to it within popular anti-Catholic rituals—­observing and containing performances, and sanctioning outcomes by withholding condemnation of the crowd’s actions until its victims produced the ritually required response. The town’s willingness to sanction the crowd’s action forced the Loyal Nine to embrace a more democratic style of politics that reflected the view of community and authority put forward by the crowd in the Stamp Riot. In the short term, even those not seeking the crowd’s political support carefully 132

The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution shaped their future actions to fit within the visions of community and authority that the crowd’s action had initiated. Violent ritual had both awakened an older sense of community and the responsibilities that went with it and pointed the way toward a new style of politics that would direct that sensibility to contemporary ends. The degree of change initiated by the riot and its ultimate longevity should not be overstated. In the first place, the newspaper’s account of a Pope’s Day without “negroes” suggests that the shift in political style would come at the expense of at least one part of the coalition of laboring poor who made up the Pope’s Day companies.86 Similarly, the decision to host the celebratory banquet in the primarily masculine space of a tavern made it unlikely that women would share in the new sense of common interests across economic divisions. Finally, Bernard’s observation that the Pope’s Day contributions reflected fear as much as genuine sentiment, and Hutchinson’s contention that the elite had gone silent because they were “afraid of my fate,” certainly suggests that among certain segments of the population these changes would have a limited shelf-life.87 At the same time, we should not overlook the significance of the initial innovative response provoked by the Stamp Riot’s invocation of popular anti-Catholic ritual. Whatever their motives, the violence of the Stamp Riot was a catalyst for the plebian, middling, and better sorts who opposed the Stamp Act to begin experimenting with political styles that refashioned traditional ideas of community and authority in new contexts. While these styles excluded as well as included and were entered into with varying degrees of good faith, they nonetheless point to the beginning of a conversation whereby differences among groups could become a source of political compromise and innovation. This conversation could take place largely because the parties involved recognized, grudgingly perhaps, the legitimating foundation of anti-Catholic ritual. The sense of legitimization that ritual provided served as the precursor to a sense of sovereignty that eventually empowered these self-styled patriots to use their experiments in new political styles to reach revolutionary conclusions.

Notes The author would like to thank the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the New England Regional Fellowship Consortium for their support for this project. 1. The events are narrated in the Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765 and 2 September 1765. 2. The identity of the Loyal Nine is discussed by Dirk Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1785–1780 (New York: Academic Press, 1977), 92–94

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Peter C. Messer 3. On the celebration of Pope’s Day in Boston, see Francis Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1995). 4. Ibid., 41–51. 5. Thomas Moore Brown, “The Image of the Beast: Anti-Papal Rhetoric in Colonial America,” in Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History, ed. Richard O. Curry and Thomas Moore Brown (New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1972), 1–20; Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 24, 30. 6. Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765. 7. Colin Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, 1714–80: A Political Study (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 30–40. 8. Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Brown, “The Image of the Beast: AntiPapal Rhetoric in Colonial America,” 1–20; Nathan Hatch, “The Origins of Civil Millenialism: New England Clergymen, the War with France, and the Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 31 (July 1974): 407–30. 9. Timothy Breen, Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Richard Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Carl Bridenbaugh, Cities in Revolt: Urban Life in America, 1743–1776 (New York: Capricorn, 1955). 10. Richard Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 243–75. 11. Brown, “The Image of the Beast: Anti-Papal Rhetoric in Colonial America,” in Conspiracy: The Fear of Subversion in American History, 15–20; McConville, King’s Three Faces, 261–66. 12. Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Consent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York: The New Press, 2010); Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy, Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987); Alfred Young, “Mechanics of the Revolution: “By Hammer and Hand All Arts Do Stand,” in Liberty Tree: Ordinary People and the American Revolution, ed. Alfred Young (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 27–99. 13. Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 17. 14. Ibid., 30; Young, “Tar and Feathers and the Ghost of Oliver Cromwell,” in Liberty Tree, 162; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 25–30; Gary Nash, The Urban Crucible: The Northern Sea Ports and the Origins of the American Revolution, abridged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), 164–66; Sherwood Collins, “Boston’s Political Street Theatre: The Eighteenth-Century Pope’s Day Pageants,” Educational Theatre Journal 25 (December 1973), 401–9 15. Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 31–33. 16. Edmund and Helen Morgan, The Stamp Act Crisis: Prologue to Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953, 1995). 17. Nash, Urban Crucible; Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 74–78; Benjamin Carp, Rebels Rising: Cities and the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 40–50. 18. Bernard Bailyn, Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1992), 109–12; Bailyn, Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge, MA: The

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The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution Belknap Press, 1974); Robert Blair St. George, Conversing by Signs; Poetics of Implication in Colonial New England Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 266–80. 19. On the importance of ritual in colonial America, see Peter Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981). On the power of ritual more generally, see Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and AntiStructure (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969). 20. Hoeder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts; Steven J. Stewart, “Skimmington in the Middle and New England Colonies,” in Riot and Revelry in Early America, ed. William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 41–86; St. George, Conversing by Signs, 242–52. 21. Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 72–74; Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 24–26; David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England; Natalie Davis, “Rites of Violence,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays by Natalie Zemon Davis (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1975), 152–188; Davis, “The Reasons of Misrule,” ibid., 97–123; E. P. Thompson, “Rough Music,” in Customs in Common (New York: The New Press, 1991), 478–91. 22. Richard Cullen Rath, How Early American Sounded (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003); Rhys Isaac, “Dramatizing the Ideology of Revolution: Popular Mobilization in Virginia, 1774 to 1776,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 33 (July 1976): 357–85; Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People Out of Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–21. 23. Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 96–118, Young, “The Liberty Tree Made in America, Lost in America,” in Liberty Tree, 331–36; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 44–52; Nash, Urban Crucible, 184–89; Pauline Maeir, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972), 51–76. 24. Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765. 25. Ibid. 26. St. George, Conversing by Signs, 262; Hayden, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-​­Century England, 35. 27. Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765. 28. On fire as a sign of excommunication, see Thompson, “Rough Music,” 480. 29. Sir Francis Bernard to Earl of Halifax, 15 August 1765, in “The Papers of Francis Bernard, Governor of New Jersey, and afterwards Governor of Massachusetts,” vol. 4, Sparks Manuscript 4, Houghton Library, Harvard University, 142. 30. Nash, Urban Crucible, 186–87. 31. Cyrus Baldwin to “Brother,” 15 August 1765, in Miscellaneous Bound Manuscripts, 1765. Massachusetts Historical Society, hereafter MBM, at MHS. 32. Cyrus Baldwin to “Brother,” 15 August 1765, MBM, at MHS. 33. Hayden, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, 229. 34. Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765.

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Peter C. Messer 35. Collins, “Boston’s Political Street Theatre,” 401–9; Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 252–53; Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 25–27. 36. Providence Gazette, 24 August 1765, Stamp Act Papers, Library Company of Philadelphia; hereafter SAP at LCoP. 37. Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765. 38. Bernard to Earl of Halifax, 15 August 1765, “The Papers of Sir Francis Bernard,” Houghton Library. 39. Bailyn, Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson; Beeman, Varieties of Political Experience, 82–84; St. George, Conversing by Signs, 178–80. 40. Providence Gazette, 24 August 1765, SAP at LCoP. 41. Thomas Hutchinson to unknown correspondent, 16 August 1765, Thomas Hutchinson Letterbooks [transcripts], 1741–73, Massachusetts Historical Society; hereafter THL at MHS. 42. Bailyn, Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson, 68–69. 43. Hutchinson to unknown correspondent, 16 August 1765, THL at MHS. 44. Hutchinson to Richard Jackson, 30 August 1765, THL at MHS. 45. Boston Gazette, 19 August 1765. 46. Bernard to Earl of Halifax, 22 August 1765, “The Papers of Francis Bernard,” Houghton Library. 47. On the role of McIntosh and the Loyal Nine, see Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 131–32. 48. Bernard to Earl of Halifax, 22 August 1765, “The Papers of Francis Bernard,” Houghton Library. 49. On the importance of bonfires as one of the central components of popular antiCatholicism and their association with community, see Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 82, 152–53; Hutton, Rise and Fall of Merry England, 252–53; Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 24. 50. Boston Gazette, 2 September 1765. 51. Jonathan Mayhew, “An Account of the Stamp Act,” 1766, Sol Feinstone Collection, David Library of the American Revolution. 52. Boston Gazette, 2 September 1765. 53. Diary of Deacon John Tudor, John Tudor Papers, 1732–93, MHS. John Avery noted the presence of two or three hundred boys in the display of pageantry on the 14th: J. Avery to John Collins, 19 August, Boston, 1765, Ezra Stiles Papers, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; 54. Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 24–29; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 30–31; Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England, 203; Cressy, Bonfires and Bells, 173; Hayden, Anti-​ ­Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, 53–54. Bernard to Earl of Halifax, 15 August 1765, “The Papers of Francis Bernard,” Houghton Library. Part of the explanation for the role of sailors in propagating the popular anti-Catholic rituals may lie in the persistence of more traditional notions of a community based on reciprocal relations among mariners, and a heightened sense of the need to take aggressive action to preserve it; Gilje, Liberty on the Waterfront: American Maritime Culture in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Markus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 55. Pencak, “Play as Prelude to Revolution: Boston, 1765–1776,” in Riot and Revelry in

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The Role of Violence in the Coming of the Revolution Early America, 125–55; Shaw, American Patriots and the Rituals of Revolution, 195, 202; Davis, “Reasons of Misrule,” 97–123; Davis, “Rites of Violence,” 182–85; Turner, Ritual Process, 108–11, 125–30. 56. Diary of Deacon John Tudor, John Tudor Papers, 1732–93, MHS. 57. Boston Gazette, 2 September 1765. One of Parkman’s correspondents also claims to have been present at the destruction as an eyewitness, suggesting the crowd did attract the attention of a cross-section of the population. 31 August 31 1765, Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, American Antiquarian Society. 58. Davis, “Reasons of Misrule,” 117; Thompson, “Rough Music,” 480–91. 59. 26 August 1765, Diary of Ebenezer Parkman, American Antiquarian Society. 60. 1 September 1765, William Cooper Diary, 1746–66, MHS. 61. Diary of Deacon John Tudor, John Tudor Papers, 1732–93, MHS. 62. New York Gazette, 19 September 1765, SAP at LCoP. 63. Hutchinson to Jackson, 30 August 1765, THL at MHS. 64. Nash, Urban Crucible, 187–88. 65. Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 34–35; Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 82; Natalie Zemon Davis, “Reasons of Misrule.” 66. Cogliano, No King, No Popery, 2, 18. 67. Diary of Deacon John Tudor, John Tudor Papers, 1732–93, MHS. 68. New York Gazette, Sept. 19, 1765, SAP, LCoP. 69. Morgan and Morgan, Stamp Act Crisis, 133–34. 70. ibid., 134–35; Boston Evening Post, 7 October 7 1765, SAP at LCoP. 71. Hutchinson to Jackson, September 1765, THL at MHS. 72. Carp, Rebels Rising, 30–33. 73. Bernard to John Pownall, 26 November 1765, The Papers of Francis Bernard, Houghton Library. 74. New Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle, 15 November 1765, SAP at LCoP. 75. New York Mercury, 3 March 1766, SAP at LCoP. 76. New Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle, 15 November 1765, SAP at LCoP. 77. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 21. 78. The Newport Mercury, 8 November 1765, SAP at LCoP. 79. New Hampshire Gazette and Historical Chronicle, 15 November 1765, SAP at LCoP. 80. Bernard to J. Pownall, 26 November 1765, The Papers of Francis Bernard, Houghton Library. 81. Cressy, Bells and Bonfires, 147, 181. 82. Boston Gazette, 23 December 1765, SAP at LCoP. 83. First draft of a letter to Thomas Pownall, Boston, 8 March 1766, THL at MHS. 84. Bernard to J. Pownall, 16 November 1765 and Bernard to J. Pownall, 1 November 1765, The Papers of Francis Bernard, Houghton Library. 85. Young, “Mechanics of the Revolution”; Hoerder, Crowd Action in Revolutionary Massachusetts. 86. On the presence of African Americans at Pope’s Day celebrations, see Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street, 21; Gilje, Road to Mobocracy, 30.

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Peter C. Messer 87. Hutchinson to Benjamin Franklin, 18 November 1765, THL at MHS. Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: The People, the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Bouton makes a compelling case that the aspiring middling sorts and elites in Pennsylvania embraced a similarly community-oriented style of politics to the one this paper outlines emerging in Boston only so long as necessary to remove their enemies before resorting to the sort of behavior that cost Hutchinson his house.

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• Social Death and Slavery

The Logic of Political Association and the Logic of Chattel Slavery in Revolutionary America P e t e r T h o mp s o n

No utterance of Continental Congress, not even the proposition that all men are created equal, offered up a greater hostage to fortune than the eleventh article of the Association ratified by Congress on 20 October 1774. To enforce an agreement to suspend imports from and exports to Britain unless and until the Intolerable Acts were repealed, to support the seizure and redistribution of contraband property, and to require of American Patriots proof of commitment to the cause via a renunciation of various frivolous and selfinterested behaviors; Congress, an extralegal body, sanctioned the creation in every county, town, and city of new committees outside current governmental jurisdictions whose duty it was to ensure, through their “strict attentiveness,” that Americans expressed fidelity to a document—the Association. The Association’s eleventh article stipulated that when a simple majority of a local committee was satisfied that an individual had broken the agreement, the “truth of the case” was to be immediately “published in the local gazette to the end that all such foes to the rights of British America may be publicly known, and universally contemned as enemies of American liberty; and henceforth we respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.” As for colonies or provinces that refused to sign up or violated the Association, “we” will “hold them as unworthy of the rights of freemen.” The hostage to fortune offered up was that the social death of Tories, their “civil excommunication” in the words of a North Carolinian committee, would be achieved through a reign of terror whose likely outcome, so contemporaries speculated in a welter of gory imagery, would be civil war.1 In May 1777 Gouverneur Morris boasted to Alexander Hamilton that a series of public hangings had broken the spirit of the Tories in New York. Speaking from “experience,” he told Hamilton that exhibiting the bodies of those 139

Peter Thompson executed throughout the different parts of the several states was the best way of convincing “those incredulous beings that we really do hang them.” Pennsylvania in particular, Morris speculated, would experience “many Good Effects” from such an “ocular Demonstration.”2 However the promulgation of the Association agreed by Continental Congress did not lead to the erection of a gibbet at every crossroads in America. What emerged was more interesting. Throughout America the means employed to enforce the Association— the local worlds of detecting, shaming, punishing, rewarding and defining conjured into being by Continental Congress—bore more than coincidental resemblance to the local worlds that slavery made for all whites, even those who did not own slaves. The outcome, and in some part the intent, of attempts made to establish a hard and fast distinction between a “friend of American liberty” and an “enemy of American liberty” during the Associational phase of the American Revolution, was to introduce into American society a figure— the white dissident or Tory—who was an object of enduring if not permanent suspicion and unique surveillance, and whose nearest equivalent in jurisprudence, popular imagination, and cultural life was the African American chattel slave. This chapter lays out the argument that the definition and treatment of dissidents and Tories, their social death, reflects a prior knowledge and nagging consciousness of the key foundational concepts of actual chattel slavery as practiced in America, even in areas of America where slaves were rarely seen and slavery did not structure society. In summary, this chapter explores the possibility that a consciousness that chattel slavery was a legitimate punishment in a just war; that the condition of slavery was hereditary; that slaves were an alien presence in America; that any manumission of the condition came through the gift of the master rather than being earned by the slave; and that slavery was a system founded in and productive of violence helped shape the manner in which Americans defined the threat posed by, and the management and punishment due, Non-Associators and Tories under Associational rule and subsequently during state formation. This chapter explores these possibilities in hopes of moving the study of what Patrick Griffin dubs the “process” of revolutionary violence away from the crude empiricism of the bodycount and toward an appreciation of what Peter Onuf suggests should be treated as its “capacities.” It does not argue that white dissidents were transmuted by Patriots into actual white slaves, nor does it suggest that the manner in which Patriots approached the existence of a white enemy within was borrowed whole-cloth from either colonial legislation establishing chattel slavery or codes governing the behavior of slaves and free blacks. Determining whether a white neighbor was, or was not, a friend of American liberty involved evidence and value judgments distinct from those required to 140

Social Death and Slavery determine whether an individual slave or group of slaves was expressing defiance or plotting rebellion, though like slaves many white Americans deflected suspicion through silence and outward conformity. In theory and sometimes in practice, whites accused of violating Associational discipline could by expressing penitence avoid ostracism or physical punishment. Most importantly, white American dissidents could, at some cost, leave America, an option not easily available to enslaved African Americans. For whites social death was not entwined with chattel slavery, yet the fact remains that both Patriots and their opponents referenced racialized chattel slavery as they construed the Association. Some manifestations of this consciousness, typically those expressed by Patriots, fit conventional narratives. The Associators of Danbury, Connecticut, noted in December 1774 for example, “It is with singular pleasure we notice the second Article of the [Continental] Association, in which it is agreed to import no more Negro Slaves, as we cannot but think it a palpable absurdity so loudly to complain of attempts to enslave us, while we are actually enslaving others.” A meeting of the inhabitants of Fairfax County, Virginia, chaired by George Washington, had endorsed similar sentiments in August 1774. Other manifestations of a consciousness of slavery fit less comfortably with Patriotic narratives. The inhabitants of Hanover County, Virginia, declared in July 1774 “for the present, we think it proper to form a general Association against the purchase of all articles of goods imported from Great Britain, except negroes.”3 And in ways that have almost been forgotten, a consciousness of chattel slavery leached into the actions large and small of committees charged with enforcing Associational discipline, even in areas where slavery did not structure society. In the spring of 1775, for example, Alexander McDougall and Isaac Sears, leaders of New York’s Sons of Liberty, mounted a concerted campaign to induce the inhabitants of wavering Suffolk County on Long Island to sign the Association. Encountering a sixty-year-old refusenik, John Case, in tavern, the pair forced him to sit in a corner next to a black servant because, by denouncing resistance, Case had rendered himself fit only for “the company of slaves.”4 Between extremes of interpretive possibility—that Patriots conceived of and treated Tories exactly like African American chattel slaves on the one hand; or, on the other hand, that when Patriots and Tories referenced chattel slavery and political enslavement as they thought and acted in respect of Associational discipline they meant nothing by it—there is space for a constructive reinterpretation of the logic and emotion driving the attempt to construct a binary distinction between a friend and an enemy of American liberty during this phase of the American Revolution. By 1774 trade boycotts were an established tactic of American protest, but the Association adopted by Continental Congress sanctioned intrusive restric141

Peter Thompson tions on expression and behavior in the service of a much larger reformation of manners and identity. In this respect the Association mirrored detested British legislation by invoking a greater good to justify the coercion of a white population that regarded itself as free and was unaccustomed to external restraint on its freedom of action. “Greater good” justifications of draconian constraints imposed on white freedom in order to combat an existential threat were as old as British North America itself, but by 1774 they had not been invoked in respect of America’s white population in generations. The Lawes Divine Moral and Martiall, codified in 1611, for example, prescribed galley slavery for a variety of speech crimes in Virginia. In Bermuda, where the Lawes were enforced by Virginia’s former cape merchant Gabriel Tucker, one Nicholas ­Gabriell confessed to mutiny and was condemned to be hanged. At the gallows, with the noose around Gabriell’s neck, Tucker, invoking the Lawes, reprieved Gabriell on condition that “he should remaine a slave to the colony” (effectively Tucker) “until future good behaviour freed him.”5 Slavery was bad but hanging was worse; the punishment served a greater individual and collective good. The tobacco boom allowed a lucky few Virginians to discontinue the application of the grim logic of extreme coercion to their white neighbors by acquiring a workforce whose freedom had been constrained as the condition of their residence. The grievances of those whites oppressed by indentured servitude and an inadequate access to “freedom” were a contributory cause of Bacon’s Rebellion, during which both sides quickly concluded that they had to get their retaliation in first, by plundering their opponents, lest they in turn become the property of their neighbors—slaves—and by offering liberty to those servants and slaves who would help them do it.6 As Edmund Morgan famously postulated, Bacon’s Rebellion probably encouraged Virginian planters to acquire a racially distinct and comprehensively enslaved workforce, creating an imperative toward racial solidarity among whites that for several generations militated against the application of restraints on white personal liberty grounded in greater good moral reasoning. (The most significant constraint that remained, the requirement to support an Anglican establishment, proved the subject of growing contestation).7 In New England inhabitants initially covenanted among themselves to set coercive bounds to those passions figured as a greater source of potential enslavement than the means taken to combat them. Sooner or later those covenantal restraints broke down. William Bradford for example noted, with regret, that the women of Plymouth colony soon deemed it “a kind of slavery” to be forced to dress other men’s meat under the terms of the Common Course and Condition which Bradford believed had guided the colony through its initial troubles.8 The claim to independence from coercive communal norms troubled 142

Social Death and Slavery Puritans, but while subsequent revivalist ministries in New England and elsewhere offered a powerful analysis of sinful dependency, they also offered white Americans a route out of bondage toward freedom. Revivalists stressed the independence of those they renewed at least as much as the need to coerce the sinfully licentious. More generally, despite the presence of sharp and growing inequalities of wealth and opportunity within its free population, e­ ighteenth-​ century America did not possess a vast white underclass concentrated in great cities and presumed to exhibit a toxic combination of vice, idleness, and licentiousness. No problem within mid-eighteenth-century white American society generated arguments on a scale comparable to those made by British moral philosophers, among them Francis Hutcheson, who concluded that the compulsory enslavement of Britain’s urban poor, to be followed by their forcible application to industry, would be an act of charity because it would free them from enslaving vice.9 The presence in eighteenth-century America of transported British convicts and other problem cases, a by-product of greater good reasoning, was denounced by colonists.10 In eighteenth-century America those most often figured as lacking direction, exhibiting dependence, and corroding society—and suitable subjects for coercion therefore—were black, and they were already, in the main, enslaved. Greater good arguments for the abridgement of white liberties conjured in the first generations of American settlement were distant memories. Drawing on the work of Linda Colley and Gerald Newman, T.H. Breen has argued that as an ever more assertive and Anglocentric definition of “Britishness” developed over the course of the eighteenth century, so white Americans began to fear being shuffled into a permanent subordinate position as less than fully British. To adapt James Thomson’s “Rule Britannia,” if Britons never would be slaves, less than fully “British” Americans might become slaves to imperial ambition. Americans knew a slave when they saw one. Hence it is unsurprising that American justifications of opposition to British greater good imperial initiatives in the aftermath of the Seven Years War presented cultural fears in the language of racial reality.11 A protest against the Stamp Act organized by Richard Henry Lee exemplifies the point exquisitely. In September 1765 a procession, led by two of Lee’s slaves “dressed in the livery of John ­Wilkes” and, apparently, accompanied by others, escorted a cart containing effigies of George Grenville and George Mercer (recently appointed Stamp Act Collector for Virginia, a post for which Lee had applied) to the gallows outside Westmoreland county courthouse. The effigies, later burned, held placards, one reading “Money Is My God,” the other “Slavery I Love.”12 The slavery that white Americans saw presaged in parliamentary legislation was unmistakably racialized, even in colonies with fewer slaves than Virginia. John Adams, under 143

Peter Thompson the pseudonym Humphrey Ploughjogger, greeted the Stamp Act with the cry “We won’t be [your] Negroes . . . ​[Providence] never intended us for slaves.” James Otis, writing as John Hampton, told English supporters of the Stamp Act: “You think most if not all of the Colonists are Negroes and Mulattoes— You are wretchedly mistaken—Ninety nine in a hundred in the more northern Colonies are white, and there is as good blood flowing in their veins, save the royal blood, as any in the three kingdoms.” Liberty, in Otis’s formulation was heritable and permanent, precisely because white Americans knew that slavery was heritable and permanent. Successive acts of Parliament seemed to call white certainties into question. For Richard Wells, writing in 1775, Britain’s failure to repeal the Declaratory Act prompted the italicized question: “[What] security have we that they [the British] will not one day portion amongst themselves, our fair inheritances, and force us into their new claimed fields, like Guinea slaves, to till the soil?”13 The Association adopted by Continental Congress formalized impulses over and above a desire to wage economic warfare against a British ministry seemingly bent on enslaving a free people. The Manichean oppositions conjured in the Association’s eleventh article, “friend of American liberty, enemy of American liberty,” also reflect an analysis of American society. A key element of this analysis, dubbed by Edmund Morgan a “Puritan Ethic,” was that the greater good of white American society required a systematic program of moral and material regeneration.14 In a letter to Richard Henry Lee, George Mason sketched out the greater rationale for trade boycotts and punishment of the noncompliant: Experience [has] too fully proved that when Goods are here, many of our People will purchase [them], even some who affect to be called Gentlemen. For this Purpose, the Sense of Shame & the Fear of Reproach must be inculcated & enforced in the strongest Manner; and if that can be done properly, it has a much greater Influence upon the Actions of Mankind than is generally imagined. Nature has impress’d this useful Principle upon every Breast: it is a just observation that if Shame was banished out of the World, she wou’d carry away with her what little Virtue is left in it.15 Mason, like Lee, was a slave owner. Unlike Lee, Mason fretted about the effects of slavery on a white society, because “every Gentleman here is born a Petty Tyrant. . . . ​Practised in the Arts of Despotism & Cruelty, we become callous to the Dictates of Humanity.”16 Nevertheless Mason called for the “strongest” possible use of shame in the service of a politicized conception of “vir144

Social Death and Slavery tue.” Implicit in Mason’s analysis was the perception that some Americans were slaves to their vices and required the mastery of public shaming and reproach to be freed or at least neutralized. Mason did not exempt his social peers from this logic and neither did the terms of the Association. But more typically wealthier Americans saw common folk as the primary target for correction. As James Madison blithely put it in January 1775, rituals requiring individuals to publicly sign up to the Association were a “method used among us to distinguish friends from foes and to oblige the Common people to a more strict observance of it.”17 Of course commoners were quick to reverse this analysis. In this context the endlessly repeated claim made by committees charged with enforcing observance of the Association that “in every particular” they sought, in the words of a group of New Jersey committeemen, to treat Non-Associators as “deluded people” who, once “reclaimed,” would be regarded as “prodigals” was never likely to command assent from those shunned (or those shunning). Considerations of social class, religious affiliation, and personal political outlook prompted both individuals and communities to tease out from the wording of the Association and the performance of fidelity to it competing definitions of slavery and mastery.18 A resident of Suffolk County, New York, felt that the concerted effort mounted in the winter of 1774 and spring of 1775 to force skeptical communities to sign up to the Association had introduced “a Spanish Inquisition.” He warned his fellow Americans that the power of committeemen was “arbitrary and unlimited; they may judge by appearances, and condemn unseen and unheard; they are under no check, there is no appeal to another Court, they are not accountable.”19 Such skeptics and opponents began turning the logic of the Association inside out, using the themes of mastery and dependence to argue that the greatest threat to American liberties came not from Britain but from local committees. As these arguments took shape they drew more closely on chattel slavery. A freeholder in Essex County, New Jersey, for example told his local leaders, “We never can submit, nor I hope will any of us approve of men ‘whose business it shall be to observe the conduct of all persons touching this Association.’ . . . ​To such an inquisition I never will subscribe,” and “By Heaven,” he continued: I had rather submit to Acts of Parliament implicitly, nay, to the will of a King, than to the caprice of Committee-men; in the two first cases I shall . . . ​be allowed to speak at least; in the last, I shall not dare to think or act, but I shall be in danger of being held up as an enemy to my country, and tarring and feathering is the least I am to expect.—I am to be a slave. I will then be a slave to a King and a Parliament.20 145

Peter Thompson “A. W. Farmer,” the eloquent (and often the obnoxious) Tory essayist Reverend Samuel Seabury, saw in the committee structure sanctioned by Congress “a system of the most oppressive tyranny that can possibly be imagined.”21 It was bad enough, for Seabury, that committees empowered “every piddler in politics who calls himself a son of liberty.”22 Worse, committees were erecting “a tyranny, not only over the actions, but over the words, thoughts and wills of the good people of this province.” That (white) men had free will, that a man of conscience could not act freely on compulsion, led Samuel Seabury to conclude that “liberty under the supreme authority and protection of GreatBritain is infinitely preferable to slavery under an American Congress.”23 The Association made no provision for the expression of loyal opposition, indeed it was premised on the assumption that any and all opposition was indicative of a prima facie disloyalty. From a Patriot perspective, acts of defiance directed against the Continental Association were welcome in that they flushed into the open enemies of American liberties. Yet at the same time, a consistent theme of the Patriot worldview was the threat to American liberty posed by disunity. The scale and nature of opposition to Congress’s actions, and the strategic importance of the localities in which it was most consistently expressed, fused these two perspectives in a structure of thought and action that militated against the conversion of dissidents. Congress and local committees agreed that detecting, deterring, and punishing enemies of American liberty required local energy and knowledge as well as central direction and sanction. This reflected a shared conviction that there were persons in particular American localities, sometimes neighbors but often distant, who truly were overt or covert enemies of American liberty and, as such, deserved anything and everything that might come their way. After all, the corollary of the position that by resisting British tyranny the Patriot renounced slavery and earned freedom was that, by refusing to observe the Association, a Tory renounced freedom and invited violence. White American Tories differed, for the worse, from the blameless Africans against whom Jefferson believed successive British monarchs had waged a war that violated human nature itself, because NonAssociators had, according to the logic of the Association, demonstrably committed an offence. As Alexander Hamilton put it chillingly in his Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress: “Since then the persons who will be distressed by the methods we are using for our own protection, have by their neutrality first committed a breach of obligation . . . ​it is plain that obligation upon us is annulled, and we are blameless in what we are about to do.”24 As the Association and what young tyros like Alexander Hamilton referred to as its “methods” pushed to the forefront of political consciousness questions of what a world would look like in which white men were “obligated” 146

Social Death and Slavery to some, but not to all, of their neighbors, two established and mutually reinforcing tropes—civil war and chattel slavery—became prominent. In April 1775 John Cleaveland told the inhabitants of New England: “The time has come to consider whether we will defend these our rights . . . ​or be sold—we, our wives and children—as other slaves are. . . . ​Will it not be the proper dictate of reason, as soon as we see the sword of Great Britain drawn against us, to sacrifice every New-England Tory among us?”25 In a sermon preached in Danbury, Connecticut, whose inhabitants had a few months earlier welcomed the Association’s commitment to a cessation of the transatlantic slave trade, the Reverend E ­ benezer Baldwin similarly linked civil war with actual chattel slavery. For Baldwin there were “enemies from among ourselves to combat with . . . ​so lost to all Sense of Liberty, to all Love to their Country, that they contribute all their power to assist our Enemies to rivet the Chains of Slavery upon us—thus aiming to stab to the Heart the very Country which gave them Birth. . . . ​Many others doubtless there are, who . . . ​upon any unfavourable Turn of our Affairs . . . ​ would willingly join our Enemies to enslave their Brethren.”26 This led Baldwin led to “rejoice” that God had involved Patriots in a “just war,” a condition in which it was permissible to enslave the enemy. For the author of “Political Observations, without Order,” the tortures of Damiens and Ravillac were an insufficient punishment for a violator of the recently promulgated Association because Congress derived its “power, wisdom and justice” from the people and therefore: “A freeman in honouring and obeying the Congress, honours and obeys himself. The man who refuses to do both is a slave. He knows nothing of the dignity of his nature. He cannot govern himself. Expose him for sale at a public vendue. Send him to plant sugar with his fellow slaves in Jamaica. Let not the air of America be contaminated with his breath.”27 Acting on this association of ideas following a skirmish at Kemp’s Landing, Virginia, in December 1775 Colonel Woodford informed the Virginia Convention that he had handcuffed a young Tory Scotsman named Hamilton to “one of his brother black soldiers . . . ​which is the resolution I have taken shall be the fate of all these cattle.”28 Even before Dunmore’s Proclamation, the greatest Virginian of them all had parsed ends and means in similar racialized terms. On 24 August 1774, after the adoption of the Virginia Association, Washington wrote Bryan Fairfax that “the crisis is arrived when we must assert our rights, or submit to every imposition that can be heaped on us, till custom and rule shall make us tame and abject slaves, as the blacks we rule over with such arbitrary sway.”29 In 1980 the William and Mary Quarterly published an article by F. Nwa­­bu­ eze Okoye that angrily accused “establishment historians” of ignoring evidence that a consciousness of chattel slavery structured Patriots’ thought and deeds. 147

Peter Thompson Okoye gathered from wide reading in the major record groups all manner of American references to slavery during the imperial crisis, no mean achievement in a predigital age. This methodology led his article to amplify a theme inherent in the citations he assembled: that from the Stamp Act crisis onwards American commentators commingled references to an essentially political rhetoric of enslavement with references to a sociolegal understanding of the workings of chattel slavery in America. Instead of figuring the two tropes as interrelated and mutually reinforcing, Okoye sought to establish the primacy of references to chattel slavery in revolutionary thought in support of the argument that colonial pamphleteers “dreaded” “equality of status with AfroAmericans.”30 Okoye’s many critics, “establishment” or otherwise, responded by stressing the greater influence of references to “political” enslavement. “The fact is,” John Phillip Reid asserted as confidently as Okoye, “most commentators of the eighteenth century thought slavery was the opposite of liberty without equating it with chattel slavery.” American Whigs, according to Reid, used “slavery” within the parameters of an established, British, “polemical apparatus” of “constitutional advocacy.” “Given this polemical tradition of defending constitutional liberty by flying the red flag of its opposite,” Reid argued, “it should not be surprising that purported British violations of American constitutional rights were almost certain to be labelled as slavery by someone.”31 Of course, in America that “someone” might well be an owner of African American slaves, like George Washington. Reid did not feel the need to address the interpretive possibilities arising from such usage. Even as they referenced a British polemical apparatus, Americans also referenced domestic, racialized chattel slavery.32 For example, during a tussle over judicial appointments in 1760, Joseph Galloway informed the people of Pennsylvania that “if an impartial administration of justice is once wrested from your hands . . . ​you will become slaves indeed, in no respect different from the sooty Africans, whose persons and properties are subject to the disposal of their tyrannical masters.”33 Despite his groundbreaking work on political enslavement and the moral rationales embedded in trade boycotts, T. H. Breen in the most recent study of the Association, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People, avoids engagement with the Associators’ use of the language of chattel slavery. Therefore Ann Fairfax Withington’s 1991 interpretation of the explosion of references to slavery, enslavement, and civil war that accompanied the adoption of the Association continues to constitute an orthodoxy. “When colonists talked about slavery in the context of parliamentary taxation and laws,” Withington wrote in a sensitive treatment of the Association, “they did not conjure up blacks on the auction block or blacks in the tobacco fields; they meant something quite technical. Slaves were people who could not exercise 148

Social Death and Slavery their will, either because they were not economically independent (they did not own property) or emotionally independent (their passions controlled their will).”34 But it is possible to demonstrate that thoughts of black skin or the tobacco field were in the minds of some Americans, Patriot and Tory, on the occasions when they alluded to slavery and enslavement in the context of the Association. These thoughts resided in the mind of at some least some for the blindingly obvious reason that slavery and enslavement possessed a history and meaning in America independent of the polemical apparatus of British constitutional advocacy. If therefore references to slavery in the language used by Patriots to define the Tory threat and the punishment due white enemies reflected at some conscious level an awareness of actual chattel slavery, how did such a consciousness affect the definition and treatment of dissidents? The social anthropology of the ritualized performance of Associational discipline is a subject that is in its infancy. Associational coercion was played out in a myriad of community contexts and its outcomes probably inspired what Jefferson, describing the disciplinary regime of chattel slavery, identified as “ten thousand recollections” of reputations tarnished or salvaged, injuries sustained or averted. But in addition to the technical difficulties attendant on approaching a subject with almost as many explanatory variables as participants, there is a conceptual stumbling block. No scholar seeking to offer a qualitative account of the psychological workings of slavery would now proceed on the basis of a quantified account of the frequency of executions, mutilations, and whippings. Yet a fairly crude empiricism—not many people were killed or injured—continues to provide the point of departure for accounts of the values of the Associational phase of the American Revolution and of life under committee rule. Our current approach to the ritualized performance of Associational imperatives is unduly dominated by the questions of whether and how dissidents were reintegrated into communities by naming, shaming, and apology, and it takes at near face value committees’ statements that they sought to unite rather than divide. T. H. Breen, for example, has argued with great conviction recently that physical violence against individuals deemed by local committees to be enemies of American liberty was comparatively rare and homicide unknown. Conscious that in some instances the psychological violence involved in threatened or actual processes of “civil excommunication” was terrifying, Breen nevertheless concluded “instead of executing enemies wholesale the committees tried to shame them into giving public confessions. These proceedings took on a ritual quality in which terror and humiliation were aimed at converting dissenters. The bark was generally worse than the bite.”35 Breen’s characterization of the intent and outcome of Associational discipline is intended to reestablish the Association as a seminal moment in 149

Peter Thompson the American Revolution and an integral part of the story of how republican government was defined, objectives I share. However, metaphors of bark and bite or the need to break eggs to make an omelet used by Breen and others have the paradoxical effect of marginalizing Associational rule within larger narratives as an interval or episode justified not by a series of conscious choices with long term causes and consequences, but by a more nebulous “necessity.” It may be the case, as political scientists have speculated, that the articulation of a revolutionary state requires an internal enemy. It may even be the case that the articulation of an American state in the late eighteenth-century was uncommonly reliant on what Jeremy Engels has dubbed rhetorics of “enemyship.” But if either or both of these postulates hold, then the current emphasis on restraint, conversion, and re-integration in accounts of Patriotic fundamentalism and the Tory experience alike stand in need of scrutiny. The framing and enforcement of the Association reflected choice, not necessity, and these were choices made in the context of a prior knowledge of social, religious, and ethnic fault lines within America’s white population and a nagging consciousness of the presence of an enslaved black population. Both factors, I contend, suggest grounds for doubting that the Association was predicated on the expectation that dissidents would be converted.36 In response to the adoption of the Association, thousands of Loyalists, ­Tories, and neutrals, black and white, embarked on journeys that resulted in them leaving America altogether. In 1959 R. R. Palmer estimated that, adjusting for population size, the American Revolution produced five times as many émigrés as the French (with the implication that this ought to satisfy those who, noting the absence of a reign of terror, doubted whether the American Revolution was “revolutionary”).37 Men like Colonel Austin Brockenbrough of King George County, Virginia, formed one element of this stream. Brockenbrough, who had fought in the French and Indian war, returned to his local committee a letter charging him with “counteracting” the measures adopted by Congress with defiant parenthetical insertions in his own hand: You are accused before the Committee of disregarding your duty as an Associator, (Associator!) and attempting to prejudice the people of your neighbourhood, and others with whom you have communication, against the Association, (Yes, but I never went out of my way to do it.) and to draw into contempt the authority and conduct of the Committee. (That I have, and always shall.) The truth of this charge the Committee cannot avoid inquiring into, and have ordered us to give you notice to attend the monthly meeting at the Court-House, on the next Court day, (that I shall not,) that you may have an opportunity of mak150

Social Death and Slavery ing your defence; and if the charge is groundless, of evincing your innocence. (Innocence!).38 Clerk Andrew Wodrow noted the long-standing “concern” Brockenbrough’s “obnoxious behaviour” had prompted among committeemen, and claimed that “to reclaim from error, rather than punish, would be the choice of the Committee.” Citing Brockenbrough’s contempt for its “indulgence,” Wodrow pronounced the committee’s “duty” to condemn Brockenbrough as an enemy of American liberty. Brockenbrough left Virginia for exile in England. For John Saunders outright armed opposition preceded exile. Saunders was a confident young landowner in Princess Anne County, Virginia, who had served in the French and Indian War and had subsequently begun to study law. In July 1774 he refused to sign the Virginia Association at a public meeting. At another public meeting, Saunders refused to sign the Continental Association and he refused to recognize the authority of a subcommittee of the main Committee of Observation deputed to “expostulate” with him. Finally, in January 1775, a close friend acting in a private capacity persuaded Saunders to sign the Continental Association. But, the county committee noted, “Behold! at the end of his name he added the negative ‘no,’ with a capital N!”39 The county committee invoked the eleventh article. Saunders soon joined the Queen’s Own Loyal Virginian Regiment organized by Lord Dunmore. He fought his neighbors at the skirmish at Great Bridge, Virginia, and, as a dragoon in the Queen’s Rangers, fought the Continental Army at Brandywine. He never returned to Virginia, ending his days as a judge in New Brunswick, Canada, an associate of John Graves Simcoe, governor of Upper Canada.40 Men like Brockenbrough and Saunders saw Associational rule as an affront to their sense of honor, an insult to their intelligence, and hence compliance with its demands as a degrading form of submission. In a country that possessed racialized chattel slavery and a degraded free black population, it is hard to imagine that the likes of Brockenbrough and Saunders saw their situation in purely abstract legalpolitical terms or that dissident writers, who bundled perceptions of degrading submission together with references to slavery, were referencing a metaphor. Men prepared to openly defy Associational committees or leave rather than submit to their discipline could be found across America, but they were more numerous and brazen in some communities than in others. David Maas has estimated that barely 2 percent of the adult white male population of Massachusetts for example became Loyalists.41 This provided a context in which Massachusetts’ committeemen could imagine using the Association to identify isolated Tories and, in a distorted version of the African colonization schemes conjured as a necessary concomitant of emancipation, permanently exclude 151

Peter Thompson exiled Tories from the commonwealth. In the years following the adoption of the Association, the logic of its discipline was extended to make it harder, not easier, for suspects, critics and opponents to be reintegrated into their former communities. Massachusetts’ first anti-amnesty law in 1778 decreed that no citizen who had joined the British after April 1775 would be allowed to return to the state without license from the legislature. However, suspecting the resolve of the newly configured legislature, Boston’s town meeting demanded a more stringent formulation, and in October 1778 the Massachusetts Banishment Act named 308 individuals who, if they returned to the commonwealth, would be immediately deported and if they returned again would be hanged. In July 1783 Massachusetts’ legislature granted the executive authority to banish Tories without jury trial. Under the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris, the United States undertook to urge states to soften penal legislation by allowing banished or self-exiled Tories to return and reclaim property. However, the first Tory to return to Massachusetts after the peace treaty was signed was run out of town “with a handspike under his crotch and halter around his neck.”42 Eventually the legislature authorized the commonwealth’s governor to grant licenses to returnees, manumitting, as it were, those who would be “good and useful citizens,” while excluding the “highly dangerous ones.”43 Yet even in New England there remained men of indeterminate loyalty. The disciplinary imperatives promoted by the adoption of the Association manifested themselves in three trajectories of regulatory behavior applied to those of suspect loyalty. Each of these was visible across America, although any given community seldom followed the logic of Associational discipline through to all of its possible outcomes. Broadly speaking, enacting the Association prompted efforts to identify dissidents as a distinct group; to coerce ritualized acceptance of committee discipline from individuals charged with violating it; and to inflict exemplary physical punishment on dissidents who chose to remain in a particular community and yet defy committee authority. Each of these overlapping behavioral impulses shows signs of being influenced by a consciousness of the realities of chattel slavery, and each bears a relationship to the fabrication of citizenship in America’s newly independent states. Acts of identification, often taken in the secondary literature on the Association to be indicative of Associators’ “restraint,” introduce the point. In November 1775, for example, New Hampshire’s provincial council examined eight men suspected of being “inimical to this country and the cause of liberty.” Six of the suspects were subjected to what modern antiterrorist jargon describes as “control orders.” Isaac Ridge for example was ordered to “remove himself to some place at least fifteen miles from Portsmouth, and from the sea, and not on any occasion leave the Town or Parish he shall remove to, without leave of the 152

Social Death and Slavery Congress or Committee of Safety.” No time limit on this internal exile was set. In contrast, the committee found John Parker to be a “friend to this country” and set him at liberty to live and travel where he liked.44 In another example of the same phenomenon, a committee of Patriots in Worcester, Massachusetts, called in all suspected Tories, required them to surrender their weapons, and then set them free. “And that was that,” Breen commented, viewing the incident as evidence of a larger restraint. However, in the context of ministerial invocations of the necessity for preemptive violence against Tories the moment the British sword was drawn, this action left a section of Worcester’s white population uniquely vulnerable to their armed neighbors. When would those disarmed be granted access to their guns again? When their armed neighbors felt like it. Disarming Worcester’s Tories defined them as a subordinate group and gave meaning to the liberties Patriots claimed for themselves.45 The outcome of lurid applications of terror and humiliation, such as tarring and feathering aimed at individuals determined to stay in a given community and yet defy its will, was unambiguously exclusionary. As Anne Fairfax Withington notes, the victims of such punishments “were those the committees had given up on. Committees did not expect people who had undergone such an ordeal ever to be reconciled to the community.” Someone tarred and feathered would be physically, not to mention mentally, scarred for life. Even if he moved to a new location, his skin and its scars would invite onlookers to identify him, replicating a process of scrutiny and judgment long familiar to African Americans. Such a victim could, unlike a slave, endlessly rehearse his penitence (or even his innocence) to each and every questioner, but he remained a marked man. “Once a Tory had been . . . ​reduced to something subhuman, an object of ridicule,” Ann Fairfax Withington argues persuasively, “he was hardly worth executing.”46 Rituals of compliance backed by the sanctions of naming, shaming, and punishment offered a means of resolving questions of loyalty and obedience, but at the same time they introduced insoluble questions of sincerity. Communities posed and resolved these questions in the context of judgments concerning the social standing of the accused (and accusers) and by reference to the nature of the offense given. It is possible that in some cases, particularly perhaps those involving violations of the Association’s consumer code, apologies served to reintegrate individuals within communities. Thomas Lilly was an inhabitant of Marblehead who confessed that although he had purchased a small quantity of tea after the adoption of the Association, he was now sorry for it and had voluntarily burnt the tea in the presence of “respectable” members of the town. The Committee of Inspection described this performance as “penitent behaviour” and determined that “he may be justly entitled to the 153

Peter Thompson esteem and employ of all persons as heretofore.”47 Thomas Lilly and his neighbors might have been reconciled by this performance. But other cases were more protracted and served ultimately to highlight enduring fault lines, typically religious, within communities. Robert Holliday was a resident of Kent County, Delaware. He had written a letter, subsequently published against his wishes and in altered form, he claimed, in which he suggested that if the Royal Standard was erected in Kent, nine of ten inhabitants would rally to it. Haled before his local committee, Holliday testified that he was sorry he had written the offending phrase, had no intention that it be published, hoped that he might be excused “for this my first breach in this way,” and stated his intention that it should be his last. This did not satisfy the committee. They shaped with Holliday a fuller set of “concessions,” which were, in turn, published. Holliday now declared that the political sentiments he had uttered were founded in the “grossest errour”; that he now recognized “none are more ready to oppose tyranny, or to be first in the cause of liberty, than the inhabitants of Kent County”; and that “conscious I can render no satisfaction adequate to the injuries done my Country, I can only beg the forgiveness of my countrymen. . . . ​And I do profess and promise, that I will never again oppose those laudable measures necessarily adopted by my countrymen for the preservation of American freedom, but will co-operate with them to the utmost of my abilities, in their virtuous struggle for liberty, so far as is consistent with my religious principles.”48 The extra satisfaction beyond contrition that committees demanded of suspects, particularly it would seem in the Mid-Atlantic States, was typically military service. As Philadelphia’s “Independent Whig” put it in 1775, a Tory who did not choose to “remove to Nova Scotia” or Great Britain should be encouraged to take “a more honourable way, to go as a volunteer in the Continental Army, and offer his service on every perilous occasion, and then he may have the honour of dying in the glorious cause of liberty, and not be obliged to live independent.”49 Military service resolved doubts about an individual’s commitment to the cause, but it was not an option open to principled Quakers, other pietists, and, in all but the direst necessity, free blacks, mulattoes, and slaves.50 Almost by design then, actions directed at Quakers produced ambiguous outcomes that prompted calls for further action. The Associators of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, for example, joined many other localities in requiring that “exact” lists be drawn up naming who within their jurisdiction had, and who had not, pledged to observe the Association in every particular. This exercise flushed out Thomas Smith of Upper Makefield Township, who had not signed the Association and had further declared that Congress had already enslaved America, that the “whole thing” had been cooked up by a “parcel of 154

Social Death and Slavery hot-headed Presbyterians” and that he “believed the Devil was at the bottom of it.” Finding that Smith’s words and inaction were manifestly “designed to cast the grossest indignity upon the Honourable the Continental Congress” and “to raise invidious Distinctions between different denominations,” the Bucks County committee invoked the eleventh article against Smith. In some localities men were tarred and feathered for less, but after a brief interlude Smith declared himself “heartily sorry for my imprudent expressions” and promised to cooperate with measures designed to redress American grievances insofar as those were “consistent with the religious principles of the society to which I belong.”51 He had still not signed the Association but the Bucks county committee accepted Smith’s confession, probably because it invoked religious divisions and, for all we know, genuine personal conviction on Smith’s part. This may have satisfied the Associators of Bucks County, but it was outcomes of this kind that led Gouverneur Morris to suggest the benefits of exhibiting the bodies of hanged Tories in southeastern Pennsylvania. Such was the strategic importance of the area that as British troops approached Philadelphia, Congress ordered Pennsylvania’s governor and Supreme Executive Council to prepare a list of persons of suspect loyalties. Governor Thomas Wharton complied and eventually twenty Pennsylvanians, mainly Quakers and among them Wharton’s own cousin, were peremptorily marched south into an internal exile in Winchester, Virginia, that was to last three years. Meanwhile, Pennsylvania’s Test Act of 1777 required any adult travelling outside his own county or city to carry proof that he had taken an oath of allegiance to the commonwealth. In the absence of a certificate, a suspect was required to take the oath or submit to imprisonment.52 The actions of committees in localities where a clear-cut majority sanctioned discipline against marginalized individuals suggest that in many cases an apology, far from serving as a route back into a community, served instead as a mark of permanent exclusion from it. The case of David Wardrob is illustrative. Wardrob was a schoolteacher in Westmoreland County, Virginia. In June 1774, he wrote a letter to a kinsman in Scotland describing the burning of an effigy of Lord North and the closure of the local courthouse (the site of Richard Henry Lee’s memorable demonstration against the Stamp Act). Wardrob doubted Virginians’ commitment to a long-term trade boycott but suggested that local merchants were already creating a suspension of trade by withholding credit and accepting only cash for purchases. He described the state of affairs as “alarming.” Unbeknownst to Wardrob, his letter was published in a Glasgow newspaper, a copy of which eventually came to the attention of his local committee, which deemed the letter to contain “falsehoods and misrepresentations which may be of fatal consequence to the rights and liberty of 155

Peter Thompson America.” In November 1774 the committee advised Wardrob’s neighbors to withdraw their children from his school, which they in any case closed. When Wardrob ducked a meeting with the committee for reasons it found more “insulting than exculpatory,” the committee required him to attend Westmoreland Courthouse and publicly sign a letter of apology. Wardrob’s confession read in part: “I do, most heartily and willingly, on my knees, implore the forgiveness of this country for so ungrateful a return made for the advantages I have received from it, and the bread I have earned in it, and hope, from this contrition for my offence, I shall be at least admitted to subsist amongst the people I greatly esteem, and desire that this may be printed in the Virginia Gazette.”53 It is impossible to tell whether Wardrob wished to continue to live in Westmoreland or whether the community wished him to be readmitted. He was an ethnic Scot living in area where resentment of Scottish merchants was common, and his neighbors had ensured that he would find it difficult to continue to “subsist” through teaching. The image of a kneeling David Wardrob internalizing his lack of worth calls to mind a slave awaiting his master’s pleasure. Any African American, free or enslaved, would have recognized the dynamics at play in such a staged confession. However, while local Committees of Observation may have subjected malefactors like David Wardrob to ritualized performances analogous to the disciplinary apparatus of chattel slavery, dissidents were not formally enslaved. White Americans could choose to accept, or reject the discipline of the Association, African Americans had not chosen to accept the discipline of chattel slavery and they rejected it at their peril. The disciplinary logic of chattel slavery was not premised on achieving the integration of African Americans within white society and, in any case, that logic struggled to recognize the validity of apology and contrition offered by those slaves who fell afoul of its dictates. However, as the cases of Robert Holliday, Silas Newcomb, Thomas Smith, and David Wardrob suggest, the feature of the Association most often figured as establishing the limits of its intent (and its conceptual distance from the disciplines of chattel slavery)—the apparent safety valve of apology and the promise of readmission—is also the locus of an Associational discipline with varied and ambiguous outcomes. By inviting conclusions such as “once a Tory always a Tory” or “better safe than sorry,” the Association signaled the near universal reach of its logic and that logic’s exclusionary character. There are in short grounds for questioning whether the disciplinary logic of the Association was understood to be premised on the reintegration of white dissidents sidelined and subordinated within their communities. Among the hundreds of documented cases illustrating the application of Associational discipline are some that explicitly suggest the utility of defining a subordinated white “unperson” and thus establishing grounds for a com156

Social Death and Slavery parison with the disciplines of chattel slavery. An open letter to the inhabitants of Halifax County, Virginia, dated 20 October 1774 and published under the pseudonym “Brutus,” is suggestive. The target of Brutus’s letter was identified as Thomas Y——e, a Scotsman who had married a local woman, was man of property and public office and until recently of “good fame.” He had striven, “with all possible fallacy, to disaffect you, my unsuspecting countrymen, against the noble and patriotick Resolves of the late Convention [the Virginia Association], entered into by our worthy Deputies, with all that reason and prudence which could possibly have governed men in their situation.” Since only strict “adherence” to the Virginia Association could secure a repeal of the Intolerable Acts, which threatened to submit the residents of Halifax County to “the most abject state of slavery,” Brutus asked: Lives there a man amongst us who dare call himself a free man, and yet is so destitute of those exquisite feelings, natural to liberty, as to advise you to recede from the Articles of Association, so solemnly entered into as aforesaid, calculated for your happiness, and thereby yield yourselves up to those chains which tyranny and art have been so long preparing for you? Ignoble attempt! and worthy only of that unfortunate wretch who would prefer slavery to freedom, or, if not preferring it, whose dastardly soul would shrink into nothing at the bare idea of defending, with his life and fortune, that liberty which is his birthright. . . . ​And if the preservation of all that is dear to you, my countrymen, your civil rights, liberties, and property, depend upon your strict attention to the Articles of Association, how greatly are you, and the cause of liberty, indebted to Thomas Y—e, of your County, for the part he has acted toward the completion of this liberal plan? The completion of Brutus’s liberal “plan” required Thomas Y to exist in a limbo of suspicion, playing the part of the exemplary and therefore useful enemy. The insight Brutus was stumbling toward would much later be formalized by Thomas Jefferson in his first Inaugural Address: “If there be any among us who would wish to dissolve this Union or to change its republican form, let them stand undisturbed as monuments of the safety with which error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”54 Individuals like David Wardrob and Thomas Y served as axles around which the wheel of revolutionary state formation could turn. Deflecting any potential criticism of the treatment of Tories in Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson reasoned, “A Tory has been properly defined to be a traitor in thought, but not in deed,” just as, he might have added, a slave is someone who harbors thoughts of kill157

Peter Thompson ing his master but has not yet acted on them. “The only description, by which the laws have endeavoured to come at them,” Jefferson’s analysis continued, “was that of non-jurors, or persons refusing to take the oath of fidelity to the state.”55 In Virginia, and elsewhere in America, pressure to attach a loyalty oath to citizenship came from below and even predated independence. In December 1775 a petition from Lunenburg County, Virginia, citing greatly “increased jealousies and distinctions” arising from the Virginia Convention’s request that county committees extend indulgence to foreign-born resident factors and merchants, called on the Convention to establish “a Test whereby the friends of America may be distinguished from those who are inimical to the glorious cause in which this country is engaged. Citing “many disorders” occasioned by the appointment of “improper officers” to the militia, “sundry persons” in Cumberland County petitioned the Virginia Convention to request that “a Test [be] established for all suspected persons.”56 The Virginia Convention glossed its position in terms that reveal the centrality of bloodlines and racial solidarities in a slave-owning society. Although it had thought previously that “it appeared unequal that any particular set of men in a society should have the benefits arising therein” while not bearing an equal share of the dangers, the Convention had accepted arguments laid before it by British-born merchants and factors to the effect that shedding the blood of those to whom they were “connected by the nearest ties of consanguinity” was “an act at which nature recoiled.” The Convention had offered British-born residents a “line of conduct” which allowed them to demonstrate support for Virginia’s cause short of bearing arms against British troops. However this “indulgence” had been abused by British-born residents who, after Dunmore’s Proclamation, had incited slaves to rebel, violated the Association, and spread glaring falsehoods “to the great prejudice and dishonour of this country.” On 19 December 1775, the Convention resolved that British-born residents would now be required, “as good citizens,” to use “every exertion of their powers and abilities in the common defense.” Those who shirked these obligations but had not taken up arms against Virginia would, under license from the committee of safety, be per­mitted to leave the country.57 These imperatives were woven, by Jefferson, into the definition of the commonwealth of Virginia. In Jefferson’s formulation (“A Bill Declaring Who Shall be Deemed Citizens of this Commonwealth” presented to the Virginia legislature in 1779), no one possessed a natural right to be a citizen of the commonwealth. Citizenship was instead a conditional privilege. Birth in Virginia, two years residence in the state prior to the passage of the bill, or subsequent in-migration accompanied by both a sworn statement of intention to stay and an oath or affirmation of “fidelity to the commonwealth,” secured citizenship 158

Social Death and Slavery “for all white persons.” This status was heritable, devolving automatically to the children of Virginia’s white citizens, through the father in the first instance. White orphans or parentless white adults migrating to Virginia were deemed citizens of the commonwealth unless and until they renounced that status in court while giving notice of their intention to leave. A comity clause recognized the rights of citizens of other states temporarily present in Virginia, a category that Jefferson realized might soon include some free blacks. All “others” “not being citizens of any of the United States of America” were deemed aliens.58 The only natural right mentioned in the bill—the right to leave Virginia, expatriation—applied to citizens of the commonwealth but not aliens (whose numbers included the commonwealth’s slaves). Citizens who wished to exercise their right of “relinquishing the country” had to announce their intention so to do in court or have the court make the decision for them when they became citizens of other states or subjects of nations not “in enmity” with Virginia. A white resident alien who refused to swear loyalty to the commonwealth or part with the one-dollar fee charged for naturalization, or a freed slave (assuming he could prove himself “white”), could expect to attract the attention of the authorities if he ignored the imperative of loyalty to the state. White in-migrants were to think twice before relocating to Virginia, because once resident they had no right to leave but would instead be required to swear loyalty to the commonwealth and to embark on the process of naturalization. In the new commonwealth, the Continental Association’s binary distinction between “friend of American liberty” worthy of the rights of freemen and unworthy “enemies” to whom such rights did not apply came to inform an equally sharp proposition, “Stay on our terms, or leave.”59 Non-Associators could exercise a birthright claim to stay in Virginia, “undisturbed” if they complied with the requirements of test acts, “disturbed” by penal legislation and identified as a monument to error if they chose not to swear loyalty. In Virginia test acts continued and extended the disciplinary logic of the Association and, in the context of a “revisal” of manumission law, became formalized at the heart of the commonwealth. Citizenship, in Virginia and elsewhere was not slavery, but neither was it an entirely volitional choice.60 A historical generation ago Edmund Morgan famously postulated that “a belief in republican equality” did not have to rest on slavery but that “in Virginia (and probably in other southern colonies) it did.”61 To which one might add that it does not necessarily follow from invocations of racial chattel slavery in statements figuring the horrors of submission to Britain that Americans at some level defined loyalty and disloyalty by reference to enslaved Africans and chattel slavery. It would just be surprising if they had not. Race war remained distinct from civil war in white imagination, and enslavement at the hands of 159

Peter Thompson the British was not the same as American slavery. And yet, actual chattel slavery as practiced in America and familiar to all Americans exerted an influence on the definition of the Tory enemy and the threat he posed. Slavery also shaped what Jefferson called the process of “coming at” enemies through the Association in that document’s conception, operation, and influence. Defining a group of white inhabitants as lesser persons, unworthy of the rights of freemen (and therefore at the very least analogous to slaves), and devising rituals to reinforce and clarify the point, was a useful and energizing force in state formation. These claims deserve to be tested by a reexamination of the quite substantial body of evidence speaking to the formulation and operation of Associational logic before and after the Declaration of Independence. My hope is that such a reexamination might move our understanding of the significance of the Association toward terrain where the influence of Associational logic on state definition can be appreciated. This involves at the very least a crossreferencing with chattel slavery, because the central contention of the logic at the heart of the Association was that some white people ought to occupy a subordinate status, and the central outcome of the application of that logic was that some white people (who didn’t leave America) remained in that subordinate status and, therefore, the central inference drawn was that some white people, near or far, deserved everything that might come their way; including violence, seizure of property and permanent degradation.

Notes 1. “The Association of the First Continental Congress,” reproduced in Merrill Jensen, ed., American Colonial Documents to 1776 (London: Eyre and Spottiswode, 1955), 812–16; T.  H.  Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), “civil excommunication,” 186. 2. Gouverneur Morris to Alexander Hamilton, 16 May 1777 in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold Syrett and Jacob Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–87), vol. 1, 254. 3. Danbury, Connecticut, Town Meeting, 12 Dec 1774, in American Archives: Consisting of a Collection of Authentic Records, State Papers, Debates and Letters and Other Notices of Public Affairs, ed. Peter Force, 4th ser. (Washington: M. St. Clair and Peter Force, 1837–53) [hereafter Am Arch.], vol. 1, 1038–39. The freeholders of Fairfax resolved: “that it is the opinion of this meeting, that during our present difficulties and distress, no slaves ought to be imported into any of the British Colonies on this Continent; and we take this opportunity of declaring our most earnest wishes to see an entire stop forever put to such a wicked, cruel, and unnatural trade,” General Meeting of the Freeholders and Inhabitants of the County of

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Social Death and Slavery Fairfax, 18 August 1774, Am. Arch. 1, 600. Meeting of the Freeholders of Hanover County, 20 July 1774, Am. Arch. 1, 615–17. 4. Cited in Ruma Chopra, Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011), 32. 5. [Nathaniel Butler?] The Historye of the Bermudaes or Summer Islands, ed. Sir J. Henry Lefroy, Publications of the Hakluyt Society, 1st ser., 65 (1882), 100–101, 295. 6. See Herbert Paschall, “George Bancroft’s ‘Lost Notes’ on the General Court Records of Seventeenth-Century Virginia,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography [hereafter VMHB] 91 (1983): 348–86. 7. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). 8. William Bradford, Of Plymouth Plantation, 1620–1647, ed. Francis Murphy (New York: Modern Library College Editions, 1981), 133–34. 9. Frances Hutcheson suggested enslaving the urban poor in A System of Moral Philosophy (1755), vol. 2, book 3. British “greater good” arguments for restricted liberty, and their American reception, are surveyed in Michal Jan Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution, (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). The general subject area was first defined in David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966). See also Edmund Morgan, “Slavery and Freedom: The American Paradox,” Journal of American History 59 (1972–73): 5–29. 10. On colonial opposition to the transportation of British convicts, see Roger Ekirch, Bound for America: The Transportation of British Convicts to the Colonies, 1718–1775 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), esp. 134–40. 11. T. H. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism on the Eve of the American Revolution: Revisions Once More in Need of Revising,” Journal of American History 84 (June 1997): 13–39; Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); Gerald Newman, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (London: Weidenfield and Nicholson, 1987). 12. I am grateful to Alan Taylor for bringing this incident to my attention. See Oliver Perry Chitwood, Richard Henry Lee: Statesman of the Revolution (Morgantown: Western Virginia University Library, 1967); J. Kent McGaughy, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia: Portrait of an American Revolutionary (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004), 78; George Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 38; Maryland Gazette, 17 October 1765. 13. Breen, “Ideology and Nationalism,” citations at 29 [Humphrey Ploughjogger], 32 [Otis]; Richard Wells, The Middle Line (1775), cited in F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (January 1980): 3–28, citation at 13–14. 14. Edmund Morgan, “The Puritan Ethic and the Coming of the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 24 (January 1967): 3–43. 15. Cited in T. H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 257–58. 16. George Mason, Extracts from the Virginia Charters (1773), 53.

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Peter Thompson 17. Madison cited in T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 327. 18. Committee of Freehold (Monmouth County), New Jersey, 14 March 1775, Am. Arch. 2, 131. 19. Address to the Americans, 4 February 1775, Am. Arch. 1, 1211–13, citation at 1212. 20. Address from a Freeholder of Essex, 5 January 1775, Am. Arch. 1, 1094–96, citations at 1095. 21. An Alarm to the Legislature of the Province of New York (1775) [Evans 14453], 7. 22. [Samuel Seabury], A View of the Controversy between Great Britain and Her Colonies (1774) [Evans 13603], 6. Seabury’s egregious contempt was echoed by other Tory writers. Describing the destruction of a brig carrying East India tea by a crowd in Annapolis, “Americanus” reasoned: “The mob of Maryland, like the common people of all Countries, are ever ready to receive the first impressions; and being too lazy or too ignorant to inquire or examine into causes or complaints, they are ever violent in their proceedings; and when a notion is once impressed on them, it is scarcely to be effaced by reason. Can it then be surprising that the Committee who met to inquire into the merits of the affair (inflamed as they were by the incendiaries who set them on) could not put a stop to their rage. . . . ​The mischief they had perpetrated, and the blaze of the vessel pleased and appeased the populace and in some measure, though it may be presumed not to the extent of their wishes, gratified the malicious and interested, and saved Mr. Stewart [the brig’s owner], if not from death and destruction, at least from ruin, tar, and feathers.” [Americanus], “Facts relevant to the riot at Annapolis Maryland,” 4 January 1775, Am. Arch. 2, 311. 23. A. W. Farmer [Samuel Seabury], The Congress Canvassed: Or, An Examination into the Conduct of the Delegates, at their grand convention, held in Philadelphia (1774) [Evans 13601], 19; [Samuel Seabury], A View of the Controversy between Great Britain and Her Colonies (1774) [Evans 13603], 8. 24. [Alexander Hamilton], A Full Vindication of the Measures of Congress (1774) [Evans 13313]. 25. [John Cleaveland], “To the inhabitants of New England, Greeting” 18 April 1775, Am. Arch. 2, 340–41. 26. Ebenezer Baldwin, The Duty of Rejoicing under Calamities and Afflictions (1776) [Evans 14656], 26, 29, citation at 22–23. 27. “Political Observations, without Order: Addressed to the People of America (14 November 1774),” in American Colonial Documents, 817. 28. Colonel Woodford to the Virginia Convention, 12 December 1775, Am. Arch. 4, 244. See also Colonel Scott to Captain Southall, 12 December 1775, Am. Arch. 4, 245; Walter Hatton to Nathaniel Coffin, 18 December 1775, Am. Arch. 4, 346. 29. F. Nwabueze Okoye, “Chattel Slavery as the Nightmare of the American Revolutionaries,” William and Mary Quarterly 37 (January 1980): 3–28, Washington citation at 13. 30. Ibid. 31. John Phillip Reid, The Concept of Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988), esp. 39–49, citations at 45, 49. 32. As Washington chaired the meeting that produced the Fairfax Resolves, he was lobbied by Robert Pleasants and other antislavery activists to consider supporting a total cessation of the slave trade and the eventual abolition of the institution. The first Continental

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Social Death and Slavery Congress received similar representations from opponents of slavery. See Jonathan D. Sassi, Communication to the Editor, William and Mary Quarterly 69 (January 2012), 196–201. 33. Joseph Galloway, Letter to the People of Pennsylvania, cited in Okoye, “Chattel Slavery,” 12. 34. From Ann Fairfax Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union: Virtue and the Formation of American Republics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 15–16. 35. Breen, American Insurgents, “civil excommunication,” 186; “bark,” 164. 36. Jeremy Engels, Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2010). 37. Robert Roswell Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959–64), vol. 1, 188. 38. Am. Arch. 2, 338–39; see also, “The Brockenbrough Family” VMHB 5 (April 1898), 447–49. 39. Meeting of the Committee of Princess Anne County Virginia, 7 March 1775, Am. Arch. 2, 76–77. Citation at 77. 40. See E. Alfred Jones, “A Letter Regarding the Queen’s Rangers,” VMHB 30 (October 1922), 368–75. 41. David Maas “The Massachusetts Loyalists and the Problem of Amnesty, 1775–1783,” in Loyalists and Community in North America, eds. Robert M. Calhoon, Timothy M. Barnes and George A. Rawlyk (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 65–74, estimate at 67. 42. Ibid., 66. 43. Ibid., 68. 44. [New Hampshire Provincial Congress], Orders in Regard to Certain Persons Inimical to the Country, 16 November 1775, in Am. Arch. 4, 19. 45. Details cited in Breen, American Insurgents, 239. 46. Withington, Toward a More Perfect Union, 235, 237. 47. By Order of the Committee of Inspection, Marblehead, 25 March 1775, Am. Arch. 2, 234. 48. Committee of Inspection for Kent County, 2 May 1775; Further Concessions Made by Robert Holliday, 9 May 1775, Am. Arch. 2, 466; 2, 466–67. 49. To the Printers of the Pennsylvania Journal, 9 November 1775, Force, Am. Arch. 3, 1411. 50. John Shy details the case of Nathaniel Jones and seventeen others from Farmington, Connecticut, imprisoned because they had failed to join a militia unit called out to oppose Governor Tryon’s raid on Danbury. An investigating committee found “they were indeed grossly ignorant of the true grounds of the present war with Great Britain . . . ​[but] they appeared to be penitent of their former conduct, convinced since the Danbury alarm that there was no such thing as remaining neuters . . . ​[and that] the destruction made there by the Tories was matter [sic] of conviction to them.” They escaped censure by enlisting. John Shy, “The Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” in Shy, A People Numerous and Armed: Reflections on the Military Struggle for American Independence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 219. Washington resisted black enlistment in the Continental Army. Racial qualifications for militia service varied. Connecticut’s first militia law for example barred Negroes and mulattoes from service. In order to meet their quotas, Rhode Island,

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Peter Thompson New York and Maryland permitted free blacks to enlist and, occasionally, allowed masters who were called up or were desirous of a bounty to substitute a slave (who might earn his freedom). See Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War, esp. 241–2; Shy, “Military Conflict Considered as a Revolutionary War,” 219; George Van Cleeve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), part one. 51. Minutes of the Committee of Safety of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 1774–1776, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 15 (1891): 257–90, citations at 264–65, 267. Benjamin Irvin has argued that tarring and feathering became a customary punishment for refusing to sign the Association or denigrating the authority of Congress; see, Benjamin H. Irvin, “Tars, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” New England Quarterly 76 (June 2003): 197–238. 52. Anne H. Wharton, “Thomas Wharton, Jnr.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 6 (1882): 91–105, esp. 94. Nine of the twenty had signed the original Stamp Act trade boycott agreement. On the Test Act, see Allan Nevins, American States during and after the Revolution, 1775–1789 (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 250–51. 53. Am. Arch. 1, 970–71; Larry Bowman, “The Virginia County Committees of Safety, 1774–76,” VMHB 79 (July 1971): 322–37, citation 328–29; Breen, American Insurgents. 54. Cited in Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 493. 55. David Brion Davis suggests that the Romans held it to be proverbial that “all slaves are enemies,” hence it is not entirely fanciful that Jefferson might have thought along similar lines; Davis, Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 46. “Proceedings as to Tories” in [Thomas Jefferson], Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1982), 155 [emphasis added]. 56. Petition from the Inhabitants of Lunenberg County, 16 December 1775; Petition from Sundry Persons of Cumberland County, 22 December 1775, Am. Arch. 4, 86, 95. 57. Natives of Great Britain, Inhabitants of the Country, Am. Arch. 4, 89–90. 58. “Bill Declaring Who Shall Be Deemed Citizens of this Commonwealth,” in Jefferson: Writings, 374–75. 59. “The Association of the First Continental Congress,” in American Colonial Documents, Articles 11, 14. 60. That American citizenship was “volitional” is the argument of James Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978). Kettner’s treatment has recently been superseded by Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Char­ lottes­ville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). 61. Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, 381.

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• Violence and the Limits of the Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania Kenneth Owen

The General Advertiser of 25 July 1794 brought “disagreeable news” to the people of Philadelphia—telling of the opening events of the Whiskey Rebellion. “The post lately arrived from Pittsburgh” reported “riotous proceedings in that quarter.”1 Excise inspector John Neville had attempted to serve warrants on tax delinquents in Washington County, a task that for the most part had passed off uneventfully. On attempting to serve the final warrant, however, Neville became involved in a skirmish. Angry militiamen surrounded his house, shots were fired on both sides. The house was eventually burned to the ground, though not before the leader of the militiamen had been shot dead. Neville himself was forced to flee to Philadelphia. The next day’s paper compounded the bad news. “The disturbance originates in an opposition, apparently determined, to the execution of a law which has received every constitutional sanction. . . . ​If a law is obnoxious to any part of the country, let the citizens there petition for its repeal, expose its defects, or injustice through the medium of the press; let them change their representation, put into their legislature men whom they know will be active to procure its repeal.”2 This response to the opening events of the Whiskey Rebellion reflected a key tension in the political organization of the new republic. Whereas violence and crowd action had been a somewhat tolerated feature of politics under Britain’s colonial rule, its legitimacy as a political tactic under a system predicated upon popular sovereignty—which gave the people the choice of their own representatives, as well as mechanisms such as a free press and the freedom to petition—was far more questionable.3 At the same time, however, there was also a difficulty in portraying the actions of the national government in levying an excise tax as entirely consonant with principles of popular sovereignty. There was an overwhelming and long165

Kenneth Owen standing hatred of excise laws in the western counties of Pennsylvania.4 Representatives of those counties would later argue that it was not the paying of taxes that caused the outbreak of violence, but rather the imposition of a form of tax that the inhabitants felt was unequal and unjust. The key question, though, still remained: Was violence ever legitimate political expression? Burning down an excise inspector’s house was one thing. But in the weeks after the initial outbreak of violence, a further series of incidents suggested that the perpetrators of violence may have had more than resistance to a tax law in mind. The mail to Philadelphia was robbed and opened; consequently, several leading figures in the four western counties of Pennsylvania were banished.5 At the end of July, several thousand militiamen marched towards Pittsburgh in an attempt to demonstrate the potential force of the western counties. Yet this march had little defined purpose.6 Insofar as it achieved anything, its significance came in channeling efforts toward a sophisticated, quasi-representative system of committees to negotiate with federal and state authorities regarding the proper course of action to deal with the outbreak of violence.7 Instituting a committee structure served several purposes. First, it directed the potentially violent energies of a large population into a more orderly system, which, though ad hoc, could deal with competing authorities on a more equal footing. Perhaps more significantly, though, the limited nature of most violence during the Whiskey Rebellion allowed representatives of the western counties to portray the actions of the mob as the actions of an oppressed people simply trying to find an acceptable, yet unequivocal, way to display their legitimate grievances. Albert Gallatin, defending the legitimacy of elections held in the western counties of Pennsylvania in November 1794, turned to the issue of the actions of the mob: The people who attacked and destroyed Gen Neville’s house, after having seen their leader and several of their associates killed or wounded, on the very day on which they finally succeeded, treated with humanity and dismissed without injury, the soldiers who had defended the house and even the very man whom they might suppose to have been the cause of McFarland’s death. The same night they had in their possession the Marshal himself, and however offensive their behaviour towards him might be in other respects, they released him also, without any personal injury. . . . ​Criminal as those people were, they cannot be said even in their excesses, to have been cruel. Can it be supposed, that a mob in England, France, Holland, or in any other part of Europe, would, under similar circumstances, have behaved in the same manner?8 166

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community This notion of an American mob acting in a clearly directed and restrained fashion was a notion with a long lineage in American revolutionary discourse. Twenty years earlier, James Wilson had made a similar declaration in the Provincial Conference of Committees of Pennsylvania. Justifying the Boston Tea Party, he asked his colleagues: Let us suppose that the Transaction deserves all the dark and hideous Colours, in which they have painted it: . . . ​What will follow? . . . ​That every British Colony in America . . . ​merits the Imputation of being factious and seditious? Let the frequent Mobs and Riots that have happened in Great Britain upon much more trivial Occasions shame our Calumniators into Silence.9 Wilson’s talk of ‘dark and hideous Colours’ suggested a belief that violence is illegitimate if undertaken for light and transient causes. More significantly, though, he implies that the Boston Tea Party was a legitimate form of political action. Similarly, though Gallatin made clear that he was not entering into a defense of the rioters, he also informed the legislature that “it is your duty to allay and conciliate.”10 Of course, Gallatin spoke in a fundamentally different political context in the 1790s than did Wilson in the 1770s. By 1774, Americans had largely rejected Parliament’s claims of authority over the internal regulation of colonial life. Creating an informal system of dispute resolution was all but impossible, on account of the physical and ideological distance between Britain and the colonies. Yet both sets of remarks demonstrate that the difficulty of fixing a relationship between politically motivated violence and a government based on popular sovereignty was an issue that remained live in Pennsylvanian politics from the earliest attempts in American self-government up to and even after the ratification of the Federal Constitution.11 James Wilson would later find out that even a mild-mannered American mob was terrifying enough, when his house was attacked by Philadelphia militiamen in October 1779. When prices rose in the state, Pennsylvanians formed price-fixing committees as a response to popular anger at the perceived monopolizing and forestalling activities of leading merchants. These committees intensified an already stormy political life in Philadelphia, which had been evacuated by the British in late 1778, and where suspected traitors had been acquitted in heavily publicized trials at the back end of the previous year.12 Though the committee system engaged a large number of citizens in the political process, both in choosing members of the committees and in ensuring its prosecution, it broke down in September when divergent opinions pre167

Kenneth Owen vented its extralegal operations from continuing without excessive turmoil. In the immediate aftermath, Philadelphia militiamen announced that they were to march and to round up leading “Tories,” whom they felt were damaging Pennsylvania’s war effort. Wilson, fearing he would be a target of the mob, secured his house with thirty or more friends. Though the militia march up until this point had largely proceeded smoothly—certainly without any violent confrontation—the scene at Wilson’s house sent both sides into a panic. It is unclear who fired the first shots, but there was a tense stand-off outside “Fort Wilson” that ended only after the deaths of several participants and the arrival of the Philadelphia Light Horse to break up the incident. Even in this case, however, the mob seems scarcely to have acted with “dark and hideous ­Colours”—indeed, one suspected Tory taken up by the mob was allowed home to dine before being taken off to jail. The violence, rather, seems to have occurred due to the concentration of two armed forces lining up in opposition to each other—a sign of mutual distrust rather than premeditated outrage.13 Yet this incident, too, demonstrated the important role that violent action could play in forcing those within governmental structures to pay attention to the concerns of a wider population. In attempting to allay and conciliate after the Fort Wilson, state authorities were forced to take specific legislative action in accordance with the grievances of the militia. Pennsylvania’s elections for the General Assembly returned an overwhelming majority in favor of the Constitutionalists; showing that the violence in Philadelphia erupted from a broad sense of political grievances. On 10 October 1779, the General Assembly sprang into action to try and control the potential fallout, enacting a law allowing the Supreme Executive Council greater powers to apprehend those they considered “enemies to the American cause,” and increasing the fines for those avoiding militia duty.14 Joseph Reed, president of Pennsylvania’s Supreme Executive Council, ordered special distributions of flour, with attention to be paid to those who had served in the militia; the Council itself issued a proclamation placing an embargo on the exportation of all victuals for thirty days.15 These immediate acts were followed by more serious legislation addressing the long-running grievances felt by the poor over militia service. The Militia Act was amended in March 1780, adding a fine calibrated to the value of estates for those who refused to serve in the militia—an action aimed at equalizing the loss of economic opportunity shouldered by those who did not have the financial resources to hire substitutes in lieu of active service.16 An act of free and general pardon, discharging all parties involved in the Fort Wilson riot, was also passed in March17—though this was not before most of the identifiable men defending Wilson’s home had been asked to pay large bail bonds to guarantee their appearance before a court (in Wilson’s case, a bond of ten thousand 168

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community dollars).18 In short, the penalties for the militia’s involvement in violent action were insignificant—on the contrary, their claims to wider legitimacy for their actions saw an unprecedented response to their grievances. Far from threatening the future of popular sovereignty in Pennsylvania, the Fort Wilson incident demonstrated how violence could force republican governments to amend their legislative and executive behaviors. Indeed, the session of 1779–80 has been seen as the “high water mark of the radical movement in Pennsylvania”—a period in which radicals used their political strength to replace the College of Philadelphia, the bastion of elite Anglican politicians, with the University of Pennsylvania.19 Fort Wilson demonstrates how the associations of civil society in colonial and revolutionary Pennsylvania provided important links to the political process. As with the Association of 1748, spearheaded by Franklin to provide for defense in the face of Assembly recalcitrance, so Pennsylvanians in the Revolution used associational and extra-​­governmental forms of activity to enforce the impression of governmental action carried out in the name of the people.20 Fort Wilson effectively pushed the General Assembly into a position in which government responded to the concerns of its middling and lower citizens and not to the fears of the defenders of Wilson’s home, regardless of their elite social standing. The militiamen involved in Fort Wilson were seen as conducting violence in defense of positions that were representative of the will of the community. Not only was the militia an institution reflective of the politically legitimate will of Pennsylvanians (the full benefits of citizenship in postIndependence Pennsylvania having been tied to loyalty oaths and a willingness to serve in the war effort), but it had been backed up by the overwhelming Constitutionalist victory in 1779.21 In short, violence had been the resort of the militia owing to the failure of constituted authorities to deal with a variety of popular concerns in the years after Independence. It provided an important addition to the toolkit of popular sovereignty, ensuring that government remained representative of a wider community, rather than representative of an elite mentality. The post-Independence history of Pennsylvania is pockmarked with similar violent outbursts. In 1781 and 1783 the Pennsylvania Line mutinied, demanding payment—in 1783 going so far as to march on Congress and point guns through its windows while it was in session. In the late 1780s Pennsylvanians rioted against the adoption of the Federal Constitution. In 1794 western Pennsylvanians rebelled against the imposition of an excise tax on distilled spirits (the proximate cause in a dispute that involved a number of other grievances). In 1799 German-speaking Pennsylvanians in the Lehigh Valley rebelled against tax collectors assessing the value of their property for a direct tax.22 In short, 169

Kenneth Owen force was a familiar and regular part of the political arsenal of Pennsylvanians. Yet the prevalence of violence poses questions about how we understand the political legacy of the Revolution. Earlier work on eighteenth-century crowds has highlighted the ways in which extralegal action, such as rioting, gave a voice to the politically marginal.23 The action did not have to be riotous, however; it could extend to closing down courthouses, or shutting off roads. Nevertheless, much literature on ­ rioting in early America presupposes the marginality of those rioting; that it is the only option left available to them in a political and economic system that is otherwise unresponsive to their grievances. In systems explicitly based on principles of elected government, the recourse to violence must be explained in other terms. Either the revolutionary frames of government largely failed in their attempts to found a system based on popular sovereignty, or the recourse to political violence was justifiable by other means. Food riots, or even more organized protests such as the North Carolina Regulator Movement, largely occurred outside of the dominant formal political system of the time. Violence could act as a useful corrective to prevent a governmental system from descending into tyranny, but Regulators and others protested an overarching power structure not founded on the principles of popular sovereignty.24 The English traditions of this action, as outlined in the “moral economy” framework of E. P. Thompson, allowed those outside of the political realm to strike against unjust laws and social practices. In many ways, this enabled rioting to be somewhat reinforcing of a social order.25 Elites did not have to fear lower orders in society attempting to assume positions of political power; instead, the use of violence was a safety valve, a mechanism through which errors in government could be corrected without requiring fundamental change to the political order. Violence in post-Independence America was far more frightening, for now the people themselves were in charge of government. For many, especially among the elite, politics “out of doors” was no longer necessary.26 If they did not like the laws that were being enacted, they could turn to new forms of correcting mechanisms less damaging to person and property—petitioning for the repeal of laws, for example, or changing their representation. Even after accounting for political structures that favored the election of elites to high state office, the revolutionary experience remained one in which the harnessing of the political strength of the middling and lower sorts was crucial to success in Independence (through their participation in the militia and Continental Army) and in establishing new political systems (both by their popular engagement in town meetings and in the new-found sense that they must engage in elections if new governments were to have a claim to speak with the voice of 170

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community the people). If violence was simply a means through which lower orders in society could voice grievances, then the development of new mechanisms should have seen the use of violence fall away. Pennsylvania poses particular problems for studies on the use of violence in the early republic, for it had adopted the most democratic of all state governments in 1776.27 The 1776 state constitution had given the state the widest franchise in the world, with 90 percent of adult white males entitled to vote. This constitution was the embodiment of a distinct political philosophy, in which government was to be devolved from the people only where fundamentally necessary. Governmental institutions should resemble the community they served as closely as possible—this was reflected in a unicameral legislature, a plural executive, and the principle of suspended legislation and the public consideration of all laws.28 This model of community protected local political action (if rarely becoming narrowly localist), while simultaneously providing a model through which higher levels of government could be made responsive to the will of the community, and, in the words of the Declaration of Rights of 1776, “not for the particular emolument or advantage of any single man, family, or sett of men, who are a part only of that community.”29 These structures further demanded the active participation of the citizen in political life, and they rendered claims of political legitimacy dependent upon the use of representative mechanisms. Popular sovereignty, whether expressed inside or outside of formal channels of government, remained crucial in determining the course of Pennsylvania’s politics even after the revision of the state constitution in 1790. Mechanisms of extra-governmental political action helped blur the distinction between governmental forms and extragovernmental or associational activity. Pennsylvania’s vision and experience of the political community was not an essential, but rather a protean vision, in which different models of popular sovereignty vied for implementation in a continuum stretching from electioneering through to popular committees or societies discussing political subjects through more direct protests, such as road closures, through to intimidation and rioting.30 The existence of a sufficient variety of extra-governmental representative mechanisms allowed Pennsylvanians to adapt effectively to shifting national and constitutional contexts, all the while grounding their revolutionary forms of government on popular activism carried out in the name of the community. Paradoxically, the strength of this extra-governmental mobilization increased the utility of violence when applied in the right context, for it provided the means through which local anger could be transmitted into state or federal political action. The issue of the connections between the legitimacy of violence and notions of popular sovereignty was seen in particularly sustained form during 171

Kenneth Owen the debates over the ratification of the Federal Constitution in Pennsylvania. Though Pennsylvania was the second state to ratify, and the convention itself was not the scene of the heated debates seen in other large states (the ratification convention supporting the new Constitution by a majority of two to one), the controversy over the adoption of a new frame of government was seen in lively and active extra-institutional debates that raged through the winter of 1787. In its most familiar and persistent manifestation, this came through heated newspaper debates, which questioned the motives of both sides. AntiFederalists raged at the lack of time given to deliberate such an important ­matter—particularly one that seemingly threatened the viability of the 1776 state constitution, which had been at the center of Pennsylvanian political debate since Independence.31 Perhaps unsurprisingly, violence—both actual and threatened—reared its head frequently, first in the process of calling for a ratification convention, and later in backcountry protests at the act of ratification itself. Both outbreaks of violence inspired much soul-searching regarding the nature of representative government within Pennsylvania; essayists and pamphleteers reflected on the duties of elected representatives, on how legitimately to express the will of a wider community, and under what circumstances violence was an acceptable practice in reinforcing a political system. When the Philadelphia Convention broke up in September 1787, having agreed on a new Constitution to put to the several states, Pennsylvania’s General Assembly was on the verge of adjourning ahead of new elections. The Assembly, controlled by opponents of the 1776 state constitution, were fearful that defeat at the ballot box would stall the ratification process in a crucial state— yet they did not have the time to wait for Congress’s official communication if they were to pass a law organizing a ratifying convention before the end of the legislative session. Consequently, without waiting for official Congressional approval of the proposed frame of government, the Assembly moved swiftly, voting to hold elections for a ratifying convention at the same time as the annual legislative elections at the beginning of October. Their opponents, realizing the significance of the plan, bolted for home during the lunchtime adjournment, depriving the Assembly of a quorum. When these tactics became known, a mob was raised to find the missing assemblymen; two were found and dragged through the streets of Philadelphia to the State House, where the doors of the legislature were locked shut. Pennsylvania’s Federalists made some concessions in the afternoon session, agreeing to delay the elections for a ratifying convention until November, so that the new frame of government could reach the western parts of the state and allow some time for consideration. Never172

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community theless, their true aim was accomplished—to ensure the election of a ratifying convention before Anti-Federalist forces had sufficient chance to mobilize.32 The raising of a mob, though, did not meet with immediate universal disapprobation. Though the seceding Assemblymen complained that “the inhabitants of Franklin and Dauphin [counties] have been grossly insulted by the treatment of their members,” the actions of the mob were at worst contentious, and at best even approved of.33 A town meeting in Carlisle in early October, held shortly before Assembly elections, “resolved . . . ​that the withdrawing or absenting of a member of Assembly, in order to defeat any resolution or act of the legislature, is an offense most destructive to good government . . . ​and that any member who is guilty of such desertion and breach of trust is unworthy of the confidence of the people and unfit to represent them.”34 An article in the Pennsylvania Gazette echoed these sentiments. “Their absenting themselves was a desertion of their trust, [and] a betraying of their constituents . . . ​as it directly tends to a dissolution of all government”—language more customarily used in condemning violent action.35 Yet though neither publication actively advocated mob action, only the actions of the Assemblymen were condemned. In a similar manner, a writer with the subtle pseudonym “Tar and Feathers” warned an Anti-Federalist writer: It is often found expedient to use these means (in punishing those on whom remonstrance and reason were thrown away) for the same purpose that Jehovah sent the deluge in Noah’s days. Laughable indeed would it be to suppose that no villain, however dignified among villains, ought to be punished, but with a view to reclaim him. There is a point of more consequence to be considered, and that is to expel from society a monster who is unfit to associate with me, and thereby to deter others from treading in his steps.36 Such arguments would, no doubt, have had particular resonance in a city where newspaper editors and pseudonymous essayists were often targets of the mob.37 Newspaper debates relating to the ratification of the Constitution contain regular references to intimidating tactics operating within public debate. Postmasters allegedly refused to send Anti-Federalist material; editors demanded that Anti-Federalist writers leave their true identities with the printers of newspapers so that interested observers could find out who had written against the constitution—the clear implication being that they would find themselves the victims of retaliatory violence.38 Though the implication of “Tar and Feathers” was somewhat more intimidating than the Carlisle resolu173

Kenneth Owen tions, the subtext of both documents was the same—violence was justifiable for political means when done in defense of the community. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the contentious and swift nature of Pennsylvania’s ratification of the Constitution, further violence occurred. Despite the best efforts of Anti-Federalists to demand extra time for the consideration of the innovations of the new frame of government, the convention voted by a two to one majority to ratify the Constitution on December 12th. When Federalists in Carlisle attempted to mark the occasion on December 26, an armed party emerged. These men demanded that the festivities cease; when the leader announced his intention to continue with the celebration, barrels and staves were thrown at him, and he was violently beaten. The Federalist crowd dispersed; the rioters then spiked and set alight the town cannon and burned a copy of the Constitution.39 The next day, the Federalists returned to the town square to celebrate, this time with less incident. A bonfire was lit, the Federal Constitution was read, and a volley of muskets marked the occasion. After they had finished, however, the beating of the militia drum was heard once more, and Anti-Federalists paraded into the town square bearing effigies of Chief Justice Thomas McKean and leading Federalist James Wilson, which were then set alight.40 Twenty-one men were arrested for their involvement in the riot; though many accepted bail, seven refused, on the grounds that “they were prosecuted to gratify party spite.”41 As a result, the militia of Cumberland County, combined with units from two neighboring counties (about five hundred men in total), marched to Carlisle on the 1st of March.42 A small committee of one man for each company was elected to negotiate terms of accommodation with leading Federalists and Anti-Federalists. Consequently, in a display of popular power, “the militia were marched under their respective officers from the public square to the jail, where the sheriff conducted the persons to the street, having read the above discharge, they were restored to their former liberty with loud huzzas and a feu de joye from right to left of the companies, who then marched of town in good order, without injuring any person or property, except two balls which were fired through a tavern-keeper’s sign who is said to be a warm federalist.”43 Later that month, following a joint petition sent by Carlisle Federalists and Anti-Federalists, the Supreme Executive Council ordered that no further action be taken against the rioters.44 The dropping of all charges against the Carlisle rioters came at the end of a clearly negotiated process, in which the central question had been the representative nature of public political action, and the extent to which public actors had claims to political legitimacy. It is notable that the resolution of the prosecutions related to the violence was negotiated in an unmistakably 174

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community representative manner; the militia, the body that throughout the Revolution had maintained its claim to represent the active citizens of Pennsylvania, took upon itself the role of presenting popular opinion to authority figures, in the form of the leading Federalists and Anti-Federalists; moreover, the practice of electing one man from each company reinforced the idea that negotiations were representative of the sense of the people in Cumberland and its neighboring counties. The fact that the Revolution had given American citizens a democratic legitimacy made attempts to proscribe their actions much trickier. As with the Fort Wilson incident, the resolution of the Carlisle riots without any prosecutions for violent action occurred because of the development of political processes that demonstrated the weight of local support for the rioters. The question of the public legitimacy of crowd action featured not only in the legal proceedings relating to the Carlisle riot, but also in the newspaper exchanges that followed the violence. The first exchanges were made in the Carlisle Gazette in early January, with partisans on both sides of the Federalist divide arguing that their celebrations represented the legitimate voice of the community. The arguments deployed, however, suggest a divide in the belief in a participatory political culture. “An Old Man,” writing in defense of the Federalist parade, argued, “Every lover of good order must lament the wound the dignity the state has received in burning in the public street, in one of the largest towns in open day, the effigy of the first magistrate of the commonwealth. Proceedings of this kind are really alarming, directly tend to the dissolution of all governments, and must receive the reprobation of every honest citizen.”45 The attack on the rioters rested on an argument upholding respect for properly constituted authority—foreshadowing, perhaps, the sorts of rhetoric that would be used to defend governmental action under the new constitution. In response, “One of the People,” defending the rioters, asked “if a town meeting was called to consult the people” on celebrating the Constitution’s ratification. “Without this precaution, their public notice was to no purpose. It is unknown to the borough charter, and therefore the intended rejoicers were an unhallowed riotous mob.”46 There is a clear and evident irony in a man defending the wielders of barrels, bayonets, and staves describing their victims as a “mob.” The use of such language, however, further reinforces the importance of representativeness and legitimacy within Pennsylvanian political discourse. A celebration in the public square of Carlisle would be transmitted to other parts of the country as evidence of the community’s support for the Federal ­Constitution—greatly worrying to those who opposed the Constitution and saw it as an extension of centralized power that would subvert the liberties of the people. The existence of popular political mechanisms outside of the formal frameworks of government through which the will of the community 175

Kenneth Owen could be exercised was fundamentally necessary. If these mechanisms were to be subverted, furthermore, it was necessary to have a further resort to represent the popular will. Violence, for the Anti-Federalists in Carlisle, was not just a legitimate possibility. It was a necessary response to the inevitable imperfections of representative government. It prevented a narrow group of people from being able to use ostensibly representative forms for sectional or divisive purposes. The impact of the riots was not limited to Cumberland County. Philadelphia, too, debated the riots with some intensity—with attitudes again strongly colored according to political allegiance. Anti-Federalists used the riot as further evidence that the Constitution did not hold popular legitimacy—restating the view that violence was an important political act in providing a corrective to the errors that would inevitably be made by any form of government. George Bryan, writing to a friend in Northampton County, criticized the actions of the “small group” in Cumberland County that had called the town meeting in October to censure the seceding Assemblymen, for presenting themselves erroneously as representing the “sense of the people.” If ostensibly popular measures were used to promote the views of a particular party, then riots were inevitable.47 These Anti-Federalist writers reflected the ambivalent role of violence in republican society. No writers claimed that ongoing recourse to mob action was desirable in a functioning political system. Yet they always stopped short of explicitly condemning riotous behavior. Violence by the politically voiceless in British colonial society possessed legitimacy as a corrective against the unrepresentative elements of a system. In a republican society, violence could paradoxically be even more necessary to counter the unjust oppressions of a government. Without the use of force, how could citizens defend themselves against the subversion of representative forms? Federalists, on the other hand, portrayed the violence as more destabilizing. They did this, though, by suggesting that the agitators of violence were a cabal uninterested in representing the people, grasping instead only for their own power. A satire saw a writer from Cumberland County explaining how he kept up popular agitation against the constitution. “I kept Bryan from school a whole week, riding about the country, and also my two hands, Pat McBlathery and Old Swinkey . . . ​so that there was not a hands-turn done about the farm.” Though this meant that he had lost all his pigs and apples, “I care not for all this, as it is lost in promoting our schemes; and I know if we succeed, the party will make it all up to me, together with the loss of my own time, and the loss of my hands.” Yet when it came to the riot, “We expected to drive the Federalists away at once; but when we saw it was coming to blows, he and I pushed off with ourselves.”48 176

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community Like the Carlisle meeting that condemned the actions of Constitutionalists absenting themselves from the General Assembly, this formulation does not condemn the use of violence in and of itself. Instead, the writer is satirically portrayed as a coward who is unprepared to fight when confronted with the threat of violent action—though the Anti-Federalists tried to raise a crowd to subvert the will of the community, they shied away from the consequences of their actions. The importance of the critique of violence, then, comes in the unrepresentative nature of their actions. Four men could never be considered representative of the interests of a county, no matter how much their party bosses in Philadelphia wished them to be. Anti-Federalist violence was rejected in this instance not because violence was wrong (Federalists were justified, in this telling, in meeting the cabal with violence themselves), but because it was used for the emolument of a small group of men, and not in defense of the community as a whole. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists approved of the use of violence in the name of their own party and condemned violence against their fellow party supporters. This, though, rested on their claim to speak as “the community.” It was how violence was used, not that violence was used, that provided the real controversy. After all, threats to republican government, both external and internal, were ever-present. The fragility of republican society demanded that the active citizen be prepared to use the force of arms. The resolution of the Carlisle riots in March 1788 did not mark the end of Anti-Federalist agitation in Cumberland County. Remarks appeared in the Philadelphia press to the effect that Cumberland County was unusually vehement in its Anti-Federalism; the summer of 1788, however, would demonstrate that there was sufficient sentiment in Pennsylvania as a whole to support an ongoing campaign to limit the scope of the new Constitution’s operation.49 Recognizing that local action, for all that it might express the vehemence of popular opinion, risked arousing antagonism elsewhere in the state, Cumberland County created a committee of correspondence to help organize opposition to the new Constitution and to circulate Anti-Federalist pamphlets. Their petitioning efforts did not meet with immediate success. For starters, it was difficult to know who exactly to petition—the state government was neither sufficiently powerful nor sufficiently willing to derail the ratification process; yet the federal government had not yet formed. Nor was it easy to work out exactly who to mobilize—small farmers from west of the Susquehanna were not always the most comfortable bedfellows for Philadelphia elites more familiar with building distant political networks.50 Despite these efforts, however, Cumberland activists mobilized an AntiFederalist network across the state and organized a statewide convention, held 177

Kenneth Owen in Harrisburg. Delegates were sent by county delegation to discuss the constitutional amendments they sought to procure, and the ticket they sought to elect to Congress. This was quite a remarkable feat—it changed the ostensible character of Anti-Federalism from a somewhat disorganized rabble of militiamen and anonymous pamphleteers to a representative body of Pennsylvanians. Though some historians have cast the Harrisburg Convention as a failure of democratic politics, rendered ineffective by the counter-mobilization and institutional advantages of Federalist and Anti-Federalist elites, the mobilization should instead be viewed as a redirection of the anger expressed in the AntiFederalist riots towards a more orderly extralegal political process founded on firm principles of representation and popular sovereignty.51 While the Harrisburg Convention did not have the plebeian origins of the Carlisle riots, its representative nature sent fear through Federalist opponents—who, after initially pouring scorn on the Convention, organized their own meeting at Lancaster just weeks later. Even in extra-governmental action, there was a clear endgame in the minds of those who countenanced or accepted the use of violence within a republican political system. Violence was a part of the toolkit of politics, at the most extreme end of the continuum where the distinctions between directly governmental and associational action were blurred—yet its use could only be justified if it served specific purposes and, especially, to reorient the political debate to focus attention on specific issues that had gone ignored, whether deliberately or otherwise, by higher authorities. In terms of a continuum, violence was to be used in conjunction with other means of political organization. This does not mean that those who perpetrated violent actions were protoMarxists seeking a class-based revolution. Indeed, violence could not and did not succeed on its own terms. Violence was rather part of an ongoing dialectic between the rioters, the government, and the community at large. The political grievances of the crowd alone were insufficient to secure changes in the action of government; rather, violence could be used as a means of forming new structures through which these grievances could be aired. This came at a price. Most importantly, new extra-governmental political structures needed new leadership, as a means of demonstrating the wider legitimacy of leadership. What was most at stake in these violent episodes was control of the political life of the state and the nation. The use of violence was about the future of representative government. The need for violent energies to be redirected into other forms of political organization was an emergent theme in the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion. The most successful responses to violence in the western counties came through channeling the energy of violent protest into representative struc178

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community tures. The two paths of resistance that had existed ever since the excise tax was first enacted—a political path seeking constitutional redress through petitions and legislative process; and a violent path of intimidation, including the tarring and feathering of excise officials—vied for supremacy in the aftermath of the burning of Neville’s house.52 At first, the violent party seemed to be in the ascendancy, given the violent incidents of robbing the mail and banishing enemies mentioned earlier. The march on Pittsburgh, however, was heavily disorganized, and a committee from the city, in concert with other political leaders, helped avert significant violence. It is significant that while the Pittsburgh committee possessed some delegated authority, the leaders of the march had no such clear right to organize in the name of the people. The violent leaders were talked down from some of their more extreme ideas, such as attacking a federal garrison, by a combination of elected politicians and an ad hoc committee representing the people of Pittsburgh.53 Slowly and tentatively, western Pennsylvanians chose political rather than violent confrontation. The western counties therefore developed ad hoc representative mechanisms to allow them to choose leaders with the authority to speak for the wider community. An extralegal series of meetings (though somewhat susceptible to the passions of a few men) coordinated the response of the western counties. These structures were remarkably orderly for a supposed rebel cadre: each township sent elected delegates to a meeting, which in turn formed a standing committee of sixty and a committee of conference of three men from each county.54 The committee of conference was empowered to negotiate with federal and state commissioners sent to the backcountry; however, any terms of accommodation they agreed upon had to be referred back to the standing committee (which itself could reconvene the committee of townships if considered necessary). This was not a commitment to the principles of political community in form only. Representative mechanisms were agreed to by the “intemperate men” of the western counties in the full knowledge that it placed the adoption of their agenda at risk—as seen in the inclusion of large numbers of delegates from outside Washington County, the “cradle of the insurrection.” Similarly, though the committee of conference was more moderate in its aims, when it came to terms with the state and federal governments, it refused a final settlement, saying that it was only empowered to refer any settlement offered back to the committee of sixty.55 Neither violence nor political action could easily proceed without some means of demonstrating the sanction of a wider authority. Nevertheless, the end results of the Whiskey Rebellion are in many ways striking. Though federal authorities were able to raise a force of 10,000 men to march to western Pennsylvania, there was barely a shot fired in anger, 179

Kenneth Owen few rebels were seized, and there were even fewer prosecutions brought as a result of the Watermelon Army’s actions. Instead, the political activity inspired in part by the Whiskey Rebellion claimed some notable victories for the opponents of Washington’s administration—including overwhelming support for Democratic-Republicans in the western counties of Pennsylvania, and most stunningly of all, the defeat of arch-Federalist Thomas Fitzsimmons in the Philadelphia district for the House of Representatives.56 Not only had the channeling of violent energies into representative structures (however imperfect) prevented the western counties from a pitched battle against the federal government that they were unlikely to win, it had also enabled opponents of Washington’s regime to bolster their electoral position—not bad for action that supposedly existed outside the pale of legitimate political activity. The persistence of violence in revolutionary Pennsylvania suggests that feelings towards its use in political action were at best ambivalent. In fact, mob action continued to be viewed as a legitimate political act. The use of violence became more politically contested over time, but this simply reflected the changing governmental landscape in which violence occurred. Action that in the 1770s had been a productive form of community regulation against the British appeared far more destabilizing when directed against an American government. Yet as in the contests over the use of violence in the late 1770s and 1780s, so debates over violence in the 1790s rested on the rioters’ claims to popular legitimacy. It was for these reasons that the Carlisle rioters were derided for including British deserters in their numbers, as well as other newcomers who had not served America during the Revolutionary War; their leaders were accused of tactics designed to arraign power to themselves. Even Alexander Hamilton’s famous letter to George Washington on the causes of the Whiskey Rebellion is careful in its treatment of violence. Hamilton portrays violence as illegitimate because it forms part of a deliberate plan to overthrow government against the will of the national community, in the process conflating meetings for petitions with the armed parties “inflicting personal violence and outrage”; moreover, he advances the amendments that the national legislature was making to the excise law as proof that the government was responding to the grievances of the western counties—and asserts that, consequently, any violence on this head had to be illegitimate.57 There was such ambivalence over the use of violence because politicians of all descriptions recognized its politically and electorally productive uses— bringing certain grievances to the forefront of political debate and encouraging citizens to improvise extralegal structures to bring about a stronger and a wider claim to representativeness—and therefore wished to reserve “legitimate” uses 180

Violence and the Limits of the Political Community of violence for future occasions. This did not mean that violence was orchestrated solely by political elites, however. Far more often, it represented an act of defiance—a cry for help or of anguish over the fact that political leaders who rhetorically espoused political positions (defense of the state constitution, or opposition to the excise tax, for example) had been insufficiently organized to see these convictions into law. Political leaders who were seen to be directly unresponsive to the will of the community did not hold political power for long in Pennsylvania; those who were most successful, men such as Albert Gallatin or Thomas McKean, were those who were best able to coordinate the use of representative structures with their own political action. When violence did break out, elites were forced to pay greater attention to the grievances of the rioters—and the political culture of extra-governmental structures, such as town meetings, were crucial in forming links between political leaders and the governed. This demonstrated the revolutionary effects of the republican rhetoric of the revolution. Crowd action had moved from being a somewhat conservative “safety valve” protecting social elites, to having much clearer expectations of governmental action. Officeholders could no longer choose to interpret the actions of a crowd as they saw fit; instead they were forced to negotiate much closer to the ground. It was not just the rioters who scrambled to create extra-governmental political bodies to negotiate in the aftermath of political violence; governmental officials, too, recognized the importance of validating the legitimacy of relatively peaceful assembly as a means of staving off more widespread disruption. Whether outbreaks of violence could be defended as legitimate rested on two foundations—first, the nature of the violence itself, which had to be directed at fair targets and limited in its scope; second, the existence of some sort of mechanism through which popular sanction should be claimed. If these categories sound somewhat ill-defined, that is because they were similarly fuzzy in any specific debate. Where the line was drawn depended very much on the causes of the violence and the types of activity one wanted to reserve for future use. One’s position on any specific instance of violence correlated strongly with attitudes towards the positions held by the rioters themselves. Yet great care was inevitably taken with regard to the way violence was condemned. Even to those condemning crowd action, violence was only illegitimate if used in an attempt to subvert the political process for the interests of a narrow group. Of course, the use of violence had its limits. While authorities might allay and conciliate local rioters, they were far more suspicious of any violence that threatened to erupt on a wider scale. Tactics of intimidation could contribute to public discourse, but they were far less effective in mobilizing support for electoral action. Local action, for all that it might express the vehemence of 181

Kenneth Owen popular opinion, risked losing out, electorally speaking, to a concerted campaign of state-wide action—especially if that local action could be portrayed as the actions of a cabal usurping popular authority. Perhaps the legitimate role of violence within the political community is best assessed in this manner. As one safety valve of the expression of anger at governmental action, it had an acceptable role within political discourse, provided it could be demonstrated to be the legitimate act of the wider community. In such a case, it could be used to draw attention to the grievances of a particular locality. If it was to be turned into meaningful political action, however, then a more responsive and transportable means of conveying the weight of popular opinion was required.

Notes 1. General Advertiser, 24 July 1794. 2. General Advertiser, 25 July 1794. 3. Brendan McConville, These Daring Disturbers of the Public Peace (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996); Rachel Hope Cleves, “On Writing the History of Violence,” Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Winter 2004): 641–65. 4. In 1791 the Pennsylvania state legislature petitioned for the repeal of the excise tax, and meetings were held in the western counties. Pennsylvania Archives, 4th ser., 2 (1900): 5–40. William Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1796); Thomas Slaughter, “The Tax Man Cometh: Ideological Opposition to Internal Taxes, 1760–1790,” William and Mary Quarterly 41 (October 1984): 566–91. 5. Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 185–88; Leonard Richards, Shays’s Rebellion: The American Revolution’s Final Battle (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003); Pauline Maier, Ratification: The People Debate the Constitution, 1787–1788 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010), 11–24; “The Whiskey Rebellion Proclamation,” A Compilation of the Messages and Papers of the Presidents Prepared under the direction of the Joint Committee on printing, of the House and Senate Pursuant to an Act of the Fifty-Second Congress of the United States (New York: Bureau of National Literature, 1897). 6. Hugh Henry Brackenridge, Incidents of the Insurrection in the Western Parts of Pennsylvania in 1794 (Philadelphia, 1795), 49–57; Findley, History of the Insurrection, 95–100; Irvine Papers, Box 7, Folder 22, Historical Society of Pennsylvania (hereafter HSP). 7. Accounts of the working of the committee system developed can be found in Findley, History of the Insurrection, 110–30; Brackenridge, Incidents, 87–107; Albert Gallatin Papers, New-York Historical Society; and “Report of the Commissioners, Appointed by the President of the United States of America, to Confer with the Insurgents in the Western Counties of Pennsylvania” (Philadelphia, 1794), EAI 27977. Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” The Founders, and the Troubled End of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 216–44

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Violence and the Limits of the Political Community 8. The speech of Albert Gallatin, a representative from the county of Fayette, in the House of Representatives of the General Assembly of Pennsylvania, on the important question touching the validity of the elections held in the four western counties of the state, on the 14th day of October, 1794 (Philadelphia, 1795), 42. 9. “Speech in Convention, January 1775,” James Wilson Papers, HSP, vol. 2, 1–10. 10. Speech of Albert Gallatin, 43. 11. For a more detailed discussion of my definition of political violence, see Kenneth Owen, “Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania, 1774–1800,” (DPhil diss., University of Oxford, 2011), 38–43. 12. On treason trials, see Peter C. Messer, “ ‘A Species of Treason & Not the Least Dangerous Kind’: The Treason Trials of Abraham Carlisle and John Roberts,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 123 (Dec 1999): 303–32; Carlton Larson, “The Revolutionary American Jury: A Case study of the 1778–1779 Philadelphia Treason Trials,” Southern Methodist University Law Review 61 (Fall 2008): 1441–1526. On price-fixing committees, see Gary Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005), 307–20; Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country and Class: The Philadelphia Militia and the “Lower Sort” during the American Revolution, 1775–1783 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 172–227; Charles S. Olton, Artisans for Independence: Philadelphia Mechanics and the American Revolution (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1975), 81–95; Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 145–83. 13. The most comprehensive account of Fort Wilson is John K. Alexander, “The Fort Wilson Incident of 1779: A Case Study of the Revolutionary Crowd,” William and Mary Quarterly 31 (October 1974): 589–612. Rosswurm, Arms, Country and Class, 205–28. 14. Pennsylvania Evening Post, 12 October 1779. 15. Minute Book of the Supreme Executive Council, Pennsylvania State Archive, RG-27, Roll 2, 167–73. 16. “An act for the regulation of the militia of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania,” EAI 16924, 13–14. For more on visions of the militia in revolutionary America, see Gregory Knouff, The Soldier’s Revolution: Pennsylvanians in Arms and the Forging of Early American Identity (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004); Robert Gross, The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976); Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (London: Norton, 1988); Lawrence Delbert Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Saul Cornell, A Well-Regulated Militia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). For a specific account of the militia’s involvement in the writing of the Pennsylvania Constitution, see Rosswurm, Arms, Country and Class. 17. William B. Reed, The Life and Correspondence of Joseph Reed, vol. 1 (Lindsay and Blakiston, Philadelphia, 1847), 154. 18. Minute Book of the Supreme Executive Council, Pennsylvania State Archives, RG-27, Roll 2, 189. 19. Robert L. Brunhouse, Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 1942). 20. Jessica Choppin Roney, “ ‘Ready to act in defiance of Government’: Colonial Philadel-

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Kenneth Owen phia Voluntary Culture and the Defense Association of 1747–1748,” Early American Studies 8 (Spring 2010): 358–85; Sally F. Griffith, “ ‘Order, Discipline, and a Few Cannon’: Benjamin Franklin, the Association, and the Rhetoric and Practice of Boosterism,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 116 (April 1992): 131–55. For further consideration of associational life in Philadelphia through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, see Jessica Choppin Roney, “ ‘First movers in every useful undertaking’: Formal Voluntary associations in Philadelphia, 1725—1775,” Ph.D. dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 2009; Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 21. Constitutionalists held forty-three seats in the General Assembly in 1778, but won fiftyone seats in the 1779 election. Wilkes University Election Statistics Project, http://­staffweb​ .wilkes.edu/harold.cox/legis/3A.pdf; http://staffweb.wilkes.edu/harold.cox/legis/4A​.pdf. 22. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion; William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s New-Found Sovereignty (London: Scribner, 2006); Stephen Boyd, ed., The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1985); Jacob E. Cooke, “The Whiskey Insurrection: A Re-Evaluation,” Pennsylvania History 30 (July 1963): 316–64; Paul Douglas Newman, Fries’s Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Pennsylvania History 67 (Winter 2000) is a special issue relating to Fries’s Rebellion. 23. Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 27 (January 1970): 3–35; Thomas Slaughter, “Crowds in Eighteenth-Century America: Reflections and New Directions,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography (hereafter PMHB) 115(January 1991): 3–34; Barbara Clark Smith, “Beyond the Vote: The Limits of Deference in Colonial Politics,” Early American Studies 3 (Fall 2005): 341–62. 24. Marjoleine Kars, Breaking Loose Together: The Regulator Rebellion in Pre-Revolutionary North Carolina (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Wayne Lee, Crowds and Soldiers in Revolutionary North Carolina: The Culture of Violence in Riot and War (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2001); Barbara Clark Smith, “Food Rioters and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 51 (Jan 1994): 3–38. 25. E. P. Thompson, “The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century,” Past and Present 50 (1971): 76–136. 26. Gilje, Rioting in America. 27. Robert Brunhouse, Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1942); David Freeman Hawke, In The Midst of a Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1961); Richard Ryerson, The Revolution Is Now Begun: The Radical Committees of Philadelphia, 1765–1776 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1978); Steven Rosswurm, Arms, Country and Class; Owen Ireland, Religion, Ethnicity and Politics: Ratifying the Constitution in Pennsylvania (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995); Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy. 28. Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_ century/pa08.asp.

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Violence and the Limits of the Political Community 29. Article V, Declaration of Rights, Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, Avalon Project, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th_century/pa08.asp. 30. Terry Bouton, “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History 87 (December 2000). 31. “Columbus,” in John Bach McMaster and Frederick D. Stone, eds., Pennsylvania and the Federal Constitution, 1787–1788 (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1888), 445–47; Philadelphiensis I, Independent Gazetteer, 7 November 1787. Pennsylvanians whose essays have been considered instrumental in developing Anti-Federalist thought include “Philadelphiensis,” “Centinel,” “An Old Whig,” and the Minority of the Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention. 32. Full accounts of the Assembly debates regarding the process of selecting a ratifying convention, including arguments from Anti-Federalists against hasty proceedings and in favor of measures that would have given greater public information regarding the new frame of government, can be found in Merill Jensen, ed., The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1976), vol. 2, 58–110 (hereafter DHRC). One member, James M’Calmont, petitioned the Supreme Executive Council to prosecute those known to have been part of the mob action, but the Council was reluctant to intervene and the case was eventually closed without any prosecution, DHRC, vol. 2, 111. Brunhouse, Counter-Revolution in Pennsylvania, 202–15; Bouton, Taming Democracy 171–97; Maier, Ratification, 97–125. 33. “The Address of the Seceding Assemblymen,” DHRC, vol. 2, 114. 34. Carlisle Meeting, 3 October 1787, DHRC, vol. 2, 173–74. 35. Pennsylvania Gazette, 17 October 1787. 36. Independent Gazetteer, 2 October 1787. 37. Dwight Teeter, “Benjamin Towne: The Precarious Career of a Persistent Printer,” PMHB 89 (July 1965): 316–30. 38. Centinel No. 17, Freeman’s Journal, 26 March 1788; Philadelphiensis 1, Independent Gazetteer, 7 November 1787; Pauline Maier, Ratification, 70–97. 39. “An Old Man,” Carlisle Gazette, 2 January 1788. The Carlisle riot and a related violent incident in Huntingdon County are the subject of Saul Cornell, “Aristocracy Assailed: The Ideology of Backcountry Anti-Federalism,” Journal of American History 76(March 1990), 1148–72. 40. “An Old Man.” 41. Pennsylvania Packet, 15 March 1788. 42. John Montgomery to James Wilson, 2 March 1788, DHRC, vol. 2, 702–3. 43. Pennsylvania Packet, 15 March 1788. 44. “The Supreme Executive Council and the Carlisle Petition,” DHRC, vol. 2, 707–8. 45. “An Old Man.” 46. “One of the People,” Carlisle Gazette, 9 January 1788, DHRC. 47. “Letter of George Bryan to a friend in Northampton County,” Pennsylvania Gazette, 26 March 1788. 48. “Familiar Letters Between Margery and her Friends, January 2nd, 1788,” Pennsylvania Mercury, 8 March 1788. 49. Pennsylvania Gazette, 19 March 1788.

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Kenneth Owen 50. Bouton, Taming Democracy, 188–91. 51. Proceedings relating to the Harrisburg Convention can be found in Merrill Jensen, ed., Documentary History of the First Federal Elections, vol. 1, 257–81. Additional material exists in the Albert Gallatin Papers, New-York Historical Society. Saul Cornell, The Other Founders: Anti-Federalism and the Dissenting Tradition in America, 1788–1828 (Chapel Hill, NC: Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1999), 137–42; Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy, 188–94. 52. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion. 53. Brackenridge, Incidents, vol. 1, 55–80. 54. In terms of the representative structures used, these committees were remarkably similar in nature to the operation of the 1776 Pennsylvania state constitution, which called for a unicameral legislature apportioned according to population (compared here to the standing committee of sixty), and an executive council formed of one man from each county (compared here to the committee of conference). Findley, History of the Insurrection, 110–30; Brackenridge, Incidents, 87–107; Albert Gallatin Papers, New-York Historical Society. 55. “Report of the Commissioners, Appointed by the President of the United States of America, to Confer with the Insurgents in the Western Counties of Pennsylvania” (Philadelphia, 1794), EAI 27977, 8. 56. Roland Baumann, “John Swanwick: Spokesman for ‘Merchant-Republicanism’ in Philadelphia,” PHMB 107 (April 1983): 131–82; Roland M Baumann, “Philadelphia’s Manufacturers and the Excise Taxes of 1794: The Forging of the Jeffersonian Coalition,” PHMB 106 (January 1982): 3–39. 57. Tully, Letter 1, Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 23 August 1794.

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• Whiskey Chaser

Democracy and Violence in the Debate over the DemocraticRepublican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion J e f f r e y L . Pa sl e y

Postmodern methods of cultural history have opened out the study of American political history in countless ways, helping scholars to find means of reading political texts beyond the speeches and votes that white men produced. Parades, toasts, riots, slave rebellions, and other forms of popular political expression have allowed historians to incorporate slippery issues of personal identity and the multivalent perspectives of subaltern groups into political history.1 Cultural historians have also been able to expose the hidden depths of the patriarchal power and violence that lurked even, or especially, in the libertarian political rhetoric and rationalist institutions of the Enlightenment, including the American Revolution and what we choose to call American democracy. By emphasizing “the gaps in the Revolution (and in our depictions of it), its failures and repressions,” wrote Michael Meranze in one of the early manifestos of the postmodern approach to early American history, “we can both acknowledge the power relations that structure history and more fully situate our own relationship to the past.” Meranze argued that “by stressing the violence internal to the construction of any sociosymbolic order,” historians could avoid giving America’s narrow procedural democracy too much benefit of the doubt, and not paint a picture of American history as an unbroken stream of increasing pluralism in which good things come to those who wait. Peter  S. Onuf highlighted the darkness of this take on American political history in his closing remarks at the “Making Democracy” conference on which this volume is based, emphasizing the “rivers of blood” inherent in the philosophy that drove Jeffersonian democracy forward, especially in the expansion of the national state across the continent.2 Yet as powerful as it can be, the cultural approach to politics suffers from 187

Jeffrey L. Pasley serious shortcomings. Increasingly, it seems to emphasize language, texts, and abstractions over actual political events and practices, creating the possibility of a lengthy discourse on “making democracy” that barely mentions such crucial democratic processes and institutions as elections, parties, and social movements. This is not necessarily a criticism: nation-making, revolution, rebellion, and war are all important political processes, too, and they get extensive consideration here. But it does seem fair to note a certain default mode in which historians, when pondering a fundamental question like the relationship between democracy and violence, are drawn toward “cultures of violence,” violent thoughts, feelings, and words. These are all historically and morally crucial topics, but the tendency is to skirt around the ways and forms in which democracy and violence actually touch each other in the real world, our own and the world of the Founders: violence exercised by regimes and groups setting themselves against democratic claims and processes (sometimes in the name of the people), and violence as it breaks out in struggles for power over government policy. In other words, recent historians tend to neglect political violence understood as such by those involved, the kind that hurts people physically, in favor of the vaguer, more rhetorical sort that needs to be teased out or defined as such by scholars. One of the most glaring absences from recent studies of political culture and cultural politics in early America is any concern for the rights of peaceful opposition—the rights to speak, write, organize, and vote against an existing regime and to replace its leaders without violence when they lose popular support. The firm establishment of such rights is still generally acknowledged (at least outside the historical profession) to be one of America’s key contributions to world political history, and the aspect of U.S. political culture that other peoples have fought longest and hardest to achieve for themselves. Over the last half century, especially, the establishment of governments where citizens can have significant input and opponents can challenge the existing government without too much fear for their lives and livelihoods has been a goal for which peoples all over the world have struggled, as in the “Arab Spring” of 2011. The United States has often put itself forward as the world’s great promoter of fear-free democracy. In some cases (World War II, for instance), this was actually true. In others, it was a cover for imperialism. In most cases, it was a bit of both. At any rate, “peaceful transfers of power” are such a part of modern U.S. national ideology as to make it virtually imperative that we take this development as seriously in our own history as we do elsewhere.4 It is important to note at the outset that “the peaceful transfer of power” is not simply a nationalistic myth, as many humanities scholars would have it. The United States has a heritage of occasional civil unrest, like most coun188

Democracy and Violence tries, and of struggles for freedom by its native, African, and other subaltern populations. Yet the fact remains that it did successfully establish a political system where power could be competed for and transferred between warring parties without mass bloodshed, where peaceful opposition to the regime was permitted. Abraham Lincoln’s bloody Civil War was launched initially to counter a threat to that democratic system from the losers of an electoral contest who refused to accept defeat. One does not have to accept the dread charge of “American exceptionalism” to admit that this is true. Americans were building on certain aspects of British thought and practice, and other nations were able to achieve analogous results by different routes, but simply conflating the American tradition of peaceful, if sometimes rowdy, electoral democracy with the violent processes of revolution, nation-making, and territorial expansion seems equally problematic. Despite the general abhorrence of violence that characterizes academic historians intellectually and personally, on an interpretive level, the general trend has been to incorporate violence ever more deeply into the American tradition. Historians and other commentators rarely applied the word to American political history before the assassinations, riots, and campus uprisings of the late 1960s and the spread of political radicalism that went along with them. Like the vast majority of middle-class Americans, mainstream politicians and pundits of the era labeled the rioters and radicals as un-American thugs and called in the National Guard, literally or mentally. Hipper people not uncommonly concluded that the United States was a sick society ripe for revolution or destruction, a common theme in the popular culture of time as well as in the political culture. Hubert “Rap” Brown, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s last chairman, famously declared in 1967 that violence was “necessary” and as “American as cherry pie.” Brown’s line was intended to egg on rioters and urban guerillas, but it was propagated initially by establishmentarian Time magazine as an example of attitudes that justified white backlash and undermined racial integration. The original story added Brown’s threatening stinger: “If you give me a gun and tell me to shoot my enemy, I might just shoot Lady Bird.”5 In response to the national moral panic over violence in the streets, many historians and historically minded scholars responded, in effect, that H. Rap Brown actually had a point. Asked to find “answers” to the violence of the 1960s, they typically tried to talk the white establishment out of its hysteria over the supposedly unprecedented crisis; they took aim at what Richard E. Rubenstein called the “myth of peaceful progress,” the exceptionalist assumption that before the 1960s American groups seeking political and economic power had never needed to resort to violence. It was easy to show in the his189

Jeffrey L. Pasley torical record that the truth was almost the inverse, especially if the focus of inquiry was widened beyond mere elections. Just about every group with any significant influence in the 1960s had been prodigiously violent in earlier eras, and sometimes not that much earlier: immigrant political machines, corporations, white Southerners, labor unions, the federal government—the gang was all there. This seemed to be the point of the Cherry Pie Series, a short-lived Chelsea House imprint that presented books about episodes of violence in American history, quoting H. Rap Brown on its covers.6 Rubenstein’s implicit message, and the explicit message of the social history of the Revolution that emerged at the same time, was that violence was actually necessary to progress. Simultaneously with the unrest of the sixties and early seventies, neoprogressive social historians of the American Revolution were producing a literature that sometimes celebrated violence as the common people’s most effective form of political expression in a repressive society and against an oppressive government. Riotous sailors and laborers on the streets of Boston and New York, rebellious farmers in the Carolinas, and violent Pennsylvania plebeians of all descriptions were credited with sparking the Revolution and resisting the power of British and the colonial elites. Later uprisings like Shays Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, and many others were lovingly contextualized as authentic popular responses to threatening social changes, especially the rise of capitalism. Less radical readings of the revolutionary era often still normalized popular violence, but emphasized how carefully controlled it was, limited in its targets and guided by moderate elites to moderate ends. This interpretation was most influentially presented by Pauline Maier and appears in this volume in the previous essay by Kenneth Owen. For these scholars, political violence was just the occasional cost of doing political business.7 What neither revolutionary historians nor the scholarly chin-strokers over 1960s violence stopped to consider was how the relatively less violent republic of later eras had come into being. The United States had not completely solved the “oldest problem of politics—the problem of nonviolent power transference,” but by the 1960s it had achieved a condition where it was a shock to see people rioting in the streets seeking political goals, for such behavior was no longer the norm. Earlier in the decade, the white South’s violent “massive resistance” to black civil rights had suddenly seemed terribly out of step with the times, and not simply on a racial level. How did that happen? Peaceful progress might be a myth, but it was also a living ideal, one that effectively delegitimized southern racists in the civil rights era, and then did the same to the black rioters of the later 1960s and the handful of radical leftists who turned to terrorism in the 1970s.8 190

Democracy and Violence Understandably loath to grant nonviolence credits to a nation that was just then depositing millions of tons of bombs on Southeast Asia, scholars mostly skated over the origins of that American ideal and turned to other ways of looking at democracy and violence. While radical historians continued to find and celebrate what were often violent pockets of resistance outside of conventional politics, perhaps the most sophisticated scholars in the humanities began to treat the peaceful aspects of American political culture as inherently violent, completing a full reversal in which violence could be read as true popular political expression while conventional forms of political expression could be read as violence, even if nary a blow was struck. For these scholars, American violence was a cultural strain that ran even deeper than the mythical frontier heritage that was often blamed in popular works, extending to the very structures of Western thought and language. Perhaps democracy itself, with its drive for mass persuasion and claims to majority rule, was violence. That point of view found its way from its origins in the radical cultural studies of Foucault and Habermas into the forms of cultural history that are dominant today.9 This development in the academic humanities has tracked closely with the increasing dominance of neoliberals and conservatives in mainstream politics. Historians and other humanities scholars have liked democracy less and less as democratic majorities have seemed to vote against their own radical values more and more. By contrast, the more present-minded social sciences—­ especially political science and economics—have been heavily engaged in the democracy assistance business since the end of the Cold War. While for most social scientists and for the larger society the cause of allowing elections to take place without violence and coercion would seem to be an unalloyed good, historians and literary scholars working on early America have treated the issue as basically irrelevant or misleading. When raised at all, democratization was seen as a blind for the subjugation of blacks and women, and the advent of “peaceful power transference” as a white male elite marshaling society’s forces for more prodigious violence against outsiders. Out of an unstated preference for an imaginary political model completely free of any kind of domination or hierarchy, humanities scholars discounted representative democracy even as a goal.10 In the twenty-first century, cultural polarization and a seeming epidemic of gun violence have ruined the appetite of many historians for armed rural rebellions, but otherwise relatively little has changed. Despite the renewed interest in politics and “democracy” bespoken by this volume and others of the past decade, there appears to be a strange disconnect between what historians concern themselves with and the common meaning of the words involved. Hence both “democracy” and “violence” can be discussed extensively with scant at191

Jeffrey L. Pasley tention to the actual practice of either. There is much talk of gaps and spaces in democracy and its rhetoric, but almost nothing about the incessant voting that early Americans engaged in, an activity they would have considered the very essence of democracy. And this attitude was held not only by the adult white males eligible to vote in the early republic, but also by all the other groups that sought the vote later. Preferring to work with abstractions and feelings rather than the workaday activities of practical politics, culturalist historians (to coin a phrase) sometimes seem to entertain a conception of politics that makes sense only on the furthest shores past the “linguistic turn,” a conception in which harsh words and hostile feelings are roughly the same thing, or a worse thing, than physical harm.

“Visions of Violence” and Federalist Political Strategy Let me give an example from the historiography of early American political culture. A well-regarded recent work entitled The Reign of Terror in America turns out not to be about any wave of French revolutionary-type street fighting or mass executions in eighteenth-century America. (Indeed, there weren’t any.11) It is also not about Washington and Hamilton marching west with the largest army ever fielded on American soil to personally “terrify” the so-called Whiskey Rebels in western Pennsylvania.12 Nor, it turns out, does it cover what the Democratic-Republican press liked to call the “Reign of Terror”—­Jefferson preferred “reign of witches”—when John Adams and a Federalist Congress brought down on their political enemies the full force of the Alien and Sedition Acts, a brand new army, and a host of other formal and informal disciplinary measures.13 Instead, the terrors that Reign of Terror in America author Rachel Hope Cleves focuses on are the “visions of violence” (really, fears of violence) expressed by Federalist officials, politicians, and clergy in response to the French Revolution—and, more immediately, the fears they directed at the French revolutionaries’ American sympathizers. Federalists were especially exercised by the rise of the so-called Democratic-Republican Societies in 1793, just as the first emissary from the new French Republic, Edmond Genet, was arriving. American fans of the French Revolution set up a network of debating clubs (usually called the Democratic—but sometimes the Republican—Societies) that were something like the French Jacobin clubs that produced Robes­pierre. The societies and their members passed resolutions, sent public letters to one another, and drank toasts celebrating the spread of Enlightenment and democratic revolution from America to France, and now, they hoped, to the rest of Europe and on around the world. The groups provided a heady opportunity for 192

Democracy and Violence young white men from a variety of backgrounds, including immigrants, artisans, and clerks, to socialize and politicize on an equal basis with like-minded men of more economic and social substance: attorneys, bankers, merchants, manufacturers, and officials. While not party organizations per se, the clubs did often become loci for activists in the growing opposition to the Washington administration’s policies, and they bequeathed their name to what became the nation’s first political party, who called themselves Republicans in the 1790s, then Democrats early in the next century.14 As Matthew Rainbow Hale shows so vividly elsewhere in this volume, the Democratic Societies and other fellow travelers did indeed cheer the victories of the French Republic’s armies against all the assembled monarchies of Europe. They also gave verbal support to the brutal repression of the French Revolution’s perceived enemies in France, shedding no tears for murdered and imprisoned royalty, nobility, or clergy, or for the defeated royalists of the Vendée. As Cleves argues, American democrats were much more positive toward Robespierre’s Reign of Terror than they should have been. But this was hardly indicative of murderous intentions. The French military victories were an impressive accomplishment by the young republic’s revolutionary ally, and they disproved a stock belief about the military weakness of republics. Americans have turned out in droves for much dumber and more dangerous causes. Of course, many observers then and now have been disturbed to see Americans enthusiastically celebrating the armies of foreign radicalism. What seems to curdle the blood of scholars like Cleves, however, are hints that American fans of the French Revolution might have had violent feelings toward perceived aristocrats at home. Occasionally, these devotees even praised the guillotine itself, and not merely because they regarded it as a more enlightened, humane, and efficient method of execution than hanging (because it was quicker and less painful). The Fourth of July 1795 saw some patriotic citizens and armed militiamen of Bergen, New Jersey, lift their glasses to the ladies, Christianity, and the guillotine: “May it maintain its empire till all crowned heads are laid in the dust.” In February 1794, the Republican Society of Charleston wished the blade to fall a little closer to home: “The guillotine to all tyrants, plunderers and funding speculators,” a message that was not too welcome even among some fellow Jefferson supporters further north.15 In a couple of cases, American crowds acted on some of these sentiments by setting up mock guillotines and parading them through the streets or beheading a dummy—a bit of street theater that had the desired effect of blowing conservative minds. For much of the 1790s and after, the Federalists insisted that anarchy and mass murder were just around the corner, about to be sparked by Democratic Societies, angry Pennsylvania farmers, newspaper attacks on the administra193

Jeffrey L. Pasley tion, or maybe Illuminati agents disguised as Jeffersonian politicians. The expected catalysts for revolutionary violence got increasingly far-fetched as time went by—they had to, for the source of it all, the French Revolution, had faded into Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship. Yet even as the Federalists’ visions of violence got more over the top, their responses became more strenuous and detailed, directly motivating the infamous Alien and Sedition Acts, the most thoroughgoing government campaign to repress free political speech during peacetime in American history. The Federalists’ lurid fears may have been sincere enough, but there was also political strategy in their expressions of them. The specter of revolutionary violence provided a convenient atmosphere in which to pursue the suppression of their political opponents and clamp down on the rise of democratic politics more generally.16 The closest the Federalist visions of violence ever got to reality was the frontier disorders over the excise tax, culminating in the 1794 events in western Pennsylvania that the Washington administration declared an “insurrection.” The high point of this so-called Whiskey Rebellion was more a meeting to consider a possible rebellion than the actual thing. The armed men gathered at Braddock’s Field that day decided not to attack Pittsburgh after all. There was a military garrison in the town, with cannon. A guy might get killed. There were, to be sure, some real acts and fairly serious threats of violence committed against federal officials in western Pennsylvania. The mail was robbed, a revenue collector’s home was marched on, and collection of the excise was deemed physically impossible in the four western Pennsylvania counties. Yet these actions were chiefly of the type that social historians have labeled “rough music”: ritualistic forms of community intimidation like tar-and-featherings and forcible haircuts, with occasional property destruction. As Pauline Maier, Paul Gilje, and many other historians have noted, including Kenneth Owen in this volume, this type of limited political violence was part of a long tradition in Britain, Pennsylvania, and the rest of the Anglophone Atlantic world. Rough music against tax collectors was nothing any rural American had to copy from a French Jacobin or from a city debating club. Always carefully targeted at specific laws and the officials charged with enforcing them, it was a familiar form of protest that posed little threat to the underlying social order. These were the tactics that had rendered the Stamp Act unenforceable and set the thirteen colonies on the road to independence. The western Pennsylvania tax protesters thought they got the idea from the American Revolution, not the French.17 Historians may be able to calmly contextualize violence as one of the common people’s standard political options, but Washington, Hamilton, and the Federalists saw these same activities in a completely different light now that their new regime was established. They saw the Pennsylvania troubles as the 194

Democracy and Violence spear-point of a Jacobin revolution that flowed from Paris and was being locally organized by the Democratic-Republican Societies. They had seen where such physical resistance could lead—regime change—and did not regard the disturbances as politics as usual in any sense.18 In many ways, it was the responses to the Whiskey Rebellion that were more novel than the uprising itself, beginning with the Washington administration’s surprising turn to overwhelming force against what were essentially traditional resistance tactics. The “Watermelon Army” sent into western Pennsylvania to put down the largely dispersed Whiskey rebels numbered some twelve thousand men, a far larger force than previous military responses to far more serious domestic insurrections. The British Empire itself had managed no force so imposing before or during the Revolutionary War. Shays’ Rebellion in 1786 had threatened a federal arsenal but attracted only a fraction of the response. The Shaysites had even gotten some of their demands met, to boot.19 In the 1790s, Federalist visions of violence provided sanction for greatly heightened applications of real, disproportionate force. The only gun battles of the Whiskey Rebellion proper occurred when hated federal revenue collector John Neville fired into the angry crowd besieging his “Bower Hill” plantation and killed a man, and then again after Neville brought in troops from Fort Pitt to protect his house. In both cases, the only dead were among the protesters. The Watermelon Army never found anyone to fight, and none of the captured rebels were executed in the end, but bloodthirstiness was the order of the day for many Federalists who got even a slight taste of their visions becoming reality. The reaction of Pittsburgh area Federalists to the deaths at Neville’s house was to “lament that so few of the insurgents fell.” Pittsburgh landowner and commercial distiller Isaac Craig was certain that “such disorders can only be cured by copious bleedings.”20 Luckily for the Whiskey rebels, cooler heads prevailed in Philadelphia, but the use of force and threats of violence became central features of the Federalist approach to governing. In a kind of Federalist mission statement written just as their enemy Thomas Jefferson was about to take office, Alexander Hamilton’s longtime congressional ally Robert Goodloe Harper proudly admitted as much, sounding a note that the Dick Cheneys and John Yoos of the future would echo. Federalists knew, Harper wrote, that “force displayed . . . ​with energy and promptness” was the best way of dealing with opposition. “When you are known to be strong you may pardon; if thought to be weak you are compelled to punish.” So against the Pennsylvania farmers, the Federalists sent “a force so great as to preclude all hope of successful resistance.”21 The circumstance that inspired the Federalists to fully implement their belief in forceful government was neither the French Revolution nor the western 195

Jeffrey L. Pasley Pennsylvania disturbances. Instead it was the conjunction of both of these with another novelty, the development of an organized opposition to the government in the form of the Democratic-Republican Societies. Believing the individual vote to be in itself a sufficient form of representation and hewing to the traditional principle that a good government needed to be balanced among the competing forces of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and their Federalist supporters were just as outraged by young men forming clubs to criticize the government in Philadelphia, New York, and Boston as they were by the violent unrest in western Pennsylvania. (To be sure, there were also political clubs in western Pennsylvania, and these can be connected a bit more closely to the politics of the rebellion, though not to the violence.)22 Peaceful groups of citizens gathering to express their opinions about government policy were treated as the moral equivalent of armed men preventing the execution of existing laws, and both were seen as, inevitably, the precursors of full-scale revolution. When violence broke out in the west, Federalists almost instinctively blamed it on the Democratic Societies, and further assumed that both the societies and the rebels had revolutionary intentions. Washington immediately saw the rebellion as the “first ripe fruit of the Democratic Societies,” with a bountiful harvest of murder and pillage yet to come. In his valedictory for Federalist policy, Robert Goodloe Harper asserted blandly that the Pennsylvania tax protest “undoubtedly [had] for its secret object the overthrow of the government.” For a president who believed that, only one course of action was open. As Johann Neem has argued, “Washington’s decision to use force was intended not only to put down the rioters, but to eliminate organized opposition altogether.” The winning argument at administration meetings over how to respond to the Whiskey Rebellion was that just rounding up a few ring­ leaders of the recent disturbances would not be enough. Critics and resisters of government would scatter into the woodwork and then crawl back out again later. Threats against would-be rebels and critics must be frightening enough to deter all future resistance.23 The Federalists were acting on a conservative understanding of popular politics that tracks surprisingly well with the views of radical, neoprogressive historians, but to a completely different effect. In both cases, the approach is to treat violence as a form or outgrowth of democracy rather than an alternative to it. Violence is seen as popular politics continued by other means, as Matthew Hale put it at the “Making Democracy” conference, borrowing a phrase from Clausewitz: public opinion expressed with clubs, knives, and guns. A similar analysis confirmed the Federalists’ view of the common American as thuggish, thoughtless, and desperately in need of direction and discipline. Thus every196

Democracy and Violence thing from voting and petitioning to joining clubs to tar-and-featherings and riots to armed rebellion and guillotine-wielding revolutionary committees could be arranged along the same sliding scale. Historians may able to intellectualize violence as traditionalist resistance or the expert machinations of revolutionary politicians, but for most Americans, from the 1790s until the present, the establishment of a national republic probably meant something quite different. It meant a new day with new rules: collective violence would now be just violence, and treated as criminal or revolutionary. Serious democrats looking to establish a system with meaningful popular participation, without violence, would be forced to defend and develop their oppositional activities.24

Democracy and Violence: In a Relationship? My purpose here is not to reject the idea that violence and coercion, by the few or the many, have formed part of the larger political toolbox that rulers, institutions, or peoples have used in their contentions with each other. As a factual matter, all political societies throughout history have experienced at least episodes where force decided who would hold power or what policies would be followed. Indeed, in most places and at most times, this has been the norm. The most useful and comprehensive attempts to conceptually map “public politics” and categorize historical regimes have had to include a place for violence on their maps. The Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Contras, the Provisional IRA—they were all practicing politics, and it would be naive and narrowly American not to admit it.25 But were these revolutionary vanguard groups practicing democratic politics? Was their violence some kind of ultimate extension of democracy (as Owen’s chapter argues) or a contravention of it? As Peter Onuf points out in the epilogue to this volume, the People is such a bedrock conceit of the modern nation-state that “virtually every regime” that has emerged since the beginning of the twentieth century “calls itself ‘democratic,’ however it may be ­constituted”—even dictatorships and one-party oligarchies that do not permit criticism or any other form of opposition. Revolutionaries and dictators may both wield force in the name of the People, but are their claims equally convincing? Not according to the conception of democracy that actually existing peoples and nations have struggled for since the eighteenth century. Political scientist Charles Tilly developed a definition for his 2007 study Democracy that categorized present-day and past regimes in order to trace the process of democratization (and de-democratization) around the world and throughout history. Tilly argued that to be counted as a full-fledged democracy a regime 197

Jeffrey L. Pasley must engage in mutually binding consultation with its citizenry, have a broadly inclusive form of citizenship, grant roughly equal political rights and obligations to its constituent social groups, and protect its citizens from coercion and reprisals when they exercise their rights. By this definition, very few pretwentieth-century regimes qualify as full democracies, including the antebellum United States with its slave population. On the other hand, some elements of the formula can be found in almost all times and places. Here is Tilly’s comment: “On all inhabited continents, councils of lineage heads occasionally met to make momentous collective decisions in rough equality for millennia before glimmers of democracy appeared in Europe. If, under the heading of democracy, all we are looking for is negotiated consent to collective decisions, democracy extends back into the mists of history.”26 But such a loose definition would make a mockery of three centuries of revolution and struggles for political rights, including the Arab Spring. As Tilly writes, the rare part of the democracy formula, and the one that even privileged social groups often must suffer to defend, is protection: the creation of an environment free from violence and coercion, where political debate and competition can take place. Tilly’s “regime space” chart delineates the myriad ways in which violence can impinge on democratic politics, from politicized armies, revolutionary guerilla bands, and breakaway regions to warlords, criminal gangs, and good old-fashioned state repression. Regimes where political movements and mobilizations commonly occur might have democratic tendencies, Tilly argues, but they remain “low capacity” and prone to de-democratization as long as “multiple political actors” are out there “deploying lethal force.”27 What early Americans had was a procedurally democratic regime in which citizens had rough juridical equality, but democracy in all of Tilly’s other dimensions was still a work in progress. In many places, the boundaries of participation had not yet expanded to include even unpropertied adult males, and uncertainty was the rule where immigrants were concerned—Federalists would try to pull back the mantle of citizenship from them in the late 1790s. The nature of the consultation between governing elites and the citizenry was also much in question. Washington and Hamilton and their allies preferred that elections function only as periodic public affirmations of the government’s work that would not expose them to serious criticism or debate. Between elections, all contestation of their policies outside the halls of government should cease. Protection for dissenters and competitors was not an issue until there were some. Once the opposition newspapers and the Democratic-Republican Societies began to get under Washington’s and Hamilton’s skin, it was probably only a matter of time and opportunity before the government moved to begin punishing its opponents. The Whiskey Rebellion provided an excellent excuse 198

Democracy and Violence because it involved a (failed) attempt to deploy lethal force against the government’s agents and seemed to prove the argument that it was a short, steep, and slippery slope from criticism to armed rebellion. The Federalists had little interest in moving toward fuller democracy, so instead of providing protection for opposition, they moved to deter it. At the same time, Tilly’s conception of democracy offers a kind of defense of Hamilton and Washington’s exaggerated response to the Whiskey Rebellion, or perhaps not so much a defense as a reason to support their actions, though one based on completely different goals and values. By demonstrating the “high capacity” of the new American state (political science-speak for the federal government’s ability to control its own territory and monopolize the legitimate use of violence, to name two key qualities of a sovereign state), the Federalists unintentionally provided some of the protection that opposition politics needed. The most thoughtful and committed of the oppositionists in the Democratic-Republican societies could see that the nation and its political culture faced a choice about whether to move forward in its democratization process. Both the Federalist leadership and the Whiskey Rebels were putting into practice different aspects of the older, less democratic political regime in which citizens outside government were permitted little or no input beyond an occasional vote but periodically turned to violence when they felt compelled to express themselves. These uprisings then led to change or reprisals and repression as the balance of forces dictated. Contrary to Federalist expectations and the operant theories of many historians, then, America’s most heated “Jacobins” condemned rather than justified popular violence and joined the Federalists in seeking to suppress it. Instead, radical Democratic-Republicans in the eastern cities tried to vindicate a new model of politics that came closer to what the modern term “democracy” really means: a constitutional order in which public opinion is consulted and freely expressed at all times, at elections but also between them, in print and in public gatherings and organizations, but violence and other forms of physical and economic coercion are strictly forbidden. When decisions are taken through a fair and democratic process, the person or policy that emerges from the process with the most votes wins, and the losers, while free to criticize the winners and influence public opinion all they want, must respect the results until the next vote. In particular, they must obey constitutionally sanctioned laws and eschew physical resistance. In the early years of the American republic, this kind of democracy was an alternative to popular violence rather than the source of it To put it another way, traditional popular violence was a different, less democratic path rather than some ultimate extension of the democratic 199

Jeffrey L. Pasley process. Over the long term, the democratization of the 1790s opened the door for mass political participation and fundamental changes that simply would not have occurred—that did not occur—in the older system where rulers could only be checked from time to time by violence that erupted when people just couldn’t take it anymore. Popular violence was also a less rational path that the most radical thinkers of the late eighteenth century simply did not believe in. European historian Jonathan Israel has recently made the provocative argument that representative democracy formed the crux of what he calls the Radical Enlightenment, developed by the French Encyclopédists and typified by Thomas Paine among English speakers. For the Radical Enlightenment thinkers depicted by Israel, backwoods violence was an example of the kind of “simple,” direct democracy that would never be sustainable for long and played into the hands of despots and reactionaries by fostering anarchy, which in turn provoked authoritarian responses. A system based on rational debates decided by popular elections had a better chance of avoiding cycles of rebellion and reaction and fostering a permanent, egalitarian “revolution of the mind” instead. Israel provides the most convincing intellectual framework yet devised for understanding what many early American democrats thought was at stake in their strenuous promotion of competitive elections and public criticism as positive goods, and their hostile response to the Whiskey Rebellion.28

The Democratic Society of Pennsylvania Confronts the Whiskey Rebellion If you want to know who in the early American republic was working for democratization, the place to look first is not among the leadership elite, the men we still call the Founders, even though they did lay so much of the constitutional groundwork. Even the Democratic-Republican side of the new nation’s political elite tended to straddle the fence. The Founders and their friends among Pennsylvania’s leaders—such men as Albert Gallatin, Governor Thomas Mifflin, Chief Justice Thomas McKean, and Secretary of the Commonwealth Alexander J. Dallas—responded to the Whiskey Rebellion in a way that was consistent with the state’s existing institutions and political culture, including the people’s periodic recourse to vigilante violence. By relying on the educated gentleman lawyers of western Pennsylvania to coopt the tax protests and wind them down, the state’s top Democratic-Republican politicians followed the accepted formula for elites responding to outbreaks of popular mayhem. Something not unlike this had occurred in the wake of the popular disturbances over the Stamp Act and the quartering of British troops in Boston 200

Democracy and Violence and New York before the Revolution: the savage Stamp Act riots gave way to the carefully controlled, nearly nonviolent Boston Tea Party a decade later.29 The new, democratic political culture was instead created in the streets, taverns, and print-shops of Philadelphia and other cities. Its epicenter was the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, the “mother club” whose most radical members would be the continual targets of Federalist ire, from Washington’s denunciation of the “self-created societies” through the Alien and Sedition Acts of John Adams. In the middle of that span, members of the Society would be the architects of the first popular presidential election, in 1796. Among the radical faction’s major figures was “Lightning Rod, Jr.,” Benjamin Franklin Bache, the grandson of Benjamin Franklin and editor of the Philadelphia General Advertiser (later called the Aurora). Despite his descent from America’s most famous man, Bache had spent his childhood in Europe (accompanying his grandfather) and arrived in Philadelphia as, in effect, an immigrant from France. Having imbibed Radical Enlightenment thought directly from its sources, he was much more firmly connected to the international currents of democratic radicalism than to existing American traditions. His newspaper became the major journalistic vehicle for the opposition to the Washington administration’s policies. Two other key figures were Dr. Michael Leib, a tribune of the city’s German population, and hatter and militia leader John Smith. The group found its political base in the working-class and immigrant neighborhoods of outlying Philadelphia (especially Southwark and the Northern Liberties), which would send Leib to Congress a few years later.30 While great admirers of the French Revolution and not unwilling to defend some of its excesses, Bache and his allies marked out a decidedly different path for France’s American sympathizers. They started from the belief that, unlike the French, Americans (a term they conflated with white American men) had already secured their basic rights as republican citizens. “In this country we have fortunately no yoke to shake off; we have neither the king’s power to fear, nor the oppression of an hereditary aristocracy,” declared the General Advertiser’s July 26 editorial column. Where the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania differed from Washington and Hamilton was in believing, just as its name implied, that the United States was and should operate as an active democracy. Though Democratic Society members referred to each other as “Citizen” and tended to favor egalitarian social reforms such as public education and the abolition of slavery, the group used the word “democracy” in the procedural sense commonly used in modern parlance, to denote a polity where leaders are guided by public opinion and policies decided by a majority vote according to constitutional rules.31 Beyond their cheerleading for the French Revolution and the Rights of 201

Jeffrey L. Pasley Man, Bache and his friends also pushed the Philadelphia Democratic Society into the much more specific project of rallying public opinion against Hamiltonian policy and organizing it into a force that might make itself felt in elections and congressional votes. There was no party system yet, and the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania was not precisely a party organization, but as a voluntary political association seeking to influence government from the outside, it clearly was groping for a party-like role. The excise tax on whiskey was one of the society’s many targets. The General Advertiser had mounted elaborate arguments against the partiality of “indirect taxes” that were levied only on certain industries or regions or classes of people, comparing the excise on western whiskey levied by easterners to Great Britain’s efforts to tax the colonies before the Revolution. Yet there the analogy ended: instead of revolution, the General Advertiser declared the situation a golden opportunity to deploy its chosen strategy of political association. “The feeble hand of an individual or of any class of citizens contemplated to be the objects of oppression will have little power to stop the progress of this destructive monster.” The Philadelphia radicals therefore called on the citizens of the nation “in general, and the Democratic Societies in particular to come forward and oppose by legal measures every attempt” to use this form of taxation.32 Like all the Democratic Societies and most of the opposition press, the Philadelphians vigorously defended themselves from the criticisms of President Washington, upholding “out of doors” political expression and organization as the very essence of republican citizenship. One of the arguments they denied most vehemently was the Federalist charge that trying to turn public opinion against the administration was an inherently revolutionary act, that the ­Democratic-​Republican Societies were trying to overthrow the government and constitution rather than just influence their operation. Contrary to Federalist fears that the societies might “over-awe” the government, the radicals emphasized the mismatch in a confrontation between a private body of relatively ordinary men like themselves and the institutions and officers of the state. To pretend that the Democratic Societies were overwhelming was to suppose “our governors . . . ​a set of idiots.” The modern term would be “crybabies.”33 The outbreak of violence in western Pennsylvania came as most “disagreeable intelligence” to Bache and the Democratic Society radicals. It belied the sort of peaceful opposition through association and argument they were trying to promote, and undermined the claim that the republic at large had nothing to fear from such associations. The whole world was watching, and it was crucial “to demonstrate that . . . ​the genuine principles of Democracy were perfectly compatible with the principles of social order.”34 As soon as the General Advertiser had printed its first reports of the Pitts202

Democracy and Violence burgh disturbances, Bache issued a stern plea that citizens engage only in political activity that followed democratic norms and constitutional rules. The excise “was odious in many parts of the Union,” he admitted, and the executive should have tried harder to persuade the western people of its benefits and not tried to enforce it so rigorously. Nonetheless, the tax had “received every constitutional sanction” and so stood as legitimate law. Opposing its execution by force was an act “hostile to liberty and good government”—and democracy. In a sentiment that connected Bache forward to Abraham Lincoln, the General Advertiser’s editorial condemned the rebellion primarily as an attack on the principle of majority rule. The electoral and legislative processes must be able to settle important questions and be obeyed: It was “the right of regulating their internal concerns by the voice of a majority” that was “the standard which in republican governments we must abide by.” It was “to be lamented” that “freemen should so far lose sight of their duty, as by force of arms thus to infringe on the rights of their fellow-citizens, by counter-acting the will of a majority.” More to our point, such conduct would lead to a political regime without protection or binding consultation, two of the key elements in Charles Tilly’s conception of democracy.35 Rather than simply denounce the rebels as Washington and the Federalists had done, the General Advertiser set out to educate them on the proper way to express their grievances in the new political culture that the Philadelphians were trying to create. The newspaper explained that there were plenty of other, more appropriate avenues western Pennsylvanians might have chosen to pursue before tarring-and-feathering tax collectors, and especially before marching on John Neville’s house. “If a law is obnoxious to any part of the country, let the citizens there petition for its repeal, expose its defects, or injustice through the medium of the press; let them change their representation, put into their legislature men they know will be active to procure its repeal.”36 The Philadelphia radicals themselves pushed the idea of working to change the political complexion of the national government, especially by electing a more democratically minded and French-friendly Congress. Gearing up for a local congressional election in which it was backing Democratic Society member John Swanwick’s challenge to incumbent Representative Thomas Fitzsimons, the General Advertiser suggested that excise tax haters redirect their energies toward more productive ends: “You have a constitutional mode of doing yourselves justice, and should this not be exerted, no resort to other means can be pardoned or excused.” Swanwick went on to win in what is generally thought to be the first successful unseating of a congressional incumbent based on national party issues. The General Advertiser’s optimism about what a lone off-year congressional election might mean almost brings a chuckle today, but 203

Jeffrey L. Pasley Bache and friends were pioneering a new institution at the time and their idealism was heartfelt: “Let the men of your choice be the friends of justice, the ­enemies of inequality, the patrons of the rights of man, and the lovers of freedom, and America will become a land of promise where tranquility and contentment shall inhabit.”37 Philadelphia’s congressional election probably seemed more important to the political activists of Philadelphia than it did to western farmers, and Bache admitted that his recommended strategy might not be successful against the excise tax. But after a certain point, that was just too bad. Democratic citizens needed to accept that fundamental policies would not and should not change until a majority of voters were convinced they should; and further, they needed to understand that democratic politics was an ongoing process. If their views could not win the day at this current election or Congress, the campaign could be renewed at the next one. Even if the excise opponents’ persuasive efforts ultimately met with no success, “they should rest satisfied, that other parts of the nation do not view the law in the same light, that a majority of their fellowcitizens conceive it necessary or proper.” It then became even the opponents’ duty “to bear its burdens, not however without continuing their remonstrances and legal endeavours to have it removed.” In other words, citizens did not lose their freedom just because they had to pay a tax they disagreed with, nor did they did lose their right to speak and write and organize against it. If opponents considered the law fundamentally illegitimate, they had the still more extreme—yet peaceful—remedy of trying to have the Constitution amended.38 To go further would be to reverse the enlightened political progress that Bache and the Democratic-Republican Societies constantly celebrated and tried to practice. A Democratic Society of Pennsylvania resolution lamented that “passion instead of reason having assumed direction of [the western counties’] affairs, disorder and disunion were the consequences.” To allow a return to revolutionary-era tactics would be to reverse, somewhat literally, the course of history, though perhaps not quite as far as Bache argued in the General Advertiser: “If every portion of the republic rises in arms to prevent the execution of laws obnoxious to them we revert to a state of anarchy and barbarism” and “forfeit every advantage of organized society.” A few days after the original editorial, “A Democrat” developed on the same thought in a more Democratic-​ R ­ epublican direction by suggesting that violent opposition to “the establishment or enforcement of a republican government” was not only a retrograde but also an aristocratic act, even if it was done in the name of the people: The first principle of democracy is that government is instituted for the happiness of the many. The first step of aristocracy is to throw it 204

Democracy and Violence into the hands of the few. . . . ​Have not those citizens who oppose the execution of a law of the union by force of arms endeavored to introduce this aristocratic principle into action? If the minority in a republic think themselves oppressed the only just mode of redress is to endeavor by reason to get the majority on their side; if they fail it is their duty to submit; but if they appeal to arms, the majority in their own defence must make the same appeal, and the minority must either introduce an aristocracy or undergo the punishment due to their unjust attempt.39 The threat at the end of “A Democrat’s” statement, and of several others that appeared in the General Advertiser, was unmistakable. Bache, Leib, and company were not pacifists, but it is important to note that chastisement was threatened explicitly to vindicate the possibility of peaceful politics. The Federalist interpretation of the Whiskey Rebellion was precisely that a regression to revolutionary violence was the natural consequence even of supposedly peaceful opposition activities like those of the Democratic-Republican Societies. The clubs’ behavior in response to the rebels aimed to prove that “however they may be disposed to watch over the conduct of the servants of the people, they are at the same time enemies to every principle of anarchy or aristocracy.”40

“A Quorum in the Field” This belligerence for peace was far from universally accepted within the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, and the Bache-Leib radical faction’s insistence on it would eventually tear the club apart. Initially it held together, but with evident signs of tension. A “considerable and respectable part” of the group argued for keeping completely silent about the western tax protests, but soon after the first reports of the disturbances, the Society passed a brief set of resolutions that echoed the General Advertiser’s editorials: “Resolved, as the opinion of this Society, that in a Democracy, a majority ought in all cases to govern; and that where the Constitution exists, which emanated from the People, the remedies pointed out by it against unjust and oppressive laws and bad measures, ought to be resorted to; and that every other appeal but to the Constitution itself, except in cases of extremity, is improper & dangerous.” At the same time, Citizen Israel Israel, a tavernkeeper, was appointed to draft an inquiring, admonishing letter to the Democratic Society in Washington County, Pennsylvania, suspected of being a hotbed of the insurrection even, apparently, by the brethren in Philadelphia.41 One tension within the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania’s response to the rebellion was that many of the urbane, internationally minded Philadel205

Jeffrey L. Pasley phians were actually not that upset about the excise tax on whiskey. Their condemnation of excises had more to do with the new set of taxes passed in 1794 that covered a number of products that up-and-coming Philadelphia entrepreneurs made or dealt in, including snuff, shoes, coal, and coffee. Prosperous tobacconist Thomas Leiper was one of the Bache-Leib’s group’s most loyal and generous backers, which included being a major creditor of the General Advertiser. Neither Philadelphia faction cared all that much about western farmers, but another source of division within the club was philosophical: the more high-minded Radical Enlightenment-influenced members like Bache and Leib were much more concerned to foster democratic political culture and the international democratic revolution than they were about any particular interest group’s complaints. A roughly coterminous fault line was that between the radicals and the club’s more established and well-connected politicians. Among the latter were merchant, state legislator, and revolutionary militia leader Blair McClenachan, the sitting president of the Democratic Society, and Alexander J. Dallas, who held the state of Pennsylvania’s second most powerful office, Secretary of the Commonwealth. (Dallas essentially ran the state for Governor Thomas Mifflin.) Wealthy ex-Quaker Dr. George Logan was another prominent moderate. Many of the Democratic Society’s moderates were elite lawyers and bankers and merchants who happened to possess some characteristic that excluded them from Federalist circles; often it was because they were relatively recent immigrants or harbored heterodox religious or political beliefs. (The club’s middling members, the hatters and printers and clerks, seem to have fallen in with the radicals.) The moderate faction of the club had much wider connections in Pennsylvania politics than Bache or Leib and close working relationships with western Democratic-Republican politicians, such as congressmen Albert Gallatin and William Findley, who were trying to stay ahead of the rebellion as best they could: joining in the antigovernment rhetoric enough to maintain their own political standing while also working to damp the rebellion’s violent tendencies from within. As Kenneth Owen noted in the previous essay, western Republicans did a tremendously effective job of maintaining their own and their party’s popularity among western Pennsylvania voters despite the troubles.42 Secretary Dallas and Governor Mifflin had already taken the position that Pennsylvania could deal with the problem itself, through its own justice system, without federal intervention or military action. Their official letter to President Washington explicitly linked their preference for “this lenient course” to their experience running the state. There had been “riots” many times before, but Pennsylvania courts had handled them when necessary. The potential 206

Democracy and Violence for violence was a fact of political life in the state. Rural Pennsylvanians had a tradition of expressing their approval or disapproval of their rulers through the direct and practical means of following them, or not. Mifflin (with Dallas writing) had warned President Washington that Pennsylvanians would need to be convinced to go along with the enforcement of a law they disagreed with, especially if militia service was involved: “Their general character does not authorize me to promise a passive obedience to the mandates of government . . . ​ [because] as freemen, they would inquire into the cause and nature of the service proposed to them; and I believe that their alacrity in performing, as well as in accepting it, would essentially depend on their opinion of its justice and necessity.” The moderate establishment faction of the Democratic Society wanted to avoid the embarrassment they and their western friends would suffer if the club took a tougher position than they had. They were also working within the older political paradigm that incorporated physical resistance to government as a live option for democratic expression; not a historic occasion of popular revolution, in other words, but a political tool that could be resorted to with some frequency.43 This venerable idea did not die out easily, and the United States would suffer flare-ups of violent popular political expression throughout the nineteenth century. It was especially prevalent among rural and less educated people, and in the white supremacist version of the Democratic Party that dominated the South—as well as in more socially backward parts of the North—during the second half of the century. But the radical faction of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania took a crucial early stand for a rational and truly democratic means of conducting politics. The Society’s implicit divisions over political violence broke out into the open as the state and federal governments’ final moves were made. In early September, the people of the western counties rejected a settlement with peace commissioners who had been sent by the governor in hopes that they might calm things before federal intervention became necessary. With the chances of a nonmilitary solution greatly reduced, a number of other Democratic-​ ­Republican Societies joined in the denunciations of the rebellion, including clubs in Baltimore, Maryland, and New York State. At the D.S.P. meeting of September 11, 1794, the leaders of the two factions, General Advertiser editor Benjamin Franklin Bache and Secretary of the Commonwealth Alexander J. Dallas, announced they would no longer be able to work together on an address to the people for the congressional election. Then three resolutions were introduced, responding to the failure of the governor’s negotiations with the rebels. The first two were uncontroversial, reflecting the moderate viewpoint. They unctuously praised Governor Mifflin’s handling of the rebellion, while 207

Jeffrey L. Pasley admitting that military action might be needed “should the power of reason prove inadequate with the Western citizens.”44 Then came the third resolution. It embodied the radical position just as the General Advertiser had outlined it, reading the rebels out of the democratic family: “The intemperance of the Western Citizens, in not accepting” the Governor’s peace offers “augurs an enmity to the genuine principles of freedom, and that such an outrage upon order and democracy, so far from entitling them to the patronage of Democrats, will merit the proscription of every friend to equal liberty” and, “exhibit a rank aristocratic feature.” A reading of the resolutions as a whole eked out a 30–29 win, but when the meeting had to approve them paragraph by paragraph, there was trouble. When the third resolution came up, “an unusual warmth” broke out among some of the members, and President Blair McClenachan suddenly vacated the chair, throwing the meeting into temporary chaos. Regrouping, the surprised radicals called Benjamin Bache to act as president pro tempore, and began to debate the third resolution, whereupon McClenachan walked out with George Logan and twentyseven other followers. Realizing they were about to be defeated, the moderates had opted to delegitimize the whole process instead. The shocked radicals offered an olive branch by withdrawing the third resolution even now that their opponents were out of the way, but the damage was done. The Democratic Society of Pennsylvania would never regain its full strength, and enmities were planted that would carry forward for decades in Philadelphia politics.45 Left behind to some degree, the radicals carried their point home to its conclusion. With some fanfare, they rallied the democrats of Philadelphia to join Hamilton and Washington’s march west against the rebels en masse. “McPherson’s Blues,” a volunteer company commanded by a Federalist customs collector, actually advertised for a drummer and fifer in the General Advertiser. Dr. Michael Leib, his brother, and numerous other Democratic Society members enlisted in the campaign, while factional rival Alexander Dallas went unhappily along in his official capacity. Henry Kammerer of the German Republican Society bragged that his group’s “brethren, the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania, could have made a quorum in the field.” Died-in-the-wool city folk all—Leib had never slept in a tent before—they were relieved to find no rain to suffer and no armed rebels to confront during the whole of their western jaunt.46 The relief the democratic troops felt was ideological as well as personal. Leib recorded his feelings on the march in letters back home to his sister. While celebrating the fraternal sense of single purpose he felt in the Watermelon Army, he also dreaded the regression that civil strife would bring. If any real fighting occurred, it would be a terrible setback for the democratic revolution 208

Democracy and Violence and the promise of America: “There is one thing I lament in this business, and that is that there should exist a cause for citizens of the same great family to arm against each other, & to shed each other’s blood. The bloody part I hope heaven will avert, & not furnish the second garden of Eden to be the empire of his satanic majesty.” At least in that moment, Leib the democratic radical regarded violence as a satanic force, not as righteous justice to be meted out with pride.47 While the Philadelphia radicals were the most loquacious on the subject, and their club the best documented, other Democratic-Republican societies responded to the rebellion in similar ways. The Baltimore Republican Society was, if anything, more unified on this point. They unanimously passed a resolution condemning forcible resistance to law as “dangerous to freedom, and highly unbecoming good citizens.” Then, after Alexander Hamilton sent warning of an alleged rebel attack on the Maryland state arsenal at Frederick, an estimated 90 percent of the Republican Society’s members marched west with a force hastily assembled by militia general Samuel Smith. Thus, according to Congressman Gabriel Christie, the local democrats had tried to show themselves to be “the friends of peace and order, and not the disorganizers” that Federalists made them out to be. Smith was also a congressman, just beginning a forty-year stretch as a Democratic-Republican pillar, a career that ran through the Jackson presidency. A critic of the excise and other Federalist policies in Congress, Smith gave his troops a rousing send-off speech that sounded a martial version of one of the Philadelphia radicals’ themes, casting the supposed popular insurgency as a would-be aristocracy: “It is not,” he said, according to a newspaper report, “against an enemy that we have to march, but a set of men more daring than the rest, a lawless banditti, who set themselves up to govern. Shall we permit them to seize our arms and give us laws, or shall we keep them and give laws to ourselves?” The assault on the Frederick arsenal turned out to be a figment of Hamilton’s imagination, but the Baltimoreans had made their point.48 After returning home from their western outings, Democratic-Republican Society members found themselves not lauded but denounced, and even more severely than before, eventually from the mouth of George Washington himself. The president took the occasion of his sixth Annual Message to Congress, given in November 1794, to drop the hammer on the clubs for good, blaming the insurrection on “certain self-created societies” acting in “formal concert” against the excise. Federalists in Congress then expanded on the theme and made the charges more specific in their official response to the president, setting off a debate that brought out many defenders of the clubs, but which over209

Jeffrey L. Pasley all seems only to have damaged their political viability. If Congress had failed to echo Washington’s language, it would have appeared to take the rebels’ side over the chief magistrate’s in a time of military crisis, an untenable position.49 The Democratic-Republican Societies seemed to go into decline after the congressional debate, but not before most of them put out lengthy rebuttals to the charges thrown down at them from on high. The Democratic Society of Pennsylvania was operating without its president and vice-president and numerous other prominent members, but Bache and Leib were able to produce a magnificent statement defending the clubs against Washington’s accusations and touting their particular society’s role in helping preserve the republic and its president’s authority. Reminding readers how large a number of their members had marched west, they praised “those patriotic bands of Citizen-soldiers, who, by their readiness to take the field, have probably saved this country much bloodshed, and given this important lesson to the world, that the spirit of Republicans, and their knowledge of the principles of civil liberty, give to their Government all the energy required to secure a due subordination to the laws.” The mother club itself, however, was falling apart. The top officers of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania had stopped showing up for meetings, and the last big statement that was released went out without Blair McClenachan’s signature, though Bache inserted his name in the newspaper edition anyway.50 Their club might have broken up, but Bache, Leib, and the other Democratic Society of Pennsylvania radicals would become the prime movers, working on a less formal basis, in the subsequent campaigns to convince Congress to reject the Jay Treaty and, most critically, to elect Thomas Jefferson president in 1796. A conscious rejection of violence as a political method was thus central to the development of American democracy’s most fundamental extraconstitutional institution, the opposition political party. This turned out to be one of the major contributions of the United States to world political culture as well.51 Obviously it was not a contribution made all at once, nor was it made all from one side. While the United States managed to remain relatively unscathed by military coups and other forcible regime changes (except for those performed by and attempted against Abraham Lincoln), American party politics was sometimes terribly violent during the nineteenth century, especially in the cities. It may be true, at several removes, that Federalist anti-Jacobinism played some role in mitigating that disorder via the social opprobrium and self-control of the Victorian middle classes and their progeny, the Progressive reformers. Yet, before a gentrified, educational form of the “people’s politics” could be thought of, someone had to vindicate the right of popular opposition even to exist, and then prove that it could do so without spiraling the country into anarchy. The Democratic Society of Pennsylvania’s response to the Whis210

Democracy and Violence key Rebellion was an important moment, then, in a peaceful democratic revolution that peoples around the world are still seeking to join today.

Notes 1. For a general introduction to cultural history and its postmodernist origins, see Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); and Saul Cornell, “Early American History in a Postmodern Age,” William & Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 50 (1993): 329–41. For what many consider the finest example of the approach applied to political history, see David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Some other practical examples of cultural approaches applied to political history can be found in my own edited volume, Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 2. Michael Meranze, “Even the Dead Will Not Be Safe: An Ethics of Early American History,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 50 (1993): 367–78. Onuf quoted from author’s notes at the conference “Making Democracy: Violence, Politics, and the American Founding,” sponsored by the George Washington Forum at Ohio University, Athens, Ohio, 22–24 April 2010. 3. For works displaying some of the problems discussed, see Michael A. Bellesiles, ed., Lethal Imagination: Violence and Brutality in American History (New York: New York University Press, 1999); Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). About the closest the cultural approach comes to such transparently political forms of violence are discussions of Indian wars and repressive law enforcement, and even in those cases the concern is often but not always more with attitudes and language than consciously political struggles. 4. One of the mental blocks here would seem to be the association of this theme with the “liberal consensus” history of the Cold War era and the neoliberal and neoconservative foreign policy of the 1990s and after, neither of which has enjoyed much popularity in the leftist-inflected U.S. historical profession, not a bad thing in my book. For one example each, see Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969) and John Zvesper, From Bullets to Ballots: The Election of 1800 and the First Peaceful Transfer of Political Power (Claremont, CA: Claremont Institute, 2003). 5. “Cities: The Fire This Time,” Time, 4 August 1967, found at http://www.time.com/ time/magazine/article/0,9171,837150–7,00.html. 6. Richard E. Rubenstein, Rebels in Eden: Mass Political Violence in the United States (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970); Richard Hofstadter and Michael Wallace, eds., American Violence: A Documentary History (New York: Vintage Books, 1971). The volume from the Cherry Pie series in my collection is a reprint of Arthur May Mowry’s 1901 work, The Dorr War: The Constitutional Struggle in Rhode Island (New York: Chelsea House, 1970). 7. Jesse Lemisch, “Jack Tar in the Streets: Merchant Seamen in the Politics of the Revo-

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Jeffrey L. Pasley lutionary America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 25 (1968): 371–407; Alfred Young, The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976); Gary B. Nash, The Urban Crucible: Social Change, Political Consciousness, and the Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). 8. Clifford Geertz, “We Can Claim No Special Gift for Violence,” New York Times, 28 April 1968, SM25; Rubenstein, Rebels in Eden, 19 (quoted). The ultimate in scholarly chinstroking on 1960s violence was Hugh Davis Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., The History of Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (New York: Praeger, 1969). 9. Though hardly limited to the subject of violence, one of the best accounts of the postmodern tendency in U.S. scholarship is Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States, trans. Jeff Fort (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). 10. Smith-Rosenberg, Violent Empire, is a good example. 11. Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence From AntiJacobinism to Antislavery (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). An interesting point Cleves makes is that the reaction against the French Revolution may have started the process of reducing tolerance of violence in northern society, but she relies completely on other scholars (notably Randolph Roth) for her information on a decrease in northern violence and makes no effort to weigh other causal factors. Surely evangelical Christianity, the anti-dueling movement, the rise of the middle class, and maybe even democracy played some role? 12. On the Whiskey Rebellion, see Terry Bouton, “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History 87 (2000): 855–87; Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); William Hogeland, The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006); Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 13. Quotations from George Washington to John Jay, 1 November 1794, in George Washington: A Collection, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 604; Thomas Jefferson to John Taylor, 4 June 1798, Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 1050. 14. The most prominent works on the Democratic-Republican Societies include: Philip S. Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976); Albrecht Koschnik, “The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the Limits of the American Public Sphere, c. 1793–1795,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (2001): 615–36; Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York: Octagon Books, 1973); Matthew Schoenbachler, “Republicanism in the Age of Democratic Revolution: The Democratic-Republican Societies of the 1790s,” Journal of the Early Republic 18 (1998): 237–61. 15. Elizabeth[town], N.J. New-Jersey Journal, 15 July 1795; New York Daily Advertiser, 26, 27 February 1794.

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Democracy and Violence 16. James Morton Smith, Freedom’s Fetters: The Alien and Sedition Laws and American Civil Liberties (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1956); Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati (New York: Columbia University, 1918); Whitman H. Ridgway, “Fries in the Federalist Imagination: A Crisis of Republican Society,” Pennsylvania History 67 (2000): 141–60; Norman L. Rosenberg, “Alexander Addison and the Pennsylvania Origins of Federalist First Amendment Thought,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 108 (1984): 399–417 17. Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999); William Pencak, Matthew Dennis, and Simon P. Newman, eds., Riot and Revelry in Early America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002). Benjamin I. Irvin shows that the practice of tarring and feathering flourished with the American tax protests before the Revolution, to the point of becoming rather quaint by the time the war started, only to turn much nastier when the actual Revolution broke out. See “Tar, Feathers, and the Enemies of American Liberties, 1768–1776,” New England Quarterly 76 (2003): 197–38. 18. This is the main thesis of Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion. 19. For works framing Shays’s Rebellion as relatively successful traditionalist popular resistance, see Robert A. Gross, ed., In Debt to Shays: The Bicentennial of an Agrarian Rebellion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1993); and David P. Szatmary, Shays’ Rebellion: The Making of an Agrarian Insurrection (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980). 20. On John Neville’s role in sparking the violence, see Jacob E Cooke, “The Whiskey Insurrection: A Reevaluation,” Pennsylvania History 30 (1963): 316–46; and Chadwick Allen Harp, “The Tax Collector of Bower Hill,” Pennsylvania Heritage 18 (1992): 24–29; and Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion. Quotation from Samuel Hodgdon to Isaac Craig, 26 July 1794, in Kenneth A. White, ed., “ ‘Such Disorders Can Only Be Cured by Copious Bleedings’: The Correspondence of Isaac Craig During the Whiskey Rebellion,” Western Pennsylvania Historical Magazine 67 (1984): 220. According to Pennsylvania’s official state history, there were only five to six deaths, all but one a rebel. See Randall M. Miller and William Pencak, eds., Pennsylvania: A History of the Commonwealth (University Park & Harrisburg: Pennsylvania State University Press & Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, 2002), 147–48. 21. Harper, “Letter in March 1801,” cited in Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Beginnings of the Military Establishment in America (New York: Free Press, 1975), 338. 22. Marco M. Sioli, “The Democratic Republican Societies at the End of the Eighteenth Century: The Western Pennsylvania Experience,” Pennsylvania History 60 (1993): 288–304. 23. Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 484–85; Johann N. Neem, “Freedom of Association in the Early Republic: The Republican Party, the Whiskey Rebellion, and the Philadelphia and New York Cordwainers’ Cases,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 127 (2003): 259–90, quotation on 272. See also, William Miller, “The Democratic Societies and the Whiskey Insurrection,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 62 (1938): 324–49. 24. Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (Oxford University Press: 2007), 227–28; Neem, “Freedom of Association,” 276–78. The granddaddies of this approach were the great British Marxist historians Eric Hobsbawm and E. P. Thompson. See E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Norton, 1965);

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Jeffrey L. Pasley Eric Hobsbawm, Bandits (New York: The New Press, 2000); and E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common: Studies in Traditional Popular Culture (New York: The New Press, 1990). For wider Anglo-American applications of the same ideas, see Alfred Young, ed., The American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1976); and Margaret C. Jacob and James Jacob, eds., The Origins of AngloAmerican Radicalism (Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press, 1991) 25. See the “regime space” laid out in Charles Tilly, Democracy (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), drawing on other works of his own and Robert A. Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972). An even more ambitious map that tries to take in all possible political activity was created by John L. Brooke, for “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic,” in Pasley, et al, Beyond the Founders, 207–50. 26. Tilly, Democracy, 14–15, 28–29. 27. Ibid., 20–21. 28. Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 62–65. 29. Maier, From Resistance to Revolution. 30. On Bache, Leib, and their base, see James D. Tagg, Benjamin Franklin Bache and the Philadelphia “Aurora” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), chap. 8; Kim Tousley Phillips, William Duane, Radical Journalist in the Age of Jefferson (New York: Garland, 1989), 104–7; Kim Phillips, “William Duane, Philadelphia’s Democratic Republicans, and the Origins of Modern Politics,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 101 (1977): 365–87; Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), 90–91 and passim. Probably the best work on Bache’s outlook is Jeffery A. Smith, Franklin and Bache: Envisioning the Enlightened Republic (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). 31. Quotations from Philadelphia General Advertiser, 26 July 1794; and Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 88. “Procedural democracy” falls a bit short of Charles Tilly’s definition, but it is the version used by the “democracy promotion” outfit Freedom House to rate present-day regimes. One of Tilly’s goals was to add a little more social and historical substance to the narrowly neoliberal conceptions of groups like Freedom House. See Tilly, Democracy, 8–9. 32. “Excise,” Philadelphia General Advertiser, 2 August 1794. 33. “A Democrat,” Philadelphia General Advertiser, 4 August 1794. 34. DSP Minutes, 11 September 1794, in Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 90–91. 35. Philadelphia General Advertiser, 26 July 1794. 36. Ibid. 37. Quotations from “Franklin,” Philadelphia General Advertiser, 22 August 1794. On the Swanwick election, see Roland Baumann, “John Swanwick: Spokesman for ‘Merchant Republicanism’ in Philadelphia, 1790–98,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 97 (1973): 131–82; Roland Baumann, “Philadelphia’s Manufacturers and the Excise Taxes of 1794: The Forging of the Jeffersonian Coalition,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 106 (1982): 3–39. 38. Philadelphia General Advertiser, 26 July 1794. Original text uses the spelling “burdins,” which has been corrected for intelligibility.

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Democracy and Violence 39. Philadelphia General Advertiser, 26 July 1794; Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 94; “A Democrat,” Philadelphia General Advertiser, 12 August 1794. 40. Ibid. 41. Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 88, 91–92. 42. For biographies of two of these men, see Frederick B. Tolles, George Logan of Philadelphia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953) and Raymond Walters Jr., Alexander James Dallas: Lawyer—Politician—Financier, 1759–1817 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1943). See the next note for further sources documenting this paragraph. 43. Tagg, Bache, 218–19; Phillips, William Duane, 104–5. Quotations from George Mifflin Dallas, ed., Life and Writings of Alexander James Dallas (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co., 1871), 30–31, 151–52. 44. Minutes of the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania (typescript of mss.), 11 September 1794, Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 142; Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 30, 92; Miller, “Democratic Societies and the Whiskey Insurrection,” 330–32; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 481; Koschnik, “Democratic Societies of Philadelphia,” 634. 45. Ibid.; Phillips, William Duane, 104–7; Tolles, Logan of Philadelphia, 141–42. 46. Phillips, William Duane, 106; Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 62; Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 481–82; Koschnik, “Democratic Societies of Philadelphia,” 634n71; Michael Leib to Lydia Leib, 5 October 1794, Society Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 47. Michael Leib to Lydia Leib, 5 October 1794, Society Collection, HSP. 48. Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 31–32, 339; Annals of Congress, 3d Cong., House of Representatives, 908–9; Frank A. Cassell, Merchant Congressman in the Young Republic: Samuel Smith of Maryland, 1752–1839 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1971), 58–60; Libero Renzulli, Jr., Maryland: The Federalist Years (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1972), 169–71. Smith quotation from J. Thomas Scharf, History of Maryland from the Earliest Period to the Present Day (Baltimore: John B. Piet, 1879), vol. 2, 586. 49. Elkins and McKitrick, Age of Federalism, 484–85; George Washington, “Sixth Annual Message,” in George Washington: A Collection, ed. W. B. Allen (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1988), 492. 50. Foner, Democratic-Republican Societies, 98–102. 51. William Nisbet Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation: The American Experience, 1776–1809 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), ch. 6; Tagg, Bache, ch.10; Noble Cunningham Jr., The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789– 1801 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1957).

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• Escaping Insecurity

The American Founding and the Control of Violence D av i d C . H e n d r i c k s o n

A succession of wars mark the era in which the founders of the United States grew to maturity and governed. In 1754 a great war began (called the Seven Years’ War in Europe, the French and Indian War in America) that culminated in the expulsion of the French government from North America and the apparent dominion of Great Britain over eastern North America. It was followed by the War of American Independence only a decade later, after which Britain lost its claim to dominion over the thirteen continental colonies of the seaboard. No sooner was the 1787 Constitution made than the French Revolution brought Europe in 1792 to a war that would rage on, with one brief interval, until 1815. In the European system, war was the norm, peace the exception, and the British North American colonies and, later, the United States were intimate parts of this Atlantic system. Especially in the early part of this period, from 1754 to 1781, control of North America was widely seen by European observers as holding the key to the balance of power in Europe.1 The cascading violence associated with Britain’s war against France, and then the American colonies’ war against Britain, had a dramatic effect on relations with the Native American nations of the interior. Whereas the first half of the eighteenth century had witnessed a “long peace” in the “middle ground” between French and British America, the war begun in 1754 led to horrifying violence between whites and Indians on the frontier, with the violence continuing beyond the conclusion of formal peace among the European powers in 1763. The outbreak of the American Revolution—and the decision by the British government to employ Indian auxiliaries in raids as punishment for the American rebels—further hardened perspectives and made the prospect of peaceful relations increasingly remote. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson charged against George III the crime of bringing “on the in216

The American Founding and the Control of Violence habitants of our frontiers the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, & conditions of existence.” Whites on the frontier saw their conflict with the Indians in those terms, and ascribed it to an evil that must be extirpated, moral indignation supplying the fuel for counter-atrocity and conquest. The Indian nations, by contrast, saw a history of broken promises and an unremitting expansion that pushed them from their ancestral homes.2 The specter of violence was also inseparable from the institution of slavery, an anxiety reflected in Jefferson’s 1797 warning that unless rapid steps were taken toward emancipation, “we shall be the murderers of our own children.”3 Exacerbated in the 1790s due to the Haitian Revolution, the fear of slave revolt was yet an inherent feature of the American Revolution, having been provoked by the British offer in 1775 to exchange emancipation for service in the British army. Whether in the North or South, it was difficult to think of the institution and its cruelties without wondering whether the slaveholders were “laying up stores of wrath for the day of wrath in revenge for those which they are inflicting.”4 Hence did Jefferson tremble for his country when he reflected that “God is just,” and “that his justice cannot sleep forever.”5 The violence that actually took place in North America in this period has filled many volumes. However, it is important to appreciate that violence anticipated often played just as critical a role as the violence that actually occurred in shaping the response of contemporaries to ongoing events. In 1765, John Dickinson imagined a set of dreadful consequences that lay in wait if the controversy between the mother country and her colonies ended in war, an expectation that profoundly shaped his own reluctance to move to a formal break with Britain in 1776. In a letter to William Pitt, just as the Stamp Act crisis was unfolding, Dickinson expressed no “doubt in the least” that the colonies would prevail in such a struggle, but he warned that there would follow a “Multitude of Commonwealths, Crimes, and Calamities, of mutual Jealousies, Hatreds, Wars and Devastations; till at last the exhausted Provinces shall sink into Slavery under the yoke of some fortunate Conqueror. History seems to prove, that this must be the deplorable Fate of these Colonies whenever they become independent.” In his great speech supporting confederation in 1776, John Witherspoon espied the same danger, holding that the American colonies, were they to fail to establish perpetual union, would inevitably fall victim to “a more lasting war, a more unnatural, more bloody, and much more hopeless war, among the colonies themselves.”6 Federalists laid out the same dire prospect in arguing for a strengthened union in the late 1780s and, as we shall see, the specter did not disappear with the establishment of the Constitution. There is a hazy idea in the national consciousness that it was not until the 217

David C. Hendrickson twentieth century that the United States experienced a condition of profound insecurity, that the “anguishing dilemmas of security that tormented European nations did not touch America for nearly 150 years.”7 This is emphatically not the case with respect to the founding generation, which confronted issues of war and peace at every turn; indeed, the problem of the limitation and control of violence was central to the political thought of the time. The overall tenor of American thought cannot be grasped unless we see the degree to which it responded to a set of very real security problems. Though these problems had many dimensions, the overarching danger, in my view, centered on the interaction between the threats of foreign powers and the difficulties encountered by North Americans in forming a durable union. All of the security problems faced by this generation, whether they took the form of threats from European empires, from Indian nations, or from the helots of the southern states, were bound intimately together with the vexing question of what relationship the American states and regions would bear to one another. In the course of seeking an escape from insecurity, America’s founders developed a sophisticated body of thought regarding the normative fundaments and empirical vectors of international politics.

Problematics of Union The great predicament of the era, then, was “the difficulty of combining in one general system . . . ​a continent divided into so many sovereign and independent communities,” as the Continental Congress summarized the quandary in 1777. The need for union was, at a certain level, a self-evident truth: the states were individually weak and clearly needed to join forces if they were to gain independence from Great Britain. At the same time, however, the common justification for independence was that the British Parliament, supported by the king, had violated “thirteen solemn and sacred Compacts” in the measures taken to extend British control over the colonies, claims epitomized by the 1766 Declaratory Act asserting the right of Parliament over the colonies “in all cases whatsoever.” But the creation of the union, though seen as a vital necessity, might in practice force a sacrifice of the independence for which the war was being fought. The fear expressed by one Pennsylvanian over the projected alliance with France—that the colonists might have “their allies, at last, for their masters”—was also relevant to the making of the union, and it made the terms of confederation a highly delicate matter. Seeing these difficulties, Samuel Chase commented in 1776, “Cursed be the Man that ever endeavors to unite Us.”8 That the colonies would be incapable of forming such a union was the by218

The American Founding and the Control of Violence word of British observers and formed a clinching argument for those arguing against a policy of conciliation in 1775. This expectation of divisions that would prevent concerted action among the colonies was a deeply held article of faith in Great Britain, which contrary indications barely disturbed. Critics of the American war urged it as part of their general indictment of Lord North’s administration, and ministers made it the basis of their policy. Josiah Tucker gave classic expression to this perspective in 1781, writing that the prospect of a “rising Empire” in America was “one of the idlest, and most visionary Notions, that ever was conceived even by Writers of Romance.” The diversity of climates and manners comprehended within the American confederation, together with their “mutual Antipathies, and clashing Interests,” ensured that Americans could never “be united into one compact Empire, under any Species of Government whatever. Their Fate seems to be—a disunited people, till the End of Time.”9 Americans, too, saw that the geographical area over which their experiment in federal union might reach was equal to, if not indeed greater than, the whole European system; and they were as a consequence keenly aware of the powerful forces that might smash it to pieces. As John Adams noted in 1775, “The Characters of Gentlemen in the four New England colonies, differ as much from those in the others, as that of the Common People differs, that is as much as several distinct Nations almost.” Adams dreaded the “Consequences of this Disimilitude of Character” and worried that “without the Utmost Caution on both sides, and the most considerate Forbearance with one another and prudent Condescention on both sides, they will certainly be fatal.”10 States and sections that differed “as much as several distinct Nations almost” exactly describes the situation, and it made highly problematic the establishment of a secure national identity. “The colonies,” as Adams observed in 1818, “had grown up under constitutions so different, there was so great a variety of religions, they were composed of so many different nations, their customs, manners, and habits had so little resemblance, and their intercourse had been so rare, and their knowledge of each other so imperfect, that to unite them in the same principles in theory and the same system of action, was certainly a very difficult enterprise.” In 1776, as David Ramsay recalled two years later, “Our enemies seemed confident of the impossibility of our union; our friends doubted it; and all indifferent persons, who judged of things present, by what has heretofore happened, considered the expectation thereof as romantic.”11 Despite Ramsay’s evident satisfaction with Congress’s ability to agree to terms of confederation, which were sent to the states for ratification in 1777, the Articles of Confederation were not ratified until 1781. The experience of the war, with armies dissolving on the expiration of enlistments, and the states 219

David C. Hendrickson failing to observe congressional requisitions, cast into doubt the assumption that heroic sacrifices would be offered for the common cause. Doubt that a settlement of accounts might ever be made led states to be cautious in making contributions to the that cause, which made French supplies, secured by the 1778 Treaty of Alliance, all the more critical to the Continental Army. The practical dependence on French assistance highlighted the concrete differences of interest between New England and the southern states. When it appeared in 1779 that New England might have to give up fishing rights as a concession to France, whose support was vital to the southern states, Massachusetts insisted that cooperation had its limits: “Before France had given us one encouraging word,” exclaimed Elbridge Gerry, “the people of New-England had poured out their blood like water in defence of their rights; they had been cheered also by their southern friends, but at first they had stood alone; and by God’s blessing they would stand alone again without allies or friends, before they would barter away their rights.” When Henry Laurens of South Carolina bravely supported New England’s claim, pursuing points (it was alleged) “in which the southern States have no Interest,” his congressional delegation was warned that North Carolina would not lift a finger in its defense. Laurens was advised to consider the calamities that would inevitably ensue “from an Insolent, Relentless, Iritated, and Rapacious enemy, from your own Slaves armed against their former Masters, from the Savages excited to more bloody and merciless dispositions. . . .”12 These expressions of state and regional antagonism—and many other examples might be given—were in one sense a formidable barrier to union. In another sense, however, they were a conclusive argument for it. If it was impossible to cooperate within the union, how might the states cooperate outside of it? The war also had the effect of creating a vast array of issues—payment of the war debt, control of the western lands, and the regulation of external commerce, among others—that required resolution by the states, either together or separately. If the latter, as Jefferson later remarked, recalling the postwar movement for a stronger federal government, “it could not but occur to every one that these separate independencies, like the petty States of Greece, would be eternally at war with each other, & would become at length the mere partisans & satellites of the leading powers of Europe. All then must have looked forward to some further bond of union, which would ensure internal peace, and a political system of our own, independant [sic] of that of Europe.”13 When the Framers gathered at Philadelphia in the late spring of 1787, they repeatedly emphasized the dangers that Jefferson evoked; at the same time, recent experience was not favorable to the hoped-for reformation. “Our prospects are not flattering,” wrote Hamilton in 1783. “Every day proves the inef220

The American Founding and the Control of Violence ficacy of the present confederation, yet the common danger being removed we are receding instead of advancing in a disposition to amend its defects. The road to popularity in each state is to inspire jealousies of the power of Congress, though nothing can be more apparent than that they have no power.” That jealousy of Congress grew out of the same recalcitrance in the face of external control that earlier led to the rejection of British authority and had produced by 1787 a sort of vis inertaie in the federal government. It reminded one observer of a man attempting to walk with both legs cut off. This created, simultaneously, an exigent need for a strengthened union and clear evidence that the achievement of that goal would require something approaching a miracle.14 Whereas the challenge of establishing constitutional government in each of the individual states might find a host of useful precedents, no such fund of practical experience or theoretical speculation existed for creating a stable system of cooperation on a continent “divided into so many sovereign and independent communities.” The precedent closest to home was the extended polity of the British Empire, and the drafting of the confederation in 1776 and 1777 had in critical respects flowed directly from the understanding of the imperial constitution the colonists developed in the decade before 1776.15 But that ungainly structure—which in effect transferred a limited monarchical authority to the Continental Congress—had barely worked during the war and by 1787 had clearly broken down. Nor were the philosophers of much help. The long line of ancient and modern thinkers who had probed the foundations of balanced government had virtually nothing to say about how a multitude of commonwealths might act in a durable concert. Montesquieu’s few observations on the subject, though tantalizing and aimed at an intelligible goal—a république fédérative that would somehow combine the force of a monarchy with the freedom and independence of a small republic—left obscure the means of reaching it. In framing a united government over distinct and widely separated communities, the founders were left “almost without precedent or guide.”16

Novus Ordo Seclorum Both at the time and subsequently, there would be much disagreement over the powers that the Constitution did give; it was birthed and subsequently lived under the shadow of a multitude of uncertainties. “Partly national and partly federal,” it proposed that America pursue the aims long associated with confederations through the creation of a general government that acted directly upon individuals, avoiding the direct reliance on the states that had proven fatal to the old confederation. The national government, that is to say, was to have the 221

David C. Hendrickson powers traditionally invested in the state to secure objects avowedly federal, with its enumerated powers largely confined to the “federative” or “external” functions of war and peace, diplomacy, and foreign commerce. Advocates said that it would secure “federal liberty,” and insisted that the states needed a compact to get them out of the state of nature for the same reason that individuals in a state of nature needed a government. The ideal of federal union proposed itself as a means of contending with the opposing specters of international anarchy and universal empire, and as offering a solution to the baffling question of how to secure international order in a system of sovereignties prone to collective violence and unilateral action.17 The two mutually reinforcing specters at either extreme of this spectrum of possibilities—anarchy and despotism—were associated with uncontrolled violence, whereas the remedies for this condition, independence and union, promised a way to peace. Now at last, claimed James Wilson in his celebrated defense of the Constitution, “is accomplished, what the great mind of Henry IV of France had in contemplation, a system of government, for large and respectable dominions, united and bound together in peace, under a superintending head, by which all their differences may be accommodated, without the destruction of the human race.” The same point was made shortly after the Convention by Benjamin Franklin, in a letter to a French friend. “I do not see,” wrote Franklin, “why you might not in Europe carry the Project of good Henry the 4th into Execution, by forming a Federal Union and One Grand Republick of all its different States and Kingdoms, by means of a like convention, for we had many different Interests to reconcile.” These comments invite us to view the making of the union as an experiment in international cooperation, as a working out, under the novel conditions and circumstances of North America, of the “peace plan” tradition in European thought. It did so, paradoxically, through the creation of a state, albeit a state confined to “federal” objects. “In strictness,” noted Madison, the Constitution was neither national nor federal “but a composition of both. In its foundation, it is federal, not national; in the sources from which the ordinary powers of Government are drawn, it is partly federal, and partly national; in the operation of these powers, it is national, not federal: In the extent of them again, it is federal, not national: And finally, in the authoritative mode of introducing amendments, it is neither wholly federal, nor wholly national.”18 Of the founders, Alexander Hamilton was the most forthright in his nationalism, and his aspirations are most conformable to Max Edling’s recent portrait of the founding as a “revolution in favor of government,” an enterprise modeled in part on the fiscal-military states of Europe.19 “A nation without a national government,” Hamilton wrote in The Federalist, was “an awful 222

The American Founding and the Control of Violence spectacle.” Both at the Convention and then, spectacularly, as secretary of the Treasury, he pressed schemes intended to strengthen the national government and reduce the states to nullities. But Hamilton, though singular in his abilities, was not especially representative in his view of the federal question. His speech represented the ne plus ultra of centralizing tendencies at the convention and was admired by all but “supported by none.” Hamilton, too, was the last man to underestimate the significance the centrifugal forces at work in the new federal system. He later pronounced the Constitution a “frail and worthless fabric” in the construction of a cohesive national state.20 In the argument over the Constitution, it was the Anti-Federalists who charged upon the “tyranny of Philadelphia” the objective of creating a government of unlimited powers modeled on the princely domains of Europe. Federalists, by contrast, denied the imputation, holding that the new constitution provided an escape from that very condition. As Madison emphasized, the Constitution did not impose limits on the size of the military establishments that might be raised under its authority—that, he insisted, had to be determined in relation to the exigent threats that other nations might pose in the future—but he did insist that the Union, which the Constitution “cements and secures,” would destroy “every pretext for a military establishment which could be dangerous. America united, with a handful of troops, or without a single soldier, exhibits a more forbidding posture to foreign ambition than America disunited, with a hundred thousand veterans ready for combat.” The Federalists also insisted that it was to be a government of laws, and not of force, substituting reason and deliberation for the sword, and that the federal government had no implied powers but only those expressly given. The AntiFederalists, claimed the supporters of the Constitution, had it all backwards, and the very course the Antis counseled would lead inevitably to the result they most feared. The rejection of the Constitution would mean the emergence of separate confederacies and the acceptance, with all its fateful consequences, of the precedents and practices of the European state system, and thence onward to war and despotism.21 Avoiding that fate not only required a strengthened Union; it also meant reaffirming the protection to slaveholding interests, which the Constitution did in manifold ways.22 The leaders of the American Revolution, to be sure, recognized that the institution of slavery was starkly incompatible with the natural rights they had claimed as their birthright. Indeed, 1776 constitutes a vital and formidable advance in the belief that the slave system was fundamentally illegitimate. The Revolution was a sort of Great Awakening on that score, and it is impressive how many American leaders took that to heart. The heated condemnation of slavery by Hamilton, Jefferson, Marshall, Jay, Morris, 223

David C. Hendrickson Franklin, and Sherman shows this sentiment to be no passing affectation but as sincerely entering into their whole political outlook. It is also the case, however, that the American Constitution further entrenched the slaveholding interest and gave it a formidable redoubt. Northerners who saw the iniquity of slavery nevertheless felt that they had no alternative but to compromise. From the first moments, as John Adams recalled, he had been terrified by the phenomenon and by the prospect of violence it disclosed, but had “constantly said . . . ​to the Southern Gentlemen, I cannot comprehend this object; I must leave it to you. I will vote for forceing [sic] no measure against your judgements.”23 That line of policy had indeed occurred to Adams from the first moments of the American confederation, and it was on the broad principle of noninterference that the Union had been reared. Opponents of slavery saw that the institution would be as well fortified outside a separate northern confederation as within the American union. Confronted, on the one hand with the evils of disunion and separate confederacies, and on the other with the fact that a refusal to confederate because of slavery would do nothing to ameliorate its cruelty, even Northerners hostile to slavery realized that they could not make emancipation a sine qua non of union, for this condition would ensure that there could be no continental union at all. Few Americans wished for that outcome, but the entrenchment of slavery in the southern states did lead some, during the Confederation, to warn against a government of more extensive powers. The United States, wrote one New Englander, had to “remain a collection of Republics, and not become an Empire . . . ​[because] if America becomes an Empire, the seat of government will be to the southward, and the Northern States will be insignificant provinces. Empire will suit the southern gentry; they are habituated to despotism by being the sovereigns of slaves: and it is only accident and interest that has made the body of them the temporary sons of liberty.”24 Such reservations, however, could not easily keep pace with the specter of disunion and the uncontrolled violence with which that specter was associated. After its ratification, the Constitution immediately became the standard to which opposing parties appealed in justifying legitimate actions under the federal system. The prospect of disunion was never far distant, however.25 The ferocious party rivalries of the 1790s showed fundamental disagreements over what it was exactly that had been accomplished at the Philadelphia convention. Before 1789 was out, Madison declared in the House of Representatives that had “a prophet appeared in the Virginia ratifying convention and brought the declarations and proceedings of this day into their view, . . . ​Virginia might not have been a part of the Union at this moment.” Responding to the same deepening sense of betrayal, Henry Lee, who had been among the warmest ad224

The American Founding and the Control of Violence vocates of the federal constitution in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, wrote to Madison that the new government would “prove ruinous in its operation to our native state.” Lee pronounced himself ready to “submit to all the hazards of war and risk the loss of everything dear to me in life” rather than to “live under the rule of a fixed insolent northern majority.”26 The Constitution, then, was intended to solve the security problem of the American states, but it did not really do so. Repeatedly over the next seven decades, the Union would face crises over its survival until it finally did crack up in the 1860s. An international system in embryo, it was no more exempt from the specter of war than any other system of states. Its legendary constitutional crises (e.g., of 1798, 1809, 1814, 1820, 1833, 1844, and 1850) were also security crises. From the beginning, however, the fear that its dissolution would mean intestine war served, paradoxically, as a formidable basis of its support. “The great good of the Union,” as the Unitarian minister William Elery Channing observed in 1829, “we may express almost in a word. It preserves us from wasting and destroying one another. It preserves relations of peace among communities, which, if broken into separate nations, would be arrayed against one another in perpetual, merciless, and ruinous war. It indeed contributes to our defence against foreign states, but still more it defends us from one another.”27

Reds and Whites The problem of insecurity and fearsome violence was a marked feature of Anglo-Indian relations throughout the era of revolution and constitution building. The history of the time, however, must record not only the episodes of violence that did occur but also the attempts at formulating a policy that would prevent a repetition of these frightful incidents. The pervasive violence that marked the frontier, especially during and after the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution, inculcated the lesson that a different policy was needed, one that would seek to make white expansion compatible with the preservation of peaceful relations with the Indians. The framers of the Constitution saw the grasping action of many state governments as a prime cause of Indian wars and believed that placing the control of Indian relations in the hands of the federal government would increase the prospects for peace. More generally, they shared the anxiety that the course of white expansion had been terribly destructive to the Indians. “It is a melancholy reflection,” wrote Henry Knox, secretary of war in the Washington administration, “that our modes of population have been more destructive to the Indian natives than the conduct of the conquerors of Mexico and Peru. Evidence of this is the utter extirpation of nearly all the Indians in the most populous parts of the Union.” Knox 225

David C. Hendrickson believed that unless the federal government adopted different and better policies, the next twenty-five years would visit a similar fate on the tribes of the eastern Mississippi valley. “A future historian,” Knox warned, “may mark the causes of this destruction of the human race in sable colors.”28 The desire to arrest the cycle of mutual outrage, war, and extermination entered deeply into the Indian policy of the federal government after its establishment in 1789. The Washington administration held that a different policy must seek to make the expansion of white settlement compatible with the preservation of peace, with advances taking place through purchase and treaty, and with the ultimate aim of assimilating individual Indians into the larger white society. In order for this to succeed, it was necessary, in Washington’s summary, that the following conditions should be met: That [the Indians] should experience the benefits of an impartial dispensation of justice. That the mode of alienating their lands, the main source of discontent and war, should be so defined and regulated as to obviate . . . ​ ­controversy concerning the reality and extent of the alienations which are made. That commerce with them should be promoted under regulations tending to secure an equitable deportment toward them, and that such rational experiments should be made for imparting to them the blessings of civilization as may from time to time suit their condition. That the Executive of the United States should be enabled to employ the means to which the Indians have been long accustomed for uniting their immediate interests with the preservation of peace. And that efficacious provision should be made for inflicting adequate penalties upon all those who, by violating their rights, shall infringe the treaties and endanger the peace of the Union.29 Though an early statement of government policy, Washington’s guidelines were not only his, but were largely kept in force by successor administrations. The control of Indian commerce was to be in the hands of federal agents, who were to license white traders, supervise government stores, and instruct Indians in agricultural arts. White settlement would advance as their lots were contracted. Government trading houses would display to the Indians the better lifestyle to be obtained through the abandonment of hunting and adoption of agriculture. The government would aid the Indians by teaching agricultural methods and provide them with needed capital through the purchase of lands made extraneous by the abandonment of hunting. Advocates of this policy, like Wash226

The American Founding and the Control of Violence ington, Knox, and Jefferson, made appeal to humanitarian and philanthropic motives, arguing that the greatest good for the Indians would be to encourage their assimilation into the white, agricultural society. As president, notes historian Peter Onuf, Jefferson “never tired of preaching to his Indian ‘children’ the great advantages of a settled, agricultural regime that would enable them to have more children, thus countering the devastating and demoralizing effects of population loss” on native societies. If the right policies were followed, the founding generation had believed, it might be possible to break “the fearful connexion” with “fraud and violence” theretofore endemic.30 This early policy did not preclude war against the Indians if they refused to negotiate or committed depredations, as the Washington administration’s expedition against the Ohio Indians showed, nor was it without cynical elements. Jefferson, alarmed by the prospect of a French military colony in New Orleans and anxious to secure a stronger foothold in the Southwest, would note in 1803 that the Indians might be forced to yield their lands as a means of paying their debts and had seen indebtedness as a most promising means of dispossession. His administration also pressed far more avidly for removal treaties than the Federalists had done.31 The white mind, however, was increasingly divided over Indian policy, with the split between New England and the southern and western states being, as usual, the most pronounced. Noting the Indian treaties made by the Federalists, John Taylor of Caroline argued, “Instead of encroaching upon the barbarians,” the Federalists were encouraging “the barbarians to encroach upon us.”32 Ultimately, the success of Federalist Indian policy would depend on the ability of the federal government to restrain and punish the atrocities committed by frontiersmen; otherwise the treaty regime would be nugatory. From the outset, however, that proved a difficult if not impossible proposition. The local juries mandated by the federal system would not convict white offenders, and, for their part, the Indian nations often proved unwilling to accept the bargain the Federalists had laid out, preferring resistance to what they regarded as disgraceful surrender. Both before and after the years in which Knox drafted his reports on Indian policy, finally, the claim of the West was, “Protect us, or we will separate.” Rumors of foreign alliance and of conspiracies of western separation were rife for three decades after the 1783 Treaty of Paris. The Spanish Conspiracy in Kentucky (1787–1789), the Whiskey Rebellion (1794), the Blount Conspiracy (1797), the Louisiana crisis (1802), and the Burr Conspiracy (1806– 7) attested to the anxiety with which people viewed the prospect of a durable union between the Atlantic and transmontane territories. That western interests had to be protected and supported in order to secure the West’s loyalty to the Union seemed axiomatic. Unconditional support, however, promised 227

David C. Hendrickson to secure the union only at the cost of indicting the United States at the bar of posterity, because the cycle of mutual outrage and war would end in the destruction of the tribes. The constraints of policy were very narrow, but within those constraints it does not seem reasonable to doubt the sincerity of many of those in the federal government who struggled to find a humane outcome. At a minimum it would seem necessary to introduce into the account of these relations a greater sense of the sectional differences on the white side. Reviewing the history of Indian-white relations in 1820, William Pinkney asked, “What was the settlement of our ancestors in this country, but an invasion of the rights of the barbarians who inhabited it? That settlement, with slight exceptions, was effected by the slaughter of those who did no more than defend their native land against the intruders of Europe, or by unequal compacts and purchases, in which feebleness and ignorance had to deal with power and cunning.” The Indians had been swept away “by the injustice of our fathers, and their domain usurped by force, or obtained by artifices yet more criminal.” A determination that this end was, ostensibly, the essence of government policy under Washington, Knox, and Jefferson, but Pinkney saw little in the way of progress. With the Indians driven back “by the swelling tide of our population,” he argued, the practice of making contracts and treaties with their “miserable remnant” had only further sealed their ruin. The entire process, he observed, was both thoroughly shameful and utterly inexorable. “Will you recur to those scenes of various iniquity for any other purpose than to regret and lament them? Will you pry into them with a view to shake and impair your rights of property and dominion?”33 From before 1754 and up to the War of 1812, the encounter between red and white was often expressed in terms of the dialectic between unity and division, and federal norms were understood and celebrated on both sides of the encounter. The Iroquois League was the most famous of the Indian confederacies that recognized the federal principle, and it is fairly considered as the first great enterprise of federal union in North America. A recognition of the importance of union, and the danger of division; a pledge of perpetual peace within, and of concerted action toward enemies without; an understanding of how individuality might be preserved by common action; the vital significance attached to sworn oaths and plighted faith—all these hallmarks of the federal principle were reflected in the institutions and norms of that distinguished confederacy (which had its origins in the Great League of Peace and Power, an association uniting the Five Nations of the Iroquois that predated the white man’s arrival on the continent).34 This does not mean, as some enthusiasts have claimed, that the Iroquois League exercised a commanding influence at the Philadelphia convention; the recorded debates do not bear out that thesis. The experience of 228

The American Founding and the Control of Violence the Six Nations was but one example relevant to the building of the American union and not nearly as important as a host of European precedents.35 The question of relative influence is, however, misplaced. The interesting thing is not whether or to what extent the Indians and whites directly influenced one another in the building of their institutions, but the fact that they hit upon the same ideas independently. There existed a close proximity of reasoning and experience resulting from a mutual recognition of federal norms. Among the Indian nations of the interior, and reaching even to the solitudes of Canada and the vistas of Chapultepec, the terms so central to the federalist imagination—despotic empire versus liberty and independence, unity and division, balance of power, aggression and neutrality—had extraordinary relevance and resonance. The comingling of Indian and white perception and reasoning is especially marked in the attention given to union. Discerning observers on each side understood the importance of unity for themselves, while seeing in “the other” a spirit of union that might be emulated, a dangerous confederacy with formidable powers, or an experience of discord that taught the fatal lesson of disunion. Notes historian Joseph Ellis, “At the same time that state delegations were meeting at Philadelphia in the summer of 1787 to form ‘a more perfect union,’ all the Indian tribes south of the Great Lakes, to include the Iroquois, Hurons, Mohawks, Wyandots, Oneidas, and Shawnees, had convened with the Creeks and Cherokees to create an Indian alliance, their Native American version of the Constitutional Convention.” When Longfellow had Hiawatha say that “all your strength is in union, all your danger is in discord,” he said what had been said a thousand times on both sides; and the wise men on both sides knew it.36

The Causes of War Throughout the Founding Era Americans engaged in a heated debate over a wide range of international questions. Working from the models of the Scottish, English, and French Enlightenments, they created a sophisticated science of international politics. Especially penetrating attention was given to the causes of war. The question of whether democracy would lead to international peace was argued frequently and with fervor during the debates over the making and ratification of the Constitution. Federalists had warned that in the absence of ratification the division of the continent was at hand; that as a consequence of this division regional confederacies would form that would entertain relations with one another very similar to those prevailing in the European state system; and that this development—inevitably accompanied by perennial rivalries and by the standing armies and wars that such rivalries bred—would 229

David C. Hendrickson jeopardize the fragile growth of republican government on the American continent. “To be more safe,” Publius warned in Federalist No. 7, the separate and rival confederacies of North America would “at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.” In the absence of union, these confederacies would likely attach themselves to the interests of foreign powers, and the American continent would become, like the petty republics of Greece and Italy, the scene of foreign involvement and perpetual war. In those circumstances, “the face of America will be but a copy of that of the continent of Europe. It will present liberty everywhere crushed between standing armies and perpetual taxes.”37 Anti-Federalists, by contrast, denied that the situation facing the American states was nearly as critical as the supporters of the new constitution were maintaining. Centinel, a prominent Anti, dismissed projections of inevitable war as a “hobgoblin” that had “sprung from the deranged brain of Publius, a New-York writer.”38 “What will democratic states make war for, and how long since have they imbibed a hostile spirit?” asked William Grayson in the Virginia convention. The theory that democracies are inherently pacific was echoed by James Monroe, who believed that “all those terrors which splendid genius and brilliant imagination” had depicted were “imaginary—mere creatures of fancy.” “The causes of half the wars that have thinned the ranks of mankind, and depopulated nations, are caprice, folly, and ambition: these belong to the higher orders of governments, where the passions of one, or of a few individuals, direct the fate of the rest of the community. But it is otherwise with democracies, where there is an equality among the citizens.”39 Publius had been especially dismissive of the democratic peace theory. Republics, the Federalist had held, were no less addicted to war than monarchies; commerce had done nothing more than “change the objects of war.” The author of the passages in the Federalist that denied both the pacific character of republics and the pacific consequences of commerce was Alexander Hamilton. Then, as later, Hamilton is frequently to be found ascribing the causes of war either to the infirmities of human nature or to the structural pressures of the state system; he did not believe, either as a matter of historical record or future conjecture, that republics had been or would be more pacific than other forms of government. It was not “funding systems,” Hamilton argued, that produced “wars, expenses, and debts”; they were rather produced by “the ambition, avarice, revenge, and injustice of man.” The seeds of war were “sown thickly in the human breast,” and Hamilton considered it “astonishing, after the experience of its having deluged the world with calamities for so many ages, with how much precipitance and levity nations still rush to arms against each other.”40 Hamilton shared the general sense of the Enlightenment that war frequently failed to achieve its ostensible object and was continually involving its authors in unex230

The American Founding and the Control of Violence pected calamities. Though Hamilton thirsted for military distinction—“all that is honor in the character of a soldier was at home in his heart”—the view that he was a military adventurer is misleading.41 The Hamiltonian system, in both finance and diplomacy, was predicated on the achievement of peace. The Republican credo was most famously laid out by Thomas Paine in The Rights of Man. “Why are not Republics plunged into war, but because the nature of their Government does not admit of an interest distinct to that of the Nation?” Dismissing the analysis of the Hamiltonians, Thomas Paine had insisted that war was “the common harvest of all those who participate in the division and expenditure of public money, in all countries. It is the art of conquering at home; the object of it is an increase in revenue; and as revenue cannot be increased without taxes, a pretense must be made for expenditures.” Paine speculated that the “intrigue of Courts, by which the system of war is kept up,” might “provoke a confederation of Nations to abolish it,” and he believed that “a European Congress, to patronize the progress of free Government, and promote the civilization of Nations with each other, is an event nearer in probability, than once were the revolutions and alliance of France and America.”42 Madison considered these issues in a remarkable essay published in 1792, where he occupied ground that differed substantially from the stand that Hamilton had urged in the Federalist. The propensity toward war, Madison argued, was strongly heightened by certain internal institutions—monarchy, aristocracy, “funding systems”—that created a profound disjunction between those who gained, and those who lost, from war. Dissecting what he termed “Rousseau’s plan” for a “confederation of sovereigns, under a council of deputies, for the double purpose of arbitrating external controversies among nations, and of guaranteeing their respective governments against internal revolutions,” he found it both undesirable and impossible—“preposterous” as well as “impotent.” So long as war depended “on those whose ambition, whose revenge, whose avidity, or whose caprice may contradict the sentiment of the community, and yet be uncontrolled by it; whilst war is to be declared by those who are to spend the public money, not by those who are to pay it; by those who are to direct the public forces, not by those who are to support them; by those whose power is to be raised, not by those whose chains may be riveted, the disease must continue to be hereditary like the government of which it is the offspring.” The regeneration of existing governments was the first, and indispensable, step toward a cure; the absurdity of Rousseau’s plan for perpetual peace lay in the fact that it not only failed to allow for such regeneration but created a mechanism (the guarantee against internal revolutions) that might actively prevent it.43 Madison’s comments on “Rousseau’s plan,” were almost certainly based on 231

David C. Hendrickson Rousseau’s 1761 Abstract of Saint-Pierre’s “Project for Perpetual Peace,” in which Rousseau had refined the idea and concluded that “all the alleged evils of the federation, when duly weighed, come to nothing.” If the plan lies unrealized, Rousseau wrote, “that is not because it is utopian; it is because men are crazy, and because to be sane in a world of madmen is in itself a kind of madness.” Madison’s unfamiliarity with Rousseau’s far more critical Judgement (which was not published until 1782, though written contemporaneously with the Abstract) may be deduced from the fact that Rousseau, in the Judgement, gave voice to many of the objections against St. Pierre that Madison himself unfolded in his essay “Universal Peace.” The whole life of kings, Rousseau noted, was “devoted to two objects: to extend their rule beyond their frontiers and to make it more absolute within them.” These twin objectives—war and conquest without, the encroachment of despotism within—gave mutual support to one another: “Aggressive princes wage war at least as much on their subjects as on their enemies.” Madison said the same, and his clinching objection against “Rousseau’s plan” was also voiced by Rousseau in the Judgement: “It is impossible to guarantee the prince against the rebellion of his subjects without at the same time securing the subjects against the tyranny of the prince.” There is little in the Judgement that Madison would have disagreed with, and much he would have relished, for Rousseau saw clearly the deformities of the military system, especially its seeming incapacity to achieve stability and its limitless ambitions: “I have beaten the Romans,” said Hannibal. “Send me more troops. I have exacted an indemnity from Italy. Send me more money.”44 Both Hamilton and Madison saw the causes of the great war that engulfed Europe through the lenses of their respective theories, with Madison viewing the war, with Jefferson, as a “confederacy of kings” that “warred on human liberty,” and Hamilton taking a far more jaundiced view of the course of the French Revolution and France’s responsibility for the war. Republicans saw despotic governments as the cause of war, and war as reinforcing despotic government. They were soulmates, near-identical twins who would protest vigorously any prolonged separation one from the other. Aspects of this republican credo would later draw a sharp objection from John Quincy Adams, then minister to Prussia. Writing from Berlin, and comparing the evils inseparable from the military government of Europe with the condition of human society in his own country, Adams could not forebear “an ejaculation of gratitude to Heaven.” Adams went on to attribute the military system of Europe not, as Thomas Paine and the Republicans had done, to the bloated aristocracies and avaricious monarchies of Europe, but rather to what he called “the European condition of society,” by which he meant the fact that Europe was “divided into a number of wholly independent states.” Given 232

The American Founding and the Control of Violence that division, it was “by their armies alone that they can defend themselves against the encroachments of the other.” This opinion, Adams acknowledged, was not “conformable to that which faction so delights to prattle, and knowing ignorance to repeat,” but it was nevertheless the truth. The “spirit of encroachment” stemming from this division was “so far from being extinguished by the flood of philosophy which poured upon that self-conceited dupe, the eighteenth century, that it never burnt with a more consuming blaze than at the birth of this her daughter.” Expressing astonishment over the number of sovereign states that had been “swallowed up in the vortex of the last ten years,” Adams thought it possible that this tendency “toward consolidation” was so strong that it might end with no more than “four or five sovereign states left of the hundreds” that once existed there. But there was no escape from the imperious demands of the system, which bore as much upon free countries that cherished their survival as it did on any others. An army, therefore, is as necessary to every European power which has any hope of long existence as air to the motions of the lungs, and France through the whole course of the revolution has been so convinced of this that she has not only kept on foot such armed myriads hitherto, but has settled for her peace establishment one of the largest armies in Europe. Now it is impossible that such armies should be levied, recruited, and maintained, without principles and measures of continual compulsion upon the people. Hence France in her republican state has continued to practice them under the name of conscription, and requisition, and loan, more than the most despotic of enemies. Hence England, a country justly renowned for its liberty, has always been obliged to adopt the system as her insular situation modifies it with regard to her—by the impressment of seamen for her navy. And if she has hitherto avoided the other part of it, requisition or the compulsive raising of stores, provisions, labor, etc., it has only been by draining the pockets of posterity and loading their shoulders with debts which will end in bankruptcy. The lesson this held for America was plain. On the basis of these considerations, “more than from any others,” Adams looked to “the Union of our country as to the sheet anchor of our hopes, and to its dissolution as to the most dreadful of our dangers.” With unity, “a large permanent army” would never be necessary, and the possibility of external invasion that would require a large temporary force would steadily diminish with the growth of population and strength. With disunity, however, the catalogue of European horrors could not be avoided. 233

David C. Hendrickson If we once divide, our exposure to foreign assault will at once be multiplied in proportion to the number of states into which we shall split, and aggravated in proportion to the weakness of every single part compared with the strength of the whole. The temptations of foreign powers to invade us will increase with the prospect of success which our division will present them, and fortresses and armies will be then the only security upon which the disunited states can rely for defence against enemies from abroad. This is not the worst. Each of the separate states will from the moment of disunion become with regard to the others a foreign power. Quarrels, of which the seeds are too thickly sown, will shoot up like weeds in a rank soil between them. Wars will soon ensue. These must end either in the conquest of one party by the other, or in frail, precarious, jealous compromises and momentary truces under the name of peace, leaving on both sides the burden of its army as the only guarantee for its security. Then must the surface of our country be bristled over with double and treble ranges of rock-hewn fortresses for barriers, and our cities turned into gaols by a circumference of impenetrable walls. Then will the great problem of our statesmen, too, be what proportion of the people’s sweat and blood can be squeezed from them to maintain an army without producing absolute death. I speak in the sincerity and conviction of my soul in declaring that I look upon standing armies, intolerable taxes, forced levies, contributions, conscriptions, and requisitions as the unavoidable and fatal chain of which disunion is but the first link.45 As this letter shows, it was virtually impossible to consider the causes that had prompted unending war in Europe apart from those that might prompt unending war in America. The gist of Adams’s argument had been made by Publius and others at the time of the framing and ratification of the Constitution, and it would be repeatedly affirmed in coming years, for it lay at the heart of the unionist paradigm. These passages demonstrate not only that the analysis had a continuing relevance but that it touched the inner springs of thought, feeling, and devotion. In the various analyses of the origins of wars that were advanced in this early period, we find each of the three “images” of war’s causes that were highlighted by Kenneth Waltz in his classic work on the subject. Human nature (the first image) stands alongside the internal nature of the political regime (the second image) and the anarchical character of the state system (the third image) as the great lenses through which, across the ages, the causes of war have been diagnosed. Each of these images was invoked in the early American debate. In 234

The American Founding and the Control of Violence the debates provoked by the Constitution and the French Revolution, Federalists adhered to the first and third images, whereas Anti-Federalists and then Republicans put forward “second-image” arguments relating to the democratic peace and the pacific effects of international trade.46 It is remarkable that so much of the rivalry both over the Constitution and over the foreign policy of the early republic can be seen in relation to these varying theories of war; at the same time, it would be misleading to array Americans into wholly separate schools of thought. The Anti-Federalists, proponents of the democratic peace, admitted that the Articles of Confederation needed improvement, and some among them were susceptible to the fear that in the absence of union war among the surviving fragments would be inevitable. As keen as Hamilton was on tracing the causes of war to “the nature of man,” he would not have disputed that republics and monarchies did act differently, that their internal composition mattered to the conduct of their foreign policy. His system, too, would promote commercial interdependence among the sections, and he saw that as a bond of union.47 Madison, who drew the distinction between monarchies and republics as pointedly as anyone and who cherished the pacific implications of republicanism, did not deny in “Universal Peace” that republics were subject to imperial temptations. In fact, Madison pointed to a key vulnerability by highlighting the disjunction between who paid and who profited from war. The republican principle, forcing a dependence of the rulers upon the ruled, would eliminate one cause of war, but the ability of republican regimes to borrow money to pay for war might reintroduce the fatal disjuncture between benefits and burdens, opening again the gates of “the temple of Janus.” Madison’s idea was not original with him but had been advanced by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations; it would be picked up also by Kant. But no one advanced the idea with more conviction and tenacity than the Virginian. “[E]ach generation should be made to bear the burden of its own wars, instead of carrying them on, at the expence of other generations.” Then the people would proceed more cautiously. “Were a nation to impose such restraints upon itself, avarice would be sure to calculate the expenses of ambition; in the equipoise of these passions, reason would be free to decide for the public good.”48 Nor did Madison’s insistence in “Universal Peace” that the causes of war were closely linked to monarchy and aristocracy preclude recognition of the structural causes of war—that is, of the dynamic that John Quincy Adams spelled out in objection to the republican thesis. As Madison had written in Federalist No. 41, “If one nation maintains constantly a disciplined army, ready for the service of ambition or revenge, it obliges the most pacific nations who may be within the reach of its enterprises to take corresponding precautions.” 235

David C. Hendrickson This security dilemma made a standing military force both necessary and dangerous. “On the smallest scale [a standing force] it has its inconveniences. On an extensive scale its consequences may be fatal. On any scale it is an object of laudable circumspection and precaution.”49 A similar line of thought was pursued by John Marshall, a Federalist who was appointed in 1798 as one of the three American commissioners to France after the fallout from the Jay Treaty brought America and France to the edge of war. Noting that the powers of Europe had spent a third of the eighteenth century in war, Marshall observed to Talleyrand, the French foreign minister, that these nations had been induced to do so “by motives which they deem adequate and by interests exclusively their own. In all respects different is the situation of the United States. Possessed of an extensive unsettled territory, on which bountiful nature has bestowed with a lavish hand all the capacities for future legitimate greatness, they indulge no thirst for conquest, no ambition for the extension of their limits. Encircled by no dangerous powers, they neither fear nor are jealous of their neighbours, and are not, on that account, obliged to arm for their own safety.” A different policy, Marshall noted, might compromise the peace of the country. “A long train of armies, debts, and taxes, checking the growth, diminishing the happiness, and perhaps endangering the liberty of the United States, must have followed the adoption of such a system.”50 These considerations did not preclude the United States from the use of military force. In a war of self-defense, as Marshall went on to say, the resources of the United States were great. Indeed, it was a fundamental purpose of the national government under the Constitution to provide for the common defense, and the Washington administration’s use of force at the Battle of Fallen Timbers, analyzed by John C. Kotruch in this volume, was not only an assertion of the national government’s capacity to use force but also key in securing the loyalty of the “men of the western waters.”51 Given the role that the War of American Independence played in fostering sentiments of nationality and in creating the need for a more powerful central government, it cannot be denied that in North America, as in Europe, “war made the state, and the state made war.”52 At the same time, American leaders displayed considerable fear of that particular birth-cycle, which in Europe had enormously strengthened monarchical as against popular power. Fear of “standing armies” was one aspect of that anxiety, but another and perhaps more important aspect in the 1790s and beyond was the danger that war with any European power would not strengthen the central state but rather sunder the Union. In 1797, Jefferson observed that “if we engage in a war during our present passions, and our present weakness in some quarters, our Union runs 236

The American Founding and the Control of Violence the greatest risk of not coming out of that war in the shape in which it enters it.” He wrote the same after the War of 1812, an experience that both strengthened national sentiment in the country and perilously exposed the fragility of the Union: “The war, had it proceeded, would have upset our government,” Jefferson concluded, “and a new one, whenever tried, will do it.”53 Ultimately, the key to escaping insecurity for Americans lay in such parlous unity as they were able to achieve between conflicting states and rival. This contrasted with the habitual disunity of Indian nations, both within and amongst themselves, and with the intense rivalry among the European powers, whose bellum omnium in omnia from 1792 to 1815 sharply reduced the power that Britain, France, or Spain might deploy against the United States. Such American unity, as a delegate to the Congress observed in 1777, was not founded in “brotherly love.” Indeed, the bonds of union were repeatedly tested, both before and after the creation of the Constitution, which emerged as a focus of loyalty because it provided a framework for the peaceful reconciliation of difference. Ironically, notes historian Melvin Yazawa of the bitter party disputes of the 1790s, “it was precisely because mutual distrust proved so pervasive and persistent that most Americans could not envision separate confederacies coexisting in peace and thus felt compelled to work within the existing union.”54

Notes 1. This essay draws from my Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003) and Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations, 1789–1941 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2009). 2. For instances of such violence, see the essay by Patrick Griffin in this volume, “Destroying and Reforming Canaan”; Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007); and Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: W. W. Norton, 2008). 3. Jefferson to St. George Tucker, 28 August 1797, in The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Andrew A. Lipscomb and Albert E. Bergh (Washington, DC: Thomas Jefferson Memorial Association, 1905), vol. 9, 417–19. See the discussion in James Rogers Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 241; and Peter S. Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000). 4. An expression of John Quincy Adams, apropos the conduct of the Allies toward France in 1815 to John Thornton Kirkland, November 30, 1815, in The Writings of John Quincy Adams, ed. Worthington Chauncey Ford (New York: Macmillan, 1913–17), vol. 5, 430–31. 5. Thomas Jefferson, Query 18, Notes on the State of Virginia, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 289.

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David C. Hendrickson 6. John Dickinson to William Pitt, 21 December 1765, in Edmund S. Morgan, Prologue to Revolution: Sources and Documents on the Stamp Act Crisis, 1764–1766 (New York: W.  W.  Norton, 1973), 119. John Witherspoon’s Speech in Congress, [30 July 1776], in Paul H. Smith et al, eds., Letters of Delegates to Congress, 1774–1789 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress 1976–2000), vol. 4, 584–87. 7. Henry Kissinger, Diplomacy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 20. 8. “Official Letter Accompanying Act of Confederation,” 17 November 1777, in The Debates in the Several State Conventions on the Adoption of the Federal Constitution, ed. Jonathan Elliott (Philadelphia: J.B. Lipincott, 1859), vol. 1, 69–70; L. H. Butterfield et al., eds., Diary and Autobiography of John Adams (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1961), vol. 4, 38–39; Cato’s “Fifth Letter to the People of Pennsylvania,” cited in Felix Gilbert, To the Farewell Address: Ideas of Early American Foreign Policy (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 47; Samuel Chase to John Adams, 5 July 1776, Smith, Letters of Delegates, vol. 4, 415. 9. Josiah Tucker, Cui Bono?  (London, 1781), cited in David M. Potter and Thomas G. Manning, Nationalism and Sectionalism in America, 1775–1877 (New York: Henry Holt, 1949), 23–24. 10. John Adams to Joseph Hawley, 25 November 1775, Smith, Letters of Delegates, vol. 2, 386. 11. John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818, in The Works of John Adams, ed. Charles F. Adams (Boston: Little Brown, 1850–56), vol. 10, 283; David Ramsay, “An Oration on the Advantages of American Independence, 4 July 1778,” in Hezekiah Niles, Principles and Acts of the Revolution in America (New York: Barnes & Co., 1876), 381. 12. See Gerry’s remarks in Congress, 19 June 1779, in Smith, Letters of Delegates, vol. 13, 84n; North Carolina Delegates to the South Carolina Delegates, 2 April 1779, in Letters of Delegates, vol. 12, 277. See the further exchanges among Laurens, William Henry Drayton, Richard Henry Lee, and various North Carolinians, in Letters of Delegates, vol. 12, 282–83, 285, 288–94, 310–14, 326–27. 13. “The Anas. 1791–1806,” 4 February 1818, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill D. Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 663. 14. Alexander Hamilton to John Jay, 25 July 1783, in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961–79), vol. 2, 416–17; John Francis Mercer to James Madison, 28 March 1786, in The Papers of James Madison, ed. William T. Hutchinson et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977—), vol. 8, 511. 15. See Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–76 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987); Peter Onuf, The Origins of the Federal Republic: Jurisdictional Controversies in the United States, 1775–1787 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983), 16; John Murrin, “1787: The Invention of American Federalism,” in Essays on Liberty and Federalism: The Shaping of the U.S. Constitution, ed. John Murrin et al. (College Station: Texas A&M Press, 1988), 32; Jack P. Greene, Peripheries and Center: Constitutional Development in the Extended Polities of the British Empire and the United States, 1607–1788 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986). 16. Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, ed. Anne M. Cohler et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 131–32; James Wilson, “Speech in Pennsylvania Ratifying Convention, 26 November 1787,” in Elliot, Debates, vol. 3, 226.

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The American Founding and the Control of Violence 17. Herbert Storing, “The ‘Other’ Federalist Papers: A Preliminary Sketch,” in Friends of the Constitution: Writings of the ‘Other’ Federalists, 1787–1788, ed. Colleen Sheehan and Gary McDowell (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1998), xxvii. The “federal liberty” view, Storing remarks, “was very widespread among Federalist writers.” 18. James Wilson, 11 December 1787, in Elliot, Debates, vol. 2, 528; Franklin to Ferdinand Grand, 22 October 1787, in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Smyth (New York: Macmillan, 1905–07), vol. 9, 619; Jacob Cooke, ed., The Federalist 39 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1961), 257. See further Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993) and Hendrickson, Peace Pact. Two recent contributions to the debate over the Constitution that explore the importance of federal ideas are Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1804 (Char­ lottes­ville: University of Virginia Press, 2009) and Alison LaCroix, The Ideological Origins of American Federalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 19. Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Edling’s formulation of this view is more qualified than subsequent interpreters have made out. The type of state the Federalists advocated, he notes, “was both similar to and different from the states in the Old World” (46); “The state created by the Federalists was very different from the contemporary British state” (47). Compare with the more unrestrained statement of the “fiscal-military state” thesis in Simon Johnson and James Kwak, White House Burning: The Founding Fathers, Our National Debt, and Why It Matters to You (New York: Pantheon, 2012). 20. Max Farrand, ed., The Records of the Federal Convention (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1911), vol. 1, 363; Alexander Hamilton to Gouverneur Morris, 29 February 1802, in Alexander Hamilton: Writings, ed. Joanne B. Freeman (New York: Library of America, 2001), 986. 21. Federalist 85 (Hamilton); Federalist 41 (Madison). 22. For the most recent expert reviews, both confirming the centrality of slavery in the deliberations over the Constitution, see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York: Hill and Wang, 2009) and George William Van Cleve, A Slaveholders’ Union: Slavery, Politics, and the Constitution in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). 23. Adams to Jefferson, 3 February 1821, in The Adams-Jefferson Letters: The Complete Correspondence Between Thomas Jefferson and Abigail and John Adams, ed. Lester Cappon (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1959), vol. 2, 571. 24. William Gordon to John Adams, 7 September 1782, in Joseph Davis, Sectionalism in American Politics, 1774–1787 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1977), 59–60. 25. David J. Siemers, Ratifying the Republic: Antifederalists and Federalists in Constitutional Time (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 26. House of Representatives, 3 September 1789 in Madison Papers, vol. 12, 372; Henry Lee to James Madison, ibid., vol. 13, 102–3, 137; and the discussion in Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). 27. “The Union,” May 1829, in The Works of William E. Channing (Boston: American

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David C. Hendrickson Unitarian Association, 1877), 630. On fears of disunion in the 1790s and beyond, see Hendrickson, Union, Nation, or Empire and Elizabeth Varon, Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 28. See the discussion of Knox’s reports in Ralph Lerner, “Reds and Whites, Rights and Wrongs,” in Ralph Lerner, The Thinking Revolutionary: Principle and Practice in the New Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 29. George Washington, Third Annual Address, 25 October 1791, in Abridgement of the Debates of Congress, ed. Thomas Hart Benton (New York: Appleton, 1857), vol. 1, 310. 30. Jefferson to General Andrew Jackson, 16 February 1803, in Lipscomb and Bergh, Jefferson Writings, vol. 10, 357–58. Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extinction: Jeffersonian Philanthropy and the American Indian (Chapel Hill, 1973). Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 28. 31. Jefferson to William H. Harrison, 27 February 1803, Jefferson: Writings, vol. 10, 368– 73. See especially Anthony Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1999). 32. Taylor cited in Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire, 44. 33. Pinkney, 15 February 1820, in The Debates and Proceedings in the Congress of the United States, 16th Cong. 1st Sess., 402. 34. See depiction in Fred Anderson, Crucible of War: The Seven Years’ War and the Fate of Empire in British North America, 1754–1766 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 12–21. 35. See Samuel Payne, “The Iroquois League, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 53 (1996), 605–20. 36. Joseph Ellis, American Creation: Triumphs and Tragedies at the Founding of the Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), 149. “The Song of Hiawatha” (1855), in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: Poems and Other Writings, ed. J. D. McClatchy (New York: Library of America, 2000). On Indian unity and disunity, see especially Gregory Evans Dowd, A Spirited Resistance: The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745–1815 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992). For discussion of the similarities and differences between the American Confederation and the post-1783 Indian Confederacy, see Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650–1815 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 413–17. On mutual recognition of disunity see James Duane to George Clinton, 13 March 1778: “An Onandagoe Chief,” speaking for the tribes that had gone over to the British, “threw the Blame on the Headstrong warriors who no longer would listen to advice, [and] laid a proper Stress on the example of our own internal Divisions and Oppositions.” Letters of Delegates, vol. 9, 289 37. Federalist 7 (Hamilton); Federalist 41 (Madison). 38. Centinel 11, 12 January 1788, in The Complete Anti-Federalist, ed. Herbert Storing with Murray Dry (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), vol. 2, 186. 39. Elliot, Debates, vol. 3, 212, 209. See also the speeches of Melancton Smith and Thomas Tredwell in the New York Ratifying Convention, ibid., vol. 2, 223–24, 396–97. On the pacific effects of commercial intercourse among the American states, see Agrippa 8, [James Winthrop] of Massachusetts, 25 December 1787, in Storing, Complete Anti-Federalist, vol. 4, 84. 40. Defense of the Funding System, July 1795, Hamilton Papers, vol. 19, 56. 41. A Sketch of the Character of Alexander Hamilton, July 1804, in W. B. Allen, ed., The Works of Fisher Ames (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1983), vol. 1, 517. 42. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Part One in Thomas Paine: Collected Writings, ed. Eric

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The American Founding and the Control of Violence Foner (New York: Library of America, 1995), 539, 473, 540. See also, Rights of Man, Part the Second, in ibid., 650–57; and, for Paine’s earlier statement of the democratic peace theory in Common Sense (14 February 1776), ibid., 32. See also David Fitzsimons, “Tom Paine’s New World Order: Idealistic Internationalism in the Ideology of Early American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 19 (1995): 569–82. 43. James Madison, “Universal Peace,” 31 January 1792, Madison Papers, vol. 14, 206–9. 44. Jean Jacques Rousseau, “Abstract and Judgement of Saint Pierre’s Project for Perpetual Peace (1756),” in Rousseau on International Relations, ed. Stanley Hoffman and David P. Fidler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 85, 88, 90–91. 45. John Quincy Adams to Thomas Boylston Adams, 14 February 1801, in Writings of John Quincy Adams, vol. 2, 499–502. This was a long-standing preoccupation of John Quincy Adams. For similar statements before and after, see JQA to Charles Adams, 9 June 1796, ibid., vol. 1, 494; JQA to John Adams, 31 August 1811 and 31 October 1811, ibid., vol. 4, 209, 266; JQA to Alexander Hill Everett, 16 July 1814, ibid., vol. 5, 63. 46. Kenneth Waltz, Man, the State, and War: A Theoretical Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1959). 47. Karl-Friedrich Walling, Republican Empire: Alexander Hamilton on War and Peace (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1999). 48. “Universal Peace,” Madison Papers, vol. 14, 208. Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. Edwin Cannan (New York: Modern Library, 1937 [1776]), 863, 872, 878. “No national debt shall be contracted in connection with the ‘external affairs of the state’ ” formed the fourth of six “preliminary articles” in Kant’s plan for perpetual peace. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795), Kant’s Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 95, and discussion in Michael Doyle, Ways of War and Peace: Realism, Liberalism, and Socialism (New York: Norton, 1997), 251–300. 49. Federalist 41. 50. American Envoys to Talleyrand, 17 January 1798, The Papers of John Marshall, ed. Herbert Johnson et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1974–2006), vol. 3, 330–31, 333–35. Marshall was the author of this exposition of the American position, which was subsequently signed by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney and Elbridge Gerry. 51. See below John Kotruch, “The Battle of Fallen Timbers.” On the key role of military protection in securing the loyalty of the trans-Appalachian frontier, see Andrew Cayton, “ ‘Separate Interests’ and the Nation-State: The Washington Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,” Journal of American History 79 (1992): 39–67. For the significance, more broadly, of establishing a national government capable of exercising the key attributes of sovereignty, see Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 52. Charles Tilly, “Reflections on the History of European State-Making,” in Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 42. See also the discussion in Don Higginbotham, “War and State Formation in Revolutionary America,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter S. Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 54–71. 53. Jefferson to Albert Gallatin, 16 October 1815, Lipscomb and Bergh, Jefferson: Writings,

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David C. Hendrickson vol. 14, 356; Jefferson to Elbridge Gerry, 21 June 1798, ibid., vol. 9, 406. To similar effect, see James Lewis, Jr., The American Union and the Problem of Neighborhood: The United States and the Collapse of the Spanish Empire, 1783–1829 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 49, 65, 69. 54. John Harvie to Thomas Jefferson, 18 October 1777, Letters of Delegates, vol. 8, 139. Melvin Yazawa, “Dionysian Rhetoric and Apollonian Solutions: The Politics of Union and Disunion in the Age of Federalism,” in Empire and Nation, 181. For the rejection of violence, see also Jeffrey Pasley, “Whiskey Chaser: Democracy and Violence in the Debate over the Democratic-Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion,” in this volume.

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• American Hercules

Militant Sovereignty and Violence in the Democratic-Republican Imagination, 1793–1795 M at the w R ainb ow Hale

The standard account of American politics in the 1790s revolves around Democratic-Republicans’ aversion to power. Having fought a revolution against British encroachment on the sovereignty of the colonies, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and their followers were by no means prepared to let George Washington’s presidential administration usurp the autonomy of the new American states. Particularly threatening in this regard were Hamiltonian attempts to construct a strong fiscal-military state. Federalists argued that a national bank, an efficient tax-collecting apparatus, and some type of army and navy were necessary to promote American interests in an unstable world. Democratic-Republicans countered by characterizing these proposals as a sinister ruse to graft corrupt British branches onto the American tree of liberty. Upon implementation, Jeffersonians asserted, Hamiltonian policies would not only consolidate the states into an undifferentiated mass, they would also subject individual citizens to the arbitrary, boundless power of a neomonarchical executive. Fear of Federalist centralization efforts thus drove DemocraticRepublicans to organize a political party, rally popular support, and elect Jefferson to the presidency in 1800. When the sage of Monticello described, in his first inaugural, the “sum of good government” as preventing “men from injuring one another,” but “otherwise” leaving them “free to regulate their own pursuits,” the Democratic-Republican movement reached the summit.1 Power had been thwarted, the people’s liberties were secure, and the United States would chart a very different course from that taken by the British Empire.2 On its own terms, this interpretation has a great deal of merit. And yet, in many ways, it occludes as much as it reveals. More specifically, the standard explanation generally overlooks—because it cannot account for—DemocraticRepublican engagement with notions of militant sovereignty and violence. 243

Matthew Rainbow Hale That engagement was forged in the crucible of the French Revolution, and it produced a vision of power that far surpassed the prospective muscle of the Hamiltonian fiscal-military state. Federalists hoped that the United States would grow sufficiently strong that it would secure a lasting spot in the existing geopolitical system. Jeffersonians visualized the complete destruction of that system. The key to this forthcoming upheaval was the democratic-­ Herculean people, who were at long last realizing their potential as agents of their own destiny. Democratic-Republicans consequently threw themselves into the French-led crusade to eliminate the forces of aristocracy, and visions of graphic, totalizing violence proliferated. Once this commitment to aggressive force was made, it developed an inertia of its own, which in turn subtly threatened to engulf egalitarian objectives in collateral dramas of personal and nationalist fulfillment. Despite their best efforts, therefore, Jeffersonians did not escape a political cultural power greater than themselves. Rather, they fell under the spell of the very same French-inflected understanding of militant sovereignty and violence that helped energize their overthrow of the Federalist regime. Highlighting democrats’ identification with Gallic revolutionary belligerence does not mean, Jeffrey Pasley’s assertion in this volume notwithstanding, that I “entertain” the notion that “harsh words and hostile feelings are roughly the same thing” as “physical harm.”3 Instead, accentuating Democratic-​ ­Republicans’ investment in French Revolutionary violence illuminates important aspects of the “sovereignty revolution” outlined by Patrick Griffin in his introductory essay. To begin with, the elaboration of political legitimacy in the wake of the ratification of the Constitution cannot be fully understood without reference to the Atlantic world and the colonial British past. Democratic activists were not only inspired by Jacobins in France; in certain instances, they thought and acted in ways that paralleled their Gallic contemporaries’ experiences. The striking affinities with Revolutionary France did not derive from the appearance in 1776 of a sui generis American people, but from longstanding Anglo-American entanglement with monarchy.4 The continuities between the American and French 1790s, as well as those between pre- and postrevolutionary American political culture, were thus more profound than the existing historiography would lead us to believe. By imagining a source of concentrated power grounded in popular sovereignty rather than the crown, followers of Jefferson and Madison ironically disclosed their reliance on a neoabsolutist ideology that was simultaneously French-inflected and vestigially Hanoverian. At the same time, the French Revolution catalyzed a reformulation of the “people” in ways that laid the groundwork for crucial developments associated with nineteenth-century American democracy. By depicting the masses 244

Militant Sovereignty and Violence as Herculean custodians of universal rights, Democratic-Republicans both heightened expectations regarding the practical meaning of civic equality and amplified the potential might and domain of public opinion. Antebellum political institutions and customs accordingly thrived on martial-egalitarian imagery, while beloved democratic presidents expanded executive power by forcefully acting in the name of the people. The emergence of an enlarged, operationalized public opinion, Peter Onuf notes in this volume’s epilogue, was coterminous with the Jeffersonian belief that a citizenry equal under the law and invested in its own government could defy foreign invaders. Opportunities to apply this new understanding of civic capacity surfaced in various nineteenth-century military conflicts, and in none more so than in the Civil War, which elicited not only an eagerness for bloodshed not seen since the French revolutionary wars, but also an awe-inspiring, government-sponsored faculty for killing fellow citizens-turned-foreigners. More than street-theater actors intent upon needling domestic opponents for the sake of political gain, pro-French followers of Jefferson and Madison were innovative agents in the reconceptualization and enactment of democratic popular authority and state power. At Boston’s 1794 anniversary celebration of the fall of the Bastille, a publicly exhibited “painting . . . ​represented France” as a woman warrior subduing the antidemocratic menace. According to the newspaper description of the image, the female combatant “was armed with a monstrous club, which she held in her left hand,” while “one of her feet” stomped “on the head of aristocracy.” The otherworldly nature of this Amazon’s exploits was further reflected in the vivid account of her awe-inspiring antagonist. Portrayed at the moment of neardeath, “vomitting a blackish vapour, mixed with a sulphureous and yellowish fire,” the “monster” of aristocracy held “in one hand a flambeau, or rather the fire brand of discord, and a Lettre de Cachet in the other.”5 The central figure of this artwork was far removed from the teary-eyed heroines that populated eighteenth-century sentimental literature. Even more significant, she stood apart from another emblem of the French Revolution, Lady “Liberty,” who merited no attention in the newspaper description of the painting other than a mention of the fact that she “accompanied” the conquering woman warrior. The implied distinction between the club-wielding female and Lady “Liberty” is illuminating.6 Whereas the former was aggressive, imposing, and self-reliant, the latter was passive, meek, and helpless. Lady “Liberty” displayed a genteel virtue that drew the masses and elevated the senses, but the purity of her constitution meant she could not defend herself against the “barbarous” onslaughts of aristocracy.7 For that task, the advocates of democracy 245

Matthew Rainbow Hale turned to a superhumanly powerful soldier who thrived on down-and-dirty combat. The specific soldier depicted in the painting would have been instantly recognizable, moreover, as a female version of Hercules. In addition to the distinctive club, the “mantua” of “Lion’s skin” draped around the woman warrior constituted an obvious Herculean allusion.8 The 1794 Boston painting was a peculiarly elaborate reference to a Gallic Hercules, but it was by no means the only one. According to a New York City essayist, the French Revolution was an “infant Hercules” that “has already had to contend with monsters.”9 A writer in South Carolina agreed, but characterized current affairs in a more upbeat manner: “Like Hercules . . . ​the French will be the conquerors of tyrants who desolate the earth; they will demolish the head of the Hydra monster.”10 Herculean markers also cropped up in civic festival toasts. “May France prove a political Hercules,” participants at a June 1793 Philadelphia gathering declared, “and exterminate the Hydra of despotism from the earth.”11 References to a French Hercules predominated, but some DemocraticRepublicans applied the titanic metaphor to the American populace. “Let us combat with Herculean strength the fashionable tenet . . . ​that the people have no right to be informed of the actions and proceedings of the government,” argued the Democratic Society of Pennsylvania in October 1794, only six months after it expressed a hope “that the Sister Republics of America and France will . . . ​ever be” a “Hercules in the extermination of every monster of unlawful domination.”12 A writer for the American Apollo approached the subject of an American Hercules by degrees, but ultimately rejoiced at the wondrous might of those residing in the United States. “The once great, but now degenerated[,] base Britain, will sink in dismay, when the infant arm of America shall again be lifted!” declared this Anglophobe. Yet “why say the infant arm? no, the nervous herculean arm, which wants naught but exercise to give it treble strength.”13 Democratic-Republican use of Herculean imagery is, in some ways, unsurprising. Classical literature constituted a major component of Anglo-American education throughout the eighteenth century.14 Hercules was also a relatively common name for horses, ships, and people (especially slaves).15 The colonial rebellion against Great Britain, finally, prompted a number of individuals to invoke the celebrated strong man of Greek and Roman mythology.16 Well before the 1790s, residents of the United States thus showed an affinity for the muscular champion of ancient legend. Even so, what occurred during Washington’s second term represented a novel development. To begin with, Francophilic utilization of Herculean symbolism was politicized in a way that traditional didactic texts and equine, marine, and human onomastics were not. In addition, whereas Herculean al246

Militant Sovereignty and Violence lusions between 1793 and 1795 were rather precise in their contemporaneous political application—very rarely was the Hercules designation applied to an entity other than the French and American republics—references during the American revolutionary era were, in the aggregate, somewhat diffuse in their meaning, so that references to a British or French, as well as an American, and to a monarchical, as well as a republican, Hercules were common.17 Most significant, Democratic-Republican statements about a “political Hercules” broached a new, French-inflected understanding of the role and character of democratic power. In the decade following the Declaration of Independence, Americans forged a version of popular sovereignty wherein special ratifying conventions and the federal Constitution both articulated and contained the will of the people.18 The French Revolution abruptly called into question these hard-earned arrangements by summoning—through the Herculean metaphor—a militant, interventionist model of democratic power.19 According to this formulation, the people-at-large were the enactors as well as the source of popular sovereignty. As such, they possessed not only a peculiar might and courage, but also a ferocious, unwieldy attachment to their rights. Should foolhardy aristocrats or treasonous factions unwisely encroach upon those rights, should they, to reapply Peter Thompson’s clever encapsulation of Associational and slaveholding logic, “deserve violence,” the giant of popular egalitarianism would respond with a monumental fury that could not (and should not) be restrained.20 Intermittent outbursts of Herculean wrath derived from the people’s authority, but they paradoxically echoed absolutist ideology and practices. Like most European kings past and present, advocates of the French Revolution seemed to act with a singularity of purpose and a breathtaking concentration of force. As a result, those who provoked the republican colossus risked not only defeat, but also utter domination. In this sense, the Herculean people— above and beyond ratifying conventions, legislative assemblies, and constitutional compacts—were the true heirs of monarchy. Even though the democratic populace lacked proper breeding and ceremonial refinement, it exercised an ineffable sovereignty reminiscent of that brandished by infamous regents like Henry VIII and Louis XIV. Simultaneously indivisible and omnipresent, inscrutable and transparent, incautious and wise, the Herculean people symbolized not only the highest stage in the course of millennial revolution, but also the mirror image of divine-right rule. The wave of French-inspired Herculean imagery in the mid-1790s consequently helped alter the mob’s significance.21 Throughout the eighteenth century, mobs were viewed as legitimate, extralegal social forces.22 Seeking redress of specific grievances by dramatizing the corporate interests of the lower sorts, 247

Matthew Rainbow Hale mobs supplemented, in an era before professional police forces, governmental attempts to maintain public order. Although a certain degree of property damage was allowed, violence to persons was limited because the goal of the mob was to restore the moral well-being of the community. In the wake of the French Revolution, however, the mob increasingly operated as the  embodiment of egalitarian ideology, which in turn meant that its prerogatives expanded. Instead of grounding its presumptive authority in the need to correct a particular transgression, the mob now acted on the basis of a desire to convert the community into a bastion of democratic sentiment. The stigma surrounding popular violence accordingly diminished. Indeed, once it had been valorized as an instrument of egalitarian transformation, the mob came into its own as an agent of destruction. Perhaps the most revealing example of Francophilic sanction of democratic mob violence is Thomas Jefferson’s January 3, 1793 letter to his protégé William Short. Responding to what he perceived as “the extreme warmth with which” Short “censured the proceedings of the Jacobins of France,” Jefferson wrote that he “considered” the members of that group “as the same with the Republican patriots.” At first, they “yeilded” to the Feuillants by giving hereditary monarchy a chance. After that “experiment failed completely,” Jacobins called for the “expunging” of kingship, a move that was vindicated by the “Nation,” which “might have been formerly for the constitution framed by the first assembly,” but “were now come over from their hope in it, and were now generally Jacobins.” The popular political “struggle” that ensued took the lives of many innocent people, yet those deaths should be “deplore[d]” in a particular way, as if “they had fallen in battle” as willing “martyrs” in the cause of liberty.23 The astonishing thing for Jefferson was not that lives had been lost, but that the French democrats’ acquisition of something so precious had been so economical: “The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?” Attempting to reframe the debate over Gallic violence in a broader perspective, the outgoing Secretary of State spelled out with vivid imagery the lengths to which he was prepared to go to see freedom established on the globe. Rather than witness tyrannical forces defeat the Gallic crusade for egalitarian fraternity, “I would have seen half the earth desolated,” he asserted. “Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.”24 As Peter Onuf has shown, a particular conception of nationhood—one in which “foreign” partisans warred against the organic unity of republican government and popular self-determination—served to partially limit the “imagined holocaust” broached in the missive to Short. More specifically, “Jeffer248

Militant Sovereignty and Violence son did not imagine a return to Edenic beginnings for the whole human race: instead, he envisioned his world as a family of nations, not as the family of man.”25 Despite this qualification, there is no denying that the author of the Declaration of Independence seemed comfortable with the possibility that the French Revolution might generate carnage on a scale heretofore unknown. What is more, the Jeffersonian idea of nation so brilliantly analyzed by Onuf was instrumental to both democratic self-preservation and massive blood­ letting. Confronted with the possible “reestablishment of despotism,” the Jacobin “Nation” began to “use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree.” Although Jefferson failed to provide a specific modifier, the “arm of the people” mentioned here was strikingly consonant with—and perhaps an unacknowledged appropriation of—the image of the club-wielding Herculean limb. The characterization of that “arm” as “blind,” as susceptible to indiscriminate and excessive application, necessarily disclosed Jefferson’s elitist sensibilities. But the more important point is that he believed monumental popular force “was necessary.” Only the bellicose “Nation” could give the “coup de grace” to the forces of aristocracy. Only the interventionist people could intuit and act upon the idea that the elimination of Louis XVI was “of absolute necessity.” Like a savage beast, a biological “machine,” French revolutionaries protected their rights with a nationalist survival instinct born in the tumult of—or better yet, coterminous with—democratic revolution.26 Here then was a critical virtue of the virile republican nation with which Jefferson was enthralled, and large numbers of Democratic-Republicans enthusiastically joined him in calling for an unambiguous, irreversible demonstration of the “people’s vengeance.”27 Without doubt, Francophilic exhortations to mortal conflict on a grand scale stood apart from twentieth- and twenty-first century genocidal incitement in that the object of eliminatory fantasies was a heterogeneous set of antidemocratic individuals rather than a specific racial, religious, or ethnic group. Nevertheless, Democratic-Republican use of words and phrases like “annihilation,” “extinction,” “extirpated,” “expiring,” “exterminate,” “extinguish,” “vanish from the earth,” “completely demolish,” and “purge” is striking.28 Instead of imagining the mere defeat of the French Revolution’s aristocratic antagonists, followers of Jefferson and Madison hearkened to the day when “extermination and destruction will soon overtake them, when the poisonous draught they prepared for us, will be swallowed by themselves; their vile carcasses putrefy and burst, and return to their original nothing.”29 Statements about reducing aristocrats “to their original nothing” contained a subtly emotional as well as an overtly ideological component. Indeed, democratic activists did not simply infer catastrophic violence; they desired 249

Matthew Rainbow Hale it as a mode of personal and national fulfillment. Individuals proved worthy of the blessings of equality by giving themselves over to the havoc-wreaking popular will. The United States proved worthy of the highest form of political ­community—fraternal democracy—by embracing the slaughter of those who opposed that form of political community. The implacable longing to see despotic enemies converted into “their original nothing” thus drew strength from and reinforced a neomystical longing to become “nothing” as a way to gain everything. The sublimation of individual and collective selves for the sake of egalitarian progress bore a vestigial relationship to classical republican notions of self-sacrifice. But in the end, the demands and the promise of pro-French democratic struggle transformed traditional versions of virtue by reorienting them to the emotionally uplifting aspects of violent suffering. In the aftermath of the republicanization and militarization of France, the quest for obliterated enemies and abnegated selves was coterminous with personal and national apotheosis. Popular longing for exaltation through eradication surfaced most dramatically in Democratic-Republicans’ animated support for the Gallic military crusade. That support reflected not only Francophilic interest in militant sovereignty and violence, but also the outsized clash of armies that at least a few historians have characterized as “total war.”30 As one scholar observes, the war begun in 1792 “did not witness any great leaps ahead in military technology, but Europe nevertheless experienced an astonishing transformation in the scope and intensity of warfare.”31 The unprecedented hostilities were not exactly balanced, moreover. Although French victories on the Continent were never as complete as American Francophiles made them out to be, France nonetheless secured the upper hand and did so in a most convincing fashion. “The First French Republic,” asserts an authority on 1790s warfare, both “devise[d] new military techniques that gave them hitherto unimagined power” and “produced more conquests than any previous regime.”32 When American democrats cheered Gallic armies, they identified with an emerging military behemoth. If notions of democratic-Herculean power and real geopolitical developments served as the foundation for Jeffersonian interest in French Revolutionary military conflict, its particular character drew strength, paradoxically, from an Enlightenment fascination with the concept of perpetual peace, with the idea that warfare was an exceptional, unnecessary state of affairs rather than an ordinary facet of the God-given social hierarchy.33 Prior to 1792–93, that notion circulated among some elites, but in general it exerted relatively little influence in American political culture, even during the colonial war against Britain.34 With the republicanization and militarization of France, however, the idea of an egalitarian civilization untouched by military conflict assumed a 250

Militant Sovereignty and Violence newly beguiling, increasingly volatile aspect. In particular, followers of Jefferson and Madison oxymoronically characterized the French revolutionary military contest as a war to end all wars. “This slogan may not have been coined until World War I,” one historian notes, “but its essence was already present” in the 1790s, which is precisely why seven out of fifteen participants at the January 21, 1794 meeting of the New York City Calliopean Society concluded that “the establishment of Republican Governments throughout the world [would] exterminate war.”35 By depicting military violence as an essential precondition for—or more accurately, a redemptive stimulant to—“universal peace,” Democratic-­Republicans participated in the broad cultural movement that imparted to the French revolutionary wars a dangerously apocalyptic and unprecedentedly destructive dynamic.36 Bolstered by the supposedly immanent prospect of a world wherein “war shall be no more,” followers of Jefferson and Madison ironically called for and exulted in a horrific amount of military bloodletting.37 In a poem written “for the 14th of July,” an anonymous “Lady” described the “Goddess” of liberty descending “from high heaven; her garments dy’d in blood.”38 The author of an “Ode to Liberty” urged “Frenchmen” to “advance to your frontier” by recalling various “monuments of death”—including “Hungarians, wet with blood” and slaughtered “thousands from [northern] tribes”—left behind by previous armies imprudent enough to attack “Gauls on Gallic plains.”39 The French war anthem “Marseillaise” likely garnered much of its American popularity, moreover, from its rousing, sanguinary refrain: “To arms, citizens, form your ­battalions. / March on, march on, let impure / blood water our furrows.”40 French “battalions” were the symbolic and practical center of the crusade for peace-producing carnage, and Democratic-Republicans followed their actions with excitement. The “war raging in Europe . . . ​cannot be unfelt . . . ​it has roused our feelings,” suggested William Neely, while more than three decades after the fact E. S. Thomas remembered how “French victories followed each other in such rapid succession on the continent, that the enthusiasm in their behalf became extreme.”41 The “extreme” “feelings” noted by Neely and Thomas point to a desire to experience vicariously European military conflict. It was one thing to follow the war from a detached, intellectual standpoint, it was quite another to incorporate it into your heart and soul. Democratic-​­Republicans consequently held little back in their embrace of French revolutionary warfare, and in so doing they imparted new meaning to that phenomenon.42 In the first place, the way in which advocates of French-inspired fraternity spoke about the ebb and flow of military events revealed a desire to have their emotional states track closely to the fortunes of Gallic soldiers. “We have rejoiced when victory followed the standard of liberty,” boasted members of the 251

Matthew Rainbow Hale “Democratic Society” in Wythe County, Virginia, but whenever “despots were successful, we have experienced the deepest anxiety.”43 A newspaper author named “Valerius” likewise described the “ardor of affection” for French arms by stating, “We sympathized in their misfortunes, we triumphed in their victories.”44 The popular eagerness to cede emotional control to events beyond control amounted to a veritable dash into unreason. Yet this dash proved eminently gratifying because it enabled Democratic-Republicans to experience the fullness of French revolutionary sensibility. Heartache and jubilation were, in that regard, equally fulfilling, because giving oneself over completely to the plight of Gallic soldiers was the only way to experience war vicariously. The reminiscences of William Wirt dramatically convey the degree to which Democratic-Republicans threw themselves into vicarious war. Two decades removed from seminal French revolutionary events, Wirt wistfully remembered not only “the glorious, magnificent triumphs of the arms of France,” but also their capacity to stir his emotions. “O, how we used to hang over them, to devour them, to weep and sing, and pray over these more than human exertions and victories!” he wrote in 1821. “And how were the names of those heroes of Liberty, ‘in our flowing cups, freshly remembered,’ and celebrated almost to idolatry!”45 The words “devour” and “cups” evoke the process by which Democratic-Republicans metaphorically savored reports of martial activity as tasty morsels and mouthwatering beverages nourishing the ravenous egalitarian body—“a feast to every republican reader,” one newspaper author put it.46 The overt religious references, meanwhile, shed light on the fact that war intelligence served a sacramental function for those devoted to French-inflected regeneration. Gallic success not only redeemed American Francophiles’ faith in liberty, equality, and fraternity, it also edified the democratic soul and prepared it for even more engrossing, sublimely mystical confrontations with the god of war. The Battle of Valmy, the recapture of Toulon, and the conquest of Holland thus provided both practical evidence of geopolitical transformation and a medium for transcendent personal experience. People like Wirt never truly lived until—and perhaps never lived so deeply since—they encountered French revolutionary warfare. The exhilaration Wirt experienced upon hearing news of Gallic combat meant that the Deuteronomical and Gospel injunction that “man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word of God” had found its counterpart in the American 1790s.47 Francophiles, more particularly, lived by every word associated with French revolutionary military news. Newspapers served as the main clearinghouse for military intelligence, frequently reprinting foreign governments’ accounts verbatim. Editors supplemented official documents with observations from travelers and correspondents. Although coverage of martial 252

Militant Sovereignty and Violence events left little room for—and frequently overshadowed—discussion of Jacobin Club debates, the Reign of Terror, and the assault on French Catholicism, Francophile readers in the United States did not seem to mind. Rather, Democratic-Republicans betrayed an insatiable thirst for news of French military affairs.48 The way in which American Francophiles consumed French revolutionary military news altered both the character of and readers’ relationship to news. On August 15, 1793, William Stuart wrote, “I have been at the Coffee House this morning and find nothing new—save, that there is a paragraph in one of the papers which says that the French have beaten the Combined Armies near Ostend.”49 Nine months later, an author in the New York Diary communicated the fact that “some say, the papers are good for nothing to-day, when they hear of no battles being lost or won, and a great deal of human carnage and garments rolled in blood.” In conjunction, these concise observations reveal that, in the mid-1790s, only battlefield news qualified as real news, and only a certain type of “melancholy pleasure” satiated the public yearning for affective identification with the war.50 Democratic-Republicans were dependent, in that sense, on gruesome military intelligence as a form of emotional sustenance. Like a drug addict longing for the next “fix,” American supporters of Gallic warfare hungered for an overseas transmission that would enable them to get “high” (or “low”) on vicarious war experience.51 No wonder that Simon Newman discovered that “by far the most popular French revolutionary festivals and celebrations [in the United States] were those that commemorated French military victories, and these outnumbered all other celebrations of France combined.”52 The resulting cycle of miserable, impatient longing and indulgent, euphoric festivity in turn helps explain a Baltimore Rangers Light Infantry Company toast to the “brave and gallant soldiers of France—may their successes keep pace with our wishes.”53 As these volunteer militia members attested, the popular hunger for news of French success became harder and harder to satisfy because real-life European campaigns moved slowly compared to the digestive powers of the democratic imagination. Indeed, even though most DemocraticRepublicans regularly described French Revolutionary time as “accelerated,” and even though most American egalitarians acknowledged the rapidity of Gallic victories, the tempo of martial triumph was never fast enough. Rather, the widespread sensation of brisk change ironically exacerbated the craving for ever-speedier military accomplishments, and the public’s perception of the protracted temporal distance between fresh reports of European campaigns grew ever more acute.54 A similar dynamic took hold with regard to assessments of the size and nature of battle. The more the French were successful, the more Democratic253

Matthew Rainbow Hale Republicans yearned for spectacular triumphs. In a short article rejoicing in the fact that the “French are every where victorious,” New-Hampshire Gazette editor John Melcher felt compelled to share (and shape) the popular aspiration for a culminating event of epic proportions: “We hope the drama of blood, in Europe, is drawing to its catastrophe . . . ​and we trust the expiring pang of despotism will be the epilogue.”55 Nurtured on remarkable French successes, the democratic appetite dilated to encompass ever-greater dreams. Whereas small, incremental gains sufficed in the Old Regime, the new, French-inflected understanding of war demanded much more. The finale of the European “drama of blood” could not, therefore, be a traditional military set piece; it had to be an apocalyptic cataclysm, and George Thatcher accordingly wrote, “All minds seem anxious & suspended upon some dreadfull Battle.”56 Only a “dreadfull Battle” would ensure the “downfall of monarchy.”57 Only a “catastrophe” could provide the appropriate dénouement to the Greek tragedy of French revolutionary combat. Enthusiasm for democratic warfare had a momentum of its own, in other words. Indeed, because Gallic conflict promised the elimination of aristocratic society and war, it elicited from its American adherents an unquenchable passion for grandiose human violence. That passion was moderated, to be sure, by the fact that most Democratic-Republicans did not directly participate in or even witness European battle. And yet, in some ways, geographical distance encouraged an even more powerful affective identification with French belligerence.58 For in the same way that American colonists in the decades before 1776 expressed a fervor for neoabsolutist Hanoverian rule that was rare among Britons who lived near actual Hanoverian monarchs, so Francophiles in the mid-1790s developed an exuberant connection to Gallic war that would have seemed naïve to battle-tested Armée du Nord conscripts, Languedoc peasants who paid extra taxes, Lyonnaise merchants whose property had been pillaged, and Parisian women whose husbands had perished.59 Even as the Atlantic Ocean reduced opportunities for concrete military experience, it gave free reign to emotionally intense imaginative bonds. “I feel the most ardent enthusiasm for the [French revolutionary military] cause,” wrote Virginia law student John Randolph. “I dream of nothing else. I think of nothing else; [and] what . . . ​ do you suppose . . . ​I should make of [the writings of English legal theorist Sir Edward] Coke when my thoughts are dwelling on the plains of Flanders?”60 The way in which a sizeable number of Democratic-Republicans marveled at the greatest aggregation and implementation of force the Western world had ever seen suggests that Francophilic egalitarianism was not only compatible with, but also instrumental to the emergence of a new culture of war.61 This 254

Militant Sovereignty and Violence new culture maintained that martial virtues were superior to civilian ones. It flirted with the idea that conquest needed no justification beyond its own magnificence. And it characterized warfare as a glorious forum for romantic self-expression and nationalist achievement. By identifying so deeply with French soldiers’ efforts to pummel their opponents, Jeffersonians exalted and thus submitted to a neoabsolutist vision of militant, interventionist power that dwarfed the Hamiltonian fiscal-military state. The sudden materialization of this vision had both short- and long-term consequences. With regard to the former, the adoration of Gallic arms contributed to a spate of flamboyant martial activity. Some Democratic-Republicans served on French-commissioned privateers, others joined (abortive) Frenchsponsored expeditions against the Spanish in the Mississippi River Valley, and at least a few sailed to Europe to take part in the egalitarian military crusade.62 In the longer term, fascination with Gallic combat shaped a nineteenth-​ ­century populace transfixed by the supposedly regenerative aspects of battle. This fixation not only helped bring about the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, and the American Civil War, it also pushed participants in those conflicts to measure themselves against French revolutionary and Napoleonic predecessors.63 In addition, enthrallment with militant egalitarian power worked its way into American politics. Numerous scholars have noted that martial imagery, voluntary militia activities, and former soldiers suffused and structured nineteenth-century party contests.64 A different group of historians has docu­ mented not only the prevalence and increased recklessness of antebellum mobs, but also the frequency with which members of “the Democracy” cited the doctrine of popular sovereignty as justification for violent lawlessness and the abuse of minorities.65 Last but not least, the individuals American democratic activists elected to the presidency bore witness to the allure and enlargement of neoabsolutist, interventionist power. During his eight years in office, Thomas Jefferson put forth and acted upon a dynamic notion of democratic leadership that purportedly concentrated the will of the nation. Indeed, as Jeremy Bailey has convincingly argued, “Jefferson pointed the presidency toward a virtue of monarchy, inequality,” and rendered the commander in chief “free to become lawless on behalf of the people.”66 Two decades later, the “military chieftain” Andrew Jackson more blatantly aggrandized incredible reserves of political and institutional power by embodying the idea of the neoabsolutist, interventionist executive. The authoritarian streak he displayed between 1829 and 1837 infuriated his political opponents, who, not coincidentally, took the name “Whigs” and labeled the seventh president “King Andrew.”67 Yet, like 255

Matthew Rainbow Hale Jefferson, Jackson generally endeared himself to his democratic supporters with his unrepentant assertions of executive authority, which were sometimes framed as Herculean attempts to “loose the sluices upon the Augean stables.”68 The rise of democracy in the United States was thus more complicated than the standard account of the Jeffersonian movement would have us believe. To be certain, the classical republican suspicion of centralized government effectively links democratic activists in the 1790s with those in the 1820s and 1830s.69 But so too does an infatuation with prodigious civic and state capacity. Visions of muscular power were, in that sense, anything but anathema to political culture in the early republic. On the contrary, dreams and demonstrations of Herculean, neomonarchical strength animated, helped constitute, and epitomized the apotheosis of American democracy.70

Notes The author thanks Peter Onuf, Patrick Griffin, Brian Schoen, Robert Ingram, Ben Irvin, Bradley Hale, and the participants in the 2010 “Making Democracy” conference for helpful comments. In addition, I gratefully acknowledge the financial support provided by the Marc Friedlaender Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the SHEAR (Society for Historians of the Early American Republic) Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies Gilder Lehrman Junior Research Fellowship, the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History Fellowship at the New York Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society Legacy Fellowship, the McNeil Center for Early American Studies Dissertation Fellowship, and a Goucher College Faculty Affairs Grant. 1. Merrill Peterson, ed., Thomas Jefferson: Writings (New York, 1984), 494. 2. Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca: Cornell University Press 1978); Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980); Lawrence Cress, Citizens in Arms: The Army and Militia in American Society to the War of 1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Caroline Press, 1982); Richard Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Beginnings of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York: Free Press 1975). 3. Pasley essay in this volume. 4. Brendan McConville, The King’s Three Faces: The Rise and Fall of Royal America, 1688–1776 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Richard Bushman, King and People in Provincial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Jerrilyn Greene Marston, King and Congress: The Transfer of Political Legitimacy, 1774–1776 (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 1987); Winthrop Jordan, “Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776,” Journal of American History 60 (1973): 294–308; William Liddle, “ ‘A Patriot King, or None’: Lord Bolingbroke and the American Renunciation of George III,” Journal of American History 55 (1979): 951–70.

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Militant Sovereignty and Violence 5. Columbian Centinel, 26 July 1794; General Advertiser, 1 August 1794. For French Jacobins’ graphic depictions of the melodramatic suffering of aristocratic monsters, see Patrice Higgonet, Goodness beyond Virtue: Jacobins during the French Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 244–46. 6. The analysis that follows owes a great deal to Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 96–98; Lynn Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image in the French Revolution,” Representations 1 (1983): 95–117. 7. South-Carolina State-Gazette, 5 September 1794. 8. The first of twelve labors Hercules performed for King Eurystheus was killing the Nemean lion that terrorized the countryside. As a result, it is often possible to identify artistic depictions of Hercules by looking for the man wearing a lion’s skin. 9. American Minerva, 7 March 1794. 10. South-Carolina State-Gazette, 5 September 1794. 11. Federal Gazette, and Philadelphia Evening Post, 3 June 1793; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 4 June 1793; National Gazette, 5 June 1793; Diary, 5 June 1793; Gazette of the United States, 5 June 1793; Independent Gazetteer, 8 June 1793; New-Jersey Journal, 8 June 1793; Salem Gazette, 18 June 1793. For other references to revolutionary France as a Herculean power, see the National Gazette, 11 May 1793; Argus, 21 May 1793; Columbian Centinel, 6 July 1793; NewJersey Journal, 23 October 1793; Spooner’s Vermont Journal, 26 May 1794; Georgia Gazette, 29 May 1794; Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, 23 July 1794; American Minerva, 7 January 1795; Massachusetts Mercury, 10 February 1795; Gazette of the United States, 4 March 1795; Philadelphia Gazette, 5 March 1795; Philip Foner, ed., The Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976), 347; James Monroe, “Sketch of the State of Affairs of France,” in The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. John Catanzariti (Princeton: Princeton University Press: 2000), vol. 28, 393. In addition, in the 28 March 1794 edition of the Impartial Herald, Americans could read of Jacques-Louis David’s proposal to construct a “colossal” Hercules on the ruins of previous monarchs’ statues. 12. The first quote was printed in the Independent Gazetteer, 20 December 1794; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 22 December 1794; Greenleaf ’s New-York Journal, 27 December 1794; Federal Orrery, 1 January 1795; Newport Mercury, 6 January 1795. The second quote was printed in Greenleaf ’s New-York Journal, 16 April 1794. 13. American Apollo, 9 August 1793. 14. For a reference to Hercules that clearly demonstrates elite Americans’ familiarity with classical literature, see Landon Carter to George Washington, 9 May 1776, in The Papers of George Washington Digital Edition, ed. Theodore Crackel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007) (Consulted on 26 January 2008). For classical literature in the AngloAmerican world, see Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Caroline Winterer, “From Royal to Republican: The Classical Image in Early America,” Journal of American History 91 (2005): 1264–90; Carl Richard, The Founders and the Classics: Greece, Rome, and the American Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). 15. For a horse named Hercules, see the New-York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury, 20 February 1775. For ships named Hercules, see the Providence Gazette, 30 September 1775; Con-

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Matthew Rainbow Hale tinental Journal, 20 March 1777; Boston Gazette, 9 October 1775 and 24 March 1777. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson both owned slaves named Hercules. 16. The most notable example is the Libertas Americana medal (1782), commissioned by Benjamin Franklin and executed by French artist Augustin Dupré. See Lester Olson, Emblems of American Community in the Revolutionary Era: A Study in Rhetorical Iconology (Washington: Smithsonian, 1991), 189–92, 248–49; Carl Zigrosser, “The Medallic Sketches of Augustin Dupré in American Collections,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 101 (1957): 535–50; Winfried Schleiner, “The Infant Hercules: Franklin’s Design for a Medal Commemorating American Liberty,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 10 (1976–77): 235– 44. For additional Herculean references during the American Revolutionary era, see Olson, Emblems of American Community, 228; Henry Temple Luttrell’s speech in Parliament cited in the New-York Gazette, and Weekly Mercury, 15 May 1775; Freeman’s Journal, 22 September 1781, 14 December 1782, and 19, 26 February 1783; Pennsylvania Packet, 17 November 1781; and Continental Journal, 7 March 1782. 17. Independent Gazetteer, 19 April 1783; Boston Evening Post, 29 December 1781; Freeman’s Journal, 17 April 1782. 18. See Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969), 524–36; Edmund Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (New York: Norton 1988), 263–87. 19. Once again, my analysis is indebted to Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class, 94–113; Hunt, “Hercules and the Radical Image,” 95–117. 20. Thompson essay in this volume, p. . 21. My interpretation draws upon, even as it differs from, Paul Gilje, “The Baltimore Riots of 1812 and the Breakdown of the Anglo-American Mob Tradition,” Journal of Social History 13 (1980): 547–64; Paul Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy: Popular Disorder in New York City, 1763–1834 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1987). 22. Pauline Maier, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly 27 (1970): 3–35; Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1972), 3–26. 23. Thomas Jefferson to William Short, 3 January 1793, in Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 25, 14. 24. Ibid. See also Jefferson to Tench Coxe, 1 May 1794, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 28, 67. Jefferson’s comment was not the only one of its kind circulating in the mid-1790s. The 5 September 1796 edition of the Boston Gazette lauded Samuel Adams’s “fervent patriotism” by citing his (apocryphal?) American revolutionary era assertion that “I should advise persisting in our struggle for liberty, though it was revealed from heaven, that 999 were to perish, and only one of a thousand were to survive and retain his liberty.” 25. Peter Onuf, Jefferson’s Empire: The Language of American Nationhood (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), 173. 26. Jefferson to Short, 3 January 1793, Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 25, 14. For the overlap of the biological and the mechanical in the eighteenth century, see Colleen Terrell, “ ‘Republican Machines’: Franklin, Rush, and the Manufacture of Civic Virtue in the Early Republic,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 1 (2003): 100–32.

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Militant Sovereignty and Violence 27. Aurora. General Advertiser, 23 November 1795. 28. For “annihilation,” see General Advertiser, 12 February 1794; New-Jersey Journal, 23 March 1796, cited in Ruth Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought, 1756–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 155. For “extinction,” see General Advertiser, 3 May 1794; Baltimore Daily Intelligencer, 7 July 1794. For “extirpated,” see General Advertiser, 3 January and 13 February 1794; Carlisle Gazette, 29 January 1794. For “expiring,” see New-Hampshire Gazette, 4 November 1794. For “exterminate” and “extermination,” see General Advertiser, 1, 3 January and 12 May 1794; Federal Intelligencer and Baltimore Daily Gazette, 23 April 1795; Diary, 17 April 1794; William Jackson to William Bingham, 9 March 1795, Bingham Papers, William Bingham Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. For “extinguish,” see Robert Alderson, Jr., This Bright Era of Happy Revolutions: French Consul Michel-Ange-Bernard Mangourit and International Republicanism in Charleston, 1792–1794 (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2008), 116. For “vanish from the earth,” see Albany Register, 17 March 1794. For “demolition” and “completely demolish,” see Elias Lee, The Dissolution of Earthly Monarchies (Danbury, CT, 1794) 22, cited in Bloch, Visionary Republic, 157; Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, 22 January 1794. For “purge” and “purging,” see Joel Barlow, A Letter Addressed to the People of Piedmont [1792] (New York, 1795), 27, cited in Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions, 1776–1814 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993), 143; Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 28 December 1794, The Papers of James Madison, ed. J.C.A. Stagg (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1985), vol. 15, 428. 29. New-York Journal, reprinted in the American Apollo, 9 August 1793. A group of Philadelphian civic festival participants likewise toasted the destruction of “the race of kings: and may their broken scepters and crowns[,] like the bones and teeth of the mammoth, be the only evidences that such monsters ever insulted the earth.” See Gazette of the United States, 4 May 1795. 30. David Bell, The First Total War: Napoleon’s Europe and the Birth of Warfare as We Know It (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2007); Gordon Wood, Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789–1815 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 620. 31. Bell, The First Total War, 7. 32. Steven Ross, Quest for Victory: French Military Strategy, 1792–1799 (South Brunswick: A.S. Barnes, 1973), 10–11. 33. Bell, The First Total War. The analysis in this paragraph and, more generally, my discussion of Democratic-Republican attitudes toward French Revolutionary warfare, is heavily indebted to Bell’s cogent work. 34. The absence of the perpetual peace theme is striking in Charles Royster, A Revolutionary People at War: The Continental Army and American Character, 1775–1783 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1979). Ruth Bloch refers to a few individuals who talk about a new age of peace, but the people she quotes were writing after the victory at Yorktown (1781). In that sense, war remained the converse of, rather than an instrument for achieving perpetual peace. See Bloch, Visionary Republic, 94. 35. Bell, The First Total War, 115; Proceedings of the Calliopean Society, 21 January 1794, New York Historical Society. 36. Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 3 January 1793. See also the Princeton, New

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Matthew Rainbow Hale Jersey toasts cited in the National Gazette, 17 July 1793; the Philadelphia Democratic and German Republican Society toasts cited in the Boston Gazette, 19 May 1794; and Diary, 19 February 1793, from the General Advertiser. 37. Farmer’s Library, 25 November 1793. 38. National Gazette, 24 July 1793. 39. Ibid., 29 May 1793. The author of this poem also warned French revolutionaries that failure to join the egalitarian military crusade would ensure that “Poland’s fate each monster brings, / Mows millions down, your cause defeats, / And Ismael’s horrid scenes repeats.” 40. For English- and French-language versions of “The Marseillaise” lyrics, see http:// chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/browse/songs/#. 41. Virginia Gazette and General Advertiser, 23 July 1794; General Advertiser, 1 August 1794; Gazette of the United States, 1 August 1794; New-Hampshire Gazette, 26 August 1794; E. S. Thomas, Reminiscences of the Last Sixty-Five Years, Commencing with the Battle of Lexington. Also, Sketches of His Own Life and Times (Hartford: Arno, 1840), 18. 42. Charles Royster, The Destructive War: William Tecumseh Sherman, Stonewall Jackson, and the Americans (New York: Knopf, 1991), 232–95. The analysis that follows owes a great deal to Royster’s cogent interpretation. 43. Democratic-Republican Societies, 352. 44. Aurora. General Advertiser, 1 September 1795. 45. William Wirt to Judge Carr, 14 May 1821, in John P. Kennedy, Memoirs of the Life of William Wirt, Attorney General of the United States (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1849), vol. 2, 122. 46. New-York Journal, 15 January 1794, cited in Alan Blau, “New York City and the French Revolution, 1789–1797: A Study of French Revolutionary Influence” (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 1973), 260. 47. Deuteronomy 8:3; Matthew 4:4; Luke 4:4 (King James Version). 48. See Matthew Rainbow Hale, “On Their Tiptoes: Political Time and Newspapers during the Advent of the Radicalized French Revolution, circa 1792–1793,” Journal of the Early Republic 29 (2009): 191–218. 49. William Stuart to Griffith Evans, 15 August 1793, Griffith Evans Correspondence, 1786–1848, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. 50. Diary, 21 May 1794. See also the New-Hampshire Gazette, 1 December 1795. 51. The drug addiction metaphor is not used lightly. In “The Affective Revolution in 1790s Britain,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34 (2001): 491–521, Lynn Hunt and Margaret Jacob discuss a connection between experimental drug use and ardent support for the French Revolution. 52. Simon Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 136. 53. Federal Intelligencer and Baltimore Daily Gazette, 18 February 1795. 54. For “accelerated time” and Americans’ restless anticipation of French Revolutionary news, see Hale, “On Their Tiptoes.” 55. New-Hampshire Gazette, 4 November 1794. 56. George Thatcher to George Peirson, 8 May 1794, Thatcher Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society. 57. New-Hampshire Gazette, 4 November 1794.

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Militant Sovereignty and Violence 58. My thanks to Peter Messer for suggesting this idea to me. 59. McConville, King’s Three Faces, 105–41, 192–219; Jean-Paul Bertaud, The Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen-Soldiers to Instrument of Power, trans. R. R. Palmer (Prince­ ton: Princeton University Press, 1988 [orig. 1979]), 111–242, 260–61, 313–16; Alan Forrest, Soldiers of the French Revolution (Durham: Duke University Press, 1990), 166–79 and 185– 86; Richard Cobb, The People’s Armies, trans. Marianne Elliott (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987 [orig. 1961, 1963]), 480–506. 60. John Randolph to St. George Tucker, 25 May 1793, cited in Henry May, The Enlightenment in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), 246. 61. Bell, The First Total War. 62. Melvin Jackson, “The Consular Privateers; an account of French Privateering in American waters, April to August, 1793,” American Neptune 22 (1962): 81–98; Melvin Jackson, Privateers in Charleston, 1793–1796: An Account of a French Palatinate in South Carolina (Washington: Smithsonian, 1969); Harry Ammon, The Genet Mission (New York: Norton, 1973); Alderson, This Bright Era; R. R. Palmer, “A Revolutionary Republican: M.A.B. Mangourit,” William and Mary Quarterly 9 (1952): 483–96; Richard Murdoch, “Citizen Mangourit and the Projected Attack on East Florida in 1794,” Journal of Southern History 14 (1948): 522–40; Charles Bennett, Florida’s “French” Revolution, 1793–1795 (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1981); John Ahlstrom, “Captain and Chef de Brigade William Tate: South Carolina Adventurer,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 88 (1987): 183–91; Louis Arthur Norton, Joshua Barney: Hero of the Revolution and 1812 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000), 127–49; Lee Kennett, “Joshua Barney and the French Revolution,” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 44 (1973): 9–25; Lee Kennett, “John Skey Eustace and the French Revolution,” American Society Legion of Honor Magazine 45 (1974): 29–43; J. J. St. Mark, “The Oswald Mission to Ireland from America: 20 February to 8 June 1793,” EireIreland 23 (1988): 25–38; Aurora. General Advertiser, 15 October 1795; Columbian Mirror and Alexandria Gazette, 22 October 1795; Diary, 7 September 1793; Federal Intelligencer and Baltimore Daily Gazette, 13 June 1795; Connecticut Journal, 25 September 1793; Providence Gazette, 30 May 1795; Independent Chronicle and Universal Advertiser, 25 May 1795, cited at http://boards.ancestry.com/surnames.cusack/101/mb.ashx?pnt=1 (consulted on 29 May 2010); J. Thomas Scharf, The Chronicles of Baltimore; Being a Complete History of “Baltimore Town” and Baltimore City from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (Baltimore: Turnbull, 1874), 277 and 393. 63. Robert Johannsen, To the Halls of the Montezumas: The Mexican War in the American Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Royster, Destructive War; Rachel Hope Cleves, Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); John Morgan Dederer, “The Origins of Robert E. Lee’s Bold Generalship: A Reinterpretation,” Military Affairs 49 (1985): 118–19; Michael Bonura, Under the Shadow of Napoleon: French Influence on the American Way of Warfare from the War of 1812 to the Outbreak of WWII (New York: New York University Press, 2012). 64. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press: 1997), 157–66; Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 90–183; Richard Jensen, “Armies, Admen, and Crusaders: Types of Presidential Campaigns,”

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Matthew Rainbow Hale History Teacher 2 (1969): 33–50; John and Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, “Commissions and Canvasses: The Militia and Politics in Western New York, 1800–1845,” New York History 63 (1982): 4–38; Jean Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998 [orig. 1983), 287–316; Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 535; Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979), 53; Marc Kruman, “The Second American Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 523–25; Cedric de Leon, “Vicarious Revolutionaries: Martial Discourse and the Origins of Mass Party Competition in the United States, 1789–1848,” Studies in American Political Development 24 (2010): 121–41. 65. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy; Robert E. Shalhope, The Baltimore Bank Riot: Political Upheaval in Antebellum Maryland (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009); Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828–1861: Toward Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Daniel Walker Howe, What God Hath Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 430–39. 66. Jeremy Bailey, Thomas Jefferson and Executive Power (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 274, and passim. See also Peter Onuf, The Mind of Thomas Jefferson (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007), 65–80, 99–136. 67. Howe, What God Hath Wrought, 328–445. 68. United States Telegraph, 17 January 1828, cited in Fletcher Green, “Duff Green, Militant Journalist of the Old School,” American Historical Review 52 (1947): 248. Cleaning out the stables of King Augeas was the fifth labor Hercules performed for King Eurystheus. It was accomplished by channeling two rivers into the stables. 69. See, for example, Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990). 70. The connection between monarchy and democracy is an underexplored theme, but see McConville, King’s Three Faces, 314–16; Paul Downes, Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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• The Battle of Fallen Timbers

An Assertion of U.S. Sovereignty in the Atlantic World along the Banks of the Maumee River John C. Kotruch

On 20 August 1794, Major General Anthony Wayne and the Legion of the United States decisively crushed the British-sponsored Indian Confederacy of the Old Northwest at the Battle of Fallen Timbers along the north bank of the Maumee River, near present day Toledo, Ohio. More than a decade after the Revolutionary War, General Wayne and the Legion pursued the defeated warriors, their Canadian militia accomplices, and their British Army advisors two miles beyond the battlefield. They lay siege to the British garrisoned at Fort Miamis, well within United States territory. The Legion withdrew after a tense three-day stalemate that brought Great Britain and the United States to the very precipice of war and heralded a definitive shift in the balance of power in North America and the Atlantic world.1 The early republic emerged from the revolution as thirteen “free, independent and sovereign states,” committed by ideology to sustain a democratic republic and by necessity to maintain a viable government. Independence severed colonial ties to the former metropole but simultaneously removed the protection of the British Empire, instantly casting the infant republic onto the world stage, forced to compete for its very existence with former enemies and allies alike. The nascent nation quickly discovered that achieving its separate and equal station among the powers of the earth was no entitlement. It was a hard-earned position, achieved and maintained through diplomacy, and supported by commercial and military strength. The initial character of the postrevolutionary confederation of states was unclear to both the founding generation and outside observers. During the Revolution the colonies had evolved into independent political entities, yet the complex relationship of the newly independent and sovereign states to one another obscured the locus of power and the authority of government.2 The Arti263

John C. Kotruch cles of Confederation deepened the enigma by acknowledging the sovereignty of each of the thirteen new states, yet reserving certain “powers, jurisdictions and rights . . . ​to the United States, in Congress assembled.”3 Where then was the locus of power or authority? With the individual states or with the collective? Who would enforce the Treaty of Peace of 1783? With whom would new treaties be made? The ambiguous nature and location of the “ultimate power of the state” initially resulted in a shortfall of sovereignty for both the individual states and the confederation.4 The Articles of Confederation claimed the federated powers to levy war, conclude peace, enter treaties, and contract alliances for the collective, but did not grant the legislative authority for enforcement, thus denying the confederation the “unlimited legal competence” of a sovereign state.5 The confederacy was also denied the “sovereign ability to compel obedience through the threat of force or the use of arms,” either internally or externally, because the founding generation abhorred the concept of standing armies as the tools of tyranny and disbanded the Continental Army immediately after the 1783 Treaty of Peace.6 Great Britain and Spain physically surrounded the United States with their territories in Canada, Spanish Florida, and Louisiana. Without a standing army to “exercise a legitimate means of physical coercion within its given territory,” the confederation of United States was unable to repel encroachments.7 This allowed the Spanish and British empires to operate with impunity during the 1780s and well into the Federalist Era as each maintained and continued to construct military posts further into U.S. territory, aided by their Native American allies and military surrogates. Westward settlement by U.S. citizens was impeded long after the Revolutionary War by the deadly harassment of Native Americans armed, supplied, and encouraged by European antagonists, each pursuing an agenda aimed at hegemony in North America that would have confined the Unites States to the Atlantic seaboard east of the Appalachians, or simply dismantled the fragile Union.8 Ideological commitment to a democratic republic inspired the founders to transform their government into a more perfect Union. The federal Constitution distributed the sovereign powers to levy war, conclude peace, and contract alliances between Congress and the president and enumerated limited legislative authority over the Union. Although the founding generation continued to fear standing armies, the Constitution provided a compromise that allowed Congress to establish and fund a federal army, but limited its duration. These fundamental adjustments to the founding principles enabled George Washington and his cabinet to begin the process of establishing the United States’ sovereignty and legitimacy as an equal state. 264

The Battle of Fallen Timbers The Legion of the United States’ campaign in the Ohio Valley was an early expression of U.S. sovereignty. The federal government had determined to establish order within its territorial boundaries and for the first time since the Revolutionary War was capable of enforcing its will through the power of coercion and the force of arms. The federation acted in unison to establish the first federal army of the United States, to fund a lengthy campaign, to diplomatically pressure its antagonists, and to legislate economic sanctions to punish its enemies. A unified, discernible central government that successfully exercised sovereign powers was emerging in a manner that the European Atlantic world understood. The violent, intensely personal, hand-to-hand, bayonet, hatchet, and scalping-knife warfare of Mad Anthony Wayne and the Legion of the United States at the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the siege of the British Army at Fort Miamis asserted the sovereignty of the United States within its borders and to the Atlantic world from the banks of the Maumee River. The significance of the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the campaign of the Legion to the national sovereignty of the United States have been neglected in the historiography of the early republic because they have been associated almost exclusively with the Indian Wars of the Old Northwest. Anthony Wayne and his campaign have a historiography of their own, and the Native American struggle with European conflicts has a historiography that locates Fallen Timbers as just one of many tragic defeats in the invasion of their lands. These approaches obscure the place of Fallen Timbers in a larger geopolitical context. The Battle of Fallen Timbers also features on the periphery of the historiography of the early republic. Histories of Jay’s Treaty include Fallen Timbers because of its timing during Jay’s negotiations or the proximity of the battle to the British Fort at Detroit. Yet these histories fail to recognize the siege of Fort Miamis as a British military defeat on U.S. soil more than a decade after the revolution. Histories of the Whiskey Rebellion include the Battle of Fallen Timbers due to their concurrent timing during the summer of 1794 and their close geographic proximity, but without acknowledging the significance of the campaign to bring peace to the Old Northwest. Interestingly, the Battle of Fallen Timbers and Wayne’s campaign do not feature at all in the historiography of the Spanish occupation of southwestern United States territory, even though the Legion strategically threatened their equally contentious positions. A synthesis of the various historiographies of the early republic, in which the Battle of Fallen Timbers is an understated nexus, reveals the vital role the Legion of the United States played in preserving the republic by asserting the will of the federal government to both Native Americans and the Atlantic world. Acknowledging the emergence of U.S. national sovereignty with respect to making war to preserve peace and secure its own borders through the ap265

John C. Kotruch plication of a credible military force relocates the United States as a new state determining its own destiny during the Federalist Era, rather than a mere bene­ ficiary of fortuitous changes in European politics. After the peace of 1783, Great Britain and Spain each resumed their prewar agendas aimed at establishing dominance in North America with little regard to the treaty boundaries created in Paris or Versailles, and with no respect for the confederation of states. At the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, Spain’s peace was made separately with Great Britain without diplomatically recognizing the United States. Britain also ceded their colonies of East and West Florida to Spain. Spain therefore continued to occupy Fort Natchez, which it had captured from the British in 1779, a position well north of the 31°N line specified by the separate Anglo-American treaty.9 Spain freely operated in its “Natchez District” and claimed all territory west of the Appalachians from the Gulf of Mexico to the Tennessee River and thence northwestward to the Ohio and the Mississippi Rivers, aware but unconcerned that the same territory had been ceded to the United States by the Anglo-American Treaty of Peace.10 Spain also invoked a European convention of international law to claim the exclusive right to navigate the Mississippi or any other waterway on which “Spain controlled both banks.”11 Control of Louisiana and West Florida as far north as Fort Natchez therefore denied Americans commercial access to the Mississippi River and the use of the Port of New Orleans, the terminus of America’s extensive inland waterway system. Spanish East and West Florida further occluded the United States’ access to commercial shipping in the Gulf of Mexico anywhere along the southern border of the United States. The U.S. confederation attempted to resolve the Mississippi question and the disputed southwest territory with a nation with which they had no existing treaty and no diplomatic relationship, for Spain refused to formally exchange diplomats throughout the confederation period.12 John Jay met from 1785 to 1787 with Diego de Gardoqui, who represented Spain as encargado de negocios (a negotiator rather than an ambassador), but the lengthy negotiations ended without results.13 Although Gardoqui’s mission to negotiate with the confederation implied recognition of the United States as a political entity, the absence of a diplomatic exchange fostered an asymmetric relationship that diminished the United States’ credibility as a sovereign government or as an equal state. The separate 1783 Anglo-American Treaty of Peace, generously negotiated under Lord Shelburne’s government by Richard Oswald, granted the U.S. a northern boundary along the St. Lawrence and through the Great Lakes as far west as the Mississippi River and thence south to Spanish Florida; but harsh criticism of the treaty triggered a rapid sea change in the government of Great 266

The Battle of Fallen Timbers Britain. By 1784 William Pitt’s government acknowledged that, from the British perspective, the border was seriously flawed. The fertile lands between the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers were entirely within U.S. territory, as were most of the lucrative fur trading routes to Montreal.14 Critically, seven of the eight frontier posts of the British Empire were left on the American side of the border. Two forts on Lake Champlain, Dutchman’s Point and Point-au-Fer, controlled trade in the Hudson Valley to the St. Lawrence. Fort Oswegatchie (Ogdensburg, New York) overlooked the St. Lawrence along the short stretch where the United States had access to that river. Fort Ontario (Oswego, New York), on the south shore of Lake Ontario, guarded inland access to the lake. Fort Niagara, New York, located at the northeast entrance to the Niagara River, regulated the northern choke point between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, while Fort Erie at the southwestern entrance to the Niagara River on the north shore of Lake Erie, and therefore actually on the British side of the border, guarded southern access to the Niagara River. Fort Detroit, on the west bank of the Detroit River, commanded the choke point between Lake Erie and Lake Huron, while Fort Michilimacinac controlled the entrances to both Lake Superior and Lake Michigan from Lake Huron.15 The frontier posts, ceded to the British Empire by France at the end of the French and Indian War in 1763, were manned by the British Army and used by the British Indian Department in North America, under the supervision of the British Board of Trade, to control the fur trade and to maintain the tenuous relationship between European empire and Native Americans, just as the French had done before them. During the Revolutionary War the frontier posts had been instrumental to launching British-Indian offensives against the northwestern frontier as “His Majesty’s Indian Allies” fought alongside Canadian militia and the British Army much as they had previously fought alongside the French, inflicting horrific violence upon western settlers. Their strategic locations made the posts invaluable to controlling navigation between the Atlantic Ocean and the interior of North America. With forts on both banks of the St. Lawrence, Niagara, and Detroit Rivers, and on each shore of the Great Lakes, international law assured Great Britain absolute control of navigation on the inland waterways, similar to Spain’s claim on the Mississippi.16 Samuel Flagg Bemis revealed a British plan for North America to permanently retain the barrier posts and eventually create an “Indian Country,” or an “Indian barrier-state.” To this end, the British would mediate a separate peace between their Native American allies and the United States that would establish a new U.S. boundary along the Appalachians or the Ohio River in order to contain the rapidly expanding United States and ensure British control of the interior of the continent.17 As early as 1784, Lord Sydney, the British Secretary 267

John C. Kotruch for Home Affairs, formally established Great Britain’s policy for continued occupation when he informed the governor general of Canada that “there was no need to evacuate the posts,” citing U.S. noncompliance with the Anglo-­ American treaty of 1783, specifically unsettled American prewar debts and the poor treatment of loyalists.18 On these grounds, only the British forces at New York City and Charleston were evacuated at the conclusion of the Revolutionary War, while the British Army continued to garrison the frontier posts, and the British-Indian Department continued its Indian Affairs within U.S. territory well into the 1790s.19 John Adams was received by the British government as a minister plenipotentiary in 1785, although Great Britain did not reciprocate with an exchange of diplomats during the period of confederation, creating another asymmetric diplomatic relationship. Adams strenuously argued for the removal of British troops from U.S. territory in accordance with the Anglo-American Treaty, but William Pitt’s government capitalized upon the weakness of the confederation to forestall evacuation of the critical posts. Lacking legislative authority over the independent states, the confederation was unable to compel them to comply with the terms of the Treaty of 1783 by prohibiting individual state laws that protected debtors and confiscated Loyalist property.20 Without the sovereign means to enforce the terms of the treaty within its own confederation, the United States was diplomatically powerless to demand British compliance with Article VII, to “withdraw all armies, garrisons and fleets from the United States.”21 When George Washington was inaugurated in April 1789, he became the president of an occupied country, as there were both British and Spanish garrisons on U.S. territory. The United States did not have formal diplomatic relations with either of these occupying countries, whose competing agendas involved denying American expansion west of the Appalachians (the Spanish Natchez District) or northwest of the Ohio River (the British Indian barrierstate). As Washington’s administration took office, Spain further fortified the Natchez District in disputed southwestern U.S. territory with the construction of Fort Stephens (St. Stephens, Alabama), ninety miles north of Spanish Mobile along the Tombigbee River, one hundred and fifty miles east of the Mississippi.22 The federal Constitution significantly changed the character of the Union by clarifying the locus of power over the collective, enabling the United States to behave as a single sovereign state. A pivotal departure from the Articles of Confederation was the limited legislative authority over the independent states given to the central government, for this provided the republic with the “legal competency” required to compel obedience to collective policy.23 The Union 268

The Battle of Fallen Timbers would no longer be an association of independent bodies politic in a consensual league of friendship; it would become a compulsory federation of states forming a single body. A more functional central government promised more capable enforcement of existing treaties, such as the Anglo-American Treaty of 1783, with its unresolved debt and Loyalist issues, and more credibility as a single source of negotiation for future international treaties.24 The new federal government was immediately confronted with an international crisis in diplomacy as Great Britain and Spain continued to compete for the remainder of the North American continent. The “Nootka Sound controversy” began just months after Washington’s inauguration, when Spain seized three English ships exploring Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in July 1789.25 Spain appealed for support to France, its traditional ally and the only Atlantic nation with both a diplomatic relationship and a treaty of alliance with the United States.26 Fearing a Franco-Iberian alliance in which France might invoke the defensive clause of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance to solicit United States’ support in the event of conflict, Great Britain considered appeasing the United States by voluntarily surrendering the contentious perimeter posts to secure U.S. neutrality.27 Spain was forced to back away from its claim over Nootka Sound in July 1790, removing the threat of war, but the diplomatic crisis motivated Great Britain to exchange ministers with the United States the following year.28 Although each imperial power feared the United States would form an alliance with its enemies, none yet feared or respected the United States itself. An early priority of Washington’s administration was to gain control over United States territory and define its borders with both Native Americans and European interlopers. Postrevolutionary violence between white settlers and Native Americans armed, supplied, and encouraged by the British-Indian Department south of the Great Lakes continued at an alarming pace along the northwestern frontier and threatened to halt western expansion of the United States at the Ohio River. The economic bounty of the Northwest Ordinance would never be realized if the new government could not guarantee the safety of settlers or their property. The government’s inability to provide access to the Mississippi River frustrated all settlers west of the Appalachians and threatened to either break the western territories away from the Union completely or fragment it into smaller confederations, as noted by David Hendrickson. Great Britain and Spain therefore both renewed their efforts to organize and supply their Native American surrogates along the frontier of the United States so as to achieve their stated goal of separating “the frontiersmen west of the Appalachians from the eastern government of the United States.”29 Yet President Washington and Secretary of War Henry Knox’s first efforts 269

John C. Kotruch in the Old Northwest were failures. Although the new federal constitution empowered Congress to establish an army, Brigadier General Josiah Harmar’s campaign of 1790 was mainly composed of militia augmented by untrained federal troops. The first federal campaign ended after only one engagement, with the whole of Harmar’s small, undisciplined force scattered and disbanded. The following campaign season Major General Arthur St. Clair led an expedition force that was just as hastily assembled and poorly trained as Harmar’s. On 4 November 1791, St. Clair’s composite force, consisting of 1,400 militia and federal troops, was attacked along the banks of the Wabash River less than one hundred miles north of the Ohio River and completely routed with a loss of over nine hundred combatants and an additional two hundred women and children, this in a single engagement.30 Each successive defeat of U.S. arms further strengthened the British-Indian alliance and emboldened Native-American resolve in the Old Northwest, placing western settlers in increasing danger while increasing the pressure on the eastern government to protect its citizens.31 As General St. Clair’s expedition marched to its doom in 1791, the Spanish governor of West Florida continued his fortification of the Southwest with the construction of Fort Nogales along the Mississippi River (Vicksburg, Mississippi).32 George Washington eventually called upon Major General Anthony Wayne in early 1792, “to quell the Indians of the Old Northwest and bring them to peace.”33 Unlike previous expedition leaders, General Wayne spent nearly a year assembling men and supplies while vigorously training in Indian tactics and guerilla warfare on the Ohio River just south of Pittsburgh. Wayne drilled his troops in hand-to-hand combat, insisting that the only reason a soldier had a rifle was to have a place to fix his bayonet. In December the United States Congress established the Legion of the United States, the first standing army of the early republic, and set in motion a deliberate three-year campaign into the Ohio Valley.34 Wayne’s well-prepared Legion began their journey down the Ohio River with a force of over two thousand federal troops in the spring of 1793.35 Throughout the year, as the Legion methodically advanced into the Indian territory of the Northwest, George Washington and Henry Knox strenuously attempted to achieve a peaceful settlement with the Native Americans to avoid another Indian War. The campaign was, however, continually hampered by the unwelcomed interference of the British-Indian Department and the governors of Upper and Lower Canada. These agents of the king in North America continually strove to put in place the Indian barrier-state by ensuring through British mediation that the Native Americans establish a treaty line with the United States based upon the 1763 Proclamation Line along the Appalachians, 270

The Battle of Fallen Timbers the 1768 Treaty of Fort Stanwix along the Ohio River, or the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar with the six nations of Iroquois, potentially pinning the United States permanently southeast of the Ohio River.36 Secretary of War Henry Knox steadfastly insisted upon exercising the United States’ sovereign right to negotiate directly with all peoples within its perceived boundaries and flatly refused British mediation, but the various Indian Confederations continued to press for the boundaries suggested by their British sponsors. When the negotiations finally failed in the autumn of 1793, General Wayne’s Legion left the banks of the Ohio at Fort Washington (Cincinnati, Ohio) and pressed northward into the disputed territory. By December Wayne had erected Fort Recovery (Ft. Recovery, Ohio) on the battleground of General St. Clair’s defeat, “as a perpetual challenge to the Indian warriors and the British outposts.”37 At this pivotal moment in a mounting frontier crisis, the British Navy began enforcing, without warning, an order in council of 6 November 1793 for the seizure of all shipping and provisions bound for France. They captured as many as two hundred and fifty U.S. ships in the Caribbean.38 The British governor general of Canada began 1794 with an ominous speech to the Indians of the Old Northwest that was meant to reassure the tribes of Great Britain’s continuing support after the failed peace negotiations of the previous year and to assuage their fears of Wayne’s formidable approach. Lord Dorchester’s infamous words to the chiefs on 10 February 1794 predicted that “from the manner in which the people of the United States push on, and act, and talk . . . ​I shall not be surprised if we are at war with them within the present year.” Lord Dorchester’s speech also appeared to abrogate the AngloAmerican treaty of 1783, as he implied that there was no defined border for the Americans north of the Ohio River and refused to acknowledge “any land claimed by the U.S. since the year 1783.” One week later Lord Dorchester authorized the manning of Fort Miamis along the Maumee River (Maumee, Ohio), fifty miles south of the British Garrison at Fort Detroit, as a defensive screen against the advance of General Wayne’s Legion and as a gesture of support to the hostile Indian Confederacy of the Old Northwest.39 The British governor general’s ominous words soon reached Philadelphia, followed by intelligence of British seizures of U.S. shipping in the Caribbean the previous December; war with Great Britain loomed closer. As the nation approached a war footing, the U.S. Congress issued a thirty-day embargo of all British goods on 25 March 1794. While Congress contemplated more permanent economic retaliation during April, George Washington nominated John Jay as “special envoy to the court of St. James,” in hopes of negotiating a peaceful settlement to growing Anglo-American tension.40 The spirit of Jay’s mission temporarily quelled the tide of anti-British eco271

John C. Kotruch nomic legislation pending in Congress, but news of the fortification of Fort Miamis reached Philadelphia shortly after his departure and rekindled the threat of war.41 On 20 May 1794, Secretary of State Edmund Randolph presented the British minister to the United States, George Hammond, with a scathing diplomatic ultimatum. Randolph cited Lord Dorchester’s incendiary remarks of 10 February and concluded that the absence of an official retraction by the British government implied that Lord Dorchester was acting with at least the tacit approval of Great Britain. With regard to Fort Miamis, Randolph summarized the decade of negotiations over the existing forts “which were confessedly within the limits of the United States,” but noted that “the present aggression” could not be placed in the same category because Fort Miamis was a new fortification within U.S. territory not manned at the end of the Revolutionary War, and therefore not covered under the status quo. Randolph called it “an act . . . ​ calculated to support an enemy whom we are seeking to bring to peace.”42 The secretary of state offered the recent mission of special envoy John Jay to London as an “unequivocal proof . . . ​of the sincere wish of our government to preserve peace,” but sternly warned that “our honor and safety require that an invasion shall be repelled.” Randolph issued the president’s demand that the British government “take immediate and effectual measures . . . ​to suppress these hostile movements.” The rebuke ended with a dark caution that warned the British government not to interfere with the Legion’s campaign, as “the army of the United States, in their march against the enemy, will not be able to distinguish between them, and any other people, associated with the war.”43 George Washington submitted Randolph’s correspondence to Congress the following day, with a covering letter stating that he objected to the “encroachment made upon our territory, by an officer and party of British troops,” and fully endorsed every word of Randolph’s enclosed letter to the British minister. The president concluded that the serious nature of the armed incursion dictated preparation for war with Great Britain if John Jay’s negotiations failed.44 George Hammond’s response to Randolph’s lecture protested “the style and manner” in which Randolph had addressed him, implying that he was an equal to Randolph rather than a foreign ambassador addressing the secretary of state of a sovereign government, and reinforcing the perception that Great Britain did not recognize the U.S. as an equal state. Hammond went on to claim that he could not acknowledge the right of the United States to demand an explanation from him for the activities of the governors of Canada.45 The hubris of Hammond’s statement exemplified the issue: what other channel was there if the secretary of state of the United States could not ask the king’s representative what the British government’s intentions were along the U.S. border and within U.S. territory? For the first time since independence, the United States 272

The Battle of Fallen Timbers government addressed the British state as an equal, through firm diplomacy backed by legislative economic sanctions and a credible military in the field. By mid-1794 “the American cauldron was boiling.” Alexander Hamilton’s increased efforts to collect taxes from the western counties of Pennsylvania were being met by mob violence, which led British officials in North America to conclude that the United States was about to crumble due to the increasing differences between the western counties and the eastern government.46 Lieutenant Governor Simcoe informed the British Home Secretary that “a successful war waged from Canada would soon separate Kentucky and the other ‘colonies’ of the United States west of the Alleghenies,” while Spain pushed further into U.S. territory with its construction of Fort Confederacion, along the Tombigbee River (Epes, Alabama), nearly two hundred miles east of the Mississippi River.47 The pressure mounted in late June when General Wayne’s Legion successfully repelled a full-scale attack of Fort Recovery by the main body of the Indian Confederacy, augmented by Canadian militia in Native American dress and supervised by military officers of the British-Indian Department.48 While George Washington’s cabinet debated the use of force to quell the rising Whiskey Rebellion, and John Jay negotiated in London for a peaceful settlement to severely strained Anglo-American relations, Anthony Wayne established and fortified Fort Defiance in an area known as the Grand Glaize (Defiance, Ohio), along the Maumee River just fifty miles southwest of the British at Fort Miamis, and, for good measure, ordered all bayonet sheaths destroyed. There would be no need to cover the long knives of the Legion as they prepared for mortal combat.49 On 20 August 1794, Major General Anthony Wayne and the Legion of the United States advanced upon the Indian Confederacy concealed in a defensive position just two miles in advance of Fort Miamis. The area, a forest that had been devastated by tornadoes several years earlier, was a labyrinth of twisted trees, roots, and thick underbrush impassable to cavalry or massed troops in formation. Wayne’s well-trained and disciplined Legion moved slowly along the Maumee, methodically driving the Indians from the protection of the “fallen timbers” by means of skilled hand-to-hand combat and the well-practiced use of the bayonet, hatchet, and scalping knife. The survivors of Wayne’s deliberate attack retreated, heading for the protection of the British at Fort Miamis with the Legion in pursuit.50 Secretary of State Randolph’s forceful diplomacy and the British-Indian alliance collided decisively at the gates of Fort Miamis. As the remnants of the Indian Confederacy literally ran for their lives to what they thought was safety at the British fort of their professed allies, Edmund Randolph’s strong words of May that had sternly warned the British government of the consequences of its actions compelled the commandant of Fort Miamis to close the gates and 273

John C. Kotruch refuse aid to the fleeing warriors. If the British army had openly supported the fleeing Indian Confederacy within sight of the advancing Legion, it would have confirmed Randolph’s accusations and justified an armed response on the contentious British outpost. Randolph’s warning that the advancing army would not be able to distinguish British from Indian combatants proved so accurate that the gates of Fort Miamis were closed to all, including fleeing British regulars of the British-Indian Department and the Canadian militia that had been fighting alongside the confederacy.51 The commandant of Fort Miamis, Major Campbell of the Welsh 24th Regiment of Foot, also had a more immediate, tactical concern as Wayne’s legion surrounded Fort Miamis and trapped the occupants in a siege. Major Campbell’s cadre of two hundred British infantrymen, augmented by sixty Canadian Rangers, was no match for General Wayne’s battle-proven army of well over two thousand troops, cavalry, and artillery.52 General Wayne had been specifically authorized by President Washington to attack the British at Forts Miamis and Detroit “if he deemed it necessary,” and had been supplied with copies of Secretary of State Randolph’s earlier rebuke of British policy in North America.53 Major Campbell’s detachment had been dispatched from its headquarters at Fort Detroit on the orders of Lieutenant Governor Simcoe, following Lord Dorchester’s controversial remarks to the Indian Confederacy, and was reenforced after the Anglo-American diplomatic volley of May.54 Both Wayne and Major Campbell were well aware of the diplomatic tension between the United States and Great Britain, and both commanders in the field would have known the consequences of armed conflict at this critical moment. Wayne did not assault the British garrison because he did not need to do so in order to accomplish his mission of bringing the Native Americans to peace. Instead, Wayne razed the area within approximately eight miles of the fort by burning all of the fields, Indian villages, and garrison buildings not within the walls of the fort, including the homes and stores of the resident British-Indian Department officers. The besieged British Army was powerless to stop them. Wayne further taunted the British commander by marching his Legion “within arm’s reach” around the perimeter of the fort while Major Campbell trained his loaded and primed guns upon them, creating a potential Lexington and Concord moment. If a gunshot had rung out, there would have been no knowing who fired first, but the destruction of the British fort would have been certain, as well as war between the United States and Great Britain, just as Lord Dorchester had foretold and President Washington had warned. After three days of scorched earth destruction Wayne’s Legion withdrew, leaving the humiliated British commandant of Fort Miamis alone in a sea of ash.55 General Wayne had emasculated British arms on U.S. soil and decisively asserted the 274

The Battle of Fallen Timbers United States’ sovereign right to defend its territory through the force of arms. The Battle of Fallen Timbers was much more than an Indian War. The Indian Confederacy was cruelly betrayed by the British. Years of promises, material support, and inflammatory rhetoric had culminated in a cold refusal of aid at their moment of desperate need. The Indian Confederacy might have been able to recover from a single, though significant, defeat; but, “the conduct of the British Fort dispirited the Confederates much more than the issue of the battle.” Although the chiefs considered the defeat “a misfortune that might be repaired with glory,—another time,” the perfidy of the British Army during the battle was an injury that they did not know how to remedy.56 The British-Indian alliance in North America was therefore dissolved from that moment, dooming British plans for the interior of North America, the inland waterways, and an Indian barrier-state. Within eighteen months of the Battle of Fallen Timbers, the United States concluded three critical treaties that provided for an end to British and Spanish occupation of U.S. territory, established peace with the Native Americans along the western frontier, and granted Americans commercial access to the inland waterways and the Gulf of Mexico. Histories of the early republic tend to isolate these treaties, but when considered collectively, Jay’s Treaty, the Treaty of Greenville, and the Treaty of San Lorenzo may be seen as closely interrelated, driven by emerging U.S. sovereignty and the military campaign of the Legion of the United States. Jay’s Treaty with Great Britain was hotly debated during its ratification, yet despite its perceived shortcomings it provided for the surrender of the British posts in U.S. territory by June 1796 and established a commission to arbitrate the contentious prewar debts, resolving two competing complaints over noncompliance with the Anglo-American Treaty of 1783.57 The news of Fallen Timbers and the siege of Fort Miamis reached London in mid-October 1794, and by the end of the month John Jay reported for the first time that Lord Grenville had agreed to include the evacuation of the barrier posts in the terms of the pending treaty. The conspicuous timing might suggest that Lord Grenville acquiesced to the surrender of the forts based upon the dreadful news from the frontier, but the news from Lieutenant Governor Simcoe was neither particularly dire, nor accurate. At the time of Simcoe’s dispatch from Niagara, just a week after the battle, he could not yet have known just how complete the loss of the Indian Alliance was to the British government, and his generous portrayal of the siege of Fort Miamis as a triumph of British fortitude that had “obliged Mr. Wayne to retreat” after being berated by the stern language of Major Campbell, did not signal a significant change of affairs in North America.58 275

John C. Kotruch Historians have suggested that Lord Grenville may have intended throughout the negotiations to appease the Americans by surrendering the perimeter forts and simply moving them across the lakes and rivers to the British side of the border (which they eventually did in several cases).59 John Jay, however, had not perceived such an inclination in Grenville when he reported early in the negotiations that that “the posts would not be surrendered,” while Lord Grenville’s brother, among others, strenuously argued for the retention of the posts during Jay’s negotiations.60 Surrendering the forts on the U.S. side of the major inland waterways was not merely a matter of geography; moving the forts implied relinquishing control of both banks of the waterways and the end of the British monopoly of inland navigation crucial to its plans for the continent. The actions of the British government following Jay’s negotiations indicate that the Indian barrier state project had not yet been abandoned and that Great Britain actually planned to retain the barrier posts even after signing Jay’s Treaty. The British cabinet met on 18 November 1794. The next day Lord Grenville signed Jay’s Treaty.61 The Duke of Portland and Lord Grenville each immediately issued nearly identical instructions to Lieutenant Governor Simcoe and George Hammond, respectively. Both ministers hinted that there were points of Jay’s Treaty that were “not yet settled,” and which could “delay the final execution of the Treaty” in a similar manner to the nonexecution of the Treaty of 1783, perpetuating the British policy of noncompliance.62 Portland, the Home Secretary, instructed Simcoe to increase aid to the Indians “for the preservation of their friendship,” and reminded Simcoe that British mediation of the peace in the Northwest “would materially enlarge and improve the Advantages proposed to all parties,” alluding to the British Indian barrier state with its potentially more restrictive U.S. boundary with the Native Americans along the Ohio River. Simcoe was then ordered to work closely with Hammond and Lord Dorchester to expeditiously accomplish that goal and was provided with a copy of Lord Grenville’s instructions to Hammond.63 The foreign secretary’s instructions to George Hammond on 20 November 1794 accompanied a copy of Jay’s Treaty, as well as the Duke of Portland’s instructions for Simcoe. Grenville echoed Portland’s emphasis on the need for a British-mediated peace in the Northwest and empowered Hammond to act as the king’s mediator, but placed a crucial time constraint on Hammond that revealed the British cabinet’s plan. Grenville informed Hammond that it was vital “that this matter [the boundary] be adjusted . . . ​before the evacuation of the Posts takes place.”64 The timing was critical. If a more favorable B ­ ritish-​ m ­ ediated boundary between the Native Americans and the United States could be established that excluded the barrier posts from U.S. territory “before the date set for evacuation in Jay’s Treaty,” the posts would no longer be subject 276

The Battle of Fallen Timbers to Jay’s Treaty or the Anglo-American Treaty of 1783, allowing Great Britain to retain their forts and control of the inland waterways, as planned. With Jay’s Treaty already signed, the new boundary had to be established before June 1796. The British cabinet had no way of knowing either the extent to which the balance of power had actually shifted in North America as a result of Wayne’s campaign or that their plan to negotiate a new boundary line via their Native American surrogates was doomed before it reached America in May of 1795.65 The Treaty of Greenville was the desired long-term objective of General Wayne’s campaign to bring the Indians of the Northwest to peace. Despite attempts by the British agents in North America to intervene, the tribes sued for peace directly to Wayne and by February 1795, all of the hostile nations agreed to meet with Wayne at Fort Greenville in mid-June. Over the vain protestations of a British-Indian Department that was powerless to halt the exodus of their former allies, the warring nations met at Greenville, where Wayne fulfilled his three-year mission on 3 August 1795.66 The Treaty of Greenville was dictated by Wayne from a position of strength as a conquering general and the sovereign instrument of physical coercion sufficient to compel obedience to the will of the federal government. It was a separate peace between the Native Americans and the United States, pledging to end hostilities in the Northwest that Great Britain had been attempting to mediate to their own advantage since the Revolutionary War. The successful application of the strength of arms had enabled the new federal government to exercise, on its own terms, its sovereign power to wage war and conclude peace with the Native Americans within its perceived borders. The defeated and dispirited Indian Confederacy was forced to accept a boundary line with the United States even more restrictive than the 1789 Treaty of Fort Harmar. The new line began further west, at present-day Cleveland, Ohio, ran just sixty miles south, then due west to Fort Recovery (the present Indiana-Ohio border) and thence southwest to the Ohio River just west of Fort Washington (Cincinnati, Ohio). The Treaty of Greenville further stipulated that all lands to the east and south of the new boundary were permanently surrendered to the United States, placing the British Forts at Niagara, Oswego, Oswegatchie, and on Lake Champlain in uncontested U.S. territory. The Confederacy also yielded to the United States all rights to land belonging to the established forts north of the new boundary line and all land within twelve square miles of them, specifically naming the British Forts at Miamis, Detroit, and Michilimacinac, as well as the new American forts at Defiance and Fort Wayne. This removed any hope that the British might hold on to these posts by the grace of their former allies and compelled the insidious British-Indian Department’s removal from U.S. territory.67 277

John C. Kotruch In the summer of 1795, in the wake of Fallen Timbers and the pending treaties between the United States and the tribes of the Northwest and Great Britain, Spain agreed to reenter negotiations to resolve the southern border and the question of U.S. navigation on the Mississippi. As Spain encroached further north into United States’ territory with the construction of Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas at Choctaw Bluffs (Memphis, Tennessee) in June 1795, Thomas Pinckney was welcomed in Madrid to negotiate a peace in the Southwest. Pinckney’s “Treaty of San Lorenzo,” 27 October 1795, was the first between the United States and Spain. The treaty firmly established the contentious northern border of the Spanish Floridas at the original Anglo-American line of 31°N east of the Mississippi, thereby eliminating the Natchez district and necessitating the evacuation of Spain’s five forts in U.S. territory. The treaty provided free American navigation on the Mississippi and access to the Port of New Orleans for the first time since independence.68 Histories of Pinckney’s Treaty have failed to appreciate the strategic implications of Fallen Timbers and Wayne’s campaign to the Spanish Southwest. Washington’s administration methodically isolated the threat on the northwestern flank of the United States, eliminating one pincer of a military bracket. With the bracket thus destroyed and the northwestern flank brought to peace through Jay’s Treaty (1794) and the Treaty of Greenville (1795), Spain had reason to fear that the Legion of the United States would be free to maneuver against the Southwest and the Iberian-Indian Alliance the following campaign season. Spain was therefore compelled by physical coercion to succumb to the will of the United States and enter meaningful negotiations.69 After the Treaty of San Lorenzo, Spain exchanged ambassadors with the United States and established formal diplomatic relations in reluctant recognition of the sovereignty and legitimacy of the United States more than a decade after independence.70 Wayne’s campaign, the Battle of Fallen Timbers, and the three treaties that followed preserved the republic and its experiment in democracy. Jay’s Treaty and the Treaty of Greenville dissolved the British-Indian alliance within U.S. territory, doomed the British Indian barrier state, and ended British-sponsored violence between Native Americans and white U.S. settlers for the remainder of the Federalist Era. The temporary militia famously called out to suppress the Whiskey Rebellion had not, in fact, provided security for white settlers west of the Appalachians. Rather, long-term security and therefore westward settlement were assured by a standing federal army in the field that facilitated Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier line of settlement” across the Ohio River and into the Northwest Territory, fulfilling the promised bounty of the Northwest Ordinance while fostering democracy. The Treaty of San Lorenzo similarly opened the Southwest, provided increased security to settlers and, criti278

The Battle of Fallen Timbers cally, opened commercial access to the Mississippi, thus removing the most common argument for secession by western territories and thereby preserving the Union. Acknowledging the emergence of U.S. national sovereignty with respect to making war to preserve peace and securing its own borders through the application of a credible military force identifies the early republic as an emerging sovereign state actively determining its own destiny during the Federalist Era and exerting itself as an equal state among the powers of the earth. The federal Constitution clarified the sovereign nature and location of the ultimate power of the state that empowered the Union to act collectively to establish the first federal army of the United States, to fund a lengthy campaign, to diplomatically pressure its antagonists, and to legislate economic sanctions to punish its enemies as a more unified, discernible central government. The violent three-year campaign of Mad Anthony Wayne and the Legion of the United States that culminated with the Battle of Fallen Timbers and the siege of the British Army at Fort Miamis literally preserved the early republic, asserting the sovereignty of the United States within its borders and to the Atlantic world from the banks of the Maumee River.

Notes 1. James Ambler Johnson, “The War Did Not End at Yorktown,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 60 (1952): 444–57; Alan Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness: Anthony Wayne’s Legion in the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), 301–27; Reginald Horsman, “The British Indian Department and the Resistance to Anthony Wayne, 1793–1795,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review 49 (1962): 269–90. 2. Gordon Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787, 2nd ed. (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 357. 3. Articles of Confederation, art. 2., Statutes at Large of the United States of America 2: 4–9. 4. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press, 1992), 198. 5. Hugh Evander Willis, “The Doctrine of Sovereignty under the United States Constitution,” The Virginia Law Review 15 (1929): 441. 6. Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 199; Robert Lansing, “Notes on Sovereignty in a State,” The American Journal of Law 1 (1907): 110. 7. Sanford Lakoff, “Between Either/Or and More or Less: Sovereignty Versus Autonomy under Federalism,” Publius 24 (1994): 67. 8. Samuel Flagg Bemis, Jay’s Treaty: A Study in Commerce and Diplomacy, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 147–82; David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 270; Samuel Flagg Bemis, Pinckney’s

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John C. Kotruch Treaty: America’s Advantage from Europe’s Distress, 1783–1800, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1960). 9. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 6–15; Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 268–70; “The Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship between His Britannic Majesty and the King of Spain,” Versailles, 3 September 1783, in A Collection of all the Treaties of Peace, Alliance, and Commerce Between Great Britain and Other Powers, 1648–1783, ed. Charles Jenkinson (London, 1785), vol. 3, 392–99; “The Definitive Treaty of Peace and Friendship Between His Britannic Majesty and the United States of America,” Paris, 3 September 1783, Stats at Large of the U.S.A. 8: 80–83. 10. Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 275–79; Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 63–90. Bemis de­­ picted several Spanish claims for territory during the 1780s. 11. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 35. 12. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 10, 35; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, http://history.state.gov/countries. 13. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 63–90. 14. “The Definitive Treaty of Peace,” Paris, 1783; Charles R. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution: British Policy Towards the United States, 1783–1795 (New York: Norton, 1969), 4–9; Jerald A. Combs, The Jay Treaty: Political Battleground of the Founding Fathers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970), 3–5. 15. Bemis, Jay’s Treaty, 3; New York State Military Museums, http://www.dmna.state.ny​ .us/forts; Michigan State Library, http://michigan.gov/hal; “The Definitive Treaty of Peace,” Paris, 1783. 16. Robert Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies (Toronto: Dundurn Press, 1992) and Patrick Griffin, American Leviathan: Empire, Nation, and Revolutionary Frontier (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007). 17. Bemis, “The Neutral Indian Barrier State Project,” in Jay’s Treaty, 147–82. 18. Lord Sydney to Governor Haldimand (Canada), London, 8 April 1784, in Combs, The Jay Treaty, 11. 19. Johnson, “The War Did Not End at Yorktown,” 447; Allen, His Majesty’s Indian Allies. 20. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 75–87. 21. “Definitive Treaty of Peace,” Paris, 1783. 22. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 311; St. Stephens Historical Commission, http://www.old​ ststephens.com/history. 23. Willis, “Doctrine of Sovereignty,” 441. 24. Lakoff, “Sovereignty Versus Autonomy,” 67. 25. Howard Evans, “The Nootka Sound Controversy in Anglo-French Diplomacy-1790,” The Journal of Modern History 46 (1974): 609–40. 26. Ibid.; “Treaty of Alliance Between the United States and His Most Christian Majesty, Paris,” 6 February 1778, Stats at Large of the U.S.A. 8: 6–11. 27. Ritcheson, Aftermath of Revolution, 99; Combs, The Jay Treaty, 91. 28. George Hammond arrived in Philadelphia as the British Minister to the United States in October 1791. 29. Thomas P. Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and David Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The

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The Battle of Fallen Timbers Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003), each discuss the many possible fragmentations of all of the states west of the Appalachians. 30. John Tebbel, The Compact History of the Indian Wars, (New York: Hawthorn Books, 1966), 78–84. 31. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 107. 32. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 178; Weber, Spanish Frontier, 284. 33. Knopf, Wayne-Knox Correspondence, 347–48. 34. Andrew Birtle, “The Origins of the Legion of the United States,” The Journal of Military History 67 (2003): 1249–61. Birtle debunked the popular misconception that the founders gave the army the title of “Legion” to mollify republican opposition to a standing army, and demonstrated that the Legion was actually a strategic reorganization as a flexible combined arms force ideally suited for frontier Indian warfare. 35. Johnson “The War Did Not End at Yorktown,” 451. 36. J.G. Simcoe to George Hammond, York, Upper Canada, 24 August 1794, in The Correspondence of John Graves Simcoe: With Allied Documents Relating to his Administration of the Government of Upper Canada, ed. E. A. Cruikshank, 5 vols. (Toronto: Toronto Historical Society, 1924), vol. 2, 40, 43 (hereafter Simcoe Papers); Tebbel, Compact History of the Indian Wars, 87, 88. 37. Johnson, “The War Did Not End at Yorktown,” 451, 452. 38. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 159. 39. Johnson, “The War Did Not End at Yorktown,” 452; Riley Sword, President Washington’s Indian War: The Struggle for the Old Northwest (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985), 261. 40. Combs, The Jay Treaty, 120–24; John Alexander Carroll and Mary Wells Ashworth, George Washington: First in Peace (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1957), 164, 166. 41. Bemis, Jay’s Treaty, 272; Combs, The Jay Treaty, 135. 42. The Secretary of State to Mr. Hammond, Philadelphia, 20 May 1794, American State Papers 1, Foreign Affairs 1: 461 (Italics added). Randolph could not have known that due to a violent winter in the North Atlantic the British government did not receive copies of Lord Dorchester’s 10 February speech until June 1794. Fort Miamis had been occupied by the British during the Revolutionary War and was well known to Washington and others, but it had been abandoned prior to the Anglo-American treaty of 1783. 43. Ibid. (italics added). 44. George Washington to the Gentlemen of the Senate and the House of Representatives, Philadelphia, 21 May 1794, American State Papers 1, Foreign Affairs 1: 461. 45. Mr. Hammond to the Secretary of State, Philadelphia, 22 May 1794, American State Papers 1, Foreign Affairs 1: 462. 46. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 167–71. 47. J. G. Simcoe to Henry Dundas, Navy Hall, 21 June 1794, in Simcoe Papers vol. 2, 280; Fort Confederacion was named for the Spanish-Indian confederation that was created at Fort Nogales in 1793 and consisted of the Chickasaws, Choctaws, Cherokees and Creeks. Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 285; National Park Service, http://www.nps.gov/history. 48. Gaff, “Battle at Fort Recovery,” in Bayonets in the Wilderness, 243–53; Wayne recognized the attack as a coup de main and reported that “three British Officers were dressed

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John C. Kotruch in scarlet,” in the rear of the action. Anthony Wayne to Henry Knox, Fort Greenville, 7 July 1794, in Richard C. Knopf, Anthony Wayne: A Name in Arms; The Wayne-Knox-PickeringMcHenry Correspondence (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1955), 347, 348; Horsman, “The British Indian Department,” 275–77. 49. Slaughter, Whiskey Rebellion, 196; Fort Defiance was established 8 August 1794. Johnson, “The War Did Not End at Yorktown,” 453; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 280. 50. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 298, 299; Thomas Boyd, Mad Anthony Wayne (New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1929), 286–92. The confederacy Wayne’s army faced at Fallen Timbers, frequently referred to as the Hostile Confederacy, was composed of at least: Wyandottes, Mingo, Delaware, Shawnee, Potawatomi, Ottowa, Chipewa, Miamis, and Mohawks. 51. The Canadian militia consisted of approximately sixty former members of the Tory Rangers, also known as Butler’s Rangers, under the command of Lt. Col. William Caldwell, who had also served in the Rangers, fighting alongside the Indians against the Americans during the Revolutionary War. The Canadians suffered at least five dead and one taken prisoner. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 319; Horsman, “The British-Indian Department,” 283. 52. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 319; Historical Records of the 24th Regiment from its Formation in 1689, ed. George Patton, Farquar Glennie, and William Penn Symons (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., 1892), 77–79. 53. Henry Knox to Anthony Wayne, Philadelphia, 7 June 1794, in Knopf, Wayne-Knox Correspondence, 337. 54. Patton, Historical Records of the 24th Regiment, 75, 76. 55. There are numerous accounts of Wayne’s actions before the fort. Sword, Washington’s Indian War, 307–11; Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 319–25, includes the barrage of correspondence between Wayne and Campbell. 56. Gaff, Bayonets in the Wilderness, 325. 57. Combs, The Jay Treaty, 151–54; “Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation Between his Britannic Majesty and the United States of America,” 13 November 1794, Stats at Large of the U.S.A. 8: 116–29. 58. J. G. Simcoe to Henry Dundas, no. 34, Navy Hall, Upper Canada, 30 August, 1794, British National Archives, WO 1/14; John Jay to Edmund Randolph, London, 29 October 1794, American State Papers 1, Foreign Affairs 1: 500. 59. Bemis, Jay’s Treaty, 318–45; Combs, The Jay Treaty, 157. 60. John Jay to George Washington, London, 23 June 1794, Simcoe Papers, vol. 2, 290; The Marquis of Buckingham to Lord Grenville, Weymouth, 6 August 1794, Historical Manuscript Commission, The Manuscripts of J. B. Fortesque Preserved at Dropmore, (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1894), vol. 2, 611, (hereafter cited as Dropmore Papers). 61. Dropmore Papers vol. 2, 611. 62. The Duke of Portland to J. G. Simcoe, Whitehall, 10 November 1794 (marked secret), Simcoe Papers, vol. 3, 174 (italics in the original). Portland reiterated this position in his letter of 19 November 1794. 63. The Duke of Portland to John Graves Simcoe, Whitehall 19 November 1794, Simcoe Papers, vol. 3, 185. 64. Lord Grenville to George Hammond, Downing Street, 20 November 1794, (no. 21), British National Archives, FO 5/5.

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The Battle of Fallen Timbers 65. J. G Simcoe to the Duke of Portland, York, Upper Canada, 20 May 1795, (no. 22) Simcoe Papers, vol. 4, 14. 66. Horsman, “The British Indian Department,” 283–88; Sword, Washington’s Indian War, 314–29; “The Treaty of Peace Between the United States of America and the Tribes of Indians called Wyandots, Delawares, Shawanoes, Ottawas, Chipewas, Putawatamies, Miamis, El-River, Weea’s, Kickapoos, Piankashaws, and Kaskaskias,” 3 August 1795, Stats at Large of the U.S.A. 7: 49–54. 67. “A Treaty of Peace Between the United States and the Tribes of Indians,” art. 3, 3 August 1795, Stats at Large of the U.S.A. 7: 49–54. 68. Weber, The Spanish Frontier, 285; Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 287–94; “Treaty of Friendship, Limits, and Navigation Between the United States and the King of Spain,” 27 October 1795, Stats at Large of the U.S.A. 8: 138–53. 69. John Francis Bannon, The Spanish Borderlands Frontier, 1513–1821 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), 204. 70. Bemis, Pinckney’s Treaty, 291.

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• Epilogue Peter S. Onuf

What did Americans achieve with their Revolution? At the time, and ever since, custodians of the national narrative have answered that question by invoking the principles that justified patriotic resistance to the authority of king and Parliament in the years leading up to independence. Once loyal subjects of George III celebrated their escape from monarchical despotism and embraced their continental destiny: the sovereign “people” now would be the source of legitimate authority in their new republican world. Intensely conscious of their place in history, Americans saw the break with Britain both as a culminating moment in the progress of constitutional government and as a radical, revolutionary rupture, the advent of a “new order for the ages.” The United States was the first great modern republic, a bold and unprecedented experiment that would test man’s capacity for self-government. Yet if they were to succeed, it would be owing to the culture of liberty that Anglo-Americans had so long enjoyed within the empire and under the king.1 Americans were reluctant revolutionaries who protested their loyalty to the end, imploring George III to restore them to the way things were before 1763 when their rights supposedly had been secure. Provincial Patriots gloried in the “rights of Englishmen”—until they suddenly found themselves acting on the world stage and declaiming the “rights of man.” How new was this new nation? How different was this new man, the American citizen, from his provincial predecessor, the British subject? These questions get to the heart of a never-ending debate over “American exceptionalism” that began with the compelling need to explain and justify the break with Britain.2 Provincial Americans were faced with a stark choice, as the authors in this volume suggest: Would they abjure their king and now consider his subjects their enemies, or would they join in the counterrevolutionary campaign to re285

Peter S. Onuf duce their fellow Americans to a state of subjection and servility? Before the fighting began at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, and for many agonizing months thereafter, most Americans avoided making that choice, even when they took up arms in defense of their liberties. That so many Americans remained “Loyalists”—and that so many proved to be what Thomas Paine called “sunshine” Patriots, whose loyalties shifted with the changing fortunes of the war—testifies to their terrible and terrifying dilemma.3 To resolve the crisis of allegiance, Patriots had to convince the confused and conflicted—themselves included—of the cosmic, world-historical significance of their choice as they juxtaposed the free citizen with the servile subject, republican liberty with monarchical despotism, America with Britain. These exaggerated oppositions were a measure of the Patriots’ desperate inventiveness. It was precisely because it was so hard to distinguish an American citizen from a British subject that the difference between the two had to be constructed in such absolute terms. Exaggerated claims to exceptionalism then and now betray profound anxieties about what really distinguished or distinguishes “Americans” from other peoples—beginning with themselves, as Britons. That Americans were a people—much less an exceptional one, showing mankind the way to a glorious future—was itself a highly dubious proposition; that they could think so at all was a result of their imaginative identification with a transatlantic British nation, the salience of conceptions of the “people” in Anglo-American political culture, and the brutal circumstances they now confronted and could not escape. If the rebellion-cum-revolution generated a “national imaginary” as provincial Americans recognized and identified with their countrymen in a continental community of suffering, wartime violence and dislocation brought the choice for (or against) the new nation to everyman’s doorstep. As John Adams famously claimed, the seeds of the revolution may have been sown “in the minds of Americans . . . ​from 1760 to 1775,” predisposing them to embrace “the logic of rebellion.” But other deep-rooted predispositions made many Americans reluctant to risk everything by taking the final, fatal step.4 If they stumbled, Patriot neighbors might offer a helpful hand—or, taking their gloves off, might demonstrate the dire consequences of resisting the resistance movement.5 Hesitant Americans were “forced to be free,” coerced into consenting to a new regime that claimed to derive its “just powers from the consent of the governed.”6 With the collapse of legitimate authority, persuasion and threats of violent reprisal converged. Revolutionary mobilization forced Patriot leaders to resort to force, tangling them in contradictions that Loyalists delighted in exposing—until their 286

Epilogue presses were shut down.7 But there was nothing surprising about this, for Americans found themselves in a state of war many months before they claimed a place for themselves “among the powers of the earth” with a recognized right to make war. The imperial crisis, as Patrick Griffin argues, was ultimately about sovereignty, or the legitimate claim to a monopoly of coercive force.8 In traditional language this was the “protection covenant,” the exchange of allegiance for protection that made any form of rule legitimate.9 The Declaration of Independence showed in now perplexing and tedious detail that King George III had betrayed that covenant, casting his loyal American subjects into an anarchic “state of nature” and making war on them. Americans knew that the state of nature into which they were descending was not necessarily and immediately violent and anarchic. Where they enjoyed the balance of sentiment and power, Patriots could sustain a measure of law and order. Drawing on a civic capacity developed over generations of settlement, they improvised new, ad hoc institutions to mobilize resistance (and intimidate their neighbors) and fill the constitutional void. Their immediate and most urgent task was to identify and neutralize internal enemies while supplying men, materiel, and money to the continental cause. If they failed to do so and the resistance movement collapsed, then all hell would break loose, as it did in frontier regions where any effective sovereign authority had long since collapsed, or on any ground where king and congress met in battle, or in occupied or contested regions where partisans literally brought the war home. The threat of anarchy was ubiquitous, even where Patriots exercised control. The great challenge, Griffin writes, was to restructure sovereignty. Military campaigns were thus paralleled and complicated by political and constitutional campaigns as the British sought to reconstruct civil authority in New York and Georgia and pacify other occupied areas, and state constitution-writers struggled to establish viable and legitimate republican governments that could manage the war and secure the peace.10 Revolutionary war-making and state-making were inextricably linked. Before the Revolution, Americans assumed that they had their own provincial “constitutions,” even as they enjoyed the benefits of constitutional liberty in a powerful and expanding empire. Patriots responded to “unconstitutional” encroachments on their rights by completing the demolition of the old imperial order they had once so fervently embraced, turning against Parliament—the great “palladium” of British liberty—and, finally, killing the king in Jefferson’s Declaration. For many a sense of betrayal and loss was palpable. As Jefferson wrote, in a passage that his congressional colleagues cut from the final draft, “We might have been a free and a great people together.” Now Americans had 287

Peter S. Onuf to distance themselves from—and define themselves against—everything British, renouncing all ties with “these unfeeling brethren.”11 They had to obliterate their provincial identities in a “new birth” of republican freedom. Anglophile provincials reinvented themselves as Anglophobe Americans, a “new” people determined to secure their independence against “old” and corrupt Britain.12 To vindicate their pretensions, Americans had to reconstruct the sovereignty they had just demolished by creating legitimate and effective governments of their own. But as they did so, the repressed returned. Beneath the thin veneer of universal, natural rights claims, constitution-writers drew on English and British sources, metropolitan and provincial, to construct their new republican regimes. Written constitutions might have been a great novelty, even a revolutionary departure from the British tradition, but they also represented the culmination and apotheosis of provincial identification with the British metropolis. At the same moment when Americans were insisting to the world that they were not British, their urgent, even desperate efforts to restructure sovereignty testified to their profound indebtedness to the “mother” country. This paradox is at the core of the exceptionalist riddle: vindicating claims to distinctiveness depended on reconstructing authority along British lines. Similarly, recognition of American independence depended on demonstrating the capacity to function as a sovereign power in a world of sovereignties. That meant, as Alexander Hamilton and like-minded “realists” recognized, that the United States would have to become more like Britain in order to secure their independence from Britain. American exceptionalism was beside this fundamental point. The question instead was whether the United States could make the grade as a would-be sovereignty, worthy of recognition by other powers. Americans might congratulate themselves on their “experiment” in republican government, but the measure of their success would be the capacity and competence of their government, not its form. In the midst of a protracted war Americans themselves had good reason to wonder whether their quest for a new sovereign order could possibly succeed. Neither the Paris Peace of 1783 nor the inauguration of a new federal government in 1789 offered definitive answers: skeptics at home and abroad expected the Union to collapse and the experiment to fail at any moment.

Sovereignty Sovereignty was no abstraction. As David Hendrickson has shown, Americans understood the dangers of “universal monarchy” and despotic authority on the one hand and “anarchy” or the absence of any effective authority on the other.13 288

Epilogue Whatever their motives or original intentions, revolutionaries were acutely conscious of the need to navigate between these extremes and construct governments that could secure their liberties, individually and collectively. The collapse of constitutional government during the imperial crisis and the outbreak of the war itself made it all too clear that threats were not simply external, coming from a corrupt and despotic imperial government. Without legitimate governments, Americans threatened each other as well. In the absence of an effective postimperial continental government, the new state-republics were the only (barely) plausible pretenders to sovereignty, and they confronted each other in the same “state of nature” that Americans felt themselves confronted them in the larger world after their break with Britain.14 Would Americans go to war with each other? They had and they would, as Hamilton told readers of his Federalist essays: If these states should either be wholly disunited, or only united in partial confederacies, a man must be far gone in Utopian speculations, who can seriously doubt that the subdivisions into which they might be thrown, would have frequent and violent contests with each other. To presume a want of motives for such contests, as an argument against their existence, would be to forget that men are ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious. To look for a continuation of harmony between a number of independent unconnected sovereignties, situated in the same neighbourhood, would be to disregard the uniform course of human events, and to set at defiance the accumulated experience of ages.15 In a state of nature, all states—regardless of their forms of government—­ confronted one another as independent sovereignties. Law of nations writers taught that the first law of nature was self-preservation, and the implications of this imperative were all too clear to revolutionary Americans as regime change unleashed—or threatened—an anarchy of violence and destruction. By 1787 Americans should have learned that republican governments were not naturally peaceful: that belief, Hamilton concluded, was “the deceitful dream of a golden age.” Federalist polemics in the ratification controversy focused on the sovereignty problem. America’s survival in a dangerous world depended on a strong central government capable of exercising sovereign authority; union was equally crucial in maintaining peace among the states; and the states themselves needed to consolidate effective authority over their often unruly populations. Restructuring sovereignty was the necessary precondition of securing republican government and guaranteeing citizens’ rights. The great challenge 289

Peter S. Onuf was not simply to reconstruct the superstructure of authority, expanding the capacity and effectiveness of governments at all levels; constitutional designers also needed to accommodate citizens’ increasingly expansive claims to a voice and presence in their own government. Reconstructing sovereignty at the ground level meant recalibrating the relationship between regime and society, rulers and ruled in self-governing republican governments. Broadening participation, rising expectations, and new standards of legitimacy emerged out of the protracted process of political and military mobilization. In the mythic conception of our national origins, the Declaration of Independence changed everything. In John Adams’s famous formulation, “thirteen clocks were made to strike together—a perfection of mechanism, which no artist had ever before effected.”16 This was a miracle of simultaneity, a virtuoso performance by the deists’ clockmaker God. But of course Adams knew how difficult it had been to orchestrate that moment, as so many congressmen— particularly from the crucial middle colonies—balked at striking the chord that seemed so resonant in retrospect. The real miracle was that there the provincial “clocks” were in a sufficient state of repair to give congressional delegates some semblance of authority as they struck for independence. The most dubious case was that of Pennsylvania, where the old provincial government resisted regime change and ultimately had to be abolished and replaced. Adams’s “clock” and its messy mechanism may not bear close examination, but they do suggest the broad transformation that fifteen months of war had effected across the continent. Constitution-writers were not simply retooling colony “constitutions” and carrying on business as usual. To the contrary, popular enthusiasm for the “common cause” transcended provincial boundaries, making it possible for patriots across the continent to recognize each other as “Americans.” The ways in which resistance leaders everywhere mobilized to communicate and cooperate—to make their cause “common”—enabled subjects to see themselves as citizens. Drawing deeply on the rights-consciousness and “common-law constitutionalism” that had flourished in provincial AngloAmerica, revolutionaries improvised an extra-constitutional governing infrastructure that linked local committees and associations to continental congresses. This “citizenship revolution” enabled and compelled a reconstitution of authority in the various provinces as well as on the continental level. With his clock imagery Adams mystified the halting, sometimes violent struggle to establish a new regime of legitimate authority in postimperial America, abstracting the spectacle of independence from a protracted process of mobilization that tested and enhanced citizens’ civic capacity.17 The reconstruction of sovereignty was well underway long before independence. Even as rebellious provincials effectively immobilized the constituted 290

Epilogue authorities of the old regime, they demonstrated their capacity for organizing themselves and disciplining hesitant or recalcitrant neighbors. Protests sometimes seemed to spin out of control, giving victims and bystanders a terrifying glimpse of what the state of nature might actually look like. But regime change did not precipitate a general descent into anarchy. The Anglo-American culture of liberty was a culture of social relationships and broadly diffused power. When Thomas Paine proclaimed “society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness,” he juxtaposed these enduring, customary relationships to the arbitrary impositions of a foreign “government.”18 Paine rejected the conventional conservative logic that allegiance to the king was the only secure foundation of civil society, that the crown alone could protect subjects from each other as well as from external threats. Instead, Paine charged, George III had unleashed the “dogs of war” on unsuspecting subjects, demolishing the social and economic networks that sustained provincial peace and prosperity. This was not a libertarian fantasy of spontaneous social order, but rather an appeal to the Common Sense of embattled patriots increasingly conscious of the unprecedented powers they wielded in defense of their traditional rights. Paine’s readers had to answer some critical, related questions. Who or what was responsible for the violence that threatened to engulf them? How could they best resolve their security dilemma and secure their rights? These were the same questions the framers would grapple with a decade later in Philadelphia. The patriots of 1776 saw submission to a king who no longer protected them as tantamount to self-enslavement, just as the framers of 1787 recoiled at the threat of “universal monarchy.” Yet no power—the absence of legitimate authority—was as terrifying as totally concentrated, and therefore illegitimate power. To decide for or against independence or ratification of the Constitution was to embrace alternative narratives about how sovereignty had collapsed in the imperial crisis and about how it might be durably reconstructed in the war’s aftermath. No one experiencing or remembering the violence of war could believe in a benign anarchy in which liberty would flourish in the absence of power. Paine attacked “government” in order to mobilize the self-​­governing civic capacity of ordinary citizens in defense of their liberties; in order to promote the collective security of dangerously disunited states, Hamilton caricatured Antifederalists who believed in the spontaneous, peaceful union of republics as dreamers. In both cases, alternative narratives and prescriptions were compelling to large numbers of cautious Americans who feared the tyranny of self-constituted states and their extra-constitutional congress or, later, balked at a “consolidated” federal Constitution that, in Patrick Henry’s memo291

Peter S. Onuf rable phrase, “squints towards monarchy.”19 The pervasive sense in both cases was that the wrong choice could have catastrophic consequences, jeopardizing any hope for reconstructing and sustaining sovereignty. Sovereignty is the great equalizer, among states and among citizens in the crucible of war and regime change. In geopolitical terms, this equalization obliterates distinctions among regimes, or forms of government: on the battlefield, victory goes to the most powerful, not the most virtuous. Yet the dynamic works in reverse among citizens facing a choice of would-be sovereignties: mobilizing support for—or opposition to—the “common cause” entails recognition of citizens’ power. If fighting the good fight was a civic obligation, as Patriots claimed, it also constituted a powerful claim to civic privileges. Of course, death on the battlefield levels social differences, and it is no coincidence that the Declaration of Independence—as a wartime appeal to popular patriotism—should emphasize equality at birth: “All men are created equal” and “are endowed by their creator with inherent and inalienable rights.”20 The status distinctions that sustained unequal, hierarchical social orders, in which earthly sovereigns usurped the creator’s prerogatives, dissolved at the primal moment that gave birth to a new society. This was the social contract theorists’ state of nature, the state of war in which Americans found themselves in 1775 and 1776. In this moment, the civic capacity they had developed in provincial courts and governments—and in the customary mob action of Peter Messer’s Boston, or the extra-constitutional militias of Jessica Roney’s Pennsylvania, or Peter Thompson’s continent-wide association movement—became a valuable asset to the resistance movement, giving citizens a sense of their own dignity and power: they were, self-evidently, equal to each other and to the greatest in the land, the people’s “servants.” If Patriot resistance leaders, claiming to speak and act as tribunes of the people, wanted citizens’ support, it would be on their terms. This does not mean that the “mob” would seek to redistribute property by means of agrarian laws, or that there would be a carnivalesque role reversal with the lowly now riding high. The very distinction Paine adumbrated between “society” and “government” constituted a powerful bulwark against leveling, for the reconstruction of sovereignty that he envisaged was in the domestication and democratization of government. Paine and Jefferson promised civic, not social or economic equality: citizens were equal in their citizenship. The powerful and privileged would no longer exploit government to enhance their positions, and this would open up new opportunities for enterprising and meritorious Americans. By the same logic, a true republican government would not encroach on the rights or property claims of the citizens who were the source of its authority. 292

Epilogue

Democracy French visitor Alexis de Tocqueville was astonished to discover that American democracy—unlike its French counterpart—did not lead to despotism. “Citizen equality” was the watchword of the new democratic age, Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America (1835–40), and its logical implication was, in his view, a massive leveling of status and redistribution of property, fueled by class envy and resentment. As the hierarchies of the old regime collapsed, men faced a fundamental choice: “they [could] all have the same rights or all be equally deprived of rights.” Tocqueville trembled at their decision when he thought “how much more difficult it is to live free than to vegetate in slavery.” In the midst of war’s horrors, it was hardly surprising that ordinary folk should choose to “sleep peacefully in the arms of despotism while stammering some words about liberty.” The French escaped their crisis of sovereignty by embracing Napoleon Bonaparte’s authoritarian regime. In the American crisis, contemporaries also feared that anarchy would lead to despotism, and anxieties about a regression to monarchism gripped the democratic imagination for many decades thereafter. How, Tocqueville wondered, could Americans have avoided taking this plunge? Why didn’t the rights talk that precipitated their revolution degenerate into meaningless “stammering” about liberty and a new epoch of “democratic despotism”?21 If this was the rule, what made America the exception? Tocqueville’s “democracy” was a protean concept, capable of taking on an infinite variety of forms along the continuum from a despotic obliteration of all rights to a republican regime in which “all have the same rights.” Tocque­ ville imagined individuals—and whole societies—making fateful choices that would shape their distinctive futures as they were swept up in an irresistible, irreversible democratic tide. The bulwarks of liberty in democratic America were seemingly survivals of the provincial old regime: the rule of law (and the ubiquity of lawyers); the importance of religious faith (and the prevalence of preachers); the centrality of “municipal liberties” (and the proliferation of corporate forms). In the absence of rigid hierarchies, however, these survivals were all absorbed into the life of the “people,” shaping their “manners” or what we would call “political culture.” The democratization of American political culture thus antedated the emergence of the contagious and corrosive democratic consciousness of the revolutionary age, immunizing Americans from its pathological excesses. American readers recognized themselves in Tocqueville’s mixed message. Anxious about their identity, they simultaneously exulted in their world-​ ­historical role in inaugurating a new democratic age and in their claim to a 293

Peter S. Onuf colonial past that constituted an extraordinary—and perhaps historically unique—apprenticeship in liberty and self-government. Modern critics might wonder at the tension in Tocqueville’s emphasis on the transformative power of the idea of equality and the enduring legacy of a political culture that sustained liberty. But it made perfect sense to Anglophobic exceptionalists who defined themselves against the old mother country even as they situated themselves in a Whiggish narrative of the progress of constitutional liberty deeply rooted in their British past. Tocqueville’s two narratives converged in the midst of war, regime change, and the crisis of sovereignty. The choices provincial Anglo-Americans made in this revolutionary moment were shaped by their political culture as well as by the political discourses that made breaking with Britain conceivable; they could also draw on civic practices forged in familiar institutional settings as they mobilized citizens to engage with novel circumstances. But the state of nature was a new, profoundly unsettled and unsettling terrain for Americans, and their decisions would set precedents for the future. The ways in which citizens participated in public life over the course of the imperial crisis and through the extended revolutionary era shaped the very character of citizenship itself. If the notion of civic “equality” seems abstract and disembodied, denying deep-seated differences among Americans, civic capacity can only be developed in the very particular, concrete, and contested contexts the authors in this volume describe. Americans did not make the world new on July 4, 1776 simply by declaring it to be so. Their decisions were made at many different moments, through a protracted crisis of authority punctuated by violence. Revolutionaries claimed to be defending their liberties—whether they defined them historically, as the rights of Englishmen, or as universal, natural rights—against the despotic power of a corrupt royal government. But the revolution was less a triumph of liberty over power than a desperate effort to reconstruct sovereignty by grounding a new distribution of power in the expanding civic capacity of a mobilized “people.” Popular sovereignty was no fiction, for it was in the people’s power both to subvert the old imperial regime and to improvise and authorize new governing structures. This was not the libertarian, antistatist fantasy of escaping from power, but rather the apotheosis of the people’s power. Revolutionary republicans rejected the classical notion that a good constitution depends on the mixture or balance of contending forces, with an ignorant unruly “people,” however numerous, playing a largely passive role. Mobilization leveled distinctions, raising the lower sorts to the level of civic competence and dignity and making “all men” equal. With the lower sort leveled up and their quondam superiors leveled down, the vertical axis of the hier294

Epilogue archical old regime flipped to the horizontal. In theory this meant that society would no longer be at war with itself, as fractious governing elites competed for power while imposing order on surly subjects. In a commonwealth, where the “people” included everybody, all power could be directed outward, against common enemies. It is no coincidence that the new American republics constituted themselves in the midst of war, when Americans were forced to declare themselves friends or foes. The concept of the “people” may have been abstract and aspirational, but its boundaries were clearly and concretely marked in the conspicuous choices made by self-declared citizens. The people would destroy its enemies—or be destroyed. Looking back on the Revolution at his presidential inauguration, Jefferson exulted in the people’s power: “This is the strongest Government on earth . . . ​the only one where every man, at the call of the law, would fly to the standard of the law, and would meet invasions of the public order as his own personal concern.”22 Jefferson’s critical move was to identify and conflate the “personal” and the “public.” The citizen’s identity was not a function of membership in a particular class or corporate entity, as was the subject’s under the old regime. The democratic premise of equality dissolved all such distinctions, simultaneously securing the rights of individual citizens against each other and enabling them to identify with—and sacrifice everything for—the people or nation. As Jefferson later argued, the exercise of civic capacity, “not merely at an election one day in the year, but every day,” would reinforce this identification. Citizens’ participation in government at all levels of government, from the ward or neighborhood community, all the way to the great “republic of the Union,” would make the power of the people irresistible. “When there shall not be a man in the State who will not be a member of some one of its councils, great or small,” Jefferson concluded, “he will let the heart be torn out of his body sooner than his power be wrested from him by a Caesar or a Bonaparte.”23 Here was a modern, democratic notion of an existential, participatory “stake in society” that transcended property rights—but did not jeopardize them. The continuous participation of vigilant citizens on the lookout for abuses of power and encroachments on their rights would beat back reactionary forces of monarchism and aristocracy that threatened peace at home, while deterring foreign despots like Bonaparte from pursuing designs for universal empire. Alexis de Tocqueville and other aristocratic survivors of the French Revolutionary cataclysm were all too familiar with the power of the people. What was astonishing to him was that American democracy seemed so extraordinarily capable of limiting the excesses of popular power and sustaining liberty. Given the French experience with Bonapartism, he was disinclined to see “King” Andrew Jackson as a potential American despot (as Jackson’s Whig 295

Peter S. Onuf contemporaries did), or to worry that the collapse of the weak federal superstructure would reveal the more destructive dimensions of national patriotism and democratic power. Tocqueville thought the Americans had resolved their crisis of sovereignty, if they had ever had one: the American Revolution itself received scant attention in Democracy compared to that lavished on the enduring influence of provincial Anglo-American political culture. Tocqueville thus reassured Americans that they could have it both ways, that they could enjoy the great boon of liberty even as their great nation projected its power across the continent and throughout the hemisphere. But the protean force that Jefferson celebrated in the nexus of civic participation and national identity that flowed from the revolutionary reconstruction of sovereignty could be channeled in extraordinarily destructive directions as well, as the Civil War would demonstrate. Tocqueville lived long enough to see this new crisis of sovereignty unfold and to recognize that the survival of the Union was all that stood between civil society and the state of war. For the sovereignty of modern nation-states, and their monopoly of coercive force, is both the solution to the Hobbesian dilemma at home and its projection, at unprecedented levels of destructiveness, on to the larger stage of a lawless, anarchic world. In 1776, as they decided for or against independence, Americans saw each other as foreigners; they would do so again in the Civil War as they jettisoned their union and yet again unleashed the “dogs of war.”24

Beyond Exceptionalism? The nation’s founders were the first exceptionalists. Intensely self-conscious about their place in the world and their role in world history, the revolutionaries insisted on the universal significance of their bold experiment in republican government. Exercising the “inherent and inalienable rights” with which all men were originally “endowed,” this new people defined itself against the tyrannical British king and his servile subjects and showed the way toward the liberation of all mankind. As the fiftieth anniversary of independence approached, Jefferson looked back with satisfaction on what he and his fellow Patriots had achieved. As they declared themselves independent, Americans became conscious of themselves as a people, inspiring people everywhere “to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government.”25 Yet if, in retrospect, the Declaration of Independence changed everything, it was unclear at the time what the revolutionaries would finally achieve. Independence would be won on the battlefield and in the diplomatic negotiations 296

Epilogue that finally led to the recognition of American pretensions. Throughout the war the new nation’s French allies were justifiably anxious about the possibility of a separate Anglo-American peace, perhaps even imperial reunion. Americans insisted on fundamental and intractable differences between the two warring peoples, but skeptical observers might wonder. Were the revolutionaries protesting too much? Britons and Americans bore all the customary markers of a single nationality—a common language, history, and political culture—and shared economic interests drew them more closely together until the war disrupted trade. British commentators doubted that the weak union the war had forced on the Americans could survive the peace. Even if it did, commercial connections would revert to old channels; as Adam Smith prophetically suggested in The Wealth of Nations, Britain could reap the benefits of the American trade without carrying the overhead costs of empire. The French may have won the war, but they proved poorly equipped to win the peace. Britain’s “informal” empire soon resumed its sway over the postcolonial United States and expanded throughout the hemisphere in the wake of independence movements in the Spanish and Portuguese empires.26 Americans’ insistence on the world-changing significance of their Revolution and on the fundamental differences between Old World and New World, Britain and America, betray powerful misgivings about the success of their bold experiment. The original rhetoric of exceptionalism stands in counterpoint to the barely suppressed knowledge that claims to distinctiveness, expressed in such absolute binary terms, might not in fact bear close examination. Perhaps Americans were only exceptional in their exceptionalism, in their inflated, universalistic claims to represent all mankind? Perhaps independence and the constitution of new governments were simply long overdue adjustments in Anglo-American constitutionalism that ultimately facilitated the spread of British institutions and values? Many Americans welcomed closer ties with Britain after independence as diplomats sought to regain access to British and imperial markets while opening up new commercial connections throughout the trading world. But the outbreak of the French revolutionary wars demolished American hopes for peaceful integration into the European state system. French revolutionary excesses seemed to discredit hyperbolic claims of republican and democratic exceptionalism at home and abroad. Federalists identified the cause of “civilization” with Britain’s struggle against Jacobin terrorists and their own struggle against American “Jacobins” and “democrats.” Republican oppositionists “wanted their country back,” mobilizing in defense of the Declaration’s ­nation-defining republican creed. Jefferson became their culture hero and iconic leader. His electoral triumph in 1800 vindicated the “Spirit of 1776,” banishing the “En­ 297

Peter S. Onuf glish Party” to the political wilderness and restoring the imagined unity of a people united “with one heart and one mind” in dedication to the Declaration’s principles.27 The United States was something “new under the sun,” Jefferson told Joseph Priestley after his ascendancy to the presidency was assured, for this whole chapter in the history of man is new. The great extent of our Republic is new. Its sparse habitation is new. The mighty wave of public opinion which has rolled over it is new. But the most pleasing novelty is, it’s so quickly subsiding over such an extent of surface to it’s true level again. The order & good sense displayed in this recovery from delusion, and in the momentous crisis which lately arose, really bespeak a strength of character in our nation which augurs well for the duration of our Republic.28 It was as if the party battles of the 1790s were a bad dream, a “delusion” that dissipated when Americans opened their eyes and came to their senses. Americans’ understanding of themselves as a people—the idea of the “nation” itself— was the only enduring reality. American exceptionalist rhetoric, the language of nationhood, has always stood in counterpoint to complicated historical circumstances that seem to compromise its claims. But the claims have consequences. The nation, whatever its ambiguous history, is the master fiction that valorizes and enables sovereignty, and sovereignty in turn makes the nation “real.” The revolutionaries’ great challenge was to convince themselves and the world that they were a “people,” worthy of recognition by the “powers of the earth.” To do so, they insisted on profound and irreconcilable differences with Britain, even as they sought to demonstrate a capacity to monopolize and project power that would make them like Britain and other sovereignties. Alexander Hamilton’s more or less successful efforts to construct a British-style fiscal military state may have raised the hackles of Jeffersonian nationalists by threatening to collapse the all-important distinction between Britain and America. But Hamilton was no less committed to the nation-making project than Jefferson. If the legitimacy of a nation depended on Jefferson’s community of sentiment, its functional ­capacity—to raise money and make war—was what made the nation recognizable to and by other nations.29 Legitimacy and capacity are the two faces of sovereignty, and sovereignty is what revolutionary Americans made for themselves. It was sometimes and necessarily a violent process, for ordinary folk made extraordinary demands on their would-be superiors. If they were going to fight and die, their claims to 298

Epilogue civic equality would have to be recognized and accommodated. Popular sovereignty thus opened new spaces for the presence and participation of the people, or what we call “democracy.” At the same time, as Barbara Clark Smith shows, the abstraction of civic identity from its traditional social contexts muted and marginalized customary forms of popular political action that gave the lower orders “leverage” over and against the better sort.30 Now “all men” were presumed “equal,” and collectively the “people” offered unprecedented power to any state that could command its loyalty. This new national subjectivity, conflating citizen with citizen body, is the foundation of sovereignty in the modern world. This is why virtually every regime today calls itself “democratic,” however it may be constituted. Successful sovereignties offer peace and security at home and protection against external threats. But all sovereignties are created unequally, under unique historical circumstances, and all reflect their origins in historical memory and mythology and in their distinctive political beliefs, practices, and culture. Celebrating those origins ordinarily reinforces a regime, emphasizing the great sacrifices and wise foresight of past generations. But, as American history demonstrates, the return to first principles can also challenge regime legitimacy. Eager to experience and reenact the primal, nation-making narrative, latter-day patriots may bring on a new crisis of sovereignty and plunge themselves and their countrymen into the anarchic and violent state of nature that American revolutionaries struggled so hard to escape. Confederates thus severed the link between nation and state, invoking the rhetoric of the founders even as they demolished the Union, the founders’ great legacy. The authors in this volume reconstruct the history of our first great, nationmaking crisis of sovereignty. Provincial patriots destroyed the great empire they professed to love and invented a new nation to justify—and escape—the havoc their resistance movement unleashed. History works in these mysterious ways, translating unintended consequences into original intentions.

Notes 1. Michal Rozbicki, Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (Char­ lottes­ville: University of Virginia Press, 2011). 2. Peter Onuf, “American Exceptionalism and National Identity,” American Political Thought 1 (2012): 77–100. 3. Thomas Paine, “The Crisis,” 23 December 1776: http://www.ushistory.org/paine/ crisis/c-01.htm. 4. John Adams to Thomas Jefferson, 1815, quoted in Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Ori-

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Peter S. Onuf gins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), 1. On the “logic of rebellion,” see 94–159. 5. T. H. Breen, American Insurgents, American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010); Peter Thompson, “Waging War against a Distant People: Slavery and the Violent Logic of the Associational Movement,” in this volume. 6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1762), Book 2, Section 4: http://www​ .constitution.org/jjr/socon_02.htm; Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776, in Thomas Jefferson: Writings, ed. Merrill Peterson (New York: Library of America, 1984), 19. 7. See the excellent discussion in Benjamin Irvin, Clothed in the Robes of Sovereignty: The Continental Congress and the People out of Doors (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 52–70. 8. See the introduction to this volume. For a full exposition of Griffin’s argument, see his America’s Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 9. On the protection covenant, see James Kettner, The Development of American Citizenship, 1608–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1978), 165–72. 10. The literature on state constitutional development largely ignores the exigencies of the war. See, for instance, Gordon S. Wood’s classic, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). But see James Hrdlicka, “Violence, Identity Formation, and Constitution-Making in Revolutionary Massachusetts, 1774–1775” (M.A. thesis, University of Virginia, 2012). 11. Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776, in Jefferson: Writings, 23. 12. Sam Haynes, Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010). 13. David Hendrickson, “Escaping Insecurity: The American Founding and the Control of Violence,” in this volume; Hendrickson, Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2003). 14. Peter Onuf, “Anarchy and the Crisis of the Union,” in “To Form a More Perfect Union”: The Critical Ideas of the Constitution, ed. Herman Belz, Ronald Hoffman, and Peter Albert (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 272–302. 15. Federalist no. 6, “Concerning Dangers from War between the States,” The Federalist (The Gideon Edition), ed. George W. Carey and James McClellan (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2001), http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=​ 788&chapter=108569&layout=html&Itemid=27. 16. John Adams to Hezekiah Niles, 13 February 1818: http://www.constitution.org/primary​ sources/adamsniles.html. 17. This discussion is heavily indebted to Douglas Bradburn, The Citizenship Revolution: Politics and the Creation of the American Union, 1774–1800 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009); and Bradburn, “ ‘The Great Field of Human Concerns’: The States, the Union, and the Problem of Citizenship in the American Revolutionary Era,” in State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States, ed. Peter Thompson and Peter Onuf (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2013), 77–112. See also the other essays in this volume. 18. Thomas Paine, Common Sense (Philadelphia, 1776), http://www.ushistory.org/paine/ commonsense/singlehtml.htm. 19. The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Digital Edition, ed. John P. Kaminski, Gaspare J. Saladino, Richard Leffler, Charles H. Schoenleber, and Mar-

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Epilogue garet A. Hogan (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009). Canonic URL: http:// rotunda​.upress.virginia.edu/founders/RNCN-02–09–02–0004–0007–0001. 20. Declaration of Independence, 4 July 1776, in Jefferson: Writings, 19. 21. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America: Historical-Critical Edition of De la démocratie en Amérique, ed. Eduardo Nolla, trans. James T. Schleifer (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2010), vol. 1, chap. 2, “To Understand the Revolution,” http://oll.libertyfund.org/ title/2285/218789/3498678. 22. Jefferson Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, in Jefferson: Writings, 493. 23. Jefferson to Joseph C. Cabell, 2 February 1816, ibid., 1380. For further discussion, see Peter S. Onuf, “Jefferson and American Democracy,” in A Companion to Thomas Jefferson, ed. Francis D. Cogliano (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 397–418. 24. See Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqueville: A Biography (London: Profile, 2006), for a good account of Tocqueville’s second thoughts. On American nationalism, see Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War: Modern History and the American Civil War (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006). 25. Jefferson to Roger C. Weightman, 24 June 1826, in Jefferson: Writings, 1517. 26. Jay Sexton, The Monroe Doctrine: Empire and Nation in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 2011); Bernard Semmel, The Rise of Free Trade Imperialism: Classical Political Economy, the Empire of Free Trade, and Imperialism, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970). See the discussion of Smith and the American crisis in Onuf and Onuf, Nations, Markets, and War, 216–18. 27. Jefferson to Thomas Lomax, 12 March 1799, in Jefferson: Writings, 1062; Jefferson, First Inaugural Address, 4 March 1801, ibid., 493. 28. Jefferson to Joseph Priestley, 21 March 1801, in Jefferson: Writings, 1086. 29. Max Edling, A Revolution in Favor of Government: Origins of the U.S. Constitution and the Making of the American State (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 30. Barbara Clark Smith, The Freedoms We Lost: Dissent and Resistance in Revolutionary America (New York: The New Press, 2010.

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Contributors CHRIS BENEKE is Associate Professor of History at Bentley University. He the author of Beyond Toleration: The Religious Origins of American Pluralism and coeditor of both The First Prejudice: Religious Tolerance and Religious Intolerance in Early America and Profane: Sacrilegious Expression in a Multicultural Age. ANDREW CAYTON, University Distinguished Professor of History at Miami University, is the author of Love in the Time of Revolution: Transatlantic Literary Radicalism and Historical Change, 1793–1818 and coauthor (with Fred Anderson) of The Dominion of War: Empire and Liberty in North America, 1500–2000. PATRICK GRIFFIN is the Madden-Hennebry Professor of History at the University of Notre Dame. He has published a number of books on Atlantic history and the American Revolution, most recently America’s Revolution. MATTHEW RAINBOW HALE, Associate Professor of History at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, won the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic’s 2010 Ralph D. Gray Prize. He is the recipient of various fellowships, including the Marc Friedlaender Fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies Gilder Lehrman Junior Research Fellowship, and the American Antiquarian Society Legacy Fellowship. His book on the French Revolution and the early United States is forthcoming from the University of Virginia Press. DAVID C. HENDRICKSON is Professor of Political Science at Colorado College. He is the author of Peace Pact: The Lost World of the American Founding and Union, Nation, or Empire: The American Debate over International Relations. He is the coauthor, with Robert W. Tucker, of Empire of Liberty: The Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson and The Fall of the First British Empire: Origins of the War of American Independence.

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Contributors ROBERT G. INGRAM, is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University and director of the George Washington Forum on American Ideas, Politics and Institutions. JOHN C. KOTRUCH is a PhD student at the University of New Hampshire, researching the imperfect postrevolutionary peace with Great Britain and the persistence of British cross-border insurgency intended to reshape the geography of the United States. He earned his BA in Russian and Eastern European Studies at the University of Washington in 1985 while on active duty in the United States Marine Corps. After his service retirement as an F/A-18 pilot, Kotruch became a full-time airline pilot. PETER C. MESSER is Associate Professor of History at Mississippi State University and the author of Stories of Independence: Identity, Ideology, and History. His essay is part of a larger project exploring the ways in which violence shaped the development of republican political institutions and practices in the era of the American Revolution. PETER S. ONUF, Senior Research Fellow, Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Monticello, and Thomas Jefferson Foundation Professor Emeritus, University of Virginia, is the author of numerous works on the history of the early American republic. He is the coauthor, with Annette Gordon-Reed, of “Most Blessed of Patriarchs”: The Worlds of Thomas Jefferson (forthcoming). KENNETH OWEN is Assistant Professor of early American history at the University of Illinois at Springfield. He received his DPhil from the University of Oxford in 2011, for his dissertation “Political Community in Revolutionary Pennsylvania, 1774–1800.” JEFFREY L. PASLEY is Professor of History at the University of Missouri’s flagship campus in Columbia. His latest book is The First Presidential Contest: 1796 and the Founding of American Democracy, winner of Missouri Conference on History’s book prize and a finalist for the George Washington Book Prize. JESSICA CHOPPIN RONEY is Assistant Professor of History at Temple University and was on the faculty of Ohio University from 2008 to 2014. She received her MA from the College of William and Mary and her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. She is the author of Governed by a Spirit of Opposition: The Origins of American Political Practice in Colonial Philadelphia. 304

Contributors BRIAN SCHOEN is Associate Professor of History at Ohio University and currently holds the Mary Ball Washington Chair of American History at University College, Dublin. He is the author of The Fragile Fabric of Union: Cotton, Federal Politics, and the Global Origins of the Civil War and coeditor of The Old South’s Modern Worlds: Slavery, Region, and Nation in the Age of Progress. PETER THOMPSON is Sydney L. Mayer Associate Professor of American History at the University of Oxford and author of Rum Punch and Revolution: Taverngoing and Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia.

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Index Act for the More Effectual Disarming of the Highlands in Scotland, An (1746), 47 Act of Toleration (1649), 66 Adams, Abigail, 84, 239 Adams, John, 84, 143, 192, 201, 219, 224, 232–35, 268, 290 Adams, John Quincy, 232, 235 African Americans, 16, 65, 140–60 Alien and Sedition Acts, 192, 194, 201 Allen, William, 95 Alliance, Treaty of (1778), 220 American Apollo, 246 American exceptionalism, 189, 285, 288 Amherst, Sir Jeffery, 49–50 Amherst’s War, 50 Anglo-American Treaty (1783), 152, 227, 264, 266, 268–96 Anti-Federalists, 172–78, 223, 230, 235 Appalachian Mountains, 48, 52, 264, 266–70, 278 Arab Spring, 188, 198 Armeé du Nord, 254 Armitage, David, 8 Articles of Association, 99–101, 157 Articles of Confederation, 219, 235, 264, 268 Associators, 84, 90, 93, 95, 97–106, 140–41, 146, 148, 152, 154–55 Atlantic system, 6, 16, 216 Atlantic world, 16, 32, 41–42, 55, 118, 126, 194, 244, 254, 263, 265, 267, 279 Bache, Benjamin Franklin, 201–8, 210 Bacon’s Rebellion, 142 Bailyn, Bernard, 2 Baldwin, Ebenezer, 147 Baltimore Rangers Light Infantry Company, 253 Baltimore Republican Society, 209 Barton, Thomas, 53 Bastille, 245 Bayle, Pierre, 66 Behn, Aphra, 26, 28 Bemis, Samuel Flagg, 267 Berlin, 232 Bermuda, 142 Bernard, Francis, 122, 124, 129, 131–33

Bill Declaring Who Shall be Deemed Citizens of this Commonwealth, A (1779), 158 Black, Hugo, 63 Black Act (1723), 22 Blount Conspiracy, 227 Bolsheviks, 197 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 194, 293, 295 Bonapartism, 295 Booker, John, 43 Boston, 24, 56, 66, 70, 97, 114–18, 120–21, 123–25, 127, 129–32, 152, 167, 190, 196, 200–201, 245, 246 Boston Gazette, 125–26 Boston Tea Party, 167, 201 Braddock’s Field, PA, 194 Bradford, William, 142 Brandywine, PA, 151 Breen, T. H., 3, 143, 148–50, 153 British Indian Department in North America, 267 Brockenbrough, Austin, 150–51, 163 Brown, Charles Brockden, 34, 36 Brown, Hubert, 189 Brutus, 157 Bryan, George, 176 Bucks County, PA, 154–55 Burke, Edmund, 29 Burr Conspiracy, 227 Caesar, 27, 295 Campbell, William, 274 Canada, 151, 229, 264, 268, 270–73; governor general of, 268, 271; Roman Catholics in, 66 Canny, Nicholas, 42 Carey, Matthew, 76–77 Caribbean, 9, 24, 271 Carlisle, PA, 175–78, 180 Carlisle Gazette, 175 Case, John, 141 Catholicism, 22, 26, 43–44, 46, 55, 62, 66–68, 73, 75–76, 78, 115–20, 122, 125, 128, 253; and anti-Catholicism, 114–38; in Canada, 66 Channing, William Elery, 225 Charles I (king of England), 28, 70 Charleston, SC, 56, 72, 268

307

Index Chase, Samuel, 218 Chauncy, Charles, 70 Cherokee Indians, 49–50, 229 Cherry Pie Series, 190 Christie, Gabriel, 209 Church of England, 71, 116, 124 Cincinnati, OH, 271, 277 Clausewitz, Carl Von, 196 Cleveland, OH, 277 Cleves, Rachel Hope, 192–93 Coercive Acts, 66 Cold War, 191 College of Philadelphia, 169 Colley, Linda, 143 Committee of Inspection, 153 Committee of Privates, 100–101 Committee of Safety, 99–103, 153, 158 Concord, MA, 56, 97, 274, 286 Conestoga Manor, 52 Conestogoes, 53 Congress, U.S., 192, 201, 202, 203–4, 206–7, 209–10, 221, 231, 237, 264, 270–72, 287, 290–91 Connaught, Ireland, 44 Connecticut, 66, 141, 147 Constitution, U.S., 1, 6, 14–15, 23, 55, 61, 63, 69, 77, 85–86, 88, 96, 102–7, 116–18, 131, 148, 167, 169, 171–77, 179, 181, 201, 202, 204–5, 216–17, 219, 221–25, 229–30, 234–37, 244–45, 247–48, 264, 268–70, 279, 287–88, 290–91, 294; First Amendment, 61–65, 72, 77 Constitutional Convention, 6, 103, 229 Continental Association, 141, 146, 151, 159 Continental Congress, 66, 102, 104, 139–41, 144, 146–47, 150, 153–55, 169, 172, 178, 218, 219–21, 237, 287, 290 Cooper, Anthony Ashley, 3rd Earl of ­Shaftesbury, 31 Cooper, William, 127 Creek Indians, 229 Cromwell, Oliver, 43, 46, 50, 70 Crusoe, Robinson, 25–26, 29, 31, 36 Culloden, Battle of, 46–47, 49–50, 53, 73 Dallas, Alexander J., 200, 206–8 Damiens, Robert-François, 147 Danbury, CT, 144, 147 Dauphin County, PA, 173 Declaration of Independence (1776), 2, 33, 160, 216, 247, 249, 287, 290, 292, 296 Declaration of Rights (1776), 60–61, 63, 67, 69–70, 72–73, 171 Declaratory Act (1766), 144, 218

Defense Association, 85, 90–91, 95–97 Defoe, Daniel, 25 Delaware Indians, 54 Delaware River, 88–89 Democratic-Republican Societies, 193, 200–210, 246, 252. See also Jacobin Clubs Detroit River, 267 Dickinson, John, 217 Dreisbach, Daniel, 69 Dunmore’s Proclamation, 147, 158 Edgar Huntly (Brown), 34–36 Edling, Max, 222 Elizabeth I (queen of England), 45 Elliott, J. H., 43 Engels, Jeremy, 150 English Civil War, 62, 117 English constitution, 116–18 English Revolution, 25 Enlightenment, 17, 22, 32, 52, 187, 192, 229, 230, 250, 253 Essex County, NJ, 145 Europe, 25, 43, 61, 62–63, 67, 166, 192–93, 198, 201, 216, 220, 222–23, 228, 230, 232–34, 236, 250–51, 254–55 Everson v. Board of Education (1947), 63 Fairfax, Ann, 148, 153 Fairfax, Brian, 147 Fairfax County, VA, 141 Fallen Timbers, Battle of, 15, 236, 263, 265, 273, 275, 278 Farmer, A. W., 158 Federalists, 14, 172–78, 180, 192–96, 198–99, 201–3, 206, 208–10, 217, 223, 227, 229, 236, 239, 243–44, 264, 266, 278–79, 289, 297 Federalist Papers: No. 7, 230; No. 41, 235 Findley, William, 206 First Amendment, 61–65, 72, 77 Fitzsimons, Thomas, 180, 203 Fourth of July, 193 Florida (Spanish), 264, 266, 268, 278; governor of, 270 Fort Champlain, 267, 277 Fort Confederacion, 273 Fort Defiance, 273 Fort Detroit, 267, 271, 274 Fort Dutchman’s Point, 267 Fort Harmar, Treaty of (1789), 271, 277 Fort Miamis, 263, 265, 271–75, 27 Fort Michilimacinac, 267, 277 Fort Niagara, 267 Fort Nogales (Vicksburg, MI), 270 Fort Ontario, 267

308

Index Fort Oswegatchie (Ogdensburg, NY), 267, 277 Fort Pitt, 195, 275 Fort Point-au-Fer, 267 Fort Recovery, 271, 273, 277 Fort San Fernando de las Barrancas (Memphis, TN), 278 Fort Stanwix, 52, 271 Fort Stephens (AL), 268 Fortune, John, 43 Fort Washington, 271, 277 Fort Wayne, 277 Fort Wilson, 168–69, 175 Foucault, Michel, 190 Foxe, John, 64 France, 2, 28, 66, 116, 166, 192–93, 201, 216, 218, 220, 222, 231–33, 236–37, 244–46, 250, 252–53, 267, 269, 271 Franco-Iberian alliance, 269 Francophilia, 246, 248–50, 254 Franklin, Benjamin, 52, 88–93, 97, 99, 169, 173, 201, 207, 222, 229 French and Indian War, 49, 52, 116, 150–51, 267 French Revolution, 1, 15, 192, 195, 201, 216, 232, 235, 244–55, 295, 297 Friendly Association for Regaining and Preserving Peace with the Indians, 95 Furstenberg, Francois, 7 Gabriell, Nicholas, 142 Gallatin, Albert, 166–67, 181, 200, 206 Galloway, Joseph, 148 Gardoqui, Diego de, 266 Gaustad, Edwin S., 63 General Advertiser, 165, 201–8 Genet, Edmund, 192 Grenville, George, 143 George I (king of England), 22 George II (king of England), 22 George III (king of England), 22, 115, 116, 216, 285, 287, 291 Georgia, 287 German Republican Society, 208 Gerry, Elbridge, 220 Gilbert, Humphrey, 42–42, 45 Giljie, Paul, 194 Glorious Revolution, 23, 44, 47, 117 Gnadenhütten Massacre, 54 Gordon, Thomas, 68–69, 74–75 Grayson, William, 230 Great Awakening, 106, 223 Great Bridge, VA, 151 Great Lakes, 266–67, 269 Great League of Peace and Power, 228 Great Wagon Road, 48

Greece, 220, 230 Greene, Jack, 7 Grenville, George, 275–76 Greenville, Treaty of (1795), 275, 277–78 Gross, Jan, 12 Gulf of Mexico, 266, 275 Gunpowder Plot (1605), 115 Guy, Carleton, 1st Baron of Dorchester, 271–72, 274, 276 Habermas, Jürgen, 191 Hague, 24 Haitian Revolution, 34, 217 Hallowell, Benjamin, 124, 127 Hamilton, Alexander, 139, 146–47, 180, 192, 194–96, 198–99, 201–2, 208–9, 220, 222–23, 230–32, 243–44, 255, 273, 288–89, 291, 298 Hammond, George, 270, 272 Hampton, John, 144 Hannibal, 232 Hanover County, VA, 141 Harmar, Josiah, 270, 271, 277 Harper, Robert Goodloe, 195, 196 Harrisburg, PA, 178 Havana, 22 Henry IV (king of France), 222 Henry VIII (king of England), 247 Henry, Patrick, 291 Hercules, 246–47 Hiawatha, 229 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 17, 25, 296 Hoerder, Dirk, 132 Holland, 166, 252 Holliday, Robert, 156 House of Lords, 47 Hudson Valley, NY, 267 humanitarianism, 23 Hunt, Lynn, 64–65 Huron Indians, 229 Hutcheson, Francis, 143 Hutchinson, Thomas, 114–15, 118–19, 121–33 Indians. See Native Americans and individual groups Intolerable Acts, 139, 157 Inverness, Scotland, 46–47, 55 Ireland, 9, 25, 34–35, 41–52, 55 Iroquois, 48, 50, 52, 229, 271; League of, 228 Islam, 22 Israel, Jonathan, 205 Jackson, Andrew, 255, 295 Jacobin Club, 192, 253

309

Index Jacobins, 192, 194–95, 199, 210, 244, 253, 297 Jacobite, 47, 74–75 Jamaica, 15, 22, 147 James II (king of England), 26, 28 Jay Treaty, 210, 236 Jefferson, Thomas, 14, 33, 63, 71–78, 146, 149, 157–60, 164, 187, 192–95, 210, 216–17, 220, 223, 227–28, 232, 236–37, 243–45, 248–51, 255–56, 287, 292, 295–98 Jeffersonian, 187, 194, 243–45, 249–50, 255–56, 298. See also Republican Jesus, 25, 67 Jews, 62 Johnson, Sir William, 50–52 Juster, Susan, 62, 64 Kant, Immanuel, 235 Kentucky, 52, 55, 273; Spanish conspiracy in, 227 King George’s War, 85, 88 Knox, Henry, 225–27, 269–71 Lancaster, PA, 53, 97, 178 Laurens, Henry, 220 Lee, Mother Ann, 65 Lee, Richard Henry, 143–44, 155, 224–25 Leib, Michael, 201, 205–6, 208–10 Leland, John, 65, 76 Lexington, MA, 56, 84, 97, 274, 286 Liberty Tree, 131 Lilly, Thomas, 153–54 Lincoln, Abraham, 189, 203, 210 Locke, John, 17, 25, 30, 32, 66–67 Logan, George, 206, 208 Logan, James, 87 London, 22, 24, 50, 52, 272–73, 275 Long Island, NY, 141 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 229 Lords of Trade, 51 Louis XIV (king of France), 247 Louis XVI (king of France), 249 Louisiana Crisis, 227 Loyal Nine, 115–16, 119, 121, 123–26, 128–32 Loyalists, 104, 150–51, 268, 286 Lynch, Michael, 46 Lynd, Staughton, 3 Maas, David, 151 Mackintosh, Ebenezer, 129 Madison, James, 63, 69–72, 75, 78, 145, 222–25, 231–32, 235, 243–45, 249, 251 Maier, Pauline, 190, 194 Marshall, John, 223, 236 Marxists, 178

Mary (queen of England), 67 Maryland, 66, 73, 207, 209 Mason, George, 69, 144–45, 169 Massachusetts, 11, 15–16, 62, 66–67, 72, 76, 102, 118, 122, 125, 151–53, 220; and Banishment Act (1778), 172; and Supreme Court, 118 Maumee River, 263, 265, 271, 273, 279 Mayhew, Jonathan, 125 McBlathery, Pat, 176 McBride, Ian, 45 McClenachan, Blaire, 206 McDonnell, Michael, 3 McDougall, Alexander, 141 McIntosh, Ebenezer, 124, 130 McKean, Thomas, 174, 181, 200 Melcher, John, 254 Meranze, Michael, 278 Mercer, George, 143 Mexican-American War, 255 Mexico, 225 Mifflin, Thomas, 200, 206–7 Military Association, 85, 97–101, 104–6 Militia Act, 92, 94, 168, 255 Militia Bill, 11, 92–95 Milton, John, 25 Mississippi River Valley, 226, 255, 266–67, 269–70, 273 Mobile, AL, 268 Mohawk Indians, 229, 282n50 Monroe, James, 230 Montesquieu, 221 Monticello, 243 Moravian missionaries, 54 Morgan, Edmund, 2, 142, 144, 159 Morris, Gouverneur, 139–40, 155 mulattoes, 144, 154, 163–64n50 Murray, John, 4th Earl of Dunmore, 151 Murrin, John, 7 Muskingum River, 54 Nash, Gary, 2 Native Americans, 9, 14–16, 22, 40, 42, 47–55, 49–50, 60, 62, 65, 86, 95, 216–17, 225–29, 264–65, 267, 269–78; and alliances, 229, 270, 273, 275, 278; Indian Confederacy, 263, 271, 273–75, 277; and wars, 15, 49, 225, 265, 267, 270–71, 275 Neely, William, 251 Neem, Johann, 196 Neville, John, 165–66, 179, 195, 203 New England, 25, 48, 76, 116, 121, 126, 142–43, 147, 152, 219–20, 224 New England Primer, 64

310

Index 200–210, 273, 290, 292; and Declaration of Rights (1776), 171; and Frame of 1776, 106; and General Assembly, 168–69, 172, 177; and Militia Bill (1775), 11 Pennsylvania Gazette, 48 Petty, Sir William, 2nd Earl of Shelburne, 44, 266 Pfeffer, Leo, 61–63 Philadelphia, 52, 56, 76, 84–85, 87–99, 102, 105–6, 154, 155, 165–69, 172, 176, 167, 180, 195–96, 201–9, 220, 223–24, 228–29, 246, 271–72, 291; City Regiment of, 92–95 Pinckney, Thomas, 278 Pinkney, William, 228, 240 Pitt, William, 217, 267–68 Plymouth, 142 Pontiac’s War, 49 Pope’s Day, 114–18, 121, 122, 126, 130–33 Portuguese empire, 297 Priestley, Joseph, 298 Privy Council, 93–94 Proclamation Line (1763), 51–52, 270 Protestant Reformation, 62 Protestants, 12, 22, 26, 33, 42–45, 50–51, 60, 62, 64, 66–68, 70, 74–77, 116 Provisional IRA, 197 Prussia, 232 Puritans, 143

New Hampshire Gazette, 254 New Jersey, 22, 145, 193 New Orleans, 227, 266, 268; Battle of, 21 New York, 139, 141, 145, 190, 196, 201, 207, 251, 253, 267, 268, 287; constitution of (1777), 74 New York Diary, 253 New York Journal, 127–28, 131 Newcomb, Silas, 156 Newman, Gerald, 143 Niles, Nathaniel, 66 Nobles, Gregory, 5 Non-Associators, 98, 100–102, 105–6, 145–46, 159 Nootka Sound Controversy, 269 North, Frederick, 2nd Earl of Guilford, 155, 219 North Carolina Regulator Movement, 170 Northwest Ordinance, 269, 278 Northwest Territory, 278; Old Northwest, 15, 263, 265, 270, 271 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jefferson), 74, 76, 157 Nova Scotia, 154 Ohio, 8, 22, 54, 227, 263, 265–71, 273, 276–78 Ohio Indians, 227 Okoye, F. Nwabueze, 147 Old World, 61, 297 Oliver, Andrew, 114–16, 118, 120–25, 127, 131–32 Oneida Indians, 229 Onuf, Peter, 140, 187, 197, 227, 245, 248–49 Oroonoko (Behn), 26–28 Osgood, David, 76–77 Oswald, Richard, 266 Otis, James, 144

Quakers, 62, 86–90, 92–93, 95–97, 104, 154 Quebec Act (1774), 66 Queen Anne’s War, 85 Queen’s Rangers, 153

Pagden, Anthony, 43 Paine, Thomas, 102, 200, 231–32, 240, 286, 291–92 Palmer, R. R., 150 Parker, John, 152 Paris, Treaty of (1783), 152, 227, 264, 266, 268–96 Parliament, 44, 64, 66, 114, 117–18, 120, 143–45, 148, 167, 218, 285, 287 Patriots, 62, 96–97, 99, 102–3, 105, 116, 119, 133, 139–41, 147, 149, 153, 248, 285–87, 290–91, 296, 299 Paxton, Charles, 125 Paxton Boys, 52–54 Penn, Thomas, 91, 94, 105 Penn, William, 66 Pennsylvania, 11–12, 15–16, 34–35, 54, 62, 66, 84–107, 148, 154–55, 166–81, 190–96,

Raleigh, Walter, 42 Ramsay, David, 219 Randolph, Edmund, 272–74 Randolph, John, 254 Rebellion of 1798, 45 Reid, Phillip John, 148 Renaissance, 41 Republicans, 27–38, 36, 56, 86, 93, 95, 157, 159, 169, 176–78, 181, 192–93, 195, 201–6, 209–10, 230–33, 235, 247–52, 254, 256, 285–90, 292–94, 296–97 Restoration, 44 revolutionary era, 40, 61, 63, 65, 68, 75, 104, 190, 204, 247, 294 Rhode Island, 64 Ridge, Isaac, 152 Robespierre, Maximilien, 192; and Reign of Terror, 193 Rogers, John, 64 Romans, 43, 232

311

Index Royalists, 27–28, 193 Rubenstein, Richard E., 189–90 San Lorenzo, Treaty of (1795), 275, 278 Saunders, John, 151 Scotland, 9, 41, 44, 46–52, 73–74, 155 Seabury, Samuel, 146 Sears, Isaac, 141 Second Great Awakening, 106 Seven Years’ War, 15, 17–18, 47, 49, 54, 86, 91, 216, 225 Shakers, 62, 65 Sherwood, Samuel, 67 Shawnee Indians, 229 Shays Rebellion, 190, 195 Short, William, 248 Simcoe, John Graves, 151, 273–76 Sister Republics of America, 246 Six Nations, 229, 271 slavery, 130, 217, 293; and Atlantic slave trade, 23, 147, 162–63n32; opposition to, 201, 223–24; and social death, 139–64 Smith, Adam, 235, 297 Smith, Barbara Clark, 299 Smith, John, 201 Smith, Thomas, 154–56 Smyth, Jim, 46 Sons of Liberty, 141, 224 South Carolina, 15, 22, 25, 72, 77, 220, 246 Spain, 66, 116, 237, 264, 266–69, 273, 278; conspiracy in Kentucky, 268; Inquisition in, 145; Spaniards, 31. See also Florida Spenser, Edmund, 43 Spinoza, Baruch, 25, 31–32 Stamp Act (1765), 76, 114–16, 118–33, 143–44, 148, 155, 194, 200–201, 217; collectors for, 120, 143; riots, 115, 119–20, 125, 129, 130–33 St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, 71 St. Clair, Arthur, 270–71 St. Lawrence, 266–67 Story, William, 124 Stuart, John, 3rd Earl of Bute, 50–51, 115, 116 Stuart, William, 253 Student Nonviolent Coordinating ­Committee, 189 Supreme Court, 63, 118 Supreme Executive Council, 155, 168, 174 Surinam, 26–27 Swanwick, John, 203 Talleyrand, Charles, 231 Taylor, John, 227 Tennent, William, 72, 75, 77 Test Act (1777), 155, 159

Thatcher, George, 254 Thistlewood, Thomas, 22 Thomas, E. S., 251 Thompson, E. P., 170 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 293 Tombigbee River, 268, 273 Tories, 12, 55, 139–41, 146, 150–53, 155, 157, 168 Townshend, Thomas, 1st Viscount of Sydney, 267 Trenchard, John, 17, 68–69 Tucker, Gabriel, 142 Tucker, Josiah, 219 Tudor, John, 126–28 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 40, 278 Ulster, Ireland, 44–45 United Baptists of Virginia, 76 Valmy, Battle of, 252 Versailles, Treaty of, 288. See also Paris, Treaty of (1783) Virginia, 15, 25, 48, 54, 74, 76, 104, 105, 141–43, 147, 150–51, 155–58; Convention of (1775), 147, 158; Declaration of Rights (1776), 60–73; Ratifying Convention, 224–25; Statute for Religious Freedom, 72–73, 77 Virginia Gazette, 156 Voltaire, 65 Wabash River, Battle of, 270 Waldstreicher, David, 2, 3 Waltz, Kenneth, 234 Wardrob, David, 155–57 War of 1812, 228, 237, 255 Washington County, PA, 54, 165, 179, 205 Washington, George, 141, 147, 148, 163n50, 180, 192–96, 198–99, 201, 202, 203, 206–10, 225–28, 236, 243, 246, 264, 268–74, 278 Watermelon Army, 180, 195, 208 Waterloo, Battle of, 21 Wayne, Anthony, 263, 265, 270, 271, 273–75, 277–79 Wells, Richard, 144 Westmoreland County, VA, 143, 155–56 Whigs, American, 255, 295–96 Whiggism, 106–7, 148; in England, 68, 116. See also Patriots Whiskey Rebellion, 165–66, 178–80, 187–215, 227, 265, 273, 278 Wilkes, John, 143 William III (king of England), 26 Williams, Elisha, 66, 68 Williams, Roger, 64, 66, 76 Wilson, James, 167, 174, 222

312

Index Wirt, William, 252 Witherspoon, John, 217 Withington, Ann Fairfax, 148–49, 153 Wodrow, Andrew Clark, 151 Wood, Gordon, 1–3, 106–7 Woodford, William, 147 Worcester, MA, 153

Worcestriensis, 67, 82, 81n26 World War II, 23, 188 Wyandot Indians, 229, 282n50 Yazawa, Melvin, 237 Young, Al, 2, 3, 132

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Recent Books in the Jeffersonian America Series Sam W. Haynes  Unfinished Revolution: The Early American Republic in a British World Michal Jan Rozbicki  Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution Ellen Holmes Pearson  Remaking Custom: Law and Identity in the Early American Republic Seth Cotlar  Tom Paine’s America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic John Craig Hammond and Matthew Mason, editors  Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation Ruma Chopra  Unnatural Rebellion: Loyalists in New York City during the Revolution Maurizio Valsania  The Limits of Optimism: Thomas Jefferson’s Dualistic Enlightenment Peter S. Onuf and Nicholas P. Cole, editors  Thomas Jefferson, the Classical World, and Early America Hannah Spahn  Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History Lucia Stanton  “Those Who Labor for My Happiness”: Slavery at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello Robert M. S. McDonald, editor  Light and Liberty: Thomas Jefferson and the Power of Knowledge Catherine Allgor, editor  The Queen of America: Mary Cutts’s Life of Dolley Madison Peter Thompson and Peter S. Onuf, editors  State and Citizen: British America and the Early United States Maurizio Valsania  Nature’s Man: Thomas Jefferson’s Philosophical Anthropology John Ragosta  Religious Freedom: Jefferson’s Legacy, America’s Creed Robert M. S. McDonald, editor  Sons of the Father: George Washington and His Protégés Simon P. Newman and Peter S. Onuf, editors  Paine and Jefferson in the Age of Revolutions Daniel Peart  Era of Experimentation: American Political Practices in the Early Republic Margaret Sumner  Collegiate Republic: Cultivating an Ideal Society in Early America Christa Dierksheide  Amelioration and Empire: Progress and Slavery in the Plantation Americas

John A. Ruddiman  Becoming Men of Some Consequence: Youth and Military Service in the Revolutionary War Jonathan J. Den Hartog  Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation Patrick Griffin, Robert G. Ingram, Peter S. Onuf, and Brian Schoen, editors  Between Sovereignty and Anarchy: The Politics of Violence in the American Revolutionary Era