Beyond 1776: Globalizing The Cultures Of The American Revolution 081394175X, 9780813941752, 9780813941769

Table of contents :
Cover Page......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Contents......Page 8
Acknowledgments......Page 10
Introduction......Page 14
Part I: Transatlantic Cliques......Page 36
Circulating the American Revolution: The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter......Page 38
Republicanism Redefined: How the American Revolution Transformed Dutch Political Culture......Page 61
French Writers on the American Revolution in the Early 1780s: A Republican Moment?......Page 87
Political Theology and the Alternate Enlightenment: From the War of the Three Kingdoms to the American Revolution......Page 118
Charlotte Corday’s Gendered Terror: Femininity, Violence, and Domestic Peace in Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast......Page 135
Part II: Secret Histories and Revolutionary Afterlives......Page 156
Soldiers, Politics, and the American Revolution in Ireland and Scotland......Page 158
Franklin’s Mail: Gun Trafficking and the Elisions of History......Page 179
“Stuck a Bayonet into the Grave & Renew’d Their Oath”: The American Revolution and the First Fleet......Page 202
The Tea Not Consumed: Cultural and Political Meanings of the American Revolution in China, 1774–1912......Page 219
“Walk upon Water”: Equiano and the Globalizing Subject......Page 239
Contributors......Page 268
Index......Page 270

Citation preview

BEYOND

1776

Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution edited by MARIA O’MALLEY and

DENYS VAN RENEN

Beyond 1776

D

Beyond 1776 G LOBA L IZ IN G THE CULTURES OF THE A M ER ICA N R EVO LUTIO N

Edited by M A R IA O’ MA L LEY AND DEN YS VA N  R ENEN

D

University of Virginia Press CHARLOTTESVILLE AND LONDON

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Department of English at the University of Nebraska, Kearney. University of Virginia Press © 2018 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 2018 isbn 978-0-8139-4175-2 (cloth) isbn 978-0-8139-4176-9 (ebook) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data is available for this title.

Cover art: British naval assault on Saint Eustatius, hand-colored etching, 1780–90, Augsbourg (Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-pga-04399) (top); The Sortie Made by the Garrison of Gibraltar, John Trumbull, 1789 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accession no. 1976.332) (bottom)

To our parents Betty and John Ellen and Denys

Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction  1 PA RT I

Transatlantic Cliques Circulating the American Revolution: The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter  25 L E ONARD VON  M ORZ É

Republicanism Redefined: How the American Revolution Transformed Dutch Political Culture  48 W YGE R R.  E . VE L E M A

French Writers on the American Revolution in the Early 1780s: A Republican Moment?  74 CA RINE LOUNISSI

Political Theology and the Alternate Enlightenment: From the War of the Three Kingdoms to the American Revolution  105 E D SIMON

Charlotte Corday’s Gendered Terror: Femininity, Violence, and Domestic Peace in Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast  122 MIRA NDA A . GRE E N-­B A RT EET

PA RT II

Secret Histories and Revolutionary Afterlives Soldiers, Politics, and the American Revolution in Ireland and Scotland  145 MATTHE W P. DZ IE N NIK

Franklin’s Mail: Gun Trafficking and the Elisions of History  166 M ARIA O’ M AL L E Y

“Stuck a Bayonet into the Grave & Renew’d Their Oath”: The American Revolution and the First Fleet  189 THE RE SE-­M A RIE ME YE R

The Tea Not Consumed: Cultural and Political Meanings of the American Revolution in China, 1774–­1912  206 J E N G-­G UO CHE N

“Walk upon Water”: Equiano and the Globalizing Subject  226 D E N YS VAN RE N E N

Notes on Contributors  255 Index  257

viii

Acknowledgments

We are pleased to acknowledge the support of institutions, societies, and scholars in helping us put together a collection with such an expansive scope. Our greatest debt is to the Department of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney (UNK), which offered a very generous grant in support of the research and production of the book. In particular, our department chair, Samuel Umland, has been an advocate for the project since its first germination and offered a ready ear to us as it unfolded. Also at UNK, Dean Bill Jurma and Dean Kenya Taylor provided research and travel funds to complete the manuscript. In particular, the Research Services Council at UNK awarded a grant to conduct research at the Library of Congress and course releases from teaching to finish the book. We thank the American Democracy Project, at UNK, for its help in promoting the book. This collection began as a panel at the American Society for Eighteenth-­ Century Studies annual conference in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 2014. In its later stages, the Society of Early Americanists invited us to hold a roundtable at the American Literature Association conference in San Francisco in 2016. We thank these professional organizations for their work in promoting scholarship on the eighteenth century. Many individuals helped us along the way, since the volume required expertise in multiple disciplines, especially Edward Larkin, Robert Markley, Leonard von Morzé, and Monique Allewaert. We owe much to the two anonymous readers who carefully read the collection in its entirety and offered constructive feedback. Our experience working with the University of Virginia Press has been a high point of the process. We offer hearty thanks to Angie Hogan, our editor, for her thoroughness, professionalism, and enthusiasm throughout the review and editing process. We also gratefully acknowledge Susan Murray for her careful copyediting of the manuscript. Many thanks to each of the contributors, whose fastidious research and good humor made the long publication process a worthwhile one. We are grateful not only for the original scholarship featured in their essays but

ix

Acknowledgments

also for the original translations they provided of source material otherwise unavailable in English. Lastly, we thank each other for creating a fruitful partnership in coediting the collection, which we put forth as evidence of the creative potential of traversing the disciplinary boundaries of American and British literature.

x

Beyond 1776

D

Introduction

Sovereignty was granted to the United States neither through the Declaration of Independence nor through the military victories that led Great Britain to end the Revolutionary War but rather through France’s willingness to enter a peace treaty with the States in 1778. If the alliance with France established the thirteen colonies as “treaty worthy,” then it was the Treaty of Paris, in which Britain relinquished its claims to the colonies in 1783, that established the United States as an empire. The coup for the United States was not merely an end to armed conflict and Britain’s recognition of it as an independent country but rather the substantial concessions it wrangled out of King George III as a result of exploiting the ongoing antagonisms among France, Spain, Great Britain, and the United Provinces. Indeed, the French ministers were surprised to see how the peace terms favored the United States.1 Ironically, even though the bilateral agreement with France cemented the United States as treaty worthy in the first place, in negotiating a separate peace with English diplomats without French counsel, and thus securing Britain’s acknowledgment of U.S. independence, the American plenipotentiaries violated the terms of its pact with France. Despite overtures of transparency to France during the fallout, the American peace commissioners in fact withheld the “secret terms” between the United States and the British that involved fishing rights, because they impinged on France’s claim to waters off the Canadian coast. When Benjamin Franklin was tasked with repairing the diplomatic slight against America’s chief creditor, he wrote a letter to his French counterpart, Comte de Vergennes, to mollify him as well as to suggest that, despite the U.S. faux pas, the two countries should continue to share the confidence of intimates: “I hope this little misunderstanding will therefore be kept a secret.”2 The foundation of the United States proves to be deeply enmeshed with shifting alliances and multiple actors; with politics saturated by imaginative literature; and with ostensible bilateral negotiations that were, in fact, shaped by speculation about realignments in international power. The history we reconstruct enlists a range of disciplinary expertise of scholars across eighteenth-­century studies, pointing as it does to the imperial networks that, as Edward Larkin observes, served as the impetus 1

Introduction

and framework for the formation of the United States.3 The United States’ “secret” with England over the fishing rights seems, paradoxically, to intensify its intimacy with France, underscoring how American foreign relations exploit and stretch imperial epistemes. Certainly, Franklin and Vergennes’s relations involve their shared cosmopolitan values, and, as Larkin underlines, imperialism and cosmopolitan thought intersect: “The tumultuous period that witnessed the birth of the nation-­state was the cradle of modern cosmopolitan.”4 More broadly, as Ross Posnock emphasizes, cosmopolitan attitudes “interrogate and unsettle conventional notions of boundary, limit, and identity.”5 In drawing attention to the relationships that bolster or compete with America’s overt wartime and diplomatic transactions, this volume seeks to examine the dialectic between (imagined or otherwise) local or interpersonal affiliations and wider (geopolitical) developments, namely the American Revolution. The problem with any sustained study of the undercurrents of the nascent United States is a practical dilemma: the limits of one scholar’s expertise. An edited collection addressing this particular subject overcomes this impediment by putting scholars working on different cultures and in different disciplines in conversation to reanimate these networks of contact. These contributors survey a range of texts beyond Anglophone sources: novels, drama, diplomatic correspondence, letters of common sailors, political treatises, newspapers, accounting ledgers, naval records, and burial rituals using close textual analysis. Moreover, this volume provides a broader context for the war, its peace process, and the implications of the new borders and settlements that arose in its wake. The American Revolution, though, still serves as a focal point, not because it epitomized or served as the template for other eighteenth-­century phenomena or events; nor do we suggest the entire world paused as the conflict unfolded. In fact, some of the subjects of this volume, like many of their contemporaries, barely noticed it. Some contributors directly invoke the American Revolution; others, though, concentrate on events that merely skirt, coincide, or indirectly relate to the conflict. Rather we chose the American Revolution because it—­ surprisingly—­is understudied in that scholarship imposes arbitrary boundaries on it. As Larkin notes, the story of the Revolution seems to “interrupt” the chronology of the rise of the United States as an imperial power: some scholars identify its roots in the colonies’ “entanglement” with the British Empire in the eighteenth century (the Anglicization thesis), while others identify the United States emerging as a nascent empire in the nineteenth century.6 These two schools of thought cannot be reconciled, as 2

Introduction

Larkin explains, because “both Anglicization and postnationalist American studies cast the Revolution as a national moment.”7 Memorializing about the Revolution has been central to constructions of the United States as a reluctant geopolitical force. The scholars collected here follow the lead of the historian Eliga Gould, who argues for “looking at the nation’s founding from what we might call the ‘outside in’ perspective of the Union’s relations” with other nations.8 Gould’s spatial formulation undergirds all the essays as they seek to illuminate often ignored actors that re-­present, appropriate, or influence the permutations of American Independence. The premise that “it would be more accurate to say that the revolution enabled Americans to make the history that other people were prepared to let them make” may overstate colonists’ passivity to world events.9 But Gould’s intervention reiterates how different governmental or commercial entities and individuals plying circum-­Atlantic routes shaped the United States, integrated with others to create new entities, or simply disappeared. That is, as Jack Greene explains, people were responsible for carrying out the imperatives of the fiscal-­military state, and these enterprises developed “cultural hearths” or specific interpretations of the directives of corporate or state entities that then “resulted in the creation of new policies with their own peculiar” identities in other realms.10 In broaching the Revolution from this perspective, we accomplish two goals: one, we further elucidate interdependencies among global players, especially in terms of trade, finance, and military aggression, that took root in the eighteenth century; and two, we overcome some of the intractability of the stories of U.S. nationhood. After all, as Greene writes, “how can anyone resist an opportunity to subvert the parochial mentality implicit in the national state focus?”11 As a narrowly defined signifier, the American Revolution both enabled others to define themselves in relation to it (and thus reject their peripheral status) and erased other lines of influence that might have stretched the Revolution’s borders. And yet disciplinary configurations in the humanities, along national lines, contribute to these others’ subordination. As Sandra Gustafson explains: “Scholars of the colonial period and the early republic are moving quickly to develop new histories that are less bound to the nation as a framework of knowledge production, and these histories have much to offer to scholars working in later periods. They provide a useful corrective to anti-­imperialist and postnationalist critiques, which can reify the nation by focusing on its formation, consequences, and inadequacies.”12 The scholars collected here trace the global dimensions that undergirded the very founding of the United States, especially the power 3

Introduction

relations that not only were fluid but also included a range of surprising actors that widen the discipline of the “American Revolution.”

Why the American Revolution? Why Global? The acquiescence of the French and even the Spanish to relinquish their negotiating power in 1784, including Spain’s long-­sought objective to reclaim Gibraltar from the English Crown, and to sign the peace settlement largely negotiated by the Americans and English peace delegations, may have derived from their wish to see a return on their substantial loans to the United States. But their acquiescence also lay in their assessment of more pressing matters involved in ongoing Old World conflicts. According to a biography of Vergennes, the French foreign minister responsible for negotiating with the Americans, France did not stymie the peace settlement despite the American breach of conduct because France had to turn its attention to the Russian invasion of Crimea in April 1783.13 France could hardly protest the favorable terms between Great Britain and the United States, even if it undercut France’s stake in North America, because Vergennes was worried that Russia’s annexation of Crimea might alter the power dynamics among France, the Ottoman Empire, and the Austro-­Hungarian Empires. The Americans’ diplomatic “coup” highlights the precarious and shifting relationships among the European and Asian powers. More importantly, it places American popular sovereignty within a broader international framework characterized by intricate and, at times, indirect connections across the world in the late eighteenth century. Networks (of people, ideas, print, commodities, and money), we argue, registered, contained, or appropriated the energies of the American Revolution. Tracing the large-­scale political developments that led to the formation of the United States in the late eighteenth century, we can better sift through the subtle gradations of exchanges across cultures. Rather than invoke the national, as in postnational or international, we emphasize the forgotten sites and local appropriations of American Independence. In particular, our emphasis lies in the ways in which U.S. self-­ sovereignty operates as one node that produces centrifugal forces that register with peoples across the globe because they, too, have thought through the sometimes parallel and sometimes contradictory vectors of local, national, and imperial agendas. Scholars who conceptualize the mutually constitutive processes that emerge through contact between disparate peoples put forth different metaphorical constructions to characterize these 4

Introduction

convergences. Many scholars refer to “systems,” usually by adapting Immanuel Wallerstein’s theories about the emergence of the “capitalist World Systems” in the early modern period, which chart the flow of capital to determine how some rise and others lose economic or social standing. The concept of “world systems” has proven useful for describing disproportionate wealth and articulating transnational or circulatory flows.14 Other scholars use the term “network” to broaden the categories of connections beyond the movements of capital to include cultural transmissions and to highlight the circuitous routes of exchange rather than simply transnational ones. The use of “networks” to chart relationships emphasizes how influence is not just unidirectional; the periphery can transform the center. Both “world systems” and “networks” concretize instances of contact and exchange, but at times, they naturalize transnational links once they are set in motion by the investment of capital or a technological innovation. These two models, in other words, do not always account for the ways in which power is established or maintained in network or system topologies because they subordinate seemingly insignificant challenges to or appropriations of capital or information. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for example, underline how the powerless enact and embody the spread of information through their global migrations, “including the production of ideas, images, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations.”15 The essays herein track the influence of actants, any entity or object that produces an effect in the world.16 The beginnings of U.S. nationhood accrue a multiplicity of meanings because of the global influences on it. At different times a different United States materializes, and these multiple iterations almost lead to incoherence; but reconstructing the actors involved in the formation of the United States as well as studying how similar impulses appear elsewhere enable us to disentangle at least the preconceptions or overarching narratives that distract from other significant cross currents. As eighteenth-­century Americanist scholars uncover the assemblages of peoples and ideas from New England and Virginia to the black Atlantic to the transatlantic to the hemispheric to the transoceanic, their studies continue to broaden Anglo-­American accounts of the period 1776–84. In the past couple of decades, research has intensified, foregrounding geographic configurations that destabilize strict disciplinary boundaries demarcated by period and nation: Paul Gilroy and Joseph Roach on the transatlantic; Ralph Bauer and Caroline Levander on the hemispheric; Michelle Burnham on the oceanic; and Paul Giles on the antipodean Americas. 5

Introduction

The Revolution was a memorable example—­one of many—­that reinforces the ways in which late eighteenth-­century upheavals dissolve and reform as different condensations of ideas and peoples. As Lawrence Buell concedes, many of these studies “offer particularly arresting testimony as to the impossibility of prying ‘hemispheric,’ ‘Atlantic,’ and ‘transpacific’ fields apart from one another.”17 Efforts to limit cultural transmission and to reiterate regional or hemispheric boundaries threaten to substitute one historical totality for another (the lore of the “American Revolution”). Even though the varieties of eighteenth-­century life can be somewhat dizzying, it behooves us to uncover some of the microsites and movements that animate the period and serve as cross-­sections of global exchanges at a time of rapid change. One way scholars have moved past fixing the United States as a nation-­ state is by attending to another key feature of the late eighteenth-­century world: cosmopolitanism. On the one hand, the era’s cosmopolitanism grasps the heterogeneity of the people that the United States sought to absorb; on the other, it provides a (sometimes negative) ontology for U.S. modalities. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, for example, argue that Barbary captivity narratives offered the new United States a way to “imagine a community in cosmopolitan terms.”18 Thus, the nation must “presuppose a subject who understands his very being, as Barbary captives do, as contingent on a group that interacts, combines, and recombines with other groups in a dynamic flow.”19 The captivity narrative both represents a contingent subject and draws from accounts of forced imprisonment in plays, autobiographies, travelogues, Afro-­British literature, and novels that depict the Middle East, the Americas, and Africa, among other sites. Perspectives that eschew the nation-­state model also have led to a reexamination of political Loyalists, a surprisingly neglected group. Philip Gould surmises that “the Loyalists’ presence changes the ways in which we read the political literature of this period and produces a new image of the complex political and cultural dynamics shaping British Americans’ renegotiations of their fraught and damaged relation to ‘English’ culture.”20 Leonard Tennenhouse argues that the colonial settlers constituted a “diaspora,” an idea echoed by Maya Jasonoff. Elisa Tamarkin, too, has sought to understand the lingering sentiment of Anglophilia in the colony long after British rule ceased.21 It seems this scholarly neglect results from how Great Britain did nothing to incorporate or identify with Loyalists during the war, nor did they figure in American accounts of the early republic.

6

Introduction

Wil Verhoeven suggests yet another word to describe the nascent United States: “postnationalist.” Verhoeven hedges, though, by offering the term “internationalists—­an economic order that is based on international division of labor, which determines relationships between different regions as well as the types of labor conditions within each region.”22 Yet “postnationalist” may be the most accurate rendering as it reanimates the tired construction of “international” at the same time it recalls a joke about Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759), which describes it as “a postmodern novel before there was any modernism to be post about.” The “United States,” as allegedly illustrative of the nation-­state, delegitimizes other forms of belonging even as it, upon closer examination, proves to benefit from these same fiercely local affiliations and increasingly far-­flung interconnections. It is the “post” that registers so much scholarly anxiety because we have not fully articulated how late eighteenth-­century forms provide the ur-­texts for the modern condition. To move past the metonymic associations of 1776 to capture more nuanced dimensions of the late eighteenth century, the essays that follow analyze the dynamic processes involved in material transactions, negotiation, colonizing, and narrativizing that occur throughout the eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century world. These processes were and are central to U.S. nation building but are not exclusively defined or controlled by Western states. In entering a long-­established debate about how to reconcile the discourse of insularity in the United States with its role as a formidable empire and as prominent player in foreign affairs, the volume as a whole notes the influences of peoples across disparate sites both during and after independence. Placing the American Revolution in a broader context by drawing upon new disciplinary configurations introduced by American studies, we illuminate both the local communities and (trans)hemispheric relationships (that were sometimes imagined as intimate) that formed alongside, in opposition to, or coextensively with the American Revolution. Although we, like others, acknowledge the dissolution of indigenous communities in the name of empire, we also attend to their reemergence through the very methods that threatened their demise. Efforts to decenter not only the United States but also its revolution have been at the heart of American studies for the last two decades. The essays that follow return our gaze to the Revolution only to put it alongside concurrent events that sometimes were energized or influenced by and, at other times, were confirmed in their opposition to some of the United States’ constituent elements. The Peace of Paris makes explicit

7

Introduction

the global transmissions involved in the establishment of the United States as a sovereign state, because different parts of the world were traded among the signers, such as Britain giving Minorca to Spain, the Senegal River to France, and Trincomalee in Sri Lanka to the Dutch Republic. Indeed, a week after signing the Treaty of Paris to finalize the peace settlement, the American peace delegation—­Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay—­wrote to U.S. authorities about the urgency of sending a diplomat to Morocco. The United States no longer could enjoy protection on international waters through Britain’s treaties with the Barbary States. They explain, “Our Trade to the Mediterranean will not be inconsiderable, and the Friendship of Morocco, Algiers, Tunis & Tripoli, may become very interesting, in case the Russians should succeed in their Endeavours to Navigate freely into it by Constantinople.”23 The statement’s use of litotes, “not inconsiderable,” and its vagueness, “very interesting,” illustrate how the formation of the United States was contingent on the moves of stakeholders in other regions and countries over which it had no control or negotiating power. As these relationships were fluid, the encrusted narratives that shape historical and literary scholarship not only diminish U.S. involvement far beyond the shores of the Atlantic but also neglect to underscore how U.S. policy was by no means unidirectional; in this case, Russia—­through the Ottoman Empire—­dictated U.S. foreign policy. That is, only by studying other countries’ governmental aims can we understand the early republic. The “outside-­in perspective,” then, reveals the networks of peoples and the seemingly insignificant places that figured substantially in the political and economic fortunes of numerous countries. For example, the Dutch West-­Indian colony of St. Eustatius—­the purloined letter of the late eighteenth century—­appeared everywhere and nowhere as the nexus for contraband, and its importance can be attested by its fate: it was burned to the ground in the final months of the Revolution seemingly as part of a renewed conflict between the British and the Dutch. Britain destroyed the country to stave off weapon smuggling to the colonies, which had relied on ships routed through the island to overcome the British naval blockade; but the severity of its destruction may be explained by yet another factor: the anti-­ Semitism directed at the island’s sizable Jewish population. Yet this aim to destroy commercial routes and decimate one ethnic group caused various communities to scatter across the globe, including the untraceable movements of those who labored as slaves. Also the devastating losses the United Provinces incurred in the Fourth Anglo-­Dutch War led to the reevaluation

8

Introduction

of republicanism in the Dutch Republic, which deepened after the U.S. Constitutional Convention. Similarly, the pressing needs of the British armed forces brought an eclectic mix of people to fight in the war, and, after its defeat, the British government sent those troops across the world to assorted outposts.24 General Charles Cornwallis, for example, after his surrender at Yorktown was sent to Calcutta and named governor-­general of India.25 The unprecedented losses in the British officer corps also led to problems when poorly trained commissioned officers were sent to settle parts of Australia. These examples clarify the ways in which the Revolution was one node of a global network, a network that repeatedly recalibrates. Indeed, every essay accounts for how the global stakes often transformed substantially just in the course of a few years. By using a “global” framework, we reconstruct the circulation of people, goods, and ideas that have been impeded by the usual metonymic associations of American Independence—­George Washington, Bunker Hill, republicanism.26 While “transatlanticism” has proven useful to reveal Anglo-­American shared enterprises before and after the United States became a sovereign nation, transactions between New England and Britain dominate the discussion. Broadening (or perhaps employing a more accurate form of) transatlanticism, the collection studies representations of German, French, Irish, Scottish, and Dutch movements; we also consider Australia, the Far East, the Arctic, and the Mediterranean. By prioritizing traffic across the hemisphere and far-­flung sites, this volume observes the pressures exerted by other actors on the United States as well as the ongoing formations of different entities that experienced similar influences. Thus, this collection looks at how different intellectuals in the period used the Revolution as a point of connection; it follows the dispersal of print books, guns, slaves, and even revolutionary memorabilia sold in China; it evaluates literary responses to the new republic; it establishes links between the American Revolution and the English Civil Wars of the seventeenth century; it also examines ritual practices that started in the colonies and then spread throughout British holdings, and even how, as Matthew P. Dziennik explains, Scottish and Irish peoples seized on the war to meet local needs.27 Yet besides the acknowledgment of France’s generous patronage and lingering fascination with the role of Hessian soldiers in the war, the U.S. story remains one that barely gestures beyond certain internal colonial spots. As Michelle Burnham remarks, “the year 1776 exerts an almost gravitational

9

Introduction

pull in dominant narratives of American history and literature, often yanking efforts at alternative narratives and perspectives back into more familiar temporal and spatial terms the closer one gets to the revolutionary moment.”28 More broadly, Amy Kaplan “challenge[s] the way the history of US imperialism has often revolved around a central geographic bifurcation between continental expansion and overseas empire.”29 We acknowledge this “gravitational pull” as indexing other global movements in the sense that the American Revolution was enmeshed with other historical and social movements. To move beyond “dominant narratives of American history and literature” means examining the developments concurrent with it. Several recent studies have demonstrated the multifaceted dynamics of the Haitian Revolution, the Mexican-­American War, and the Spanish-­ American War of 1898. This volume follows the lead of these scholars as well as spotlights other seemingly insignificant “revolutions” or forgotten elements of them. It builds upon the work of historians and literary scholars, like Eliga Gould, Leonard Tennenhouse, Maya Jasonoff, and Philip Gould, who reevaluate the internal power dynamics involved in the complex geographies of “the Crisis.” Recent scholarship, moreover, seeks to clarify the tensions within U.S. empire building. Andy Doolen memorably explains, “There is a distinctive impression that imperialism is truly a rupture in the American experience, ephemeral, and violent, but causing only a temporary suspension of republican enlightenment and order.”30 Scholars, therefore, must be attuned to the paradoxes that emerge when tackling the question of American imperialism. Indeed, Hardt and Negri argue that the U.S. Constitution is built upon a “principle of expansion [that] continually struggles against the forces of limitation and control.”31 Perhaps Kaplan clarifies the point most succinctly: “Imperialism does not emanate from the solid center of a fully formed nation; rather, the meaning of the nation itself is both questioned and redefined through the outward reach of empire.”32 The essays collected in this volume together make a strong case that empire actually precedes the formation of the nation-­state. Our treatment of global dimensions notes the unequal distribution of power. But because military hegemony was limited and people expressed many different forms of economic agency, we demonstrate how underdiscussed registers—­such as topographic knowledge, cultural literacy and adaptability, and religious authority—­introduce new frameworks for characterizing these exchanges. Americans cling to the national moment as a refuge, a comforting illusion, during times of change rather than apprehend—­even as they participate in—­the dependencies that cement its federation of states. 10

Introduction

The writings of Olaudah Equiano make the point more concrete because he, like the American Revolution, can sometimes be subsumed by shorthands. His autobiography, “one of the new classics of early American literary study,”33 serves as a representative example for scholars because even as they highlight the contributions of marginalized peoples, they sometimes link him with traditional narratives of establishing individual identity, shrinking, in effect, his travels to fit the (Western) sphere that interests us. He, moreover, maps well onto this changing narrative of the revolutionary period: he is subject to British imperial ambitions, and he identifies with heterogeneous local, national, and global assemblages, attaching to whatever group or idea that promises liberation from existing sociocultural forms. As Marlon B. Ross points out, Equiano’s autobiography, which chronicles his birth in Africa, his enslavement, his forced removal across the Middle Passage, his servitude in the United States and Europe and his eventual manumission, evidences the limitations of subdisciplinary boundaries in English literary studies.34 He, for instance, appears in surveys of both British and American literatures and in courses on transatlanticism and African American literature.35 Upending the placement of Equiano in discrete disciplines, Peter Jaros notes his use of the conjunction “or” between his two names: The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa; Equiano, he writes, manifests “the logic of plural identity.”36 Moreover, Vincent Carretta has offered evidence that Equiano may never have experienced the Middle Passage but was perhaps born in in South Carolina, not Africa.37 Equiano, in short, continues to demand fresh interpretations long after his story was published or canonized. This versatility extends to his discursive iterations of his life. In his life writing, Equiano absorbs each encounter with people, environments, or experiences into a new and more complex self; he eventually proves, for us, a figure who exhibits traces from diverse geographies and cultures. His facility, in fact, with eighteenth-­century discourses—­Gothic and sentimental literature, Crusoean adventure stories, aspirational or spiritual tales or biographies, and Afro-­British literature—­reiterates that he experiments with different overarching narratives, but these do not necessarily explain or substitute for his unique ontology, a life that proves just as compelling as the genres he inherits and transforms. The United States uses its Revolution, or its constructions of it, to shape its imperial designs or distract from them. Both the United States and Equiano operate in a state of constant apotheosis, evoking as it were the famous line from Milton’s Paradise Lost: “we know no time when we were not as now.” Each incident both rewrites the self and conceals its originary mechanisms in the process. Nevertheless, 11

Introduction

like the entity “early America,” loose frameworks of eighteenth-­century assemblages can be represented without severing them from their context within a rapidly changing world.

Essays The contributors attest to the largely unrecognized affiliations among diverse groups as more people migrated to different parts of the world but continued to transact with others back home, communicate in multiple languages, adapt to new imported products, and respond to local and international events. The focus on the American Revolution is neither special nor distinct; however, it provides a departure point, allowing us to engage with particularly vexed questions of historical teleology. As Robert Markley observes with regard to the plays of Aphra Behn, her work was neglected for so long because she “is historically on the losing side”; she dramatizes “culturally specific forms of resistance . . . at the expense of Whiggish conceptions of individual” rights.38 The “losing side,” however, perhaps appears more prominently than scholars have heretofore addressed. Restoring what was pared away to form a cohesive and continuous narrative is one of the main objectives of these essays. In the following essays, we aim to counter deliberately the, at times, teleological thinking about the revolutionary era. The essays have been divided into two parts. Part 1, “Transatlantic Cliques,” centers on the migration of ideas across cultures in Great Britain and the Continent, particularly among intellectuals and through print. These essays shed light on how dispersed people used the American Revolution, at times, to sustain their communities, and, at others, to gain concessions from power that feared the spread of revolutions. The word “clique” encapsulates the tension inherent in modes of inclusion that, of course, automatically gesture at exclusion. Many studies attend to the intellectual movements that fueled American Independence and to the subsequent debates about the ratification of the Constitution inspired political reconsiderations abroad; these essays instead concentrate on the social dimension of intellectuals whose writings preserve communities that were mediated through the American Revolution. Each essay refracts its subjects through not only the formation of the United States but also the end of feudalism, myths of American degeneracy, the consequences of the Seven Years’ War, the tumult of the French Revolution, and the shifting calibrations of how to reconcile republicanism with commerce.

12

Introduction

Part 2, “Secret Histories and Revolutionary Afterlives,” too, centers on understudied actors in late eighteenth-­century revolutions, but the essays chronicle forgotten sites or permutations of the colonies’ break with Great Britain. These essays articulate how revolutions fostered largely unacknowledged transatlantic and transoceanic exchanges, in the West Indies and in the first penal colonies of Australia; along the Celtic Fringe and Pacific Rim; and in the vast territories through which slavery circulated in the late eighteenth century and beyond. If the people discussed in part 1 seek to maintain presence in a world that increasingly erases difference, then the sites and supply chains discussed in part 2 were often overlooked as the United States perpetuated notions about its circumscribed borders. The communities that arose situate the war as a point of provocation for thinkers in Europe and in the colonies as evidenced by the essays in part 1. These essays engage with the circulation of ideas and how the American war for independence mediated the relationality of intellectuals. Wrestling with the concept of “America” as a nation, these intellectuals were forced to define what this political entity encompassed and how it refracted their own political forms of organization. All the essays engage with print’s substantial impact on the emergence of the U.S. nation-­state; but this volume emphasizes publishing rather than print exclusively.39 Many studies have established the centrality of print culture for evaluating the Revolution, but as William Warner has argued, those scholars have relied on “single-­channel communication,” “obscuring the place of each medium in a more complex ecology of communication.”40 The essays in part 1 reestablish print media’s emergence in specific contexts and how those contexts are shaped by stakeholders’ political motivations. These particular essays discuss the multiform contact zones within the United States as well as emphasize the ideas and relationships among French, Dutch, German, and English peoples. Over the last decade or so, historians and others have noted how Americans in the early republic continued to identify with British or English culture, but these studies tend to ignore the ethnic and racial diversity of the colonial population. Indeed, Germans outnumbered English immigrants by two to one by the 1770s based on estimates by historians; they were the second-­largest group of newly arrived populations, second only to those of African descent.41 With this demographic change, the United States book trade in the last two decades of the eighteenth century witnessed a dramatic increase in German-­language Americana. Although the interpretation of the American Revolution was a major theme in many of these circulated

13

Introduction

books, because these works were printed in Europe rather than the United States, they have not figured in recent scholarly accounts of the transatlantic book trade. But Leonard von Morzé argues that within transatlantic German-­American networks the United States provided a concrete example of the utopic site imagined during the German Enlightenment through his translation and analysis of Washington’s Arrival in Elysium (1800) and The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel (1815), two works distributed by Christian Jacob Hütter, a printer based in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Relying on book history, von Morzé unearths the circulation of texts by Hütter to elucidate how books in German about the Revolution circulate “as a kind of currency of affiliation.” The Low Countries are usually overlooked amid discussions about the diplomatic relations between European states and the United States. Wyger R. E. Velema claims that the American Revolution inspired Dutch intellectuals to reignite the republican ideals of the Dutch Republic. Historians take it for granted that the two Dutch revolutions of the late eighteenth century (the Patriot Revolution of the 1780s and the Batavian Revolution of 1795) were deeply indebted to the American Revolution. Yet surprisingly little detailed research has been done on the exact nature of the impact. By discussing the specific ways in which the colonial rebellion infused the political thought of a number of prominent late eighteenth-­century Dutch politicians and political thinkers, Velema resituates the American cause as precipitating new alliances among ascending Dutch politicians. It helped forge a coherent alliance among those Dutch revolutionaries who remained opposed to the introduction of the French principle of unity and indivisibility and who wished to maintain a federalist political structure. The ideation of “America” mediated a way toward an alliance that limited what were perceived as unsavory aspects of the French Revolution. In tracing the evolution of Dutch writers, one sees the petrification of American independence as a useful construct not just for American imperial ventures but also for the advancement of civil liberties abroad, which further masked contradictory elements in the U.S. system, such as slavery. It is commonplace to consider the French Revolution as an outgrowth of the American rebellion, but this misperception neglects to account for the ways in which the American Revolution, rather than fomenting violence, engendered transnational relationships shaped by the matrix of capital, political innovations, and ideas about land development. Carine Lounissi revives discussions about how the American Revolution in France served to

14

Introduction

create disparate connections among French intellectuals situated throughout Europe and North America prior to the outbreak of the French Revolution. In particular, she re-­creates the network of connections among Joseph Mandrillon, Antoine-­Marie Cerisier, and Michel-­René Hilliard d’Auberteuil as they traveled in Europe and across the Atlantic and established contacts between and among Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, the Hague, London, Santo Domingo, and North America. Drawing on new theoretical work in Atlantic history and historiography, Lounissi shifts the focus away from more famous French figures who wrote about the American Revolution, such as Condorcet and Brissot or Mably and Raynal; instead she makes a case for examining the largely forgotten actors, such as merchants, lawyers, journalists, polygraphers, and translators, whose writings consider how commerce complicates republican and liberal values through their engagement with physiocratic thought. The American Revolution is frequently read as undergirded by secularity or at the most by a strain of deism willing to acknowledge some greater unknown spiritual force—­termed the “Creator,” for example, in the Declaration of Independence. However, competing religious traditions informed both the originary documents as well as how they were read. A substantial gap, therefore, remains in how religion figured into the Revolution or how others abroad used the Revolution to sort through theological ideas. Ed Simon reveals how theological and secular undercurrents to the Revolution influenced British writers following the end of the conflict. Specifically, he identifies a continuum between 1650s English religious radicals and the visions of Herman Husband in western Pennsylvania and the great English poet William Blake. In his discussion of William Blake’s epic and prophetic poem America (1793), Simon analyzes how dissenting religious practices stoked revolutionary enthusiasm. He indexes this development as instrumental to the rise of Enlightenment-­era revolutionary fervor across America and Europe. Texts that are often read as vehemently secular, such as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, draw from a distinctive political theology. Traditional understandings of the Revolution, he insists, need to be revised to highlight the theological strains that crisscrossed the transatlantic in response to the emergence of a U.S. republic. Miranda A. Green-­Barteet considers the stakes of political assassination in the context of the “long” revolutionary arc of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by examining the American playwright Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast (1807), a play about Charlotte Corday’s murder of

15

Introduction

Marat during the French Revolution. According to Green-­Barteet, Pogson, born in Sussex but raised in Charleston, South Carolina, dramatizes an episode in the French Revolution to draw upon its forthright engagement with political violence. Green-­Barteet finds that Pogson intimates a much more violent role for women in the postrevolutionary societies as an untapped source of nationalist fervor. Using Corday to counter depictions of cloying republican motherhood, Pogson imagines women committing acts of terrorism to protect domestic peace if the men in authority fail to do so. In particular, the private scene of assassination—­Marat in his bathtub—­counters the public spectacle of the guillotine. Marat’s inability to conceptualize women as anything but benign objects within the domestic sphere, in fact, seals his fate. Because the theater stages private moments in public spaces, it, as Green-­Barteet shows, served as the preeminent space to rethink the public/private binary; as such, the theater allowed citizens to sort through retroactive frameworks about the American Independence in the first decades of the nineteenth century. Part 2 of this volume concentrates on the sites that remain outside the purview of studies on the American Revolution and the circulation of material objects within these wider networks which shadowed, underpinned, or challenged the Revolution. The section ends with an essay on Olaudah Equiano as his relationship to water serves as an analogue to the book’s approach. The fluidity of the ocean rather than the fixity of land, in short, illustrates the shifting cross currents of the period. Equiano visits (and revisits) most of the sites described in this book—­the West Indies, the Near East, Europe, and the Arctic Zone to name a few—­to observe the flow of objects and peoples that reject monolithic political, economic, or sociocultural frameworks. Even though this final essay only intersects with the Revolution indirectly, it highlights how circulation (of ideas, people, things) creates entropy in the late eighteenth century that the actors themselves are responsible for organizing into a unified and distinctive system. Matthew P. Dziennik’s essay considers diversity within the British military, especially the high numbers of Scottish and Irish soldiers involved in different theaters of war, like the Caribbean. He, in particular, elaborates upon three specific veins: local changes brought about by the loss of the thirteen colonies, especially legal changes; the strengthening of power in regional elites; and the overrepresentation of Irish and Scottish troops in the British army in North America and West Indies. He argues that the effects of the war were not necessarily ideological but rather local and contingent for the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland. He demonstrates how military 16

Introduction

service led to unexpected discourses on inclusion and exclusion in the British Empire. Maria O’Malley asserts the importance of St. Eustatius, a Dutch West Indian colony that served as a clandestine site for supplies smuggled to the Yankee army during the war. In her essay, she argues that U.S. empire building depended on erasing American interdependencies on “mediated states”—­states that did not have sovereign status. She finds a connection between the master trope of metonymy and eighteenth-­century attempts to erase the global supply lines that, paradoxically, undergirded popular sovereignty. Unlike metaphor with its association of border crossings—­metaphor literally means, “to carry across”—­metonymy, by troping “within” rather than across distinct categories or realms, exposes the illusion of insularity. St. Eustatius also served as a conduit for Benjamin Franklin’s mail, playing a substantial role in the laundering of money and trafficking of weapons from Europe past the British naval blockade to the American armed forces. Franklin’s time as plenipotentiary in France during the Revolution continues to circulate in American popular culture, despite how his responsibilities in 1776 back in the colonies contributed to the rise of globalism—­the interdependencies of actors who trample upon the authority of states to regulate trade. Therese-­Marie Meyer finds connections to the American Revolution’s military practices throughout the British Empire as she considers the correspondence of transplanted British officers after the colony’s loss. In particular, she sorts through textual records from the First Fleet and offers an extended analysis of the records from David Collins, an Englishman who fought in the American Revolution at the Battle of Bunker Hill and at the Great Siege of Gibraltar and later oversaw the establishment of Port Jackson colony in New South Wales. Meyer contends that a full analysis of the extensive published and unpublished First Fleet accounts and letters reveals how logistical necessities that emerged in the American theaters of war, such as Chesapeake Bay, Quebec, and Bunker Hill, became ritualized practices in other British holdings. She describes, for example, burial practices among officers and how the slipshod officer training for British officers during the Revolutionary War years had lasting effects in the treatment of colonial others. The importation of East Indies and Chinese commodities has been largely overlooked in interpretations of the American Revolution, especially as it would reframe the story of how free trade was integral to the formation of the early United States. Jeng-­Guo Chen’s essay, too, concerns the Pacific 17

Introduction

region, specifically China. Despite China’s outsized role in the commercial fortunes of European countries, the Qianlong Emperor devoted resources to China’s overland rather than maritime empire even as Chinese tea and wares structured Britain’s colonial relationship with the American colonies. After the Revolution, Chen demonstrates how a newly forged United States was able to declare its internationalist aims, in part, by overdetermining the symbolic registers of its transactions with China. However, what was meaningful to the United States was largely ignored by the Chinese government and people. He concludes with a discussion of Taiwan, which did see in the United States a model for liberation from the imperial aims of China and Japan. The last essay serves as a conclusion to the collection, broadening the paradigms discussed in the introduction and the two parts of the book. Denys Van Renen examines how Olaudah Equiano in The Interesting Life (1789) indexes the varieties of eighteenth-­century life; Equiano, in fact, enfolds other systems, ontologies, and practices into a cumulative self. Critics have steered readers away from depicting the narrative as a companion piece to the American Revolution because of the way in which it delineates the rise of the autonomous and emancipated subject.42 Van Renen describes how Equiano surmounts the displacements and dislocations he experiences and efforts by whites to Anglicize him (all of which produce spiritual and subjective crises). Thus, Equiano’s text fosters an ontology of the “globalizing subject,” who adapts to different ambient conditions but maintains the same properties. This essay analyzes Equiano’s representations of the literal and symbolic valences of water as it functions as an ideal signifier of the globalizing subject. As the site of the Middle Passage and as a substance charged with the power to purify the self (baptism), water contains danger and potential for Equiano. The emancipated slave does not validate the so-­called American individual; instead, Equiano creates a globalizing subject whose history and self cannot be claimed by or excluded from other forms of belonging and being. Though seemingly tangential to the Revolution, this essay puts the other pieces in the volume into relief while further troubling familiar figurations of the rebellion, self-­governance, emancipation, and liberty that circulated within other eighteenth-­century contexts. The essays that follow seek to create new horizons of intelligibility for understanding contact and exchange in the late eighteenth century. At the same time, they evaluate the uncontained ways in which the Revolution forged micro-­communities that aligned along different axes in the movement of cultural capital whether intellectual, ritualistic, or material. 18

Introduction

These essays answer the persistent calls from scholars to move beyond the boundaries defined by the nation-­state or periodization to open up narratives of U.S. foundations.

Notes 1. Orville Murphy, Charlies Gravier, Comte de Vergennes: French Diplomacy in the Age of the Revolution: 1719–­1787 (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1982), 393. 2. Benjamin Franklin, The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. vol. 38, ed. Leonard Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–­2011), 463. 3. Edward Larkin, “Nation and Empire in the Early US,” American Literary History 22, no. 3 (2010): 503. 4. Edward Larkin, “The Cosmopolitan Revolution: Loyalism and the Fiction of an American Nation,” Novel 40, no. 1 (2006): 52. 5. Ross Posnock, “The Dream of Deracination: The Uses of Cosmopolitanism,” American Literary History 12, no. 4 (2000): 802. 6. Larkin, “Nation,” 501. 7. Ibid. 8. Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 13. 9. Ibid. 10. Jack P. Greene, “Elaborations,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 2 (2007): 286. 11. Ibid. 12. Sandra Gustafson, “Histories of Democracies and Empire,” American Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2007): 108. See also Paul Giles, “Antipodean American Literature: Franklin, Twain, and the Sphere of Subalternity,” American Literary History 20, nos. 1–­2 (2008): 45; and Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “The Original American Novel, or the American Origin of the Novel,” in A Companion to Eighteenth-­Century English Novel and Culture, ed. Paula R. Backscheider and Catherine Ingrassia (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 247. 13. Murphy, Charlies Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, 322. The Continental Congress upbraided the American peace coalition of John Adams, John Jay, and Benjamin Franklin for violating the terms of the French agreement and jeopardizing the diplomatic relations with France. Vergennes made his displeasure clear but accepted Franklin’s renewed overtures for diplomatic unity. 14. Dillon, for instance, uses Wallerstein to offer a nuanced analysis of the United States during the Tripolitan War to assert how “national identity is also organized within a world economy in which cultures and people flow across state boundaries; the relation to pressures from a larger world system helps to form the nation” (“Slaves in Algiers: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” American Literary History 16, no. 3 [2004]: 424). 15. Michael Hardt and Antoio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 146. 16. See Bruno Latour, “On Actor Network Theory: A Few Clarifications Plus More Than a Few Complications” and The Pasteurization of France, trans. Alan Sheridan and John Law (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 159. 19

Introduction

17. Lawrence Buell, The Dream of the Great American Novel (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 471n26. 18. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse, “The Problem of Population and the Form of the American Novel,” American Literary History 49, no. 4 (2008): 668. 19. Ibid., 672. 20. Philip Gould, Writing the Rebellion: Loyalists and the Literature of Politics in British America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 8. 21. See Leonard Tennenhouse, The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750–­1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007); Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011); and Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 22. Wil Verhoeven, “Beyond the American Empire: Charles Brockden Brown and the Making of a New Global Economic Order,” in Transatlantic Literary Exchange, 1790–­1870: Gender, Race, and Nation, ed. Julia Wright and Kevin Hutchings (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2011), 184. 23. Franklin, Papers, 40:605. 24. For other perspectives, see Prasannan Parthasarathi and Giorgio Riello, “The Indian Ocean in the Long Eighteenth Century,” Eighteenth-­Century Studies 48, no. 1 (2014): 11; and David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 2. Parthasarathi and Riello note that British involvement in the Atlantic is often treated as isolated from that along the Indian Ocean: “The different structures of British commercial activity and the divergent trajectories of British political power in the two oceans seemed to disconnect them from each other” (11). Armitage also contends that “the differences between the [British] maritime, commercial colonies of settlement in North America and the military, territorial colonies of conquest in India have been crudely overdrawn” (2). 25. Maya Jasonoff argues that Cornwallis was particularly harsh in capturing territory in India because he “was making up for his embarrassment at Yorktown some years earlier” (Edge of Empire: Lives, Culture, and Conquest in the East, 1750–­1850 [London: Harper Perennial, 2006], 161). 26. This volume advances the conversation started by works like William Warner’s Protocols of Liberty, which seek to “offer an alternative to three familiar accounts of the Revolution: founder’s narratives, people’s histories, and intellectual history” ([Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013], 20). 27. Matthew Dziennik, “Soldiers, Politics, and the American Revolution in Ireland and Scotland,” 145–65. 28. Michelle Burnham, “Early America and the Revolutionary Pacific,” PMLA 128, no. 4 (2013): 953–­54. 29. Amy Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 17. 30. Andy Doolen, “Blood, Republicanism, and the Return of George Washington: Response to Shirley Samuels,” American Literary History 20, no. 1 (2007): 79. 31. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 166. 20

Introduction

32. Kaplan, The Anarchy of Empire, 12. 33. Joanna Brooks, “Soul Matters,” PMLA 128, no. 4 (2013): 947. 34. Marlon B. Ross, “The Race of/in Romanticism: Towards a Critical Race Theory,” in Race, Romanticism, and the Atlantic, ed. Paul Youngquist (Farnham and Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013). 35. Vincent Carretta explains: “It is universally accepted as the fundamental text in the genre of the slave narrative. Excerpts from the book appear in every anthology and on any Web site covering American, African-­American, British, and Caribbean history and literature of the eighteenth century” (Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-­Made Man [Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005], xii). 36. Peter Jaros, “Good Names: Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa,” Eighteenth Century 54, no. 1 (2013): 19. 37. Cathy Davidson warns against taking the “very few miscellaneous records,” such as church baptismal records, to substantiate his birthplace in the colonies, especially as doing so contradicts “a powerful text” and ignores “the implicit and explicit testimony of almost everyone who was there at the time” (“Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself,” Novel 40, nos. 1–­2 [2006]: 37). Furthermore, reading some of the evidence, she surmises that “Claiming a South Carolina birth may have seemed more like laying claim to British morals and customs if not quite legal jurisdiction” (32). 38. Robert Markley, “ ‘Be Impudent, Be Saucy, Forward, Bold, Touzing and Leud’: The Politics of Masculine Sexuality and Feminine Desire in Behn’s Tory Comedies,” in Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-­Century English Theater, ed. Douglas Canfield and Deborah Payne (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1995), 115, 116. 39. A host of studies on the revolutionary moment from Michael Warner’s The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-­Century America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), which argued that print and reprinting were central to the formation of the United States, to Trish Loughran’s The Republic in Print (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), which corrected exaggerated accounts of the circulation and distribution of printed materials, has provided nuanced treatments of the role of print in shaping the Revolution and creating narratives of cohesion in the U.S. polity. 40. Warner, The Letters of the Republic, 25–­26. 41. Aaron Fogleman, “Migrations to the Thirteen British North American Colonies, 1700–­1775: New Estimates,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 22, no. 4 (1992): 691–­709. 42. See, for example, Andrew Kopec, “Collective Commerce and the Problem of Autobiography in Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative,” Eighteenth Century 54, no. 4 (2013): 461–­78.

21

Part I

TRANSATLANTIC CLIQUES

D

Circulating the American Revolution The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter LEONARD VON M OR ZÉ

On 8 March 1800, an immigrant living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, advertised a most unusual German-­language pamphlet. In translation, the title reads Washington’s Arrival in Elysium: A Sketch in Dialogue Form by an Admirer of the Pallid Hero. The reader would have opened the book to discover a thirty-­page dialogue, concluding with a few pages of patriotic songs—­all of this “dedicated,” as the extended subtitle indicated, “to all uncorrupted American republicans.”1 Ostensibly a memorial to Washington, the dialogue would, when finally printed and distributed sometime around September 1800, contextualize the American Revolution within a global history from Rome to revolutionary France and trace the young republic’s recent fall into corruption under the Adams administration.2 As though these topics were not ponderous enough for such a short text, the author cast them into a classical genre well known to eighteenth-­century readers: a dialogue among the dead. The text, discussed at greater length below, begins with Washington’s waking up in the pagan underworld and follows him as he engages in political discussions with revolutionaries from ancient Rome to Napoleonic France. These discussions offer a rousing history of American liberties, from the first European colonization of the continent to the American Revolution and beyond. A gesture at the end of the dialogue, however, offers its most significant hint about how the author wished readers in the new century to understand Washington’s revolution. In the closing scene, Hebe, goddess of youth, offers Washington a cup from the waters of the Lethe, which would allow Washington to forget his earthly sorrows. To Hebe’s surprise, Washington makes an unprecedented refusal, as he prefers to “keep the memory of my life!” (28). As a ceremonial gesture, Washington’s act of declining the proffered cup suggests a rejection of the Christian rite of communion. This was an appropriate way to end an uncompromisingly pagan dialogue whose author was interested in the cultural capital signified by classical learning, 25

Leonard von Morzé

by knowledge about the Greek cup itself rather than in its potential to be turned into a Christian allegory. Equally significant for the purposes of this essay, the act marks a commitment to remembering the Revolution at a time when many Americans—­so the dialogue implied—­seemed determined to forget it. By implication, Washington’s revolutionary legacy does not need Hebe’s help to remain eternal. His refusal of the cup of happy forgetfulness suggests to the reader that the specific history of founding a separate American republic could be remembered without negating the possibility of subsequent revolutions. The printer (and, in the absence of other candidates, the presumed author) of the dialogue was a young man who had not been around for the American Revolution. He had arrived in the country in 1789 and was, at the time of publication, twenty-­nine years old.3 Born in Saxe-­Gotha in 1771, Christian Jacob Hütter had been taken at a very early age to Zeist in the Netherlands, and then to Pennsylvania at the age of eighteen as part of the Moravian mission. What this background does not explain is how Hütter came to view the American Revolution through the mirror of Rome’s pagan mythology and the history of its republic, and to adopt a republican historical perspective on virtue and corruption. It seems unlikely that he had any schooling in the Anglo-­American tradition reconstructed by the historians associated with the “republican synthesis,” in which Roman history played such a central role.4 The context for Hütter’s views on revolutionary political culture was, instead, a shifting set of influences that evolved in response to the unfolding of the French Revolution. In the Washington dialogue, Hütter was evidently moved by the secularization of France, which impressed him and encouraged him to see, retrospectively, the American Revolution as having satisfied the dreams of the pagan republic of ancient Rome, a progression that made the death of the founder of the “fatherland” more tolerable as it offered hope that the principles of the American Revolution had already spread abroad. Fifteen years later, however, Hütter’s admiration for the French Revolution had considerably diminished, partly thanks to his distrust of Napoleon. At this point in his career, Hütter published a remarkable novel called The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel that reworked the familial theme of Washington, once again comparing the American republic to a fatherless orphan. Yet the later work is a realist novel with an allegorical dimension rather than a dialogue conducted in a space outside history. In Moses Nathan Israel, the American Revolution embodies the historical spirit of the age, whose global dimensions await discovery (in this case, through 26

Circulating the American Revolution

a reckoning with the laws and customs of Hanseatic Germany) by the hero and the reader. In the earlier Washington, by contrast, the American Revolution is understood as the expression of natural right rather than the establishment of a positive law. Hütter understood the history of English and German transatlantic migration as the settlers’ affirmation of the right of mobility, and defended the ever-­present possibility of continued emigration. The trappings of pagan mythology and the dialogue of the dead provided an imaginative structure for the work, whose political significance was to situate the mobility that led to the American Revolution in a setting outside place and time, in the domain of natural right.

Washington and the Book Business As the leading dealer of German-­language books in the early republic, Hütter was certainly acquainted with the latest writings from Europe. He seems to have read not just the rancorous party-­sponsored newspapers which he also published himself but also German newspapers in the genre of the political review that came to the German states near the end of the eighteenth century.5 But while this genre reflected an evolving relationship between editors in the German-­language states and their reading publics, Hütter could not count on a politically engaged German American audience and instead appealed to his readers as consumers interested in purchasing books and periodicals that were valuable as commodities from overseas. At least in the Washington dialogue, his classical framework accordingly reads more as a draft of a marketable educational program than as a coherent ideology for the interpretation of political history. Roman mythology might have, in other words, conferred distinction on readers interested in buying texts other than a family Bible. Hopeful of reaching these consumers, Hütter had unbounded ambitions for his bookstore and the associated circulating library. Advertising a stock of six thousand titles for sale and claiming that his circulating library boasted one thousand titles, with “many magnificent works missing from the largest libraries in Germany,”6 he is probably responsible for circulating more non-­English material between 1798 and 1815 than anyone else on the continent. His confidence, surprising though it may seem today, in the commercial centrality of Lancaster also led to triumphant assertions about its political centrality: “The conditions in Lancaster occupy every politician from the northernmost to the southernmost extremes of the United States,” he claimed in November 1800.7 His subsequent success, despite bankruptcy 27

Leonard von Morzé

and repeated relocations, bore this out: until his death in 1849, he would enjoy an extraordinarily varied career as a printer and controversialist in the Delaware Valley. Even more than for other German-­language newspapermen (who printed one-­third of the titles produced in Pennsylvania in the 1790s), his career remains woefully understudied. This may be because he pursued his business interests by writing and distributing work whose abiding subject was, at least in the early period, political, rather than religious or ethnically particularized, or even limited to the German language, as he began to transition to English-­language printing around 1810. Of the works printed by his own press, the Washington dialogue (1800) and Moses Nathan Israel (1815) are the first and last statements we have from him during the period of the French Revolution. No definitive claim can be made about Hütter’s precise share in writing either text; he seems the most likely candidate for the author of the unsigned Washington dialogue, and he contributed, at the very least, significant edits to Moses Nathan Israel, posthumously published on behalf of the obscure Gotthilf Nicolas Lutyens, who was born in Hamburg and died in Wilkes-­Barre, Pennsylvania, in the year of the novel’s publication. Hütter’s intentions as an author are of less relevance to this essay than his responsibility for importing or printing and then selling works that encouraged readers to interpret the American Revolution in light of ongoing events. The circulation he sought was both economic and political: he wished to attract readers and book purchasers to his Lancaster bookselling operation while at the same time attempting to disseminate a Jeffersonian interpretation of the Revolution. In the ferment around the election of 1800, Hütter saw an opportunity to align his politics with his business interests, as his political identification with the Jeffersonian side supported his proposals to sell thousands of German-­ language Enlightenment books to American readers. For him, the American Revolution was an unfinished project whose legacy he thought Jefferson and the revolutionaries in France well prepared to continue. The project of this essay is modest in the sense that I draw attention to an overlooked figure whose business was “global” insofar as it paralleled the Enlightenment book trade itself. Yet Hütter’s biography may also bridge the gap between scholarship on German American literary culture and studies of German literature on the Continent. To date, the transatlantic connections between German and American literary culture circa 1800 have remained as insubstantial as the shades that Hütter’s Washington spotted along the Styx. On the one hand, comparatists have proposed important connections between German and American writers. On the other hand, 28

Circulating the American Revolution

bibliographers and folklorists have attended to German-­language writing of the mid-­Atlantic. It is fair enough to say that “belles lettres,” as one representative historian concludes, “hardly existed in the pietistic German-­ American world.”8 The list of dozens of eighteenth-­century works compiled by Robert Elmer Ward qualifies this claim somewhat, but Ward nonetheless also equated the belletristic with the “creative.”9 This equation left political productions such as Hütter’s entirely out of Ward’s bibliography. What ethnic historians ignore, moreover, is the circulation of imported books, consumer items that conferred cultural capital and political identification. Research in the transatlantic history of the book shows that even pietistic German Americans were interested in owning creative if not belletristic works. Transatlantic book distribution gives us a more varied picture than studies of cultural particularity would suggest and offers us new directions for understanding how Germans on both sides of the Atlantic might have commemorated the Revolution. The majority of the books that German Americans read, then, came not from Pennsylvania printers but from German presses in Europe and consisted of a mix of German-­and English-­language materials. At various times, Hütter controlled and lost the capital needed to acquire and distribute these varied texts, from books to pamphlets to newspapers. Hütter might thus be regarded as the “missing link” who connected the book-­buying public of the German states with their American counterparts. A transatlantic conversation between entirely separate schools of political historiography can elucidate the political significance of Americans’ purchase of imported books. On the one hand, German American politics has been ably treated through a synthesis of community-­based social and ethnic history with political history, which produced a set of studies that are empirically grounded.10 On the other hand, approaches to the reception of the American Revolution on the Continent continued the theme of the “image of America”11 studies associated with Durand Echeverria, culminating in Horst Dippel’s definitive 1977 study of the German states’ reception of the American Revolution. Dippel’s strikingly coherent, often brilliant interpretation, grounded in Marxism, argued that the responses to the American Revolution coming from a culturally and politically backward central Europe expressed social class interests. Dippel’s critique of bourgeois ideology as “false consciousness” assumed that the American Revolution’s causes could be clearly understood; from that starting point, he found ample evidence that the German bourgeoisie misunderstood them. But his interpretation, which preceded the development of the history of the book as a discipline, treated books simply as 29

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representations or reflections of economic life rather than being themselves objects of trade.12 Attending to the materiality of book distribution does not make questions of false consciousness irrelevant, but it does complicate them. If books are not simply texts (that is, representations) but are commodities, then the books do not simply comment on the Revolution in ways reflective of class interests; they also circulate as a kind of currency of affiliation, indicating the political alignments of their buyers. In his works, as I will suggest, Hütter saw free circulation itself as a revolutionary ideal, mobility of persons and commodities being the most foundational of negative liberties.13 Thus a study of practices of the circulation of books (which is not necessarily a study of reading) would effectively bridge the Atlantic world in ways that an exclusive focus on representational norms does not, important though the latter remains for the present essay. Studies in the history of the book join cultural spheres that have been considered in isolation from one another. This essay cannot provide that synthesis but instead suggests how developments in Europe may have influenced the way the American Revolution was remembered by German American readers. A steady stream of German books arriving from Europe might have become objects for debate in the German-­language American public sphere, though regrettably little evidence of reading practices appears to have survived. Through newspapers and catalogues, Hütter drew together a group of book purchasers in ways that he hoped would connect his political and business interests. The evidence suggests that Hütter printed Washington in an attempt to capitalize on the political turmoil that led to the election of 1800, which for German Americans involved a debate over the American relationship to France. The importance of this relationship for Germans lay in the fact that French armies had made successful incursions against the states of central Europe. The desirability of Napoleon remained an open question, as many German Americans had little reason to be nostalgic about the feudal Kleinstaaten they had left behind. Hütter seems to have made an assessment of the way Napoleon’s conquests of the German-­speaking states divided German American readers along partisan lines. He produced Washington as a reflection on the American Revolution, as his homegrown contribution to a book business that consisted almost entirely of imports. With its dialogue and its patriotic songs, Washington was to serve as a low-­price provocation, perhaps even a sort of “loss leader,” that would induce readers to purchase his imported

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books. Hütter’s surviving ledger shows that, according to plan, thirteen fellow book-­loving Republicans (perhaps not as many as Hütter hoped) voted with their wallets, sponsoring the book by subscription, reselling it on commission, or purchasing the copies outright. While there is no record of a buyer purchasing only a single copy, Hütter distributed 267 copies, which suggests that the thirteen buyers may have intended to resell the pieces out of their bookstores.14 It seems that to circulate Hütter’s books was to take a political side, to identify with the Republican opposition to Adams. Hütter was not the only German American to see both a political and a marketing opportunity in the circulation of representations of the Founding Fathers. Among the distributors of Washington was a German entrepreneur in Philadelphia named George Helmbold who would, in September 1800, begin a nationwide campaign advertising the sale of David Edwin’s engraving of a full-­length image of Thomas Jefferson. Since he was retailing an image rather than a text, Helmbold was not confined to a German-­language audience; he was apparently following in the footsteps of Gilbert Stuart, who had attempted a smaller-­scale campaign distributing copies of his portrait of Washington. Helmbold and Hütter wanted their images of the Founding Fathers to appeal to partisan interests while reaching the widest possible audience. Around the time of the 1800 election, the appearance of visual images of the presidential candidate in public places inevitably incited partisan commentary, and Helmbold carefully reworded his advertisements in response to the latest election returns from each state assembly.15 In his introduction to Washington, Hütter wrote that his dramatized vision of Washington was analogous to a visual representation, concluding with a wish for its verisimilitude to be recognized (“How pleased will I be if my readers recognize the portrait [Portrait] of Washington as accurate!”). Yet this appeal can also be read less as a claim of historical objectivity than as the expression of a wish to find sympathetic readers and book buyers; Hütter wishes readers to find their likeness in Hütter rather than to see Washington perfectly represented there. Given the figures for the print run, this appeal seems to have been partly successful. Yet despite the number of copies in circulation, I have not been able to find evidence of anyone actually reading Washington.16 Jacob Dietrick, who purchased fourteen copies in January 1801, did not list it in a catalogue of the 150-­odd German books available from his circulating library in Hagerstown, Maryland, that same year, though it is possible his catalogue was already in press when he received Hütter’s books.17 Indeed the only acknowledgment of its publication

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that I have yet found is indirect, in the ridicule directed at him by Johann Albrecht, the printer of the local Federalist newspaper, who editorialized in November 1800, “So here’s a question for you: when were you molded [geknetet] into a printer of books?”18 This was a fair question: not having been apprenticed, like nearly every other printer of the era, Hütter was an upstart, and Hütter’s first print production was a bold one.19 Then, in the next column, Albrecht ridiculed his rival’s primitive print operations, asking whether Hütter had made his typefaces from Lebkuchen or from stinky cheese, and momentarily switched from Gothic to roman type in order to recommend that Hütter give up German printing and recommence in French, satirically hailing his new rival: “Au Correspondent de Lancastre. Liberté! Egalité! Fraternité! Vivre libre, ou mourir!”20 A review of Hütter’s marketing campaign points to the way Washington seemed to bring together different projects: on the one hand, Hütter’s advertisements for the little book represent an ambitious commercial project establishing a German-­language communication network, while on the other hand, the text of the dialogue reflects a fascinating interpretation of the Revolution that may perhaps owe, at least in part, to frustration at the failure of that very marketing campaign. In his initial advertisement, Hütter asked subscribers for a half dollar (or the price of six months of his newspaper, Der Lancaster Correspondent), “a large octavo volume on nice paper of about sixty pages” that would be printed as soon as he has collected $250.21 Surely worried about the declining relevance of his work as the event of Washington’s death (on 14 December 1799) grew more distant, Hütter announced three months later, on 23 August, that the work was being printed and would be distributed two weeks later.22 However, the changes to the length and price of the book indicate his reduced expectations for the volume. Instead of the promised sixty, the book is just thirty-­six pages (excluding the title pages, it is a twenty-­seven-­page dialogue plus seven pages of patriotic songs). In the December announcement, he halves the price, asking a quarter dollar per copy, or three dollars for fourteen (despite his original advertisement’s promise that the price would be raised after the completion of subscriptions). It is not until 27 June 1801 that Hütter ceases to advertise his small book. It is tempting to interpret Hütter’s weird text, then, as a cri de coeur expressing an upstart printer’s frustration at public indifference. But to focus on what makes the text an anomaly—­a rare German-­language political pamphlet—­obscures its representative quality, its presentation of a characteristically Jeffersonian interpretation of the Revolution, and its 32

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corresponding celebration of freedom of circulation, whether of goods or people. That Jeffersonian interpretation viewed British political control over the colonies as a temporary contract, sealed not through colonial charters but through a later decision to accept protection against both Native American and European enemies. In an interpretation consistent with Jefferson’s Summary View, Hütter views the decision to leave for America as an escape into a state of nature; the king had no more claim to these emigrants’ America than a German elector had over the England to which the Saxons had fled.23 In keeping also with the Declaration of Independence, the Revolution is seen as an inevitable response to the failure of the king to protect his subjects. But in the text, Christopher Columbus, whose legend German fabulists (especially Joachim Heinrich Campe) had a large part in making, stands in for Jefferson, whose voice could not yet be heard among the Elysian shades. Glimpsing Washington’s shade approaching the Elysian banks, Brutus asks Columbus about the identity of the celebrated newcomer. Columbus answers: About two centuries ago, the northern part of America began to be a sanctuary for unfortunates of every kind. Anyone who could not bear the oppression of tyrants, anyone who was driven from his home by malicious priests for his contrary beliefs, anyone who was struck low by the envy of his fellow man, anyone who loved peace and quiet and could not find them in his fatherland [in seinem Vaterlande]—­all these fled to America. Britons were the first to settle here, and many of Germania’s sons followed them. Agriculture and animal husbandry were their only trades. Peace-­loving and good, like the very first human beings, they abhorred conflict. The incursions of the savage natives and the avarice and rapacity of the whites beyond the British boundaries persuaded them to recognize the King of Britain as the guardian of their rights. But the guardian soon became a subjugator who ruled the country with an iron scepter. Columbia long endured in silence the crimes of the distant despot; the yoke finally became too oppressive; the love of liberty prevailed over the love of peace; the people rose up, expelled the mercenaries who kept them in subjection, and declared their independence. But Britannia still hoped to bring a free people back into subjection; she paid foreign princes for soldiers, sending them along with thousands of her own men to America. (13–­14)

This potted history from Columbus to the American Revolution is revealing in several respects. Columbus calls the British and Germans the first settlers of America. He narrates a history of the European settlement of the 33

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continent in which the authority of the British king was freely granted only in order to protect the settlers from Indian violence. But it is Columbus’s closing mention of the Hessian soldiers, in an echo of the Declaration, that would probably have struck German readers with particular force. It would have reminded them of German princes’ notorious practice of selling soldiers to larger countries in need of a temporary fighting force, a practice that sent these soldiers around the globe. For a group of consumers whose education was as much musical as verbal, a similar reminder of this history would have been made through the suggested musical accompaniment to the first tune appearing at the end of the pamphlet, authored by one Christian F. D. Schubart (1739–­1791), the passionately pro-­American editor of the Teutsche Chronik. The occasion for the “Kaplied” (Cape Song) whose tune Hütter borrows from Schubart was the selling of two thousand Württemberg men in 1786 to fight in South Africa for the Dutch East India Company. This infamous transaction cost many of the soldiers their lives. Republican sympathies led printers like Schubart and Hütter to see the freedom of mobility promised by both American emigration and the American Revolution as reverberating across the world.24 In Washington Hütter elevates into a literary register the partisan interpretation of the Revolution that took shape around the election of 1800. For the Jeffersonians, the American Revolution was not a completed event: its relationship to German struggles in the 1780s, or the French Revolution, remained an open question rather than a study in contrast. Here Hütter has Washington grandiloquently attribute partisan conflict to a systematic British attempt to roll back the Revolution. When Penn asks him about why John Adams’s America has returned to its prerevolutionary English alliance, Washington explains: Britannia can never forget that she once ruled America. With arms she sought to maintain her arrogated right  .  .  . that did not succeed. Thus she turns to guile now. She gives salaries to shameful scoundrels, the scum of the earth, to set the once harmonious people against each other. Magazines and pamphlets [fliegende Blätter] are the means whereby they spew their venom. Oh, this has already worked too well! English people who live among us but remain dependent on their native land; miserable Americans who played an important role under English subordination, whom necessity had made republicans and who now come forward openly as aristocrats; émigrés who left their fatherland when France restored the abrogated rights of men, and who would rather be slaves to tyrants than free 34

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citizens—­these are the people who stoke the smoldering embers of conflict, and have thus led already a large part of the American nation astray. (20; ellipsis in original)

Thus Hütter contrasts Britain’s long and bitter memory of the Revolution with the forgetfulness of the Americans, who are consumed by the fliegende Blätter, literally “flying leaves,” of partisan controversy. Hütter was himself an avid participant in this paper war, but he suggests here that Albrecht and others enjoyed a British subvention for subverting American democracy. Washington continues: At the instigation of England, everything was done to involve us in a war with France, our sister republic whom they hated, whereas the patriots were wholeheartedly delighted when she achieved the ineffably great blessing of liberty. The consequences would have been terrible for America if this plan had been successful, which would once again have eradicated the liberty that is heaven’s sweetest blessing, and reestablished a throne for whose destruction much blood had been spilled. Those Americans who remained true deeply felt the disgrace that had been inflicted on them, and they united to bring about a change in their condition. The most recent election for Pennsylvania governor provided them with an opportunity to wrest the government from these unworthy hands. (23)

But this plan did not succeed, and at least in Pennsylvania the Republicans returned to power. The freedom achieved by the “Revolution of 1800,” which Hütter thought would be realized even in the absence of definitive electoral results, is repeatedly imagined as a restoration of lost liberties: Imagine the emotions of the friends of a prisoner who, having languished in a dark dungeon for years, has suddenly been freed and given back to his family. Those emotions would be but weak in comparison to those now felt by the friends of liberty. Public festivities were held, shouts of jubilation resounded on all sides, . . . heartfelt joy replaced the dejection that had spread across their brows. The traitors to the country were consumed by their wrath and swore terrible vengeance. But their desires were ignored; the new rulers had set limits on the mischief they could do, and Pennsylvania seems to want to restore its lost happiness, and the other states are preparing to follow its lofty example. (24; ellipsis in original)

The Washington dialogue constituted a claim to the memory of the Revolution whose spirit Hütter believed had been forgotten. This “spirit of 1776” referred, for Hütter as for so many of his contemporaries, more to the achievement of social unity in the face of obvious political fissures than to 35

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political independence. This emphasis on social unity acknowledges no legitimate basis for disagreement. Like his contemporaries, Hütter attributed the disunity to the other side: “My fellow German citizens of America, I appeal to your conscience whether I am wrong in claiming that the Federalists are not animated by that spirit which animated all of us in Anno 1776”?25 He explained that “many thousands of Americans did not have the opportunity to feel the British yoke before our independence” and therefore took their liberties for granted.26 The claim to the revolutionary legacy remained in dispute, and it was left to each side to blame the other for initiating the conflict. Hütter’s Federalist antagonist Albrecht knew how to use the history of the American Revolution to make his own case against the Jeffersonian Republicans. Albrecht printed the false allegation that Hütter had been born in Hesse, thus associating him with the soldiers hired by George III.27 Like Hütter, Albrecht attributed the origins of political dissension in the republic to his opponents. Demonstrating a level of sophisticated play with the German language of which Hütter was incapable, Albrecht put a wittier version of Washington into dialogue with living heroes such as John Adams. In one newspaper pasquinade, printed around the same time as Hütter’s pamphlet, between Washington and the sitting president, Washington and Adams indict the demonic French “degenerate rabble [Lumpengesindel]” for “contaminating [verunreinigen] the country as they stepped into it.” The verb verunreinigen means to contaminate but also sounds a lot like an invented word, ver-­un-­einigen or “dis-­unifying” the Vereinigten Staaten, the “United States.”28 While Albrecht punningly called Hütter a lying deceiver, a stooge-­ like “Hüter,” or defender, of the Jacobins, Hütter all the while insisted, in a Jeffersonian vein, on the virtue of the plebeian class. The novel he printed in 1815 would develop a fuller portrait of the revolutionary plebeian, but now it linked American virtues to German rather than French roots. The move from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century also corresponded to a shift in historical consciousness for Hütter, as he began printing novels instead of dialogues, contributing to the genre that would dominate the new century’s literature.

The Orphan Republic The first years of the nineteenth century saw an important shift in Hütter’s business, as he moved from importing books en masse to printing them. At the same time, he experimented with printing narrative works.29 Perhaps 36

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he was transferring the high hopes he had entertained for the genre of the dialogue to the genre of the novel. Hütter’s experimentation with novels culminated in the publication of the English-­language work The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel (1815). Hütter edited the novel and probably rewrote some sections, as well as printing and promoting it; as with Washington, he began seeking subscribers for Israel well before publication—­in the latter case, advertisements began appearing at least six years earlier.30 Instead of the historical personages represented in Washington with its dialogue among the dead, Israel features wholly fictionalized characters. Yet important thematic links connect Washington and Israel. The contested history of the American Revolution is central to both works, as is the guiding metaphor of the nation as a male orphan entering a political order without a patriarchal source of authority. The Washington dialogue describes a subtle transition, as identification with the father of the nation is replaced by allegiance to the fatherland.31 Yet, inasmuch as he accepts that the monarchical spirit is dead in the United States, Hütter both mourns Washington’s death and acknowledges that alternative bases for social unity were always necessary in a nation without kings. America is an orphan, declares Franklin in the Washington dialogue: “Land of my birth! you are orphaned, who will be a father to you?” (18) Though Washington dismisses Franklin’s concern, the question of Washington’s replacement remains unanswered in this 1800 text. Beyond a commitment to remembering the Revolution (or a certain version of it), the Washington dialogue fails to offer an alternative basis for social unity. Clearly, the ever-­changing France of the Revolution could not offer a stable point of identification for the American republic. Even Hütter disclaimed the label “Jacobin.” After Napoleon’s reimposition of dynastic law, Hütter could not continue to maintain that the French leader was simply globalizing the principles of the American Revolution. The identification of the father of the nation with the father of its next leaders represented an obvious regression to monarchical principles.32 Turning to the German states rather than to France, The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel works out something like an alternative genealogy for American federalism, with the protagonist’s travels in Europe reversing the emigration story in Washington. The smaller Hanseatic cities, viewed through a post-­Napoleonic retrospective, offer a granular rather than monolithic picture of state sovereignty, characterized as these cities are by distinctive, mutually contradictory laws. Playing on the ambiguity of the German term Vaterland, which can refer either to a country of origin or an adopted country, the nation/orphan in this novel makes a series 37

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of involuntary discoveries that locates American political identity between Germany and the American backcountry. The plot can be briefly summarized. One night in April 1775, a pregnant woman shows up at an inn on the road between New York and Boston. During the birth throes of the American Revolution, Moses comes into the world to a mother who does not identify herself to her hosts before she dies. The only clue to the orphan’s identity is a document which is apparently a Taufschein, a baptismal certificate traditionally used by Germans, left in his mother’s Bible. The Connecticut-­born boy is educated by a series of Anglo-­American Presbyterians who can trace their revolutionary principles to their ancestors with clarity, in one case to “the Puritan Moses” Cromwell himself, while the best guess they can offer poor Moses Nathan about his baptismal certificate is that it is written in Persian or Turkish. Adding to the joke about Moses’s Middle Eastern origins is a running gag in the novel in which Moses Nathan Israel is repeatedly mistaken for a Jew, his name getting him into trouble over and over again. Figurally speaking, Israel’s story is modeled on the traditional legend of the Wandering Jew.33 But this is a secularized retelling of the Wandering Jew, which implicitly connects the hero’s lack of a nationality with Jewish statelessness, a condition that is not remedied by Moses’s wandering through a Germany consisting of many principalities with mutually exclusive laws and customs. Moses’s political maturity will be achieved only by returning to the United States. But his passage through Germany is critical to Moses’s discovery of his adult identity. While Moses’s mother actually turns out to be French, it is the father’s origins in a tiny Bavarian village that will determine the course of the plot. Born during the American Revolution, Moses is a national allegory,34 a mold into which few heroes of early U.S. novels fit: the American Revolution and its aftermath generally register in these novels as a site of unhealed trauma. This trauma pervades the works of Charles Brockden Brown, whose father’s wartime imprisonment is reflected in such novels as Edgar Huntly (1799), set outside the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Whereas Brown produces a vision of a violent backcountry, however, Lutyens scarcely gives us any sense of the American frontier at all; the alien landscapes with which the reader will become acquainted are all set in Germany and Italy. Moreover, Lutyens gives a stronger version of orphaning than one finds in Huntly—­the former hero does not know the identity of his parents at all, and feels no sense of loss over what happened during the American Revolution. In both novels, the hero loses his parents to frontier violence around the period of the Revolution, but in the German American work 38

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the father is, through a series of coincidences, triumphantly restored to his son. If orphaning in Edgar Huntly refers to the trauma of revolution and in Washington to the problem of proper patriotic remembrance, orphaning in Moses Nathan Israel refers to that which was never known at all but awaits discovery—­the identity of the parent. Far from reawakening a trauma, family history in Lutyens’s novel provides a source of national renewal. In Moses Nathan Israel, then, the American Revolution is responsible for separating the hero from his parents, but this scarcely registers as a trauma. Reversing an incipient national tradition of America-­as-­orphan narratives, which seem designed to facilitate cultural independence from Europe, or at least to allay the anxiety of European cultural influence,35 Moses Nathan Israel moves toward identification and reunification with the lost father. In terms of the realist (picaresque) novel, Moses is a typical artisan with no estate but a restless inclination that leads him to wander through the German and Italian states. Soon, having acquainted himself with German culture and the language, he is able to read the birth certificate, discovering therein the name of his father, Landman, which has the same semantic duality as the English word “countryman”: a farmer who is also a fellow American. While traveling through the German states, Moses Nathan falls in love, pledging himself to a Bavarian woman. His fiancée, Henrietta, as it turns out, is actually his cousin, and his father, for whom he works after meeting him in a tavern on the road to Washington, is a German American patriot who had been separated from his French wife during the Revolution. Comically, Moses nearly marries his sister, a woman named Betsey whom he has met on his father’s plantation in Virginia, but the revelation of his father’s identity occurs just in time, and Moses instead ends the novel marrying his cousin and marrying off his newfound sister to that wife’s brother. Thus the novel closes with two weddings of the two pairs of cousins in this reunited family. In this summary, I have deliberately neglected to mention the material that would seem to make the novel interesting to historians: published in 1815, the year that spelled the end of the age of revolutions, the novel devotes at least half its space to a meticulous survey of Germany and Italy as presented to the narrator’s open-­eyed innocence, as he “discovers” major German and Italian cities, from Hamburg to Venice, as though for the first time. Written around the time of Madame de Staël’s famous De l’Allemagne (1810), Lutyens’s narrator provides the same impression that German culture is an object of discovery, offering a deep history that can provide a counterweight to French Enlightenment. If Staël makes Germany, rather than Italy, 39

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the object of a “Grand Tour”–­style survey, then Lutyens takes this mode even further by seeing the world through the eyes of a poor artisan rather than a moneyed gentleman. On the surface, the family plot, which concerns the displacements caused by the American and French Revolutions, is less interesting than the topographical information about Europe. As so often with this type of book, the plot seems secondary, and the task of criticism is to figure out why it is there at all: why did Lutyens not write another nonfictional tract, and why did Hütter not publish another political drama along the lines of Washington? Such works could well have been updated with a political vision reflective of the dismay at the course the French Revolution had taken. In addition to the increased currency of the genre, the choice of the novel form accommodates Lutyens’s desire to develop a family plot in which the hero travels abroad. As his travels coincide with the American Revolution and as he reunites with family members, Moses’s travels resemble a homecoming, for he also discovers the secret of his family. While endogamous marriage, in this case between cousins, was probably not exceptional in any historical or sociological sense, what surprises is the novel’s peculiar use of this family melodrama: here, the hero’s discovery while in America that the woman with whom he happens to have fallen in love back in Germany is actually a family member reduces the scale of the action in a way that cuts through the unsettling changes experienced on both sides of the Atlantic. As with so many English narratives about orphans, from Moll Flanders (1722) to The Power of Sympathy (1789), the uncertainty of the orphan’s paternity poses the continual danger of brother-­sister incest. But Lutyens manages quite differently the orphan/incest nexus that tends in other early American novels to result in catastrophe. In early national narratives of brother-­sister incest, such as The Power of Sympathy, the discovery of the identity of the orphan’s father ends in madness and suicide. In the early republic such narratives reflect a “deep anxiety about ease of social movement,” a sense that the class system remains too unclearly defined.36 Yet the older colonial example of Moll Flanders is more relevant to Moses Nathan Israel, in that both novels are more concerned with physical rather than class mobility. Incest in Defoe’s novel can be taken as a figure of the magnetism by which the limitless American landscape gets reduced to the tiny scale of the family; in far-­flung Virginia, Moll cannot avoid being pulled into her brother’s arms. The prohibition against incest (which is actually broken

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in Defoe) both reduces the immensity of colonial space and forces Moll back into motion. Yet in Lutyens the hero’s discovery that his prospective bride is his sister causes nothing but a slight disappointment. He also finds, while in the United States, that the woman he met in Germany is actually his cousin, whom he may marry legitimately. Lutyens depicts the transatlantic connection between Moses and his bride Henrietta as complementing his bond with his newfound Virginian sister Betsey. As it turns out in the end, the hero’s travels throughout Europe have healed the social disruption of the American Revolution, bringing the fragmented family back together again. The family melodrama, in other words, manages both to celebrate the foundational freedom of mobility Hütter associated with the American Revolution and to satisfy a desire for history by producing a localized sense of “roots.” The hero’s free circulation is counterbalanced by a comfortable reduction of scale, as though by going abroad he had been heading home all along. This reduction also acts to counterbalance the long survey chapters that provide nondiegetic information about the wide world and that could potentially have been interminable. Through the family plot, the hero abandons the project of transmitting authoritative information about a dizzying succession of European and American cities; Lutyens, in fact, telescopes these diverse spaces into two German and French Canadian villages from which Moses’s parents stem. For all of the unrealism of the reunions, Lutyens offers enough of a nod to the traditional realist novel that the obscure town names convey something like a “reality-­effect”: the village of Aurach could not possibly be important enough to be included in the novel’s survey of great cities from Hamburg to Venice, but its insignificance makes more plausible the novel’s family melodrama. The pages and pages of information about the civic traditions of Leipzig or Rome, in fact, seem irrelevant as the novel centers on the lives of and interactions among people from a tiny Bavarian village. In another sense these two aspects of the novel—­the sweeping worldly scale of the survey of Germany and Italy, and the local scale of the family story originating with the American Revolution—­are mutually reinforcing: the narrator’s discovery of his family parallels the post-­Napoleonic discovery of German political culture, particularly its claims to civic republicanism. The conclusion and the additions by the printer Hütter reconstruct something like a republican tradition in the Hanseatic world, in which German artisans’ self-­government and free trade might offer lessons for the

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American republic, perhaps in contrast to the British liberal tradition. Likewise, the German city-­states are seen to operate differently from the Napoleonic empire; if, as the 1815 postscript to the novel suggests, those cities are likely to be restored to their pre-­Napoleonic condition, then Americans are urged to pay attention to a political tradition that once seemed to them (as recently as in the Washington dialogue itself) to have little value. While urban regulations are implemented by the heavy hand of the state, which sometimes lands Moses in jail, these laws are the product of a local rather than an imperial (Napoleonic) sovereignty and therefore by implication less threatening. Perhaps the civic tradition of the city-­states might offer an alternative to the varieties of expansionist discourse, whether Napoleonic or Jeffersonian. The context for this political conclusion is comparative revolutionary history, which apparently interested the two men who produced the novel. Lutyens having died in the year of the novel’s appearance, Hütter seems to have made strategic edits to the volume. Hütter’s concluding “Memorandum” precisely identifies the global politics at stake in the text: It is superfluous to take notice of the wonderful changes and revolutions, which since Moses Nathan Israel travelled through the continent of Europe, have happened to nearly all those places which he visited and described in this present work. Particularly as the occurrences which took place in the first part of the current year, 1814, are of such a nature as to make it probable that the old order of things, such as described by Israel, will be as much as possible restored. It is generally known that the finest pieces of art in sculpture, castings and paintings, described in this work were transported by the order of Bonaparte to Paris, wether [sic] they will be suffered to remain there, time only will develop. (215/167)

It is as if the novel depicts the early nineteenth century as organizing the disparate traditions of various nations and providing a shared global history. However, the novel expresses anxiety as to whether this history will remain accessible: “time only will develop.” If the novel exhibits anxiety about cultural history, it suggests that the origins of democracy, trade, and labor regulation, which he finds in Hamburg and Leipzig and the Hanseatic cities, provide a firmer political foundation. Lutyens’s emphasis tends to be on the enlightened features of the Hanseatic city governments in particular (Lutyens was himself from Hamburg), whose political and economic liberalism are shown to precede the arrival of the Napoleonic code. While the novel does not offer an entirely rosy picture of the German states, it does 42

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allow Hütter in his afterword to treat the restoration of pre-­Napoleonic central Europe as a positive development. In interpreting Hütter’s Washington dialogue, I have suggested that Hütter saw a community of like-­minded readers/consumers as the potential foundation for a utopian period of political consensus that would reemerge after the Revolution of 1800. By printing a pamphlet about Washington and asking his buyers to sell it for him, Hütter was building a public sphere that would celebrate the ideal of free circulation represented by American emigration and the Revolution. Fifteen years later, Hütter was living in the Republican-­controlled nation that he had desired, but his political vision became more nuanced as he came to understand the liabilities of free circulation. While Moses Nathan Israel also celebrates the value of mobility, it tends toward a reduction of geographical space to the scale of the family and situates the right to free circulation within history rather than viewing it from a timelessly classical vantage point. As he moved from printing a dialogue to printing novels, Hütter was placing the American Revolution within a history of the present that might record and preserve “the old order of things” as revolution and counterrevolutions disrupted local culture. In his “Memorandum” concluding the novel, Hütter draws attention to the artwork described in the text not to highlight the circulation of art through ekphrasis, but to catalogue German and Italian art that had been displaced to France. Hütter saw cultural artifacts as tokens of memory and political capital, as signified by Hebe’s cup or Washington’s portrait, or for that matter by the text of Moses Nathan Israel itself, part of which (as he explains) “had been lost on the route for upwards of one year,” probably due to the War of 1812 (257/167). Hütter recognized that histories that had been lost or thought to be of little value (such as those of the German city-­states) might now be circulated to an appreciative audience. At a moment when the French Revolution had lost its luster and when American Anglophobia was at a high point, Hütter thought that the local cultures of central Europe might be valuable tokens in the currency of political affiliation. But he also saw that the value of the American Revolution remained constant. During a period of turmoil in the United States and still more in Europe, Hütter invited retellings of American independence amid the shifts in political alignment following the French Revolution.

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Notes I gratefully acknowledge the excellent feedback from the editors of this volume and from my colleague Betsy Klimasmith, as well as the support of a Reese Fellowship to study Hütter from the American Antiquarian Society. All translations from the German are mine; the original language will not be quoted unless it is relevant to the argument. 1. Washingtons Ankunft in Elisium: Eine dialogisirte Skizze von einem Bewunderer des erblaßten Helden; Nebst einingen Gedichten den Zeitläuften gemäs. Allen unverfälschten republicanischen Americanern gewidmet (Lancaster, PA: printed by Christian Jacob Hütter, 1800) 3. Hereafter my translation is cited parenthetically. For a complete translation, see my “Christian Jacob Hütter’s Washington: An Introduction, Commentary, and Translation of the Work,” Amerikastudien/American Studies 60, nos. 2–­3 (2015): 293–­331. 2. The date of distribution is surmised from Hütter’s announcements in his newspaper, Der Lancaster Correspondent (hereafter LC) 66 (23 August 1800): 1. 3. The authoritative source of information on Hütter’s life is Hermann Wellenreuther’s “Printer of a New Generation.” I am grateful to Professor Wellenreuther for sharing his unpublished draft with me. 4. Robert Shalhope, “Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3d ser., 29, no. 1 (January 1972): 49–­80. 5. Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-­Century Political Thinking, trans. B. A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977), 25. 6. LC 40 (22 February 1800): 1. 7. Ibid. 78 (15 November 1800): 1. 8. Christopher Dolmetsch, German Press of the Shenandoah Valley (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 58. 9. Ward’s bibliography represents a signal accomplishment in a century-­long tradition of scholarship (dating to the ethnic historians of the 1890s) committed to constructing an admittedly slight tradition of native German American writing by “weed[ing] out” writings of European origin from writings produced in the United States (see Robert Elmer Ward, A Bio-­Bibliography of German-­American Writers, 1670–­1970 [White Plains, NY: Kraus International, 1985], xii). Such studies preceded the development of Atlanticist approaches and in fact are profoundly opposed to transatlantic textual analysis insofar as they assume that only indigenously produced works merit Americanists’ attention. Folklorists meanwhile have assumed, along related lines, that German American writing (rather than book buying) becomes worthy of attention only insofar as “Pennsylvania Deutsch” became an indigenous folk tradition with a literature, if not a language, of its own. 10. See especially Liam Riordan’s excellent synthesis Many Identities, One Nation: The Revolution and Its Legacy in the Mid-­Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 11. Deutschlands Literarisches Amerikabild, ed. Alexander Ritter (Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1977). 44

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12. Note that Jürgen Habermas’s more dialectical model assumes that the marketplace, with its “interested,” for-­profit system for distributing information, also gave rise to the “disinterested” public sphere (see Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989], 21). 13. In defending a liberal ideal of revolution, Hannah Arendt observes that an insistence on the right of mobility is the most foundational negative liberty (Arendt, On Revolution [New York: Penguin, 1964], 32). 14. In the introduction and translation of Washington in Amerikastudien/American Studies, as cited above, I erroneously underreported the number of buyers and copies sold, based on my imperfect reading of Hütter’s sales ledger. In the meantime I have benefited from the German manuscript reading skills of Alexander Lambrow, who expertly and patiently transcribed the entire ledger for me. The ledger is in the Northampton County [Pennsylvania] Genealogical and Historical Society Archives, call number 658.87M554. Its contents are briefly discussed in Hermann Wellenreuther, Citizens in a Strange Land: A Study of German-­American Broadsides (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013), 25–­30. Wellenreuther and James Green identified the ledger as Hütter’s. 15. Carl Robert Keyes, “History Prints, Newspaper Advertisements, and Cultivating Citizen Consumers: Patriotism and Partisanship in Marketing Campaigns in the Era of the Revolution,” American Periodicals 24, no. 2 (2014): 145–­85. 16. Some of this may be attributable to the remarkably poor state of German-­language newspaper preservation. The Clarence Brigham correspondence at the American Antiquarian Society from the 1920s suggests that some of these newspapers had been destroyed during the First World War. At the present time, a small part of the remaining German-­language serials have been digitized, with lone surviving issues scattered over many libraries. I draw mostly on the issues held in the American Antiquarian Society and the Lancaster Historical Society. 17. Jacob Dietrick, A Catalog of Jacob D. Dietrick’s Circulating Library Consisting of History, Voyages, Novels, &c. now kept in Hagers-­Town adjoining his Book-­, Paint-­, & Hardware-­Store (Hagerstown, MD: printed by John Gruber, 1801). My thanks to Jill Craig of the Western Maryland Public Library for digitizing the only surviving copy of the catalogue for me. 18. Amerikanische Staatsbothe 151 (19 November 1800): 3. Another issue at stake in this dispute was the procurement of lucrative state printing contracts. Hütter fired back with an equally puerile retort: “Where did you learn the noble printing trade? Didn’t you learn your alphabet from a 1527 Catholic book attacking heretics and Indians?” (LC 79 [22 November 1800]: 3). 19. Wellenreuther, “Printer of a New Generation,” 3–­4. 20. Der Amerikanische Staatsbothe 151 (19 November 1800): 3. 21. LC 42 (8 March 1800): 1. 22. Ibid. 66 (23 August 1800): 1. That fall, Hütter also began printing Helmbold’s advertisements for his copperplate engravings. 23. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1964), 83–­84. 45

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24. On Schubart’s republicanism, see Jeffrey L. High, “Introduction: Why Is This Schiller [Still] in the United States?,” in Who Is This Schiller Now? Essays on His Reception and Significance, ed. Jeffrey L. High, Nicholas Martin, and Norbert Oellers (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 2011), 2–­4. According to his ledger, Hütter sold two volumes of the Teutsche Chronik to Mathew Carey in January 1800. It must be noted that Schubart’s “Kaplied” did not overtly protest the sale; on the contrary, it prepared the soldiers to fight. Schubart apparently wrote the song in a compromise gesture after a lengthy prison sentence. 25. LC 66 (23 August 1800): 1. See Wesley Craven’s contention that “among a people who even today can recall only with difficulty the exact date on which their constitution was officially adopted, ‘the spirit of ’76’ was destined to remain a slogan calling first of all for unity. . . . The answer given to that question was shaped in part by the very incompleteness of the union achieved in 1776” (Craven, The Legend of the Founding Fathers [New York: New York University Press, 1956], 74). 26. LC 57 (21 June 1800): 1. 27. Hütter retorted by declaring that he had been born in Saxe-­Gotha, and that he became an American “not by chance but by choice” (LC 123 [26 September 1801]: 2). 28. Der Amerikanische Staatsbothe 131 (2 July 1800): 1. This narrative is numbered into mock-­biblical verses. The chronicle begins when Parisian fishwives guillotine King Ludwig and replace him with a five-­headed Demon (after the famous print made for the XYZ Affair). An epistolary correspondence between Adams and Washington follows, as the sitting president summons the latter from his “peaceful abode” (friedlichen Auffenthalt; it is unclear here whether this Washington is alive or dead, the resting place in question Mount Vernon or the grave). 29. For example, Eliza; or, The Pattern of Women: A Moral Romance (Lancaster, PA: Hütter, 1802) and Weibliche Standhaftigkeit (Easton, PA: Hütter, 1809), the latter a translation of a now-­lost English novel, Female Constancy; or The History of Miss Arabella Waldegrave (1769). 30. Oliver Scheiding has recently produced an outstanding electronic edition of the novel (http://​etext​.obama​-institute​.de​/wp​-content​/uploads​/Lutyens​_Life​_and​ _Adventures​_1815​_Final​_20​_04​_2016​.pdf). All quotations are taken from this edition. I will indicate two sets of page numbers: first, the 1815 edition; second, Scheiding’s edition (e.g., 26/15). The only other book that appeared under Lutyens’s name is a German-­ language 1796 Hamburg text addressed to potential German emigrants to Pennsylvania. While a promotional work, Lutyens’s portrait of America is not entirely sanguine; for example, he warns his readers of the dangers of dealing with land agents and states that in no country is land ownership more disputed or more difficult than in the United States, such that even a firsthand survey of the land cannot protect buyers (see Etwas über den gegenwärtigen Zustand der Auswanderungen und Ansiedlungen im Staate von Pennsylvanien in Nord-­Amerika, besonders in Ansehung der Deutschen [Hamburg: Carl Ernst Bohn, 1796], 22–­23). 31. The word Vaterland appears eight times in Hütter’s text. The patria is usually male, rather than female, in the German language. A useful set of essays exploring the implications of these and other terms during a period in which no unified German “nation”

46

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existed in any political sense is Volk—­Nation—­Vaterland: Studien zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Herrmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1996). 32. When Hütter reprinted the letter from Bonneville de Ayral calling for Napoleon’s consulate to be passed on to his heirs, he appended the simple headline: “Traurig” (Sad), LC 168 (7 August 1802): 2. 33. Hütter is thought to have reprinted a popular 1602 text about Ahasuerus, entitled Wahre Geschichte oder Lebensbeschreibung des immer in der Welt herum wandernden Juden (Hellertown, 1810). 34. Scheiding, The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel, ix. 35. On American self-­orphaning narratives, see Leo Bersani, The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), chap. 6. 36. Anne Dalke, “Original Vice: The Political Implications of Incest in the Early American Novel,” Early American Literature 23, no. 2 (1988): 188.

47

Republicanism Redefined How the American Revolution Transformed Dutch Political Culture WYGER R. E. V ELEM A

Revolutions do not, as Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein have recently observed, occur ex nihilo and usually model themselves to a certain extent on “preexisting revolutionary scripts.”1 This is certainly true for the long Dutch Revolution of the late eighteenth century, which lasted from the early 1780s until the late 1790s. Historians have long been aware that late eighteenth-­ century Dutch reformers and revolutionaries were highly conscious of both the historical and the contemporary precedents for their political experiments. They constantly compared their own thoughts and deeds with previous Dutch history, with the history of the ancient republics, and—­from the late 1780s on—­with the revolutionary scenario that was rapidly unfolding in France. Historical scholarship on the Dutch Revolution, however, has been relatively reluctant to acknowledge a further decisive factor in the revolutionary transformation of the Dutch Republic: the American Revolution.2 Yet almost from the start of their attempts to reform and reinvent their republican political order, Dutchmen demonstrated a lively awareness that events across the Atlantic were much more than a struggle for independence and constituted a veritable “republican revolution,” highly relevant to their own concerns.3 Indeed, the reception, appropriation, and adaptation of key aspects of the American Revolution was one of the central features of the Dutch Revolution of the late eighteenth century. This, of course, was a selective process. From the information about the American Revolution that reached them through the highly developed transatlantic networks of communication, Dutch reformers and revolutionaries picked only those elements that seemed germane to their own political preoccupations. Primarily focused on establishing a modern and popular form of republicanism, Dutch reformers and revolutionaries were, at first, interested in the new American forms of republican government, based as they were on popular sovereignty and the principle of representation. 48

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When, after 1795, they came to write their own first constitution, some of them, moreover, came to regard American federalism as an alternative to what were perceived to be the excessively centralist tendencies of the French revolutionary model of unity and indivisibility. Before turning to the specifics of the Dutch reception, appropriation, and adaptation of elements from the American republican revolution, however, this essay will first briefly demonstrate that late eighteenth-­century literate Dutchmen, from the die-­ hard adherents of the old order to the most fervent revolutionaries, were united in their conviction that the spectacular and ongoing transformation of their republican political culture was mainly due to the American Revolution. Second, it will provide the historiographical background against which the necessity of a renewed discussion of the Dutch impact of the American Revolution becomes clear. To those who remained steadfastly opposed to all attempts to reform the existing political structure of the Dutch Republic, it was clear where the misguided desire to do so had originated. Early in 1781, the Dutch enlightened conservative Elie Luzac explained to the readers of his Reinier Vryaarts Candid Letters why, if he were to be offered the choice, America would be the very last place in the world he would want to live. In America, he observed, “those who think that the instructions and laws of the legitimate government should be obeyed, are tarred and feathered and then displayed to the rabble, exactly as used to be the case with whores in France.” It was therefore incomprehensible, he continued, that so many of his own countrymen insisted on regarding America as a shining example of liberty and desired to follow the American revolutionary example.4 Two years after Luzac voiced these strong opinions, Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel, who would eventually become the last Grand Pensionary of Holland, wrote a short essay entitled “The Origin, Eruption, and Progress of the Political Unrest in the Dutch Republic.” How was it possible, he wondered, that his country over the past few years had seen “the seeds of democracy and licentiousness” sown in the name of liberty? The answer was clear. The example of the “pure democracy” of the new governments in North America that had caused “all heads to spin and to imagine that this was the only form of true liberty.”5 Some ten years later, well after the French Revolution had replaced the American Revolution at the center of attention, Luzac’s and Van de Spiegel’s sentiments were echoed by their fellow conservative Adriaan Kluit, a very grumpy but also very learned professor of history at Leiden University. The current political troubles of the Dutch, Kluit was convinced, had been caused by the fact that many people had abandoned the harmonious ways of their forefathers and 49

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had instead embraced the monstrous liberty of the Americans, in particular their “Philosophical notions of excessive Popular Government.”6 And at the end of the eighteenth century, the eccentric and prolific scholar Rijklof Michael van Goens still discerned the very same revolutionary genealogy: “It is not in France, it is in Holland, and originally in America, that the French revolution is to be studied. . . . Whatever horrors were committed in France, on a large scale, had been plotted in miniature and tried in dumb shew in Holland. . . . It is in Holland, and ultimately in America, that the Demon of Revolution has served his prenticeship!”7 Those who desired fundamental changes in the Dutch republican political order and were engaged in implementing them agreed with the conservative view that the American Revolution had triggered the Dutch desire for reform and even revolution. In February 1782, the Mennonite preacher François Adriaan van der Kemp, equally admired and loathed for his capacity to combine religious with political themes in his utterances from the pulpit, exhorted his Leiden flock to look to America as an example of republican virtue: “America can teach us how to counter the degeneration of our national character, how to stop the corruption of our morals and manners, how to put an end to bribery, how to smother the seeds of tyranny, and how to restore our ailing liberty to full health.”8 The extent to which such views had been assimilated by the larger population became clear when the Dutch old regime finally fell in 1795. In May of that year “citizen B. S. Sinkel” addressed his fellow revolutionaries in the “eighth district” of Amsterdam and urged them to be proud of their country, since it had been the first one where “after America had become free, the torch of General Liberty was lit in Europe.”9 On a more elevated level, a similar message had been delivered in February of that same year by Johan Luzac, who was both the editor of the famous Gazette de Leyde and a professor of Greek language and Dutch history at the University of Leiden. In the dedication of his lecture Socrates as a Citizen to his close friend John Adams, he pointed out not only that the newfound Dutch liberty would have been unthinkable without the American Revolution but also that the Dutch should continue to admire America for its felicitous avoidance of both the anarchy caused by too loose a confederation and the tyranny inevitably brought about by a completely unitary state. Moreover, at both the federal and the state level the Americans had, Luzac was convinced, established a political system in which the rule of law was assured, the liberty of the people was protected, the will of the people was adequately represented, and all arbitrary exercise of power had therefore 50

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become impossible.10 Around the same time the important journal The Republican maintained that the American Revolution had not only made “every oppressor shiver on his throne” but that it had also—­in the writings of Richard Price, Joseph Priestley, Thomas Paine, and John Adams—­given rise to a body of political thought allowing people for the first time to discern its rights.11 And when in 1799 Willem Bruin published his Religious and Philosophical Observations on the Latest Revolutions in Europe, he took great care to emphasize that although his treatise was largely about Europe, it was “in the political revolution of North America” that the first beginnings of what was happening in the Netherlands and the old continent were to be found.12 Despite the overwhelming presence of the American Revolution in Dutch political discourse of the 1780s and 1790s, later historians have, as has already been observed, been curiously disinclined to attempt an analysis of the role it played in late eighteenth-­century Dutch political life and thought. The early twentieth century saw the appearance of a number of scholarly monographs dealing with the relationship between the Dutch Republic and revolutionary America, but these predominantly concerned themselves with either diplomatic or economic history.13 Since then, there has been only one attempt to study the impact of the American Revolution on the Dutch Republic in a more comprehensive way, in line with work that already had been done for countries such as France and Germany:14 Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt’s Voorbeeld in de verte, first published in 1979 and translated into English as The Dutch Republic and American Independence in 1982.15 Although thoroughly researched and based on a wide range of contemporary sources, Schulte Nordholt’s study focused on practical politics and paid little attention to political thought. His observation that many late eighteenth-­century Dutchmen shared “a hazy enthusiasm for the new freedom of the Americans” may be said to beg the fundamental question, namely: what precisely was it that Dutch reformers and revolutionaries found so attractive in the American Revolution?16 The present essay will attempt to start answering that question by discussing the specific ways in which the American Revolution became a prominent presence in late eighteenth-­century Dutch political culture and political thought. It will do so against the background of the spectacular changes scholarship on both the late eighteenth-­century Dutch Republic and the American Revolution has undergone over the past few decades. Since the publication of Schulte Nordholt’s monograph, scholarship on the two Dutch revolutions of the late eighteenth century—­the Patriot 51

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Revolution of the 1780s and the Batavian Revolution of the 1790s—­has changed beyond recognition. Although eminent historians from outside the Netherlands, such as Robert Palmer, Franco Venturi, and Simon Schama, had already emphatically and repeatedly pointed to the great significance of these political upheavals, Dutch historians were slow in developing a sustained interest in what had since the early nineteenth century habitually been regarded as a rather embarrassing and dreary period in Dutch history.17 Over the past few decades, however, they have engaged in a remarkable exercise in historical revisionism. As a result, the Dutch late eighteenth-­century revolutions are now interpreted as political experiments of great importance and originality and as the beginning of modern Dutch political culture.18 While these new developments in Dutch historiography were coming to fruition, research on the entire era of the late eighteenth-­century revolutions also underwent a significant change in orientation. Although historians had realized that these revolutions had significant international dimensions, their Atlantic and even global nature was now increasingly being brought to the fore.19 That eighteenth-­century political and intellectual borders were highly porous had, in the meantime, also been abundantly demonstrated in yet another area of historical revisionism: the rediscovery of early modern and eighteenth-­century republicanism. This, to summarize a highly complex phenomenon in the briefest possible way, amounted to the realization that, even though early modern Europe was becoming increasingly monarchical, ever since the Renaissance there had existed and survived a classically inspired oppositional political language in which the superiority of republican government was extolled. Variously referred to by historians as civic humanism, classical republicanism, and the neo-­Roman theory of liberty, this republican mode of political thought stressed positive rather than negative liberty, intimately linked individual and political freedom, deemed the political participation and the devotion to the common good of the arms-­ bearing propertied citizen as essential to the survival of a free state, deeply distrusted the exercise of political power by individual rulers, and was obsessed with virtue rather than with rights. Originating in the small state environment of late medieval and Renaissance Italy, this mode of thought found its most powerful early expression in late Renaissance Florence.20 It was subsequently appropriated by English seventeenth-­century republicans and survived as an oppositional language in Britain until deep into the eighteenth century.21 During the 1960s, the American historians Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood then demonstrated how essential this oppositional 52

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republican language, rather than “Lockean liberalism,” had been in triggering the American Revolution.22 Finally, all these new insights about early modern republicanism were incorporated into J. G. A. Pocock’s magisterial survey of “the Atlantic republican tradition.”23 What this historiographical “republican turn” meant for historians of the late eighteenth-­century revolutions was that it had become rather difficult to depict them as straightforward battles between modern, Enlightenment-­ based “democracy” and the absolute monarchies and aristocratic “constituted bodies” of the ancien régime, as R. R. Palmer had done is his Age of the Democratic Revolution. Instead, these revolutions were increasingly interpreted as movements engaged in the attempt to adapt early modern republicanism to new circumstances. In 1971 Franco Venturi, explicitly criticizing Palmer, had already observed that it was more worthwhile “to follow the involvement, modifications and dispersion of the republican tradition in the last years of the eighteenth century, than to examine the emergence of the idea of democracy in those same years.”24 Some twenty years later Gordon Wood, also in explicit criticism of Palmer, even suggested that the late eighteenth century in the Atlantic world should not be called “the age of the democratic revolution” but “the age of the republican revolution.”25 The late eighteenth-­century emergence of a modern political culture, it is now widely held, was deeply rooted in, and heavily indebted to, a much older republican tradition.26 The discovery of the hidden riches of the Dutch revolutions of the late eighteenth century, the heightened awareness of the Atlantic dimensions of the eighteenth-­century world, and the emergence of republicanism as a central theme in the history of eighteenth-­century political thought are all historiographical developments that seem to warrant a new look at the impact of the American Revolution in the Dutch Republic. Contrary to most other Europeans, the Dutch had already been republicans for centuries by the time “the age of the republican revolution” started. As the eighteenth century progressed, however, increasing numbers of Dutch people found themselves convinced that their republican state was going through a deep, perhaps even a terminal crisis. Whereas they had long believed that the only way out of their predicament was through a process of moral regeneration, by the time of, and in large part because of the American Revolution, they finally became willing to contemplate political remedies for Dutch decline.27 For a number of reasons, it took the Patriot reformers quite a while and considerable intellectual effort to come to the conclusion that the Americans were providing them with a valuable model of republican liberty and 53

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virtue. Throughout the eighteenth century, America had routinely been depicted as a continent that was decidedly inferior to Europe and from which therefore no great things were to be expected.28 Once the political struggle of the Americans got under way, moreover, it was initially unclear what exactly was going on across the Atlantic even as news about the hostility reached them with astonishing rapidity. To many Dutchmen, the Declaration of Independence seemed to be a pale imitation of the way their own ancestors had, two centuries earlier, thrown off the Spanish yoke. It was also highly uncertain what sort of government the Americans would be able to implement. Some thought American independence was doomed to failure; others expected the Americans more or less to imitate the mixed government of their old mother country. Yet gradually it dawned upon the Patriots that the Americans were in fact revitalizing and modernizing the republican tradition and were trying to introduce new forms of popular government. Before the Dutch reformers had the chance to think through all the implications of the American Revolution, however, their own movement was brutally suppressed by Prussian arms and British money. When the Dutch republican ancien régime finally and definitively fell some eight years later, the political scene in Europe had, of course, fundamentally changed. The French Revolution, with its ideals of unity and indivisibility, dominated political reflection. Yet even in these changed circumstances the American experiment continued to play a prominent role, since it allowed the significant group of Batavian revolutionaries opposed to the introduction of a unitary state to argue their case on the basis of a contemporary republican example.

The First Phase: The Dutch Patriots and the American Revolution During the first few years after the Declaration of Independence, although many Dutchmen were convinced that their country was experiencing a deep crisis, few regarded a thorough overhaul of Dutch republican institutions as desirable. Indeed, when in 1779 the Dutch celebrated the two-­hundredth anniversary of the Union of Utrecht, they extravagantly praised the foresight of their forefathers in putting together this glorious document, which continued to serve as the basis of the entire Dutch political system.29 Between 1775 and 1777, Pieter Paulus, who would later become one of the leading Dutch revolutionaries, published the four-­volume Elucidation of the Union of Utrecht, in which he observed that he could never read this fundamental law without deep emotion and without feelings of the greatest admiration 54

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for the evident wisdom and prudence of its sixteenth-­century authors.30 Paulus was aware of the events taking place across the ocean but did not regard them as directly relevant to the Dutch situation. It was rather the other way around. For even though “both the science of politics and other branches of knowledge have tremendously progressed,” Paulus pointed out, the political arrangements taking shape in America had been inspired by the sixteenth-­century Dutch Union of Utrecht. He attempted to demonstrate that this was indeed the case by printing the entire American Articles of Confederation, translated into Dutch, in his Elucidation. Paulus concluded, rather unsurprisingly given his stance on the merits of the Union of Utrecht, that the Americans had done well where they had followed this document but had been unwise to deviate from it in a number of important areas, such as the powers given to the central government.31 Other Dutch commentators, generally observing matters from a traditional republican perspective, voiced grave doubts about the viability of the entire American experiment. Prominent among these was Lodewijk Theodorus Count of Nassau la Leck, who between August 1777 and March 1779 wrote a running commentary on American events and their European implications in a series of published letters.32 Early in 1778, Nassau la Leck devoted two of his letters to the future prospects of an independent American republic, if there ever was going to be one. He emphasized that he did not wish to take sides in the conflict between Britain and its former colonies but also made it clear that as a republican he sympathized with the American attempt to secure independence and liberty in a way that could only be compared to the much earlier successful struggles of the Swiss and the Dutch. Yet would the American experiment in confederate republicanism succeed and result in a stable new state? Nassau la Leck thought probably not. Quite apart from how the outcome of fundamental political changes remains highly uncertain and that, as the history of the ancients amply demonstrated, such changes frequently resulted in either anarchy or despotism, Nassau La Leck entertained grave doubts about the suitability of the American population for republican government.33 There were, he emphasized, far too many descendants of the Germans, who were unacquainted with liberty and used to living in circumstances of semi-­slavery, and of the French, who were devoted to the principle of monarchy.34 The Articles of Confederation, moreover, left so many matters undecided and uncertain that future conflicts and factionalism seemed almost inevitable.35 Serious problems could also arise from the leaders of the American struggle for independence and liberty: although at present shining examples of 55

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disinterested republican virtue, they would no doubt, once independence had been secured, be most reluctant to relinquish their positions of leadership.36 Matters were made even worse by the struggle for independence that had seriously impoverished the Americans and would most likely continue to do so for quite a while. The heavy American reliance on paper money was regarded as a clear sign that their economy lacked a solid basis.37 Perhaps most ominous, however, was how the young United States lacked a proper mechanism to keep them from falling apart. The main characteristic of republican government, Nassau la Leck patiently explained, was “sweet liberty.” Because liberty implied that no important decisions could be made without consulting the citizens or their representatives, legislating was not only an agonizingly slow process but also one that frequently failed to lead to any decisions at all. This was a problem common to all republics, but the larger the territory, the worse it became. The only solution was the appointment of an “eminent person,” such as the Dutch stadholder, with the power to decide disputes and generally to speed matters up. This was, Nassau la Leck remarked, a “necessary evil,” and great care should be taken to prevent this eminent person from becoming a despot. Yet it was the only way to preserve republican liberty. What then could be expected of the new United States, where most individual states were several times larger than the entire Dutch Republic, yet where nobody seemed to see the necessity of appointing an eminent person to keep the political system together? To ask the question was to answer it.38 Dutch republican doubts about the ability of the new American republic to survive continued to surface well into the 1780s, but the manner in which they were voiced had by that time undergone a profound change and reflected a high degree of Dutch insecurity. In 1783, the journal The Statesman, in which Nassau la Leck was also involved, printed a “Dialogue between a North-­American and a Dutchman” in which the prospects of an independent and republican America are once again taken up, yet this time without the slightest hint of Dutch superiority. The American enthusiastically greets the Dutchman as a brother in liberty but immediately finds his republican credentials bluntly questioned. In response, he insists that America is in fact a much healthier republic than the ailing Dutch state. Its form of government is founded on the principles of liberty and equality; it has put mechanisms in place to curb the power of all rulers; it has no court and courtiers undermining republican morals and manners; it will never allow the rise of a hereditary aristocracy; its economy is grounded in agriculture, which will produce both solid citizens and enormous riches. Moreover, 56

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since most of its citizens were now trained soldiers, America would also avoid the well-­known dangers posed by a large standing army. Playing his final card, the baffled Dutchman then suggests that the American republic will probably soon fall apart, because its government lacks an eminent person such as the Dutch stadholder. Telling him the conversation has turned into a joke, the American leaves the bewildered Dutchman to himself.39 As this fictitious conversation makes abundantly clear, by 1783 the American republic was no longer seen as a rather feeble and seriously flawed imitation of the Dutch Republic but as a new and inspiring republican model. This fundamental shift in perception was inextricably linked with the rise of the Patriot movement. Although signs of growing political unrest had appeared since the late 1770s, the outbreak of the Fourth Anglo-­Dutch War in December 1780 truly launched the Dutch Patriot movement. By mercilessly exposing the military weakness and the general helplessness of the Dutch Republic, this war led many Dutchmen to the conclusion that their present republican form of government was seriously flawed. Initially, most Patriot reformers saw the alarming increase of the executive powers of the stadholder as the root cause of the now obvious decline of their once so glorious republic. The stadholders, they claimed in a republican language virtually identical to that of the eighteenth-­century British opposition and the early American rebels, had almost succeeded in extinguishing liberty and had brought the Dutch Republic to the brink of slavery. They had done so by slowly building up a standing army, by gradually expanding their powers of patronage and appointment, and by insidiously spreading a luxurious and dissolute lifestyle from their corrupt semi-­monarchical court. Although the early Patriots were aware of the parallels between their own struggle against Stadholder William V and that of the Americans against King George III, they nonetheless tended to phrase their demands in terms of a return to an older Dutch mixed constitution and to ancient Dutch rights and privileges. It was only gradually that they discovered there was nothing to which to return. The Dutch Republic, they began to argue, had never been a real republic at all, since it had never had a proper written constitution and had, more importantly, never been unambiguously based on the sovereignty of the people. This momentous redefinition of republicanism was made possible by the steadily increasing transatlantic flow of information about the new republicanism taking shape in America. The Patriot era saw an explosive growth of the political press and the rise of countless new political periodicals. These publications, along with political plays, made the American 57

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experiment in modern republican liberty known to a large public.40 Thus as early as 1781 the fiery Mennonite preacher François Adriaan van der Kemp, in a collection of documents concerning the American Revolution and writing under the significant pseudonym Junius Brutus, pointed out that America’s new republican political order was far superior to anything the Dutch had ever achieved. It was true, he admitted, that both the sixteenth-­century Dutch and the eighteenth-­century Americans, when confronted with tyranny and oppression, had struggled to gain their national independence. Unfortunately, however, the Dutch had done so at a time when the dynamics of liberty were hardly understood. They had therefore merely succeeded in getting rid of a particular despot but not of oppression itself. The great loser in the Dutch Revolt, Van der Kemp insisted, was the Dutch people. In America, however, a free state had been established that could do without both eminent persons and aristocrats, where the preservation of republican liberty depended on the permanent sovereignty of the people. For this reason liberty, “stifled, persecuted, and abused all over Europe,” had found a safe haven in the young American republic.41 It is Baron Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, a nobleman from the eastern part of the Dutch Republic, who is usually regarded as the undisputed leader of the Patriot movement and as the political activist and commentator who did most to introduce the Dutch to the political world of the American Revolution.42 There is certainly much truth in this, yet it needs to be stressed that, although evidently inspired by recent events across the Atlantic, the baron’s political program still very much belonged to the world of the traditional eighteenth-­century republican opposition. During the 1770s, Van de Capellen had not only vehemently opposed Dutch military support for the British in their struggle with the American colonists but also translated the writings of the Scotsman Andrew Fletcher on militias and Price on the American war into Dutch.43 His greatest impact, however, came in September 1781 with the anonymously published To the People of the Netherlands, a pamphlet deemed so explosive by its author and his friend Van der Kemp that they judged it necessary to have it distributed in the middle of the night.44 To the People has long been regarded as a “democratic manifesto,” but in fact it was not.45 Although he made his utter contempt for the monarchical ambitions of the Orange stadholders quite clear, Van der Capellen did not call for the abolishment of the stadholderate itself, nor did he, despite occasional references to the ultimate sovereignty of the people, wish to see a democratic or popular republic established. His intentions were much more traditional: he desired to halt, in his eyes, the 58

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unbridled growth of the executive power and to bring about a return to a properly mixed republican constitution through the political intervention of armed and independent citizens. With these goals in mind, he exhorted his compatriots to follow the example of “the People of America” by expressing themselves freely in the press, by scrutinizing the behavior of their rulers, and above all by arming themselves. By these means he hoped to see the democratic part of the mixed constitution restored to its former power and the Dutch Republic saved from the rise of despotism.46 Soon it transpired that, according to the more radical Patriots, Van der Capellen had not gone far enough in his demands, because he had failed to understand the full implications of the American rebellion. The American Revolution, these Patriot radicals insisted, was neither simply a struggle for national independence nor just a traditional republican reaction against the unbridled growth of executive power within a mixed constitution. It was first and foremost to be interpreted, as Van der Kemp had already intimated before To the People of the Netherlands was published, as an attempt to vest all political power, either directly or through the mechanism of representation, in the permanently sovereign people. Indeed, it was to be regarded as an unprecedented transformation of the whole notion of republican liberty. By 1783 Pieter Vreede, whose demotic and direct use of language strongly resembled that of Paine, plainly stated that the Dutch were living in slavery, since they did not have either a proper written constitution, or—­more importantly—­self-­government. To bring this unbearable situation to an end, Vreede advised his countrymen to take a close look at those few nations where a free and popular government had ever been successfully introduced: the popular republics of antiquity, a few Swiss cantons, and, above all, the young American republic.47 This advice was heeded by, among others, the young Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck, who in 1784 finished his studies at Leiden University with a thesis entitled De imperio populari rite temperato, soon translated as Treatise on a Well-­ Ordered Popular Government.48 Although they have deemed it highly important, later historians have sharply disagreed on the interpretation of Schimmelpenninck’s Treatise. To Jonathan Israel, who calls him a “key theorist among the Patriots,” Schimmelpenninck indubitably was a representative of the “Spinozistic Enlightenment.”49 Others, however, have pointed out that the Treatise does not cite any of Israel’s “Spinozistic” authors but is, on the contrary, most plausibly read as an attempt to adapt and revise the classical republican tradition in the light of the recent transformation it had undergone in America.50 This latter interpretation is borne out by 59

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the contemporary reception of the Treatise. The most important Dutch review journal, which reviewed the Dutch translation of the Treatise in 1785, observed that the unprecedented discussion of popular sovereignty in the Dutch Republic had its roots both in England and in America but was particularly indebted to the American Revolution, which “in our Fatherland has certainly in many respects caused a complete intellectual upheaval.”51 A close reading of the Treatise confirms the accuracy of the observations offered by this anonymous reviewer. Schimmelpenninck’s purpose was to combine his great knowledge of the classical republics with his reading of the recent American state constitutions in order to arrive at a viable model for a modern Dutch popular republic. At the very beginning of the Treatise, he embraced the notion of representative popular government and demonstrated that, contrary to what Rousseau had maintained, the notion of representation was not incompatible with the principle of permanent popular sovereignty. The maiestas remained with the people, whereas the summum imperium could be entrusted to elected representatives.52 That such a representative system could function very well in practice, he then proceeded to show from the constitutions of Georgia, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, New York, and, above all, Massachusetts.53 Having made this fundamental point, Schimmelpenninck went on in a largely classical republican vein. The sovereign citizens he imagined were, just as their predecessors in the popular republics of the ancient world had been and just as the Americans were nowadays, independent and virtuous male bearers of arms.54 They would choose representatives but would see to it that these remained permanently responsible to the electorate.55 More generally, Schimmelpenninck envisaged a republic where “the simplicity of manners and morals, the love of liberty and equality, and the hatred of domination and slavery are a constant presence in the minds of the citizens.”56 Schimmelpenninck, in short, constructed his ideal future Dutch popular republic from what he considered best in the modern American republic, while maintaining his reverence for the virtuous republics of the ancient world. It was an approach that by the mid-­1780s was entirely in line with the political thought of the greater part of his fellow Patriots.

The Second Phase: American Federalism against the French Unitary State Far from demonstrating merely “a hazy enthusiasm for the new freedom of the Americans,” as Schulte Nordholt contended, the Dutch Patriots of the 1780s were in fact, like their American fellow republicans, 60

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attempting to adapt classical republicanism to the new circumstances of the late eighteenth-­century world. Precisely as the Americans had done, they at first employed a traditional language of oppositional republicanism, in which the unbridled growth of executive power within a mixed government was perceived as the greatest threat to liberty. As had been the case in America, this language soon started to blend with Enlightenment notions concerning inalienable natural rights and the permanent sovereignty of the people. The result was a fundamental redefinition of republicanism as popular government by representation. Although they did attempt to put their newly defined and evidently American-­inspired republicanism into practice, the Dutch Patriots were allowed very little time for their political experiments. In September 1787, the invading Prussian army brought the Patriot movement in the Dutch Republic to an abrupt end and restored the old government to power. Many thousands of Dutch Patriots fled the country and settled in the Austrian Netherlands and northern France.57 In the Netherlands itself, a brutal counterrevolution was followed by years of political repression.58 Despite these rather bleak circumstances, the political discussion that had exploded in the 1780s could no longer be silenced or contained. It was, of course, particularly the outbreak and subsequent development of the French Revolution that brought new political hope to many Dutchmen. Yet their deep interest in the American republican experiment continued. Thus, in a curious and neglected work in which he discussed the fate of ancient and modern republics at considerable length, Jan Hendrik van Dongen in 1789 once again held up the example of the free American republic to his oppressed compatriots.59 Combining old and new republican themes, he lavishly praised the Americans as “the defenders of humanity, the upholders of Liberty, and the scourges of tyrants.” He urged American citizens never to lay down their arms, to keep luxury at bay, and above all to hold on to that “noblest and most beautiful of all rights,” the right to elect their own rulers, for it was only thus that the Americans would maintain their current status as “the jewel among all the peoples of the earth.”60 In the years between 1792 and 1794, moreover, a Dutch translation of David Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution appeared in four volumes.61 Perhaps most importantly, however, from 1793 on, Gerhard Dumbar, to whom we will return below, started to inform the Dutch public in great detail about the genesis and characteristics of the new American federal constitution.62 In January 1795, when French troops and Dutch exiles marched into the country, the Dutch ancien régime definitively fell. The stadholder fled 61

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to England, the old regents were removed, and the building of what was named the Batavian Republic could begin. The Batavian revolutionaries, like their Patriot predecessors, were extremely critical of the former Dutch Republic, which they regarded as an outdated “Gothic building” run by a self-­appointed oligarchy and a power-­hungry stadholder and utterly lacking in liberty and equality. This sharp condemnation of the political structures of the old republic tended to include the federalism that had characterized the Seven United Provinces. To many Batavian revolutionaries—­and in this they clearly differed from the Patriots, who had taken the federal political organization of the Dutch Republic more or less for granted—­federalism now seemed little more than the handmaiden of prerevolutionary aristocratic domination and had therefore become something to be avoided at all cost in the future. Greatly reinforcing such views were Batavians who found the French revolutionary doctrine of “unity et indivisibility” highly attractive and worth imitating in their own new republican state. The dynamics of the revolutionary political process itself moreover also favored the adoption of the unitary state. While the first National Assembly, which met in March 1796, was not in any formal sense committed to establishing unity, to many Batavians the creation of a central political platform nevertheless seemed a logical first step in that direction. Indeed, in his speech opening the first session of the new parliament, chairman Pieter Paulus, who had by then left his previous admiration for the Union of Utrecht far behind him, emphatically celebrated the meeting of the National Assembly as “the dawn of unity and indivisibility in the country’s political system.”63 Despite circumstances that seemed to favor the establishment of a unitary state, however, and despite how “unity and indivisibility” were adopted as the basis of all further constitutional discussion in the National Assembly on 2 December 1796, a substantial group of revolutionaries remained unconvinced of the compatibility of unity and republican liberty.64 In this new and fundamentally different political context, the American republic once again became a crucial presence in Dutch political reflection. For the federalist Batavian revolutionaries, the new American constitution served as the ultimate proof that a successful modern republic by no means needed to be a completely unitary state. These Batavian federalists, it is worth pointing out, shared many revolutionary values with the proponents of the unitary state: they supported the rights of man, desired a written constitution, and defined republicanism as popular government by representation. They insisted, however, that all of these values could best be realized in a federal state. Those who desired a French-­style unitary state, 62

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they maintained, were misguided in equating federalism in general with federalism as it had existed in the old Dutch Republic. Did not the example of the American republic vividly demonstrate that federalism and revolutionary republicanism could very well go together? Indeed, the Batavian federalists considered a federal political structure as the only effective way to protect modern republican liberty, since the introduction of a completely unitary state would in the long run lead to, at best, a “monarchized republic” or, at worst, “Oriental Despotism.”65 In this vein, M. Volkryk Liebert, who even before the National Assembly had gathered showed himself deeply worried about the threat centralization posed to republican liberty, addressed the Middelburg Patriotic Society in November 1795. “That America is much better suited to serve us as an example than France” was perfectly obvious, he told his audience, since, contrary to both the Dutch Republic and America, France had a long history of authoritarian central government and its provinces were used to “obeying laws made far away and without their knowledge.”66 Also in 1795, Jan Willem van Sonsbeeck reminded Batavian republicans “that in these most enlightened times of the world . . . Franklin and Washington have not hesitated to divide their liberated and sovereign people into independent provinces and to give each of these quasi-­sovereign powers.”67 Once the National Assembly was installed, the federalists kept returning to the American example in the lengthy parliamentary discussions about the new republican constitution.68 Thus, on 23 November 1796, Cornelis de Rhoer warned his fellow parliamentarians that they seemed to forget that “both ancient and modern Statesmen and Philosophers” had always regarded federalism as the foundation of political and civil liberty and that “the august republic that in our days has arisen on the other side of the globe was founded on federalist principles.”69 A few days later, Willem Queysen pointed out to the National Assembly that the writings of Montesquieu, Mably, and Rousseau abundantly demonstrated how absurd it was to regard a unitary state as the best guarantee of “a free form of government” and that Mably in particular had argued his powerful case for federalism on the basis of the new American republic.70 Most of these federalist references to America were inspired by, and many even directly taken from, Gerhard Dumbar’s The Old and the New Constitution of the United States of America, published in three volumes between 1793 and 1796.71 Since Dumbar was both the most prominent federalist of the Batavian Republic and the theorist who most emphatically insisted that inspiration for the establishment of an enduring form of modern republican 63

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liberty should not come from France, but from America, this essay ends with a brief discussion of his political thought. Born to a patrician family in the eastern part of the country, Dumbar (1743–­1802) studied law in Utrecht and thereafter held various posts in the government of his hometown of Deventer.72 During the 1780s he sympathized with the Patriot movement and was in close touch with, among others, Joan Derk van der Capellen. As a result of these political leanings, he lost his job in the counterrevolution of 1787 and increasingly turned to writing. He became a distinguished historian of the province of Overijssel, but for our purposes his most important publication during these years was his work on America, which was completed, although not entirely published, before the Dutch Republic collapsed in 1795.73 The Old and New Constitution of the United States of America was intended to familiarize the Dutch public with the most recent developments in America, particularly with the new federal constitution that had been ratified a few years earlier. Dumbar’s rather hybrid volumes consisted of a historical overview of events in America from the Articles of Confederation onward, written by himself and largely based on Ramsay’s History of the American Revolution and on the American periodical press, of the translated texts of various documents including the federal constitution, and of an abbreviated translation of the Federalist Papers.74 His first purpose in presenting this material was to remind his fellow countrymen that they need not conclude from the chaos currently reigning in France that “political liberty” was a most dangerous thing, since in contemporary America they could find a successful example of a people “which has given itself a Constitution entirely built on popular liberty.”75 Having thus established his impeccable ideological credentials as a former Patriot, Dumbar then came to his second main point with the observation that modern republican liberty could flourish neither in too loose a federal state nor in an entirely unitary state. It was only in the new American constitution, he insisted, that the perfect middle ground between these two undesirable extremes had been found. While there was no reason for the Dutch, who lived in different circumstances and had a different national character, to imitate the American constitution in all respects, they would nevertheless do well to realize “that the American form of government is built on those true and solid foundations, on which the liberty, the security, the prosperity and the independence of a nation can and should be built; that the world has never seen a government which can better withstand the scrutiny of both critical philosophers and statesmen enlightened by history and experience; and that . . . those very 64

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same foundations should be adopted here, if we wish to be successful in our reforms.”76 To Dumbar’s disappointment and chagrin, a great many Batavian revolutionaries did not heed his advice and developed a distinct predilection for the introduction of a unitary state after the fall of the Dutch old regime. Indeed, so deeply did he deplore the gradual political drift toward the unitary state that in 1796 he refused the parliamentary seat to which he was elected, thereby causing a great uproar and gaining a reputation as “the country’s most notorious federalist.”77 Not even after the formal adoption of the principle of unity in the Dutch constitution of 1798 did Dumbar, who was briefly imprisoned for his political views that year, give up his resistance.78 In 1801 he published an essay urging his compatriots to mend their political ways by finally recognizing “that an undivided government, in a republic, is from its very nature unstable and dangerous to the liberty of the state.”79 The basic argument of this pamphlet, which was soon reprinted, was clear and simple: recent history indubitably demonstrated that a unitary state, regardless of its size, was essentially incompatible with “the true goals of Republican Government,” the preservation of popular liberty being the first of these.80 This was the reason why America was still a stable and free republic, whereas Europe, since the introduction of French-­sponsored unity, had seen nothing but instability and therefore faced the threat of Bonapartist dictatorship.81 But what exactly was it that, according to Dumbar, made a federal system so much better suited to protect republican liberty than a unitary one? Firmly dismissing the argument, frequently used by his political opponents, that the dangerous accumulation of political power in a unitary state could be prevented through all sorts of constitutional mechanisms and guarantees, Dumbar insisted over and over again that “he who is master of the Treasury and of the Army, is master of the Country.”82 In the end, the preservation of republican liberty was not primarily a matter of paper constitutions but a matter of the distribution of real, physical political power. The true importance of federalism, as the Americans had understood so well, was to be found in the spread of financial and military power over several quasi-­ independent centers and thereby made it impossible for any single authority to extinguish liberty. Dumbar’s final arguments for federalism, once again squarely based on the contemporary example of the American republic, did not lead to the abolition of the unitary state, and the federal constitution, which he designed around the same time, was never used.83 His continued campaign against the unitary state did, however, contribute to the toning down of the more extravagant aspects of “unity and indivisibility” in the 65

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new Dutch constitution of 1801.84 Even at the start of the nineteenth century, the American example remained a pervasive presence in Dutch political debate and continued to inform the Dutch in their struggle to create a new republic. Over the past two decades, historians have enthusiastically embraced the so-­called “global turn.”85 What has been true for the historical profession in general has also been increasingly true for the practitioners of intellectual history and the history of political thought. The meticulous contextualism advocated by the founders of the Cambridge school, which became the methodological orthodoxy in intellectual history in the second half of the twentieth century, is still widely—­and rightly—­regarded as the most effective precaution against the deadly sin of anachronism. Yet many intellectual historians have recently drawn attention to the ways contextualism tends to privilege synchronic over diachronic analysis and to discourage attempts to write the history of big ideas over long stretches of time or extended geographical areas.86 While not denying the validity of such observations, others have nonetheless pointed out that many exercises in “global” intellectual history are sorely lacking in both empirical grounding and analytical clarity.87 Perhaps this discussion is incapable of a general and abstract solution: the intellectual historian’s choice of the appropriate unit of historical analysis, potentially ranging from the strictly local to the broadly global, should entirely depend on the nature of the topic under investigation. In the case of the Dutch political upheavals in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, it seems clear that they cannot be adequately understood in a provincial, a national, or even a European context. In their attempts to reshape their traditional mixed form of republican government into a modern democratic republic, and in their subsequent discussions of the advantages of a unitary state versus those of a federal republic, the Dutch were demonstrably dependent on the transatlantic flow of ideas and on the example offered by the American Revolution. Obviously, they appropriated and adapted only those elements from the American republican experiment that suited their own needs. Yet without their vivid awareness of the importance and implications of the American “republican revolution,” the Dutch would not have been able to transform their republican political culture in the way they did.

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Notes 1. Keith Baker and Dan Edelstein, introduction to Scripting Revolution. A Historical Approach to the Comparative Study of Revolutions, ed. Baker and Edelstein (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015), 2. 2. David Bell has drawn attention to the paradox that, at a time of increased historical understanding of the global interconnectedness of the eighteenth-­century world, the global impact of the American Revolution has not been reexamined (Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn: The Case of the French Revolution,” French Historical Studies 37, no. 1 [2014]: 7). 3. Jack Rakove, “Constitutionalism: The Happiest Revolutionary Script,” in Scripting Revolution, ed. Baker and Edelstein, 105. 4. [Elie Luzac], Reinier Vryaarts openhartige brieven, Om te dienen tot opheldering en regte kennis van de vaderlandsche historie; En teffens ter aanwyzinge van de waare en wezendlyke oorzaaken van ’s Lands vervallen en kwynenden staat, mistgaders van de middelen om tot beteren toestand te komen, 12 vols. (n.p., n.d. [1781–­84]), 4:199. 5. George Willem Vreede, ed., Mr. Laurens Pieter van de Spiegel en zijne tijdgenooten (1737–­1800), 4 vols. (Middelburg, Netherlands: J. C. and W. Althoffer, 1874–­77), 1:82. 6. Adriaan Kluit, Iets over den laatsten Engelschen oorlog met de Republiek, en over Nederlands koophandel, deszelfs bloei, verval, en middelen van herstel (Amsterdam: Wouter Brave, 1794), 145. 7. Willem Hendrik de Beaufort, ed. Brieven aan R. M. van Goens en onuitgegeven stukken hem betreffende, 3 vols. (Utrecht: Kemink and Zoon, 1884–­90), 1: 91. 8. François Adriaan van der Kemp, Elftal kerkelyke redevoeringen (Leiden: L. Herdingh, 1782), 239. 9. B. S. Sinkel, Iets zaakelyks voor ’t volk van Holland, vervat in eene redevoering, door den burger B. S. Sinkel gedaan in de vergadering van Wyk 8. Gehouden op woensdag den 13. mey 1795 (Amsterdam, 1795), 5. 10. Johan Luzac, Socrates als burger beschouwd, in eene plechtige redevoering, uitgesproken op den 21. February 1795 bij het nederleggen van ’t rectoraat der Hollandsche universiteit, etc. (Leiden: A. en J. Honkoop, 1796), 5–­6. 11. De Republikein, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: M. Schalekamp, n.d. [1795–­97]), 1:14. 12. [Willem Bruin], Godsdienstige en wysgeerige beschouwing der jongste staats-­ omwentelingen in Europa (Amsterdam: J. Yntema en Zoon, 1799), 2. 13. Friedrich Edler, The Dutch Republic and the American Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1911); Frederik Willem van Wijk, De Republiek en Amerika 1776–­1782 (Leiden: N.V. Boekhandel en Drukkerij voorheen E. J. Brill, 1921); Pieter Jan van Winter, Het aandeel van den Amsterdamschen handel aan den opbouw van het Amerikaansche Gemeenebest, 2 vols. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1927–­33). 14. Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Horst Dippel, Germany and the American Revolution 1770–­1800: A Sociohistorical Investigation of Late Eighteenth-­ Century Political Thinking, trans. Bernhard A. Uhlendorf (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1977). For more recent research on the reception of the American

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Revolution in various European countries, see, e.g., Simon P. Newman, ed., Europe’s American Revolution (Houndmills, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 15. Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, Voorbeeld in de verte: De invloed van de Amerikaanse revolutie in Nederland (Baarn: Torenboeken, 1979); Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, trans. Herbert H. Rowen (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). 16. Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, 13. 17. Robert Roswell Palmer, “Much in Little: The Dutch Revolution of 1795,” Journal of Modern History 26 (1954): 15–­35; Robert Roswell Palmer, The Age of the Democratic Revolution. A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–­1800, 2 vols. (Princeton: Prince­ ton University Press, 1959–­64); Franco Venturi, The End of the Old Regime in Europe, 1776–­1789, vol. 2: Republican Patriotism and the Empires of the East, trans. Robert Burr Litchfield (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 497–­604; Simon Schama, Patriots and Liberators: Revolution in the Netherlands 1780–­1813 (New York: Knopf, 1977). 18. Stephan R.  E. Klein, Patriots Republikanisme: Politieke cultuur in Nederland (1766–­1787) (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1995); Niek van Sas, De metamorphose van Nederland: Van oude orde naar moderniteit, 1750–­1900 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004); Frans Grijzenhout, Niek van Sas, and Wyger Velema, eds., Het Bataafse experiment. Politiek en cultuur rond 1800 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2013). 19. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence. A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Annie Jourdan, La Révolution batave entre la France et l’Amérique (1795–­1806) (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2008); Wim Klooster, Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009); David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam, eds., The Age of Revolution in Global Context, c. 1760–­1840 (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010); Janet Polasky, Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). 20. The locus classicus is Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955). The subsequent discussion may be followed in James Hankins, ed., Renaissance Civic Humanism. Reappraisals and Reflections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 21. Zera S. Fink, The Classical Republicans: An Essay in the Recovery of a Pattern of Thought in Seventeenth-­Century England (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1945); Caroline Robbins, The Eighteenth-­Century Commonwealthman: Studies in the Transmission, Development, and Circumstance of English Liberal Thought from the Restoration of Charles II until the War with the Thirteen Colonies (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). 22. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic 1776–­1787 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1969). 23. John G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975). 24. Franco Venturi, Utopia and Reform in the Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 90. 68

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25. Gordon S. Wood, “Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution,” Chicago-­Kent Law Review 66 (1990): 13. 26. E.g., Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Andrew Jainchill, Reimagining Politics after the Terror. The Republican Origins of French Liberalism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008); Andreas Kalyvas and Ira Katznelson, eds., Liberal Beginnings: Making a Republic for the Moderns (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 27. On the varieties of Dutch eighteenth-­century republicanism, see Wyger R. E. Velema, Republicans. Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Dutch Political Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 28. Henry Steele Commager and Elmo Giordanetti, eds., Was America a Mistake? An Eighteenth-­Century Controversy (New York: Harper and Row, 1967). 29. Gerrit Jan Schutte, “Van grondslag tot breidel der vrijheid. Opvattingen over de Unie van Utrecht in het laatste kwart van de achttiende eeuw,” in De Unie van Utrecht: Wording en werking van een verbond en een verbondsacte, ed. Simon Groenveld en Huib L. Ph. Leeuwenberg (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1979), 199–­225. 30. Pieter Paulus, Verklaring der Unie van Utrecht, 4 vols. (Utrecht: J. van Schoonhoven en Comp., 1775–­77), 1: “Opdragt.” On Paulus, see Isidore Leonard Leeb, The Ideological Origins of the Batavian Revolution: History and Politics in the Dutch Republic 1747–­1800 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 110–­22; and E. J. Vles, Pieter Paulus (1753–­1796): Patriot en Staatsman (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 2004). 31. Paulus, Unie van Utrecht, 3:240–­54. The similarities and differences between the federalism of the Dutch Republic and the United States, and the ways in which these similarities and differences were perceived during the eighteenth century, have long interested historians (see William H. Riker, “Dutch and American Federalism,” Journal of the History of Ideas 18 [1957]: 495–­521; Herbert H. Rowen, “The Union of Utrecht and the Articles of Confederation, the Batavian Revolution and the American Constitution: A Double Parallel,” in Herrschaftsverträge, Wahlkapitulationen, Fundamentalgesetze, ed. Rudolf Vierhaus [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1977], 281–­93; Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, “The Example of the Dutch Republic for American Federalism,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden 94 [1979]: 437–­49; and Graham C. Gibbs, “The Dutch Revolt and the American Revolution,” in Royal and Republican Sovereignty in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Memory of Ragnhild Hatton, ed. Robert Oresko, Gibbs, and Hamish M. Scott [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997], 609–­37). 32. Lodewijk Theodorus Grave van  Nassau la Leck, Brieven over de  Noord-­ Americaansche onlusten, den waarschijnlijken uitslag dier oorlog, en den invloed die deeze gebeurtenisse zoude kunnen hebben, zo op de belangens van Europa in ’t algemeen, als van deezen staat in ’t bijzonder, 18 letters in 6 vols. (Utrecht: G. T. van Paddenburg, 1777–­79). On Nassau la Leck, see Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, 136–­37; and Klein, Patriots Republikanisme, 33–­38. 33. Nassau la Leck, Brieven over de Noord-­Americaansche onlusten, 4:54–­55. 34. Ibid., 55–­62. 35. Ibid., 62–­64. 36. Ibid., 64–­66. 69

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37. Ibid., 67–­74. 38. Ibid., 74–­78. 39. “Samenspraak tusschen een Noord-­Americaan en een Hollander,” in De Staatsman, of onpartydige redeneringen over de merkwaardigste gebeurtenissen van onzen tyd, etc., 7 vols. (Utrecht: B. Wild, 1779–­81; Amsterdam: J. Allart en W. Holtrop, 1781–­85), vol. 6, pt. 1: 246–­60. On this journal, see Klein, Patriots Republikanisme, 65–­76. 40. On the “press revolution” of the 1780s, see Van Sas, Metamorfose van Nederland, 195–­222; and Niek van Sas, “The Netherlands, 1750–­1813,” in Press, Politics and the Public Sphere in Europe and North America, 1760–­1820, ed. Hannah Barker and Simon Burrows (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 48–­68. The American presence in Dutch plays of the period is discussed in Anna de Haas, “Perikelen rond de geboorte van een republiek: Nederlandse toneelschrijvers over Amerika,” Mededelingen van de Stichting Jacob Campo Weyerman 26 (2003): 167–­77. 41. [François Adriaan van der Kemp], Verzameling van stukken tot de dertien vereenigde staeten van Noord-­America betrekkelyk (Leiden: L. Herdingh, 1781), i–xlii. The quotation is on page xxiv. On Van  der  Kemp, who after the suppression of the Patriot movement emigrated to America, see Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, passim; and Francis Adrian van der Kemp 1752–­1829: An Autobiography Together with Extracts from His Correspondence, ed. Helen Lincklaen Fairchild (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1903). 42. There is a substantial literature on Van der Capellen, from Murk de Jong Hzn., Joan Derk van der Capellen, Staatkundig levensbeeld uit de wordingstijd van de modern demokratie in Nederland (Groningen: J. B. Wolters’ U.M., 1921) to Arthur Weststeijn, ed. A Marble Revolutionary: The Dutch Patriot Joan Derk van der Capellen and His Monument (Rome: Palombi Editori, 2011). On Van der Capellen and America, see Jan Willem Schulte Nordholt, “Van der Capellen en Amerika,” in De wekker van de Nederlandse natie: Joan Derk van der Capellen 1741–­1784, ed. E. A. van Dijk et al. (Zwolle: Uitgeverij Waanders, 1984), 99–­103. 43. Johan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol, Advis, over het verzoek van zyne Majesteit den Koning van Groot Brittannie, raakende het leenen der Shotsche Brigade, etc. (n.p., n.d. [1775]); Andrew Fletcher, Staatkundige verhandeling, over de noodzakelykheid eener wel ingerigte burger landmilitie (n.p., n.d. [1774]); Richard Price, Aanmerkingen over den aart der burgerlyke vryheid, over de gronden der regeering, en over de regtveerdigheid en staatkunde van den oorlog met Amerika, etc. (Leiden: L. Herdingh, 1776); Richard Price, Nadere aanmerkingen over den aart en de waarde der burgerlyke vryheid en eener vrye regeering, etc. (Leiden: L. Herdingh, 1777). 44. The best modern edition is Hans L. Zwitzer, ed., Joan Derk van der Capellen, Aan het Volk van Nederland. Het patriottisch program uit 1781 (Amsterdam: De Bataafsche Leeuw, 1987). 45. E.g., Willem F. Wertheim and Annie H. Wertheim-­Gijse Weenink, eds., Aan het Volk van Nederland: Het democratisch manifest van Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol 1781 (Weesp: Uitgeverij Heureka, 1981). 46. This interpretation of Van der Capellen’s republicanism has been developed at greater length in Wyger R. E. Velema, “Generous Republican Sentiments: The Political

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Thought of Joan Derk van der Capellen tot den Pol,” in A Marble Revolutionary, ed. Weststeijn, 39–­68. 47. [Pieter Vreede], Waermond en Vryhart. Gesprek over de vryheid der Nederlandren; en den aert der waere vryheid (n.p., 1783); [Pieter Vreede], Beoordeelend en ophelderend verslag van de Verhandeling over de Vryheid gedrukt by Johannes Allart, 1783 (n.p., 1783). For these two pamphlets, see Velema, Republicans, 152–­54. 48. Rutgeri Jani Schimmelpenninck, Disputatio iuris publici inauguralis de imperio populari rite temperato (Leiden: Henricus Hoogenstraaten, 1784); R. J. Schimmelpenninck, Verhandeling over eene wel ingerigte volksregeering, etc. (Leiden: Frans de Does, 1785). The most recent biography of Schimmelpenninck is Edwina Hagen, President van Nederland: Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck (1761–­1825) (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Balans, 2012). 49. Jonathan I. Israel, The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall, 1477–­1806 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 1104; Jonathan Israel, “Failed Enlightenment”: Spinoza’s Legacy and the Netherlands (1670–­1800) (Wassenaar: Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences, 2007), 18, 53. 50. Stephan R. E. Klein, “Republikanisme en patriottisme: Rutger Jan Schimmelpenninck en de klassieke wortels van het republikeinse denken (1784–­1785),” Tijdschrift voor Geschiedenis 106 (1993): 179–­207; Wyger R. E. Velema, “Jonathan Israel and Dutch Patriotism,” De Achttiende Eeuw. Documentatieblad Werkgroep Achttiende Eeuw 41, no. 2 (2009): 150–­58. 51. Algemeene vaderlandsche letter-­oefeningen, waar in de boeken en schriften, die dagelyks in ons vaderland en elders uitkomen, oordeelkundig tevens en vrymoedig verhandeld worden, etc., vol. 7, pt. 1 (Amsterdam: A. van der Kroe en J. Yntema, 1785), 336–­37. 52. Schimmelpenninck, Volksregeering, 3–­8. 53. The texts of the constitutions of most American states had been available in Dutch translation since the early 1780s: Verzameling van de constitutiën der vereenigde onafhanglijke staaten van Amerika, etc., 2 vols. (Dordrecht: Frederik Wanner, 1781–­82). 54. Schimmelpenninck, Volksregeering, 16–­34, 84. 55. Ibid., 34–­37. 56. Ibid., 74. 57. Joost Rosendaal, Bataven! Nederlandse vluchtelingen in Frankrijk 1787–­1795 (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2003); Jacques J. M. Baartmans, Hollandse wijsgeren in Brabant en Vlaanderen: Geschriften van Noord-­Nederlandse patriotten in de Oostenrijkse Nederlanden, 1787–­1792 (Nijmegen: Uitgeverij Vantilt, 2001). 58. On the counterrevolution of 1787, see Cornelis H. E. de Wit, De Nederlandse revolutie van de achttiende eeuw 1780–­1787. Oligarchie en proletariaat (Oirsbeek: J. J. Lindelauf, 1974). 59. Jan Hendrik van  Dongen, Mijn tijd winst, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: Wessing en Van der Heij, 1789–­91), 1:94–­112. 60. Ibid., 1:110–­12. 61. David Ramsay, Geschiedenis van de Noord Amerikaansche staats-­omwenteling, 4 vols. (Kampen: J. A. Chalmot, 1792–­94). On Ramsay, see Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 204–­33.

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62. Gerhard Dumbar, De oude en de nieuwe constitutie der Vereenigde Staten van Amerika, uit de beste schriften in hare gronden ontvouwd, 3 vols. (Amsterdam: J. A. Crajenschot, 1793–­96). 63. Dagverhaal der handelingen van de nationaale vergadering representeerende het volk van Nederland, vol. 1 (The Hague: Van Schelle en Comp., 1796), 6. Recent treatments of the discussion about the unitary state include Thomas Poell, The Democratic Paradox. Dutch Revolutionary Struggles over Democratisation and Centralisation (1780–­1813) (Utrecht: Universiteit Utrecht, 2007), 61–­100; and Mart Rutjes, Door gelijkheid gegrepen: Democratie, burgerschap en staat in Nederland 1795–­1801 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2012), 29–­67. 64. For the vote of 2 December 1796, see Dagverhaal der handelingen van de nationaale vergadering representeerende het volk van Nederland, vol. 4 (The Hague: Van Schelle en Comp., 1796), 212; and Cornelius Rogge, Geschiedenis der staatsregeling, voor het Bataafsche volk (Amsterdam: Johannes Allart, 1799), 236–­41. An excellent recent history of the first Dutch national parliament is Joris Oddens, Pioniers in schaduwbeeld: Het eerste parlement van Nederland 1796–­1798 (Nijmegen: Vantilt, 2012). 65. [Johan Hendrik Swildens], Politiek belang-­boek voor dit provisionele tydperk, etc. (Amsterdam: Joannes Roelof Poster, 1795), 148; [John Hendrik Swildens], Zes-­daagsche staatsbrief over ’s lands hoogste zaak, etc. (Amsterdam: Joannes Roelof Poster, 1796), 30; Dagverhaal der handelingen van de nationaale vergadering representeerende het volk van Nederland, vol. 3 (The Hague: Van Schelle en Comp., 1796), 717. 66. De vriend des volks, no. 42 (Middelburg: Weduwen W. en J. Abrahams, 1796), 345–­60; the quotations are on 353–­54. 67. [Jan Willem van Sonsbeeck], Verhandeling over het nadeel eener nationaale conventie en daar uit voortspruitende eenheid van bestuur voor de Nederlandsche Republiek (n.p., 1795), 48. 68. Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence, 285–­289; Joris Oddens, “No Extended Sphere: The Batavian Understanding of the American Constitution and the Problem of Faction,” Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 10, no. 2 (2012): 397–­401. 69. Dagverhaal, 4:26. 70. Ibid., 119. Mably’s 1784 Observations sur le gouvernment et les loix des Etats-­Unis d’Amérique had been translated into Dutch as Brieven over de regeeringsvorm en wetten der Vereenigde Staaten van Noord-­America, aan zyne excellentie John Adams, etc. (Amsterdam: W. Holtrop, 1785). 71. Simon Vuyk, Jacob Kantelaar. Veelzijdig verlicht verliezer 1759–­1821 (Zwolle: Waanders Uitgevers, 2005), 180–­84; Oddens, “No Extended Sphere,” 396–­97. 72. On the family, see Combertus Willem van der Pot, “De twee Dumbar’s (1680–­1744, 1743–­1802),” in Overijsselse portretten: Jubileumbundel, uitgegeven ter gelegenheid van het honderdjarig bestaan van de Vereeniging ter beoefening van Overijsselsch regt en geschiedenis, ed. Thomas J. de Vries et al. (Zwolle: Tijl, 1958), 129–­42. 73. On Dumbar’s merits as a historian, see G. J. Mecking, “Mr. Gerhard Dumbar, een verlicht historicus?,” Overijsselse Historische Bijdragen 100 (1985): 167–­93. 74. For a detailed overview of the content of the work, see Marie-­Anne van Wijnen, “ ‘Eenheid naar buiten, federalisme naar binnen’: Gerhard Dumbar (1743–­1802),

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pleitbezorger van de Amerikaanse constitutie,” Overijsselse Historische Bijdragen 104 (1989): 101–­5. 75. Dumbar, Oude en nieuwe constitutie, 2:v–­vi. 76. Ibid., 3:v–­vi. 77. Oddens, “No Extended Sphere,” 392. 78. On Dumbar’s imprisonment, see Simon Vuyk, “Dumbar gevangen! De internering van Gerhard Dumbar uit Deventer in 1798 op slot Honselaarsdijk,” Overijsselse Historische Bijdragen 120 (2005): 129–­59. 79. [Gerhard Dumbar], Betoog, dat eene onverdeelde regeeringsvorm, in een gemeene-­ best, uit haren eigen aart, onbestendig en voor de vrijheid van den staat gevaarlijk zijn moet (Amsterdam, [1801]). 80. Ibid., 58. 81. Ibid., 8. 82. Ibid., 41, 44, 63. 83. Combertus Willem van  der  Pot, “Een ontwerp-­staatsregeling van  Gerhard Dumbar,” Vereeniging tot uitgaaf der bronnen van het oud-­vaderlandsche recht. Verslagen en mededelingen 11 (1959): 439–­80. 84. The best recent discussion of the rather neglected Dutch constitution of 1801 is Dirk Alkemade, “De Bataafse reactie: Bataafs constitutioneel denken en de staatsregeling van 1801” (master’s thesis, University of Amsterdam, 2014). 85. See Lynn Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era (New York: Norton 2014); and Sebastian Conrad, What Is Global History? (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 86. David Armitage, “What’s the Big Idea? Intellectual History and the Longue Durée,” History of European Ideas 38, no. 4 (2012): 493–­507; David Armitage, Foundations of Modern International Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); Samuel Moyne and Andrew Sartori, eds., Global Intellectual History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013). 87. Richard Whatmore, What Is Intellectual History? (Cambridge, England: Polity, 2016), 99–­100; Andrew Sartori, “Intellectual History and Global History,” in A Companion to Intellectual History, ed. Richard Whatmore and Brian Young (Oxford: Blackwell, 2016), 201–­12; Bell, “Questioning the Global Turn.”

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French Writers on the American Revolution in the Early 1780s A Republican Moment? CARINE LOU NI S S I

The American Revolution coincided with the crisis of French monarchical institutions. In May 1774, Louis XVI acceded to the throne at the time when tensions between the British government and the American colonies were coming to a head. His rise to power prompted financial reforms overseen by a series of ministers. The economist Anne-­Robert-­Jacques Turgot, appointed finance minister in August, implemented reforms based on physiocratic theories, such as the liberalization of the commerce of grain, soon after his appointment and the abolition of the corporations and of the corvée in 1776. These reforms, however, triggered a strong resistance from aristocrats, Parliaments, urban merchants, and the clergy. The resistance eventually arrested Turgot’s liberal project, and he was dismissed two years later. Jacques Necker, a Swiss interventionist who held views antithetical to Turgot’s, then succeeded him to the post in June 1777. Nonetheless, like Turgot, he favored a form of limited local power through provincial assemblies. In addition, under his watch, serfdom was abolished in royal domains in 1779. Yet Necker, too, was dismissed in 1781 for his inability to stabilize French finances, which were further strained by the official military support of the American Patriots after 1778. He was replaced by Charles-­Alexandre de Calonne in 1783 as the victory of the United States over Great Britain was settled through the Treaty of Paris. Calonne attempted to pass most of the physiocrats’ reforms, but he met the same opposition of the notables and was dismissed in his turn. The American War of Independence was for Louis XVI and his ministers an issue of foreign policy linked to their desire to reassert the power of France vis-­à-­vis England after the Seven Years’ War. The American Revolution soon became a major topic of both oral and written debate in literary and political circles in France, especially after the 1778 Treaty of Alliance. 74

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Many of the writings published during the 1780s were dedicated or sent to American revolutionaries before or after being published. Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson, among others, promoted and shaped their diplomatic counterparts’ and the French intelligentsia’s impressions about the United States when they were in Europe. The French literature of the 1780s on the American Revolution undoubtedly contains propaganda in favor of the American republic, whether originating from the Americans behind the scenes or the authors. As a result, this American moment in France has led scholars to center on diplomatic Americanophilia and Anglophobia.1 Yet this approach needs to be revised for two reasons. First, French intellectual circles were deeply interested in America’s prospects during the war and later in the formation of the U.S. government, and not merely because of the ways in which it affected French geopolitics. Second, the discussion of the American Revolution was an opportunity to reflect on political, economic, and financial matters in the context of Turgot’s attempts to modernize the feudal system and then Calonne’s and Necker’s endeavors to prevent bankruptcy. In particular, the responses to the economic reforms provide further nuance to questions of agrarianism, natural rights, and trade that dominated both sides of the Atlantic at the turn of the nineteenth century. Thus, although there was no widespread call for the overthrow of the French monarchy in the wake of the American Revolution, it is possible to view the 1780s as formative years for those who would then take part in the reform movements of the French institutions in and after 1789. Moreover, this perspective reverses the usual direction of influence by looking at how the formation of the United States also influenced French thinkers rather than interpreting a unidirectional line of influence of French writers on the American revolutionaries. Yet studying the 1780s through the lens of these liberal economic theories might give disproportionate attention to certain writers in the French, European, or Atlantic public spheres who then published books, pamphlets, or newspapers on the Insurgents and the new American republic. Some of these authors are indeed well-­known because they later played a major role in the French Revolution like Jacques Pierre Brissot, Jean-­Baptiste Mailhe, and Nicolas de Condorcet, though Condorcet had a quite different status from the other two as a recognized promising scientist who was politically active with links to Turgot. Other important figures of French philosophy who contributed to this public sphere included Gabriel Bonnot de Mably and Guillaume Thomas Raynal. However, many less famous, or rather less studied, authors also wrote influential works on the United States during 75

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the 1780s. This essay seeks to amplify those voices as they highlight how perspectives on republicanism unfolded in the 1780s for these writers read and responded to one another. They were merchants, lawyers, journalists, printers, and polygraphes, that is, authors who wrote on a variety of topics, who published various kinds of texts (essays, plays, novels, treatises, etc.) and who were often translators as well. They traveled at least in a European and more specifically English-­French-­Dutch triangle, between Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, The Hague, and London, and a few of them across the Atlantic to Santo Domingo and North America. The American Revolution as a topic of discussion contributed to the creation of networks of correspondence and communication among writers and thinkers both in France2 and across the Atlantic among French writers and prominent American Patriots. Whereas the rise of the American Revolution as a subject of study in French circles did not provoke a thorough revolution in the republic of letters, it contributed to the increase of its transatlantic dimension both as a topic (French writers addressing America) and as a geographic reality (exchanges through networks of communication across the Atlantic). A rising generation of writers, namely Joseph Mandrillon, Antoine-­ Marie Cerisier, and Michel-­René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, entered the French and French-­speaking public spheres in the 1780s. Born in the 1740s or at the beginning of the 1750s,3 they all belonged to the same generation, in contrast to established figures of the French Enlightenment, such as Raynal or Mably. Yet even if they have been either retrospectively labeled as secondary or second-­rate authors or, more often, completely overlooked in critical studies,4 they figured largely in the existing intellectual networks of Brissot or Mailhe and were not less “well-­known” than them at the time. They shared, moreover, the same socioeconomic background or profile. Mandrillon, a well-­established French merchant and printer in Amsterdam,5 was elected to the American Philosophical Society on 22 January 1785, on the same day as Thomas Paine, James Madison, Dr. Richard Price, and Joseph Priestley.6 The previous year he published Le Spectateur américain ou remarques générales sur l’Amérique septentrionale et sur la république des Treize-­Etats-­Unis, a second edition of which was printed in 1785 in Amsterdam. He sent a copy of it to George Washington, who responded politely if not very enthusiastically.7 Cerisier was a French journalist who also lived in Amsterdam during the 1780s who not only communicated with Mandrillon but also lived at his place for a time.8 He published Le Destin de l’Amérique, a fake translation of various dialogues among major actors of the conflict between the

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colonies and Great Britain in 1780 in London. He also corresponded with John Adams and eventually served as an officious diplomatic agent for him during his stay in Holland.9 Rewarded with a pension for his writings in favor of the French alliance with the American republic, he would later collaborate with Brissot in 1788 to create the Société des Amis des Noirs.10 Hilliard d’Auberteuil was a lawyer and a polygraphe who wrote essays and at least one novel, Miss Mac Rea, roman historique, published in 1784 and set in the colonies during the American Revolution.11 He had previously written on colonial matters and on Santo Domingo. By the time he began to address the American Revolution, he had fallen into disgrace with the authorities both in Saint-­Domingue and in the metropolis because he advocated some autonomy for the colony.12 He corresponded with Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in Paris, and sent him his Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-­Américains,13 the two volumes of which were published in 1781 and in 1782 in Paris and in Amsterdam, respectively. Given the correspondence and contacts the three of them had with Americans, they can even be considered as members of more solid connections or networks than Brissot or Mailhe in the early 1780s; historiography has focused on the latter figures because they played a great part in the major French events of the subsequent years. However, Mandrillon, Cerisier, and Hilliard d’Auberteuil deserve more attention because they capture pressing debates in the 1780s on the intersection of republicanism and participation in a growing world marketplace. Several contexts need to be considered when studying Mandrillon’s Spectateur, Cerisier’s Destin, and d’Auberteuil’s Essais: the American Revolution itself, French domestic and foreign policy, current views and debates on America in French public spheres, and transatlantic networking among writers and thinkers. The three texts were published after the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France and at three different phases of the American Revolution: Cerisier’s appeared during the last year of the war (which virtually ended at Yorktown); Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s came out when the negotiations between the Americans and the other European belligerents were unfolding; and Mandrillon’s circulated when the Independence of the colonies was established and debates on the question of federalism emerged in the first years of the republic. D’Auberteuil and Mandrillon were more concerned with institutional questions because of the American context,14 but all three contributed to the ongoing discussions on America that had started in French intellectual circles. They all presented the United States as a promising country peopled by vigorous republicans, which countered the views

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of Georges-­Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon, Cornelius de Pauw, and others who depicted America as a place where all species (including the human one) degenerated. The writers under discussion here hailed the United States as a large and grand republic that challenged the standard criteria used to define a republican regime. Whereas the three of them were clearly followers of Turgot and devoted to French affairs, they mostly appear in scholarship (when studied at all) in the context of the Dutch republican revolution of the 1780s.15 Yet all three more or less openly criticized what would be called the ancien régime after the French Revolution. They defended free trade and were opposed to the ways in which colonies were administered by European powers. Supporters of what we now term economic liberalism, they underlined the importance of work against speculation and annuities (rente in French) and the idleness of the aristocracy. In this regard, the new American republic was a kind of model for them and, in some respects, anticipated what they wished for France.16 At the same time, they expressed an ambivalent view of commerce; on the one hand, it brought prosperity and was a right for all nations, and, on the other, it bred corruption and luxury whereas agriculture guaranteed the existence and survival of simplicity and virtue among citizens. Therefore, even if they did not elaborate on the implications of freedom and civic participation, their writings were nourished both by a “republican” trend and a “liberal” one and thus provide further evidence that republicanism can thrive alongside the development of commerce.17 In the first section, I look closely at the kind of texts that circulated among French writers in the 1780s. In the next section, I trace how anticolonialism emerged out of the writers’ engagement with the implications of the American crisis. In the last two sections, I characterize the type of “republicanism” they defended in the wake of the American Founders’ assertion of popular sovereignty and their rejection of hereditary power through the French writers’ interest in physiocratic thought.

The American Revolution and the Transatlantic Republic of Letters First, the 1780s as an American decade in French intellectual circles needs to be explored at greater length. When the American Revolution, the United States, and more generally North America emerged as a central topic in educated circles in France in the 1770s and 1780s, intellectuals raised not only diplomatic political issues but also scientific and geographical ones. It was precisely the moment when European and French writers, thinkers, 78

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and intellectuals constructed their own image of North America and of the United States, which was fueled by books like Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (first published in 1782 in English and then in French in 1784 and 1787) and travel literature by French explorers like Chastellux’s Voyages dans l’Amérique septentrionale, published in 1786. Political and economic issues intersected with scientific pursuits (geography, climate, zoology). America in general and North America in particular were subjects of exotic curiosity for French philosophy, in the sense given to the word at the time. The Buffon–­de Pauw thesis on degeneracy, which was refuted by Jefferson in his Notes on the State of Virgnia (published in 1785 and translated in 1787) and by Filippo Mazzei in his Recherches historiques sur les Etats-­Unis (commissioned by Jefferson and published in French in 1788),18 illustrates how America remained a topic within natural science. In France, this dimension of America, as a center of scientific and political experimentation, was typified by Benjamin Franklin, who resided in Passy, a suburb of Paris, from 1776 to 1785. He was considered by the literary and political elite as the archetype of American and Quaker simplicity, in the wake of Voltaire’s idealization of Pennsylvania. Franklin, though not a Quaker, exploited this impression and fashioned his own character in the mold of the simple, if exotic, American while living among Parisians. His image was reproduced on miniatures, plates, cups, saucers, and medals, objects which testify to the Franklinmania in Parisian circles; possessing these objects signaled one’s participation or endorsement of intellectual (philosophical, scientific, and political) pursuits. The several types of writings on the American Revolution that circulated in France during the 1780s were first, speeches delivered or texts written for the various competitions of the literary academies; second, poems and prose writings celebrating America and the American Revolution; third, history books or rather books that intended to present “historical” accounts of the Revolution; and finally, essays that discussed the potential political consequences of the Revolution: the new American institutions it might require and the realignment of international or geostrategic power. My interest lies in this last category, but to better understand its circulation in the public sphere, it helps to delve into the kinds of writing that emerged in the other categories as well. Among the writers who took part in the competition organized by the Académie des Jeux Floraux in Toulouse, in the South of France, which was the oldest academy of the kind and which had a strong influence in the eighteenth century,19 was Jean-­Baptiste Mailhe. He won the first prize, and his 79

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speech was printed in 1784. Mailhe then became a quite prominent member of the National Assembly in 1791 and of the Convention after 1792. He played a significant part during Louis XVI’s trial as he headed the committee that prepared the bill of indictment of the former king. The text he wrote on the American Revolution has been said to be an important step in his political maturation.20 The last part of Mandrillon’s Spectateur was his own speech for the competition of the Academy of Lyons in 1783 on the discovery of America whose question was prepared by Raynal. Among published poems and prose works, one example of texts written to praise the American Revolution is that of Chavannes de la Giraudière, a long epic poem published in 1783 in Amsterdam, where he lived at the time. He dedicated this poem to John Adams and corresponded with him in the mid-­1780s. He was also in touch with Cerisier, who wrote to John Adams in February 1783 to inform him that de la Giraudière’s poem was almost completed.21 De la Giraudière, who nicknamed himself the “Chantre de l’Amérique” (the bard and eulogist of America), collaborated with Cerisier to edit the latter’s new journal, Le mercure hollandais, and he sent the first issue of the paper to John Adams one year later in 1784, informing him that he would act as a correspondent for the newspaper regarding news from and about the United States.22 It seems that Jean-­Baptiste Mailhe also wrote a poem to celebrate the Independence of the United States that he sent in August 1778 to Benjamin Franklin at Passy. In the letter sent along with this lost poem, Mailhe expressed his wish for the success of “the revolution that was about to take place.”23 Books that fall in the broadly historical category were more numerous and of various lengths. They presented the major events of the American Revolution and of the War of Independence to the French audience of educated readers. They did not meet what are today considered the standards of historiography. Among those “history” books, one of the most widely circulated accounts appears to have been Paul-­Ulrich Du Buisson’s Abrégé de la Révolution de l’Amérique angloise, published in Paris 1778 in the wake of the Treaty of Alliance with the United States, which might account for its success.24 Many of these “histories” were inaccurate, faulty, and often biased against the British.25 Yet at least one of these writers (who were then rather obscure and have remained so) asked for the input of firsthand witnesses and agents of the Revolution. François Soulès corresponded with Thomas Jefferson and asked him for information. He even sent him the manuscript of his Histoire des troubles de l’Amérique angloise, which Jefferson annotated

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at some length to correct what he viewed as inaccuracies. Jefferson bought the published version of the book, which was printed in Paris, and sent it to James Madison. Soulès would then become one of the French translators of Paine’s Rights of Man. One of the accounts of the American Revolution that attracted special attention was Raynal’s short book on the subject, Révolution de l’Amérique, which was published in 1781 in London and The Hague and became a chapter of his influential Histoire philosophique: Révolution de l’Amérique. Its publication led Paine to answer what he perceived as Raynal’s flawed vision of the American Revolution in his Letter to the Abbé Raynal, published in 1782 and quickly translated in French. One of the several translations of Paine’s essay was made by Cerisier, who added footnotes defending and confirming several of Paine’s assertions, especially on the events of the War of Independence.26 This translation was published in Amsterdam in 1783. Cerisier informed John Adams of its forthcoming publication, and he even suggested that his translation of Adams’s Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law should appear in the same volume, a proposal that must have annoyed the recipient of the letter, who apparently never answered Cerisier on this point. The last category of texts I consider—­essays or pamphlets on the American Revolution that pertain to French domestic or international relations—­were written either by authors who were part of the Parisian intellectual circles (such as Démeunier, Condorcet, and Mably) or authors outside of these circles (like Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon). Franklin’s publication of each of the thirteen colonies’ state constitutions in 1783 (translated into French by LaRochefoucault d’Enville) attuned political writers to the forms of American government and new questions about implementing republicanism. Many of these texts were published in the second half of the 1780s, when the crisis of French institutions deepened and when the question of federalism was debated with greater intensity in the United States. Some of these texts led to transatlantic debates, such as the Turgot-­Mably-­Adams debate on the tension between agrarian and merchant interests in the uses of government and later the four-­volume book written by Jefferson’s friend, the Italian physician and translator Mazzei.27 Turgot, in his 1778 letter to Price, praised the American Revolution, even if he had opposed French involvement in the War of Independence.28 He considered that the origins of U.S. independence were found in Great Britain’s economic policy toward the colonies, which he deemed a “monopoly,”

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and he accordingly criticized what he perceived as an illegitimate right given to state governments to control trade. The American people were likely to produce the “example of a constitution through which man enjoys all his rights.” He saw in the United States at the same time a “hope” and a “model,” even if he feared that it had yet to become independent from what he called European prejudices and errors regarding economic and political matters.29 This viewpoint is reflected in the three writings by Cerisier, d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon studied here. Looking closely at this set of texts provides other takes on debates within liberalism as not only Turgot’s but also Mably’s influence appears in their writing. In addition to promoting free trade, Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon evince anxiety about the spirit of commerce. Indeed, their work, especially Mandrillon’s, might have been influenced by Mably’s Observations sur le gouvernement et les lois des Etats-­Unis (published in 1784 in Amsterdam by Rosard and translated in English in 1785). Mably’s view of republican government aligns with J. G. A. Pocock’s theses on civic virtue or humanism as promoting the common good. Cerisier did contribute to the publication of Mably’s 1784 edition at the request of John Adams. In the letter Adams sent to Cerisier asking him to take care of the publication of Mably’s book, Adams tried to convince his French correspondent by reminding him that he shared common views with Mably; however, Le Destin de l’Amérique instead reveals Cerisier’s affinity with Turgot, who has been categorized more on the liberal fringe with his physiocratic approach.30 Thus, Turgot’s and Mably’s ideas can be seen as polarizing in this context. These three writers were influenced not only by French and colonial writers but by British ones as well. Many of these essays paid tribute to the freedom of speech in the English-­speaking public sphere or rather to what French thinkers and authors imagined this freedom was like. What may be termed a transatlantic Whig point of view pervaded the circles of French writers, journalists, and thinkers who addressed the American Revolution. It is evidenced by the very titles and subtitles of their books. Mandrillon’s title is inspired by Addison and Steele’s Spectator, the widely read Whig periodical. Cerisier’s Destin is a fake translation. Mirabeau subtitled his essay on the Cincinnatus society “Imitation d’un pamphlet anglo-­américain.” Du Buisson took on the identity of a “member of the American Congress” to publish Letters in 1779. Condorcet wrote as a “Bourgeois de New Haven” in 1787, also hiding behind an American persona.31 The masquerading and mimesis of American writers confirm the vogue of America or the American

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fashion in French intellectual circles. An extra-­European republican model perhaps stimulated the reflection of writers who appeared unsatisfied with the French, but also English, monarchies. These writings may, in fact, be considered as the visible part of a transatlantic web of connections and circulations that included networks of correspondence among prominent American Founders who stayed in Paris or in Europe, and French intellectuals. During the 1780s, the nexuses of these networks were Benjamin Franklin (who settled in Passy for a decade), John Adams (who stayed in France and in Holland from 1779 to 1788), and, during the second half of the 1780s, Thomas Jefferson (who stayed in Paris from 1784 to 1789). It is not easy to know whether these letter exchanges were prompted by French intellectuals because they were genuine Americanophiles or because they were reformers who wished to benefit from the advice of the American Founders. At bottom, though, these writers understood the diplomatic and geostrategic issues at stake during the War of Independence and then during the peace negotiations. In the case of Cerisier, John Adams consulted him according to Adams’s version of the story.32 Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil appear, rather, to have initiated letter exchanges on their writings. Amid more pragmatic questions in these exchanges, these transatlantic correspondents shared a mutual interest in Enlightenment principles, science, and a curiosity about America. In addition to networks among French peripheral or established intellectuals and the American Founders, others seem to have developed among French writers. One of them was centered in Amsterdam and might be described as the “Mandrillon connection.” This network connected at least Cerisier, Mandrillon, and Chavannes de la Giraudière. It also involved Dutch printers. The role of Holland in the Enlightenment and its diffusion, or “the role of the Dutch as middlemen in the international republic of letters,” in the eighteenth century has been studied at length.33 For my purposes, though, I want to illuminate the multiple actors, genres, and material cultures that circulated between this French-­Dutch axis. De la Giraudière’s poem, for example, was published in Amsterdam by Jacobus Adrianus Crajenschot, the Catholic printer and Patriot in the Dutch context of the 1780s. He was also the printer of Cerisier’s translation of Paine’s answer to Raynal, but the Destin de l’Amérique was published in London by John Bew, a printer and bookseller of the famous Paternoster row who printed magazines and eclectic books. Mandrillon’s American Spectator was published in Brussels and Amsterdam by E. Flon, a bookseller and a printer who sold

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books such as those by Rousseau and Voltaire and who therefore primarily disseminated Enlightenment ideas rather than strictly printed material on the American Revolution. Another network that connected writers on the issue of empire, colonialism, and America in the French Atlantic involved those who traveled between France and Saint-­Domingue (later Haiti). Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s interest in the situation of the American colonies and in the American Revolution was informed by his own experience in the French colony of Saint-­ Domingue and his conception of the relations between the colony and the French metropolis. Du Buisson, who had previously posed as an American congressman in one text, published the Abrégé in answer to Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s writing on Santo Domingo, the colony’s capital city. Du Buisson, the general postmaster of Santo Domingo at the end of the 1770s, published his Abrégé in Paris through Cellot and Jombert, an official printer, or one officially recognized by the French king’s offices, whereas d’Auberteuil published his book himself in Paris and in Brussels. The accepted version of the story is that Du Buisson and Hilliard d’Auberteuil were rivals, but this possible connection has remained largely unexamined. While scholars repeatedly recognize the existence of these networks among writers and printers, finding material to document them precisely proves difficult. One of Mandrillon’s letters to Cerisier was published in Cerisier’s Histoire des Provinces Unies, but their correspondence has not been archived except when it appears within the writings of the American Founders. In addition, the evidence to better understand the relationships among printers and writers and that could provide the detailed publishing history of the books is even less accessible and requires further investigation. Because the networks among French writers and their printers can mainly be reconstructed through the letters they sent to American Founders, the scope of a study of these networks remains limited even if the correspondence of the Founders details the connections and contacts of these French writers among themselves. As such, the narrative that develops when one exclusively studies French writers within collections on the American Founders reiterates American exceptionalism and obscures the transatlantic relations and intellectual circulations between France and the United States in the revolutionary era, which need to be reappraised.34 Both these published and unpublished materials clearly prove that there was an American moment in France in the 1780s. The American Revolution and the Alliance of 1778 turned the United States into a subject of political and scientific interest in intellectual circles in Paris and in French 84

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provincial cities, as well as in European cities where French journalists or polygraphes were established, such as Amsterdam. They also edited independent or sponsored newspapers (like Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique, with which Franklin actively collaborated) and produced writings which were circulated in France and in Europe. The sample of writings that I will look into in this essay testify to the range of approaches to the United States and former British North America that appeared at the crossroads among geostrategy, economic theories, politics, and science.

Empire Contested Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon all expressed clear anticolonial and anti-­imperial positions in their writings, which were inspired by both Raynal and physiocracy. First, the American Revolution appeared to them and to many other French authors as exceptional and as totally different from the other political changes and episodes that had taken place in the past. Mandrillon enthusiastically remarked that the “the American Revolution is a phenomenon in politics, a unique moment in history.”35 He distinguished this “revolution” from all those that had happened before and said it had “nothing in common with them.”36 The word “revolution” before the American Revolution and the end of the eighteenth century meant any kind of alteration in the governing spheres of a country. Thomas Paine in Common Sense and in his open letter to Raynal contributed to shifting meanings of the word. Paine, widely read and discussed in French literary and political circles and salons, notably explained the fundamental difference between the American Revolution and other “revolutions.”37 Even if Mandrillon did not refer to the Letter to the Abbé Raynal here, he mentioned Paine’s Common Sense, which had been the first text in which Paine argued in favor of a republican, democratic, and antimonarchical revolution in the British colonies. Mandrillon then predicted that the American Revolution would be a model for the “administrators of empires,” who would “learn lessons [from it] to rule over peoples,” in particular regarding “the sacred rights of man” at the time and for “posterity.”38 His warning did not directly mention European monarchies or France, but he did present an anticolonial attitude; in the very first pages, he mentions the “rights of indigenous people,” especially those under the subjugation of Spain.39 Hilliard d’Auberteuil also voiced his optimism about the revolution “which completely changed the political system of Europe and the existence of all America.”40 He envisioned the other 85

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armed conflicts it could trigger and the fact that “several nations” could be the victims of these future wars, which certainly included Spain. Cerisier concluded his dialogue in 1780 on the vision of “an entirely free America” and even on the idea it could make the old dream of “perpetual peace” come true.41 The American Revolution, therefore, was seen as shaping a new world order that exposed the drawbacks of imperial designs. It put pressure on the rivalries among European powers for their share of territory and wealth in America. Cerisier linked the fight of the Insurgents of North America against the mother country to that of the Irish and, more broadly, to the colonials of the whole British Empire.42 He considered imperial rule as undermining the whole British political system and more specifically undermining the British Parliament,43 and he openly supported the positions held by Price and Priestley to reform British institutions, in particular representation in Parliament. Cerisier’s attack against the economic policy of the British government was quite harsh and sarcastic as he remarked that they had “taxed chimneys, windows, posts, horses, dogs and even servants” to pay for their imperial ventures.44 The British political system was neither what it used to be nor what authorities pretended it was. Cerisier opposed the alleged “despotism” that “was said to exist in France” to “the empire based on equitable laws” in Britain.45 It is clearly propaganda in favor of France. Such propaganda also explicitly surfaced at other moments, especially when one of the characters of Cerisier’s dialogue underlined that “Louis XVI’s behavior had been far more noble and open” than that of other monarchs.46 The three writers shared the criticisms of the Whig opposition not only for obvious strategic reasons linked to foreign policy but also because they had political affinities with them. Hilliard d’Auberteuil denounced the decay of British morals and of the British system, although he suggested that this Pandora’s box had been brought there from the outside since “the English who had almost all become wealthy travelers had carried with them in their country the corruption of other nations.”47 Britain was compared to the Roman Empire and to Carthage, but at the same time Hilliard d’Auberteuil thought that it could yet resist these foreign pressures thanks to “its excellent constitution.”48 The myth of the British constitution still survived, and this myth was the foundation for the Whigs in Britain, as well as for many of the American Whigs or the American Patriots (versus Loyalists) who opposed the prime minister’s policies. These French writers took up Edmund Burke’s contention on 22 March 1775 in Parliament; spreading the fundamental rights of British subjects, 86

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he maintained, was “the cement” of the empire. Mandrillon stated that “the English should therefore have thought that they encroached on their own rights when they encroached on those of the English of America.”49 Cerisier repeated William Pitt’s warning when the former addressed the British authorities: “You will lose America if you want to bring it back by dint of cannon shots.”50 Hilliard d’Auberteuil described the policy led by the British in the colonies as “the tyranny of republicans” and again compared it to the Roman Empire.51 England was perceived as a place where “republican” virtues prevailed against the hordes of the North. For example, Hilliard d’Auberteuil pitted “the Goths and other Barbarians” against “London where republican equality was the source of a common pride.”52 What “republican” means here is not fully clear because he does not define it. In contrast, the behavior of the current British army and of the governors in the colonies of North America was equated to a form of savagery; this savagery then spread to the colonies a form of tyranny unknown to their inhabitants, which was also denounced by American Patriots. One of the methods used to gain control of the colonies was to divide in order to cement its reign; Hilliard d’Auberteuil, in fact, accused the British government of having “multipl[ied] distinctions among subjects who have the same rights in order to make them take up arms against one another.”53 This Aristotelian method of establishing tyranny consisted in corrupting people with “titles” and “honors” contrary to the habits and morals that prevailed in the colonies.54 According to Mandrillon, the “republican spirit,” which had “made swift progress among the colonists,”55 countered this declension. Again he does not expound on republicanism but alludes to it in the context of the suspension of the charters of the 1680s; it may have pertained to the rule of law, that is, fundamental rights guaranteed through established legal rules by which the governed as well as the governors abide. In Cerisier’s dialogue, his character of the annoyed British king remarked that “the colonists are quite miserable republicans.”56 Later, Cerisier’s character, Lord North, again compared the colonies to “ancient republics” and suggested that “the people” of the colonies had been seduced by “ambitious demagogues” who wanted to “make a revolution,”57 which might have been a reference to Paine and to the success of Common Sense. Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon all sided with the American Patriots and blamed the imperial policies of the mother country. To them, the American colonists were “republicans” even before the Independence of 1776 and had been so at least since the end of the seventeenth century. At the time of the Glorious Revolution and the subsequent entrenchment 87

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of charters after William of Orange took over, Hilliard d’Auberteuil said that in the colony of New York “men [were] nurtured on the salutary principles of the republic.”58 More generally in all the colonies, “freedom” was taught to children almost from their birth.59 Therefore a republican culture or a republican habitus that differed from the culture that existed in European monarchies had grown there and had been encouraged. Yet he did not specify how this “republican” tradition diverged from that of the mother country. Such a tradition nonetheless explained, according to Hilliard d’Auberteuil, why Paine’s pamphlet, Common Sense, had so great an influence on its readers: “Such words addressed to republicans who were naturally alert and impatient of any yoke could but make a great impression.”60 So it was neither Paine’s writing nor the hostilities with Britain in the 1770s that first prompted calls for a republic, even if, as Hilliard d’Auberteuil underlined, Anglo-­American colonists expressed little desire for independence before the Revolution.61

A Physiocratic View of North America? The republican education and customs of Americans were closely connected with their living conditions, which were perceived as totally different from those that existed in Europe at the time. Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil had traveled to North America and so had firsthand knowledge of it, which was not the case for Cerisier. American society was said to align with natural laws and its government with natural rights and natural principles, whereas European society was depicted as ossified and perverted.62 The aristocracy and the clergy were attacked as useless. Hilliard d’Auberteuil devoted a section to the “errors and prejudices of the French” about commerce and the organization of the navy. He considered “the old noblesse” as illegitimate,63 and he accordingly celebrated the provisions in American constitutions against “the ambitions” of the clergy and “the positive suppression of all nobility and hereditary prerogatives.”64 European regimes and monarchies appeared as rife with “arbitrary rights and laws where abuses had been as multiplied as the offices of public administration.”65 These were stumbling blocks on the way to reforms in Europe and in France, whereas America was, in Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s view, “free from these shackles,” although he did not exclude that “new prejudices” could be created on the American side of the Atlantic.66 The three writings censure the whole of the French monarchical and aristocratic system in moral terms. Mandrillon remarks that monarchies 88

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in general, including France, are the seats of “splendor,” “sluggishness,” and “indolence.”67 Attacking both “the nobility and priests” for their “servile arrogance,”68 Hilliard d’Auberteuil further describes French morals as degenerate; pleasure had become the keyword of the French aristocratic society.69 This moral criticism of the European aristocratic way of life was then turned into an economic one. What explained the moral decadence of the European monarchies and even of the Dutch Republic for Cerisier was the domination of “rentiers,” “agiotage,” and useless “luxury.”70 This explains Cerisier’s explicit rejection of Necker, whom he called “a man of expedients.”71 Cerisier sarcastically created his character, the anti-­ French Lord Weymouth, as categorically ruling out the reformation of France’s sociopolitical system and economic order. At the same time, this character functions to praise Turgot as “an enthusiastic patriot who was about to establish general freedom of religion and industry.”72 Although Hilliard d’Auberteuil did not openly advocate revolution, he nonetheless made allusions that could be understood as moderate appeals to reform; he mentions, for example, “a just” king who was “eager to seize all means to heal the old wounds of government” and even states that victory against the English was not sufficient if many “unfortunate people lived under his reign.”73 The ideal government of these liberal republicans not only responded to nature but also included limiting territories and colonies to the natural boundaries of countries.74 While writings on the American Revolution published by major figures within French philosophy (like Turgot or Condorcet) speculate on the American Revolution,75 other writers demonstrate how it intersects concretely with French institutions more than their better-­known contemporaries. The colonists differed from people in Europe as the result of several factors: the environment, climate, and “necessity.” Europeans were well aware of Buffon’s and de Pauw’s visions of America, but Mandrillon, as well as Cerisier in his newspaper, Le Politique hollandais,76 challenged these views. Inhabitants of North American were morally regenerated by their contact with nature, and it was this wilderness that made them free and independent.77 These views echo Crèvecoeur in his Letters, which was published around the same time as Cerisier’s newspaper. The positive influence of nature was visible in the physical strength of American men. They were depicted as sturdy soldiers who were adapted to their wild environment. Hilliard d’Auberteuil pictured them quite dramatically as “walking across . . . marshes . . . like hunters accustomed to mimicking the agility of the game they pursue.”78 Rough living conditions produced healthy individuals.79 General Arnold 89

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appeared as “persevering and indefatigable” and as having a “robust temper.”80 American soldiers, leaders, and people in general embodied a model close to that of antiquity as the comparison with Rome exemplifies, even if there is an implicit reference to Sparta in his description of the education of children.81 Both Mandrillon’s and Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s conceptions of America seem to be underpinned by Montesquieu’s view of the influence of climate on morals in The Spirit of the Laws. The same characteristics that Montesquieu ascribed to the English are attributed to the North American colonists, that is, “impatience” and “courage,” which were, according to Montesquieu, necessary to prevent tyranny.82 North Americans embodied, for Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil, the ideal free people. These writers characterized Americans as possessing “energy” and “courage” in contrast to European people, who tended toward degeneration and who seemed to have lost their virility and their virtù,83 reiterating their reversal of the thesis of American degeneracy. Both nature and the adaptation of men to this given space-­time created conditions favorable to “republican” morals and to the formation of a republican government. The North American territory was seen as an exceptional place predestined to be free. It was to Mandrillon an “empire for liberty” where natural rights were guaranteed by a fair political model and good legislation.84 It was another version of the British Empire and a more positive iteration of “empire” that did not imply the domination of one people over another but rather the contrary. The word here connoted greatness and immensity without the flaws of the imperial model of European nations. Whereas Hilliard d’Auberteuil praised the effects of primitive activities such as hunting on children, it was rather the agrarian or agricultural paradigm that prevailed in the development of the American republic. America was to him “this huge continent where despotism had not spread its empire” and that “was only awaiting peaceful and educated cultivators.”85 Transversing the Atlantic Ocean had made it possible “to begin the world over again,” as Paine said in Common Sense, which probably influenced Hilliard d’Auberteuil. “America” was also a creation of the European, especially French, imagination, a notion confirmed by Crèvecoeur’s fake autobiography of an “American farmer,” which generated a mythology of America in France. North America was seen as a land of plenty, as a “fertile” soil producing “fruits” and “wheat” in great quantity and enabling people to enjoy “innocence and the sweetness of a pastoral way of life.”86 Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon advocated physiocratic principles, which proposed that the source of economic viability and 90

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political and personal contentment was the fertile soil and agriculture. Mandrillon explains that “agriculture” was “the basis of the greatness of a nation” and that “commerce” was only “its consequence.”87 Hilliard d’Auberteuil also explicitly presents this essential notion of physiocratic economy: “the real wealth of nations consisted in the products of lands and in the works of industry which transform and exchange these products.”88 Beyond the economic health of a country, agriculture was the foundation of good morals and of a perennial republican regime. In Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s words, all those who tilled the land “did not move away from the rights of nature,” and if all “laborious men” could find work, the good moral order of society would be ensured;89 these were sentiments he shared with those Jefferson expressed in his Notes.90 Agriculture was the keystone of the American republic, and work in general was considered a fundamental value. The centrality of labor for the good order of society was emphasized by Mandrillon through a Mandevillian description of the state of Europe, where too many workers cannot find work and are useless in the “beehive.” Emigration to the colonies might have been a solution to the problem of poverty and unemployment in Europe, which was a criticism leveled at the mercantilist vision of the colonies and at how colonies were viewed in Europe and in France.91 According to physiocratic thought, the importance of labor as a value is even more clearly developed within a larger discussion of an ethic of work. Work contributes to human happiness and is viewed as an intrinsic part of man’s nature. It has a moral function because it increases self-­worth. Such reflections go beyond the mere economic character of labor and come close to proto-­utilitarianism: “The freedom to work for oneself naturally increases in each individual the courage and the activity that is inspired by the pleasure to be rewarded for it.”92 This liberation of the potential of America was made possible thanks to the American Revolution, which was seen not only as a political but also as an economic and moral change. The question of slavery was not taken into account in this picture and was not an issue here, although Hilliard d’Auberteuil had tackled this topic when writing on Santo Domingo.

Commerce, Virtue, and History In addition to agriculture, “commerce” and all “useful works” were instrumental in “conserving the morals” of the people, as Mandrillon stated.93 The American society whose commercial future had been opened by its 91

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Independence represented a model of a balanced social order in which there was neither “poverty” nor “luxury” nor an “excess of needs.”94 Yet Mandrillon stuck to a Rousseau-­like vision of Native Americans, whom he pictured as the embodiment of the innocence of the first ages of humanity. Sciences and arts imported by Europeans to the American continent would hasten their technological progress and improve their sociability even if it also meant the importation of luxury and thus a tendency toward corruption. Mandrillon hoped these unavoidable evils would be balanced in America by more positive laws and provisions than in Europe. He hoped former British colonists and new American citizens would learn lessons from the European model about what not to reproduce.95 In the preface, he warned them against a possible negative influence of English culture, especially “English ideas on commerce and wealth.”96 His analysis might have been an answer to d’Auberteuil, since it clearly differed from the latter’s view, who thought that Britain had preserved American settlers from habits of “luxury” and “had taught them industry and commerce by dint of prohibitions.”97 Yet both Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil agreed that commerce was good for America and that the American republic, “where commerce mostly benefited from all that could make the country and the citizen richer,” would help promote commercial freedom in general.98 Commerce as it existed in North America was a kind of rational and almost moral activity. Hilliard d’Auberteuil thought that “competition and candor,” “modesty,” “rightfulness and utility” were the cardinal virtues of commercial exchanges across the Atlantic.99 He defended the positive role of commerce and of “merchants and owners” in the former colonies and during the American Revolution.100 American “merchants” were “honest,” and North America was presented as “the country in which commerce is vital.”101 He praised General Arnold, whom he said was a former tradesman, and he turned Thomas Walker, the Canadian merchant who supported the American Revolution, into a martyr of the war and a victim of British “barbarity.”102 Both Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil mentioned the role of trade during the conflict with Great Britain. The fact that “men and women [in the colonies] renounced the consumption of goods that were provided by the metropolis” after the Stamp Act was an important moment of the Revolution in Mandrillon’s view. It confirmed what Hilliard d’Auberteuil had said a few years earlier about how the British government used commerce as a weapon and its miscalculation that “destroying the trade” of the American settlers would be enough to regain the control of the colonies.103

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North America was thus destined to be a commercial nation. Mandrillon ascribed this characteristic to geography and to “the central position of the territory of the United States.”104 The American Revolution would help establish what was a fundamental idea for these three “republican” or “liberal” writers and what Cerisier called “the natural right that all people have to trade with an unlimited freedom on all seas and in all countries.”105 Suppressing monopolies of trade was a major concern, and imperial British policy embodied mercantilism, which they interpreted as incompatible with the freedom of enterprise and of access to natural resources.106 The future or “destiny of America,” as Cerisier called it, presented a real concern as it included but also exceeded geostrategic questions. Hilliard d’Auberteuil predicted that “septentrional America was too great not to become itself an empire” in the future.107 Both Nationalists, who would then become Federalists, and Jeffersonians, discussed this idea on the other side of the Atlantic in the 1780s. Mandrillon summed up their interrogations when he considered that the crux of the matter was “to conciliate the wealth of their empire with peace, happiness and the freedom of each individual.”108 Yet how these national debates precisely crossed the Atlantic and whether Mandrillon knew of them still need to be investigated. What is more certain is that he published his Spectateur américain after Mably’s 1784 book on American governments in whose publication Cerisier played a role at the request of John Adams, as discussed above. Mandrillon may have been aware of this book as he was part of Cerisier’s network. In his preface, Mandrillon seemed to level an implicit criticism at Mably when he said that it was not sufficient to write on the flaws of constitutions,109 while sharing his distrust of English commercial customs. The Constitutional Conventions that were taking place in the United States in the 1770s and 1780s raised issues that tended to challenge what may be considered as the orthodox vision of republican regimes in eighteenth-­century political philosophy both in Europe and in North America. As Hilliard d’Auberteuil remarked, “the theory of republican government” was “almost yet unknown.”110 Yet he and Mandrillon continued to rely on the former criteria used to define the republican paradigm, notably the republican socioeconomic model, which implied an equality of wealth. Hilliard d’Auberteuil warned the Americans against military conquest and colonization and advised them to develop their commerce instead.111 He considered that they were first and foremost farmers, though, and contended that trade would not grow much before fifty years, since extending commerce meant the

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development of manufacture and of a navy.112 Similarly, Mandrillon insisted on the necessity of being “courageous enough to resist luxury,” to favor “agriculture” rather than “commerce.” These measures would prevent the American political system from falling into European degenerate and iniquitous forms of government such as “despotism,” “aristocracy,” and “anarchy.”113 The American republics could keep their exceptional character if their inhabitants remained wary of what Mandrillon called “English ideas on commerce and wealth.” He predicted that “commerce was the greatest enemy of the United States” because of the corruption it could generate in the country.114 Therefore Mandrillon thought that Americans should restrain their manufactures to “absolutely essential products,” which were already manufactured in Europe.115 In other words, they should keep the restrictions on production that had been imposed by the mother country in colonial times. Yet even in Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s writing, in which a more positive vision of commerce appeared, a negative one also surfaced. Whereas he had extolled Arnold’s and Walker’s patriotism, he quoted the case of the “avidity of a merchant of Boston” that nearly “caused a general massacre” during the War of Independence.116 He also alluded to Dunmore’s Proclamation in Virginia and suggested that the governor hoped that some of the colonists would be “corrupted by the commerce with the neighboring colonies,”117 although whether he referred either to Spanish colonies or to the British or French West Indies is not clear. How to maintain and reconcile a republican regime within the individual American states and throughout the federal government was a major issue to them and to the Founders. One of the keys to enduring republican institutions, if not the main one, was moral virtue. Hilliard d’Auberteuil seemed to share some of Crèvecoeur’s fears about the potential harmful consequences of the War of Independence on the morals of Americans.118 Both he and Mandrillon, however, were ready to move away from the standard models of republican regimes that were used and theorized in political thought at the time. They did not consider that the extent of the territory was a problem for the conservation of the republic. Mandrillon, who wrote in the mid-­1780s, when the federal question was debated with more urgency in the United States, predicted that a closer federal union would form and that even a centralization of power would take place.119 The size of the American republic was not an impediment to political happiness provided good morals were maintained. Hilliard d’Auberteuil went even further in challenging the usual conception of republics as possible only in small states as he believed that the United States could be made up of “thirteen confederate republics” as 94

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well as “twenty.”120 He argued that the republican model did not depend on the size of its territory as “activity, work and patriotism” could ultimately produce “power” or “influence” as well as in a monarchy.121 The new republican paradigm as it was unfolding in the United States appeared to him as something radically different from past models, which led him to reappraise the orthodox conception of republics to some extent. As a result, Hilliard d’Auberteuil was quite optimistic about the future of the republican constitutions of the American states. What guaranteed morals and good order were more general factors or conditions, that is, “freedom of government,” which meant neither “motives of ambition nor power to be feared nor injustice to be afraid of nor too heavy taxes to be paid.” It also depended on economic prosperity and on a good distribution of work among the population in “which all laborious men find an occupation” and provided “the fertile soil produced abundantly in exchange of labor.”122 These physiocratic conditions would serve as the best barriers against moral and political degeneracy. They required the guarantee of “the right of ownership,” which he considered “the sacred basis of all other rights of civil society” and which he believed had not been secured enough in the American state constitutions, although it was the only way “republics” could prove viable and strong.123 When all these requirements were met, organs of control, such as the Council of Censors set up by the 1776 Constitution of Pennsylvania, which he criticized, would become superfluous. Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and Mandrillon had clear affinities with the physiocrats since they emphasized the importance of agriculture as the primary economic activity for a country and of the right of ownership, the need for governments to interfere with the economy only in a minimal way, and the role of nature as the measure of all things. They offered an agrarian (and Jeffersonian) vision of America and insisted on virtue as the keystone of a well-­governed and well-­organized society, but they also advocated the importance of commerce and free trade as essential. The eighteenth-­century ambivalent view of commerce surfaced because the danger of luxury and corruption was still real to Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon. Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon therefore had a rather ambiguous, if not at times contradictory, vision of the American Revolution. They supported and celebrated it as the feat of a free and republican people, but they pointed out its harmful consequences for American society. These writings contributed to the debates about the future of the French social and political systems. They reflected the political, economic, and social 95

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crisis the French monarchy was going through in the 1780s. Those who supported or observed Turgot’s attempts to end the feudal system in France found echoes of his policy in the American republic, as Turgot himself suggested in his letter to Price.124 Nevertheless, many French public intellectuals who wrote on the American Revolution, including Cerisier, Hilliard d’Auberteuil and Mandrillon, were aware of the radical otherness of America’s spatial, social, economic, and political conditions. Consequently, whereas they hailed the American Revolution as a watershed, they did not support an end to monarchy. Their writings may be viewed as representative of some of the questions that would arise during the Revolution of 1789. Hilliard d’Auberteuil died in 1789, but Cerisier supported the convening of the States General and the reforms of the French monarchy. He apparently remained a royalist before he endorsed the republican government in 1792.125 Mandrillon also supported the Revolution, was a moderate reformer who approved of the first phase of the French Revolution and especially of Lafayette,126 but was later a victim of the Terror. However, even if writing on the American Revolution turned out to be an opportunity for discussing “liberal” and “republican” issues, it does not seem sufficient as such to underpin the thesis of a potential “influence” of the American Revolution on the course of politics in France or in precipitating the French Revolution. The French revolutionary decade has tended to obscure how the new generation of French writers and publicists, like Cerisier, Mandrillon, Hilliard d’Auberteuil, and others, grappled with the legacy of the previous generation of French Enlightenment thinkers (such as Raynal, Rousseau, and Montesquieu) and constructed their legacy. The historiographical treatment of the opposition, which has been said to polarize the political debates in 1789 between Américanistes (the promoters of American forms of government or rather of the few unicameral legislatures in state constitutions) and Anglomanes (the supporters of checks and balances), also overshadows transatlantic debates prior to the French Revolution.127 Looking at the numerous French writings on the United States that were published in the 1780s, without overdetermining the significance of 1789 in a teleological way (unless one considers that the French Revolution had already begun with Turgot’s reforms), may reveal how the American Revolution as a topic contributed to an already ongoing mutation in the French public sphere, since it enabled all sorts of writers to take part in the public debate on political, as well as economic, social, and scientific issues.

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Notes 1. As Allan Potosfky has already emphasized (Potofsky, “Le corps consulaire français et le débat autour de la ‘perte’ des Amériques: Les intérêts mercantiles franco-­américains et le commerce atlantique, 1763–­1795,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 363 [January–­March 2011], http://​ahrf​.revues​.org​/11930). My own interpretation of these writings has changed since I published “Penser la Révolution américaine en France (1778–­1788): Enjeux philosophiques et historiographiques,” Cercles 16, no. 2 (2006): 97–­113, www​.cercles​.com​/n16​/2​/lounissi​.pdf. See also Gilbert Chinard, L’Amérique et le rêve exotique dans la littérature française au XVIIe et au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1913); Bernard Faÿ, Bibliographie critique des ouvrages français relatifs aux États-­Unis, 1770–­1800 (1925; New York: Burt Franklin, 1968) (Faÿ’s work has been discredited because of his collaboration with the Vichy regime); Durand Echeverria, “Mirage in the West: L’Amérique devant l’opinion française, 1734–­1870: Questions de méthode et d’interprétation,” Revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine 9, no. 1 (1962): 51–­62; Durand Echeverria, Mirage in the West: A History of the French Image of American Society to 1815 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957); Paul M. Spurlin, “The World of the Founding Fathers and France,” French Review, Bicentennial Issue: Historical and Literary Relations between France and the United States 49, no. 6 (1976): 909–­25; Michele R. Morris, ed., Images of America in Revolutionary France (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990); Claude Fohlen, “The Impact of the American Revolution on France,” in The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad, ed. Library of Congress (1976; Honolulu: University Press of the Pacific, 2002), 21–­40; and Marie-­Jeanne Rossignol, “The American Revolution in France: Under the Shadow of the French Revolution,” Europe’s American Revolution, ed. Simon Newman (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 51–­7 1. 2. In particular through the question of the “advantages and disadvantages of the discovery of America” that Raynal chose to ask in 1780 to organize a competition for the Academy of Lyons (Gilles Bancarel, “Du bon usage de la correspondence: Les lettres de l’Abbé Raynal,” in Réseaux de correspondances à l’âge classique [XVIe–XVIIIe siècles], ed. Pierre-­Yves Beaurepaire, Jens Haseler, and Anthony McKenna [Saint Etienne: Presses Universitaires de Saint Etienne, 2006], 222). 3. Mandrillon was born in 1743, Cerisier in 1749, and Hilliard d’Auberteuil in 1751. 4. Nordholt describes them in a rather derogatory way as “hacks” (J. W. Schulte Nordholt, The Dutch Republic and American Independence [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982], 126, 128). 5. He is also sometimes described as a “banker” (see the letter “To George Washington from Joseph Mandrillon, 11 June 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://​ founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Washington​/04​-01​-02​-0303). Source: The Papers of George Washington, Confederation Series, vol. 1, 1 January 1784–­17 July 1784, ed. W. W. Abbot (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 441–­42. 6. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 19, no. 109 (June–December 1881): 13. His application, though, to the Society of Cincinnati was rejected on 18 May 1787 (Records of the Society of Cincinnati 6, https://​www​.societyofthecincinnati​.org​/pdf​

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/Calendar​%20of​%20the​%20Society​%20of​%20the​%20Cincinnati​%20Archives​%20​-​% 20May​%203​%202013​.pdf). 7. Letter “To George Washington from Joseph Mandrillon, 11 June 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Washington​/04​-01​ -02​-0303. 8. See his letters sent in October and November 1780 to John Adams, whom he asked to write to him at Mandrillon’s address in Amsterdam (“To John Adams from Antoine Marie Cerisier, 17 October 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://​founders​ .archives​.gov​/documents/​ Adams/​ 06-​ 10-​ 02-​ 0137). Source: The Adams Papers, The Adams Papers, vol. 10, July 1780–­December 1780, ed. Gregg L. Lint and Richard Alan Ryerson (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 274–­76. “To John Adams from Antoine Marie Cerisier, 15 November 1780,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://​founders​ .archives​.gov​/documents​/Adams​/06​-10​-02​-0186​-0001. Source: The Adams Papers, ibid., 343–­44. 9. For a bibliography on this much-­studied question, see Peter Nicolaisen, “John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and the Dutch Patriots,” in Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson, ed. Leonard J. Sadosky, Peter Nicolaisen, Peter Onuf, and Andrew J. O’Shaughnessy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010), 124. 10. See http://​dictionnaire​-journalistes​.gazettes18e​.fr/​ journaliste/​ 157-​ antoine-​ cerisier. 11. Joan Dayan, “Hilliard D’Auberteuil, The Breton Lawyer and Radical Critic of the Colonial Regime,” New Literary History 26, no. 2 (1995): 283–­308. 12. Malick W. Ghachem, “Montesquieu in the Caribbean: The Colonial Enlightenment between ‘Code Noir’ and ‘Code Civil,’ ” Historical Reflections 25, no. 2 (1999): 183–­210. It is Hilliard d’Auberteuil’s writings on the colony of Santo Domingo that have mostly been studied. 13. They were part of the same Masonic lodge (R. William Weisberger, “Benjamin Franklin: A Masonic Enlightener in Paris,” Pennsylvania History 53, no. 3 [1986]: 173–­74). 14. Mandrillon, in particular, focuses on the formation of institutions because he partly reacted to Mably’s essay on the U.S. Constitution published in 1784 in London. 15. See Nordholt, The Dutch Republic. However, none of the three writers discussed in this essay is mentioned by Wyger Velema in his study on Dutch republicanism in the eighteenth century (Wyger Velema, Republicans: Essays on Eighteenth-­Century Dutch Political Thought [Leiden: Brill, 2007]). The view that Mandrillon and Hilliard d’Auberteuil were part of those who advocated “modern constitutionalism” in France has been defended by Horst Dippel (see Anne-­Marie Chouillet and Pierre Crepel, eds., Condorcet, homme des Lumières et de la Révolutions [Fontenay aux Roses: ENS Editions, 1997], 204). 16. Potofsky, “Le corps consulaire français,” http://​ahrf​.revues​.org​/11930. 17. My use of these terms is informed by the Pocock/Bailyn versus Appleby debate in the 1980s. See especially Lance Banning, “Jeffersonian Ideology Revisited: Liberal and Classical Ideas in the New American Republic,” as he unpacks some of the misinterpretations of the “scholarly battle.” Ultimately, Banning argues, “I would resist the rather contradictory suggestion that party battles of the new republic can be described as contests pitting Federalist attachment to tradition against a liberal, Republican commitment to change” (William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 1 [1986]: 45). 98

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18. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1785 and 1787; London: Penguin, 1999), 43–­7 1; Filippo Mazzei, Recherches historiques et politiques sur les États-­Unis de l’Amérique septentrionale (Colle and Paris: Froullé, 1788), 3:84–­103. On the publication and debates about America in the 1780s, see Robert Darnton, “Condorcet et l’américanomanie en France au 18e siècle,” in Pour les Lumières: Défense, illustration, méthode, trans. Jean-­François Baillon (Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2002), 35, which is a French translation of Darnton’s essay “Condorcet and the Craze for America in France,” in Franklin and Condorcet: Two Portraits from the American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1997), 27–­39. 19. Jeremy L. Caradonna, “Prendre part au siècle des  Lumières: Le concours académique et la culture intellectuelle au XVIIIe siècle,” Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales 3 (2009): 633–­62. 20. Jean-­Baptiste Mailhe, Discours qui a remporté le prix à l’Académie des Jeux Floraux en 1784 sur la grandeur et l’importance de la révolution qui vient de s’opérer dans l’Amérique septentrionale (Toulouse: Imprimerie de  Desclassan, 1784); Jacques Godechot, “Le bicentenaire de la Révolution américaine,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 226 (October–­December 1976): 481–­83; Geneviève Thoumas, “La jeunesse de Mailhe,” Annales historiques de la Révolution française 204 (April–June 1971): 233–­41. Several writings of the same kind were published in the mid-­1780s. For example, the Chevalier Deslandes, about whom not much is known, had his own speech on the same subject printed in Paris in 1785 (Chevalier Deslandes, Discours sur la grandeur et l’importance de la révolution qui vient de s’opérer dans l’Amérique septentrionale [Paris: Durand, 1785]). 21. “To John Adams from Antoine Marie Cerisier, 26 February 1783,” Founders Online, National Archives, http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Adams​/06​-14​-02​-0195 [last update: 2016–­03-­28]. Source: The Adams Papers, The Adams Papers, vol. 14, October 1782–­May 1783, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Mary T. Claffey, Sara B. Sikes, and Judith S. Graham (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008), 296–­301. 22. “L. de Chavannes de la Giraudière to John Adams, 23 February 1784,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Adams​/06​-16​ -02​-0035 [last update: 2016-­03-­28]). Source: The Adams Papers, The Adams Papers, vol. 16, February 1784–­March 1785, ed. Gregg L. Lint, C. James Taylor, Robert Karachuk, Hobson Woodward, Margaret A. Hogan, Sara B. Sikes, Sara Martin, Sara Georgini, Amanda A. Mathews, and James T. Connolly (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012), 54–­56. 23. “To Benjamin Franklin from Jean-­Baptiste Mailhe, 21 August 1778,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Franklin​/01​-27​-02​ -0258 [last update: 2016-­03-­28]). Source: The Papers of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 27, July 1 through October  31, 1778, ed. Claude A. Lopez (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 285. 24. Paul-­Ulrich Du Buisson, Abrégé de la Révolution de l’Amérique angloise depuis le commencement de l’année 1774 jusqu’au premier janvier 1778 (Paris: Cellot and Jombert, 1778). 25. Echeverria, Mirage, 43. 99

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26. Thomas Paine, Remarques sur les erreurs de l’histoire philosophique et politique de Mr. Guillaume Thomas Raynal, par rapport aux affaires de l’Amérique septentrionale, trans. A-M. Cerisier (Brussels: B. Lefrancq, 1783). 27. Among the most recent articles on this debate, see Will Slauter, “Constructive Misreadings: Adams, Turgot, and the American State Constitutions,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 105, no. 1 (March 2011): 33–­67. 28. Turgot’s letter was published only posthumously in 1784 and then by Mirabeau the following year in Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus. 29. Honoré-­Gabriel Riqueti, comte de Mirabeau, Considérations sur l’ordre de Cincinnatus, ou Imitation d’un pamphlet anglo-­américain, suivies d’une Lettre du général Washington et d’une Lettre de feu M. Turgot, au Dr Price sur les législations américaines. (London: J. Johnson, 1784), 189; Stéphane Bégaud, Marc Belissa, and Joseph Visser, Aux origines d’une alliance improbable: Le réseau consulaire français aux États-­Unis, 1776–­1815 (Brussels: PIE–­Peter Lang; Paris: Direction des Archives, Ministère des affaires étrangères, DL, 2005), 14. 30. On Mably, see Johnson Kent Wright, A Classical Republican in Eighteenth-­Century France: The Political Thought of Mably (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). On Turgot, see Maria Luisa Pesante, “Between Republicanism and Enlightenment: Turgot and Adams,” in Rethinking the Atlantic World: Europe and America in the Age of Democratic Revolutions, ed. Manuela Albertone and Antonino De Francesco (Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 61–­79. 31. Lettres d’un membre du Congrès amériquain, a divers membres du Parlement d’Angleterre (Philadelphia and Paris: chez l’auteur, 1779); Quatre Lettres d’un Bourgeois de New Haven sur l’unité de la législation, in Mazzei, Recherches historiques et politiques. 32. Nordholt, The Dutch Republic, 125. 33. Martin Fitzpatrick, Peter Jones, Christa Knellwolf, and Iain McCalman, eds., The Enlightenment World (London: Routledge, 2004), 94. 34. Since Palmer’s and Godechot’s books, not many studies have been published on this question. Most of them tend to ignore the 1780s and to focus on the period starting after 1789 (see Patrice Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988]; and Denis Lacorne, “Essai sur le commerce atlantique des idées républicaines,” in Les politiques du mimétisme institutionnel: La greffe et le rejet, ed. Yves Mény [Paris: l’Harmattan, 1993], 39–­60). On Americans in Paris, since Yvon Bizardel’s study (Bizardel, Les Américains à Paris pendant la Révolution [Paris: Calmann-­Lévy, 1972]); the topic has been taken up by American scholars like Philipp Ziesche (Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots: Americans in Paris in the Age of Revolution [Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2010]). 35. “La révolution américaine est un phénomène en politique, une époque unique dans l’histoire” (Joseph Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, ou Remarques générales sur l’Amérique septentrionale et sur la république des Treize-­Etats-­Unis, suivi de Recherches philosophiques sur la découverte du Nouveau-­Monde, 2nd ed. [Amsterdam: Flon, 1785], xv). 36. Ibid., 139. 37. Thomas Paine, The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: Citadel, 1945), 2:220. 38. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 15. 100

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39. Ibid., v. 40. “Qui change absolument le système politique de l’Europe, l’existence de l’Amérique entière” (Michel-­René Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques et politiques sur les Anglo-­ Américains [Brussels: l’auteur, 1782], 1:6). 41. Antoine-­Marie Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique ou Dialogues pittoresques, dans lesquels on développe la cause des événemens actuels, la politique & les intérêts des puissances de l’Europe, relativement à cette guerre, & les suites qu’elle devroit avoir pour le bonheur de l’humanité (London, 1780), 121–­22. 42. Ibid., 107. 43. Ibid., 110. 44. “Taxé les cheminées, les fenêtres, les postes, les chevaux, les chiens et même jusqu’aux domestiques” (ibid., 104). 45. Ibid., 89. 46. Ibid., 79. 47. “Les Anglais devenus presque tous de riches voyageurs avaient rapporté dans leur partie la corruption des autres nations” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:77). 48. Ibid., 2:277. 49. “Les Anglais devaient donc penser que c’était attaquer leurs propres droits . . . que d’attaquer ceux des Anglais d’Amérique” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 130). 50. “Vous perdrez l’Amérique à vouloir la ramener à coups de canon” (Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 56–­57). 51. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:6. 52. “Londres où l’égalité républicaine faisait la fierté commune” (ibid., 1:270). 53. “On s’est intéressé à multiplier les distinctions entre les sujets sont les droits sont égaux pour les armer aisément les uns contre les autres” (ibid.). 54. Ibid., 1:271. 55. “L’Angleterre aurait déjà dû s’apercevoir que l’esprit républicain faisait des progrès rapides chez les colons” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 144). 56. “Ce sont de bien méchants républicains que ces colons” (Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 25). 57. Ibid., 44. 58. “Hommes nourris des principes salutaires de la république” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:15). 59. “Aà peine les enfants commençaient à se faire entendre qu’ils répétaient à haute voix les catéchismes de la liberté” (ibid., 1:49). 60. “De tels discours adressés à des républicains naturellement vifs et impatients du joug devaient faire une grande impression” (ibid., 1:72–­73). 61. Ibid., 1:72. He attributed this notion to his contact and correspondence with Benjamin Franklin, whose authority he cited. 62. Ibid., 2:142. 63. Ibid., 1:274–­75. 64. Ibid., 2:97, 138. 65. Ibid., 2:151. 66. Ibid., 2:152. 67. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 129. 101

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68. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:216, 275. 69. Ibid., 2:278. 70. Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 68. 71. Ibid., 13. 72. “Il n’y a pas d’apparence que la nation française recouvre ses droits. Il y a quelques années un de nos contrôleurs généraux me jeta dans une peur terrible. Il coupait dans le vif. Nous étions perdus s’il fut resté dans le ministère. Ce patriote enthousiaste n’allait rien moins qu’à établir une liberté générale de religion et d’industrie” (ibid., 15–­16). 73. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:275, 289–­90. 74. Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 123; Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:141. 75. On Turgot, see Lacorne, “Essai sur le commerce atlantique,” 41; and on Condorcet, see Darnton, “Condorcet et l’américanomanie en France au 18e siècle,” 35. 76. Nordholt, The Dutch Republic, 220. 77. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 131. 78. “Les Américains traversent aisément ces marécages. . . . Ils marchent en chasseurs habitués à imiter l’adresse du gibier qu’ils poursuivent” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:169). 79. “Ils les exerçaient à la chasse, leur apprenaient à vivre sobrement, à supporter la faim, la fatigue des longues marches dans les bois et dans les deserts” (ibid., 1:49). 80. Ibid., 2:49 and 1:174. 81. Ibid., 1:150 and 2:252. 82. Montesquieu, De l’Esprit des lois, bk. 16, ed. Victor Goldschmidt (Paris: Garnier-­ Flammarion, 1979), 385. 83. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:116–­17; Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xv. 84. “Cet espace immense où la liberté paraît avoir établi son empire, où les lois n’ont pour objet que de conserver à l’homme les droits qu’il tient de la nature” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xi). 85. “Ce vaste continent où le despotisme n’avait point étendu son empire n’attendait que des cultivateurs paisibles et instruits” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:9). 86. Ibid., 1:15–­16, 20, 23, 24, 35. 87. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 184. 88. “La richesse réelle des nations consiste dans les productions des terres et dans les travaux de l’industrie qui prépare et échange ces productions” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:41). 89. Ibid., 1:99 and 2:139. 90. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia written in the year 1781, somewhat corrected and enlarged in the Winter of 1782, for the use of a foreigner of distinction, in answer to certain queries proposed by him. [1782]. The first edition of this work was not published in Paris before 1785, even if the title page of the first private edition mentions 1782. For the publishing history of the Notes, I relied on Kevin J. Hayes, ed., A History of Virginia Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 133. Yet whether Jefferson or his book had a direct influence on the three French authors’ agrarianism is not easy to determine as I did not find letters proving such a connection. We know that Mandrillon was in Paris in 1783, whereas Jefferson arrived in Europe only in 1784. Mandrillon’s letters 102

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to George Washington for 1784 were written in Amsterdam. Hilliard D’Auberteuil’s extant letters to Franklin were written from Paris, but only in 1782 and 1783, it seems. Whether they discussed the issue with Franklin or in salons is not yet established. 91. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 127–­28. 92. “La liberté de travailler pour soi augmente naturellement dans chaque individu ce courage et cette activité qu’inspire le plaisir d’en être recompense” (ibid., 181). 93. Ibid., 131. 94. Ibid., 132. 95. Ibid., 134–­35. 96. Ibid., xiv. 97. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:41. 98. “Où le commerce surtout jouit de tout ce qui peut enrichir la patrie et le citoyen” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xi). Mandrillon had already praised free trade and the need for Europeans to establish commercial links with the United States in the second part of a translation published in 1782 (Par M. J.h M., Le Voyageur américain ou Observations sur l’état actuel, la culture, le commerce des colonies britanniques en Amérique, Adressées par un négociant expérimenté, en forme de lettres, au très-­honorable comte de. . . . Traduit de l’anglois. Augmenté d’un Précis sur l’Amérique septentrionale & la République des Treize-­Etats-­Unis [Amsterdam: chez J. Schuring, 1782]). 99. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:47–­48. 100. Ibid., 1:101. 101. Ibid., 2:255–­56. 102. Ibid., 1:175, 212–­15. 103. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 146; Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:183. 104. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 181. 105. “Le droit naturel qu’ont tous les peuples de commercer avec une liberté illimitée sur toutes les mers et dans tous les pays” (Cerisier, Le Destin de l’Amérique, 90). 106. “La nature a donné le droit de pêcher à quiconque demeure sur le bord de mer” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:131). 107. “L’Amérique septentrionale trop grande pour ne pas constituer elle-­même un empire” (ibid., 2:261). 108. “Concilier la richesse de leur empire avec la paix, le bonheur et la liberté de chaque individu” (Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, 138). 109. Ibid., xiii. 110. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:151. 111. Ibid., 1:216. 112. Ibid., 1:271. 113. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xiii–­xiv. 114. Ibid., xiv. 115. Ibid., 182. 116. “Il s’en fallut de peu que l’avidité d’un marchand de Boston ne causât un massacre general” (Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 1:125). 117. “Anglo-­Américains corrompus par le commerce des colonies voisines” (ibid., 1:271). 103

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118. Ibid., 1:36. 119. Mandrillon, Le Spectateur américain, xiii–­xiv. 120. Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Essais historiques, 2:108–­9. 121. Ibid., 2:108–­9. 122. Ibid., 2:139. 123. “Le droit de propriété est la base sacrée de tous les autres droits de la société civile” (ibid., 2:143) and “ce n’est que la réunion des propriétés, des sûretés et des félicités particulières que peuvent résulter dans la république la force et la prospérité de l’Etat” (ibid., 2:150). 124. Potofsky, “Le corps consulaire français,” http://​ahrf​.revues​.org​/11930. 125. Jeremy D. Popkin, “From Dutch Republican to French Monarchist: Antoine-­ Marie Cerisier and the Age of Revolution,” Tidschrift voor Geschiedenis 102 (1989): 534–­44. 126. Letter “To George Washington from Joseph Mandrillon, 1 June 1790,” Founders Online, National Archives (http://​founders​.archives​.gov​/documents​/Washington​/05​-05​ -02​-0281 [last update: 2015-­06-­29]). Source: The Papers of George Washington, 452–­54. 127. Joyce Appleby, Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), 238–­50; Ziesche, Cosmopolitan Patriots, 26.

104

Political Theology and the Alternate Enlightenment From the War of the Three Kingdoms to the American Revolution ED S IM ON

Herman Husband (1724–­1795) had visions in the years leading up to the American Revolution, and in the years that followed.1 Exiled from his home colony of Maryland for the role he played in the North Carolina Regulator’s Rebellion, he made a new life in the woods of western Pennsylvania near what would one day be Pittsburgh. Wandering the western frontier of the British colonies, Husband claimed he could see not just one future city but many future cities, intricately organized but designed to maximize human liberty and equality and spreading as far to the west as the Pacific Ocean. Wythe Holt writes: “He envisioned a new society and government which he superimposed on a map of the United States as it was then known. Immediately west of the Alleghenies were the Great Lakes, and the Ohio, Illinois, and ‘Meshura’ rivers, which flowed into the Mississippi down to the ‘Bay of Mexico.’ The western boundary was the ‘Shining Mountains.’ ”2 Husband imagined a New Jerusalem west of the Alleghenies; for him, American independence signaled the beginning of a new society at the world’s Hesperian edge, and in keeping with a Protestant eschatology that borrowed from nonconformist exegesis about the book of Daniel, he insisted that the job of the republic was to ensure this final democratic “monarchy.” It was the “western country” that would “at last produce an everlasting Peace on Earth” and where Christ would return among an American “glorious land of New Jerusalem.”3 As Husband wrote in one of his widely distributed pamphlets, “In the last days, the laboring, industrious people, the militia of freemen, shall prevail over the standing armies of kings and tyrants.”4 Both selections from Husband engage with millennial tropes common to English nonconformism: of a “New Jerusalem” and of “laboring, industrious people” overthrowing 105

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“kings and tyrants,” an apocalyptic image of the “world turned upside down,” as dissenters in the previous century may have put it.5 Husband’s political views were not liberal—­they were radical. He advocated for progressive taxation, regulation of government, small representative districts to ensure direct democracy, the abolition of slavery, and, of course, American independence from Great Britain.6 Yet the justification for all of these beliefs lay not in the normative Enlightenment philosophy of the French salons and Scottish Common Sense thought but rather in his own personal, idiosyncratic, syncretic mélange of radical nonconformist Christian beliefs. Born an Anglican, he flitted between theologies that could be considered Presbyterian, Baptist, Quaker, and, most importantly, one that could be understood as uniquely his own. For Husband it was the North Carolina Regulator’s Rebellion, then the American Revolution, and finally western Pennsylvania’s Whiskey Rebellion7 that were divinely sanctioned wars against the satanic order that he identified with tyranny, moneyed interests, slavery, and empire. But Husband did not arrive at these views by reading John Locke, Francis Bacon, or Isaac Newton.8 Rather his views were in the tradition of the great dissenting sects of the English Civil Wars, groups like the Levellers, the Diggers, the Fifth Monarchy Men, the Muggletonians, the Seekers, and the Ranters.9 With only a bit more than a century separating the two great Anglophone civil wars of first the seventeenth and then the eighteenth century, Husband and others like him generated their radical politics from an alternate Enlightenment that saw revolution as a prerequisite to apocalypse; moreover, these groups aligned with Husband often had a far more radical and egalitarian politics than their mainstream allies. I am certainly not the first to propose an intellectual connection between the English Civil Wars and the American Revolution.10 Rather, what this essay will examine is how the ideological continuities between English nonconformism and one branch of American colonial radicalism are such that it makes sense to classify both as within a genealogy of the alternate Enlightenment, whereby one may reclassify the first Great Awakening of the eighteenth century as the second, and the intense flowering of religious heterodoxy in mid-­seventeenth-­ century Britain as the first. This approach grounds American events in a transnational, transatlantic context, which presents an analysis of the Revolutionary War era, to borrow historian Eliga Gould’s phrase, from an “outside in” perspective.11 In using the phrase “alternate Enlightenment,” I am purposefully conflating two separate concepts. The first is of the “alternative Enlightenment,” 106

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or what historian Jonathan Israel calls the “radical Enlightenment,” and the second is “alternate” or “counterfactual history.” Israel argues that the normative historiographical interpretation of eighteenth-­century philosophy’s influence on democratic politics, which defines the era according to the conservative dictates of Lockean empiricism, minimizes an alternative Enlightenment grounded in the thought of more radical philosophers like Jean-­Jacques Rousseau and Baruch Spinoza.12 Without arguing against the particularities of any of Israel’s argument, I tentatively suggest that alongside the more conservative and radical Enlightenments there was also an “alternate Enlightenment” based not in the arguments or writings of any conventional philosophers but that rather draws its impetus from the unconventional rhetoric and theology of seventeenth-­century nonconformist dissenting groups. Husband serves as an example of this trajectory whose fullest literary manifestation appears in Blake. As regards my second term, “alternate” or “counterfactual history” draws its theoretical inspiration from a genre of speculative fiction in which authors envision the details of potential historical timelines in versions of history that differ from objective reality. Strongly associated with science-­fiction writers, alternate history has recently been embraced by academic historians who have turned to the admittedly speculative and playful genre as a means of entertaining more rigorous methods of conjecturing about historical periods, events, and processes.13 I will not pose any counterfactual history to the texts I am analyzing in this particular essay, but the phrase “alternate Enlightenment” should convey this dual connotation of both a historical “alternative” to the traditional interpretation of the Enlightenment alongside a sense that the legacy of the Enlightenment was not inevitable; indeed, an “alternate” timeline exists that could emerge from the particular ideologies this essay discusses. The alternate Enlightenment is not just a movement that draws inspiration from the latent radicalism in visionary and mystical religious worldviews of the seventeenth century but one that might have reconciled some of the contradictions in the current period of postsecularity.14 For Husband, “God sent the true Republican form of Right Government . . . in which the body of the People will have Supreme Power to choose.  .  .  . [He is the] Supreme Law of the Land.”15 Yet with his visionary, prophetic, mystical beliefs and his embrace of a type of socialist egalitarianism, it would be a mistake to read Husband as “mad man of Bedford [County],” as he was dubbed by Jefferson and Madison; the people of western Pennsylvania found him sane enough to elect him twice to the state legislature, Pennsylvania’s 1790 state constitutional convention, and as 107

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“constable, township tax assessor, auditor of road-­maintenance accounts, and county commissioner.”16 The enthusiasm of the common people of the western frontier for the preacher led to his inclusion at the meeting of organizers assembled at Parkinson’s Ferry in 1791 during the outset of the Whiskey Rebellion, which ultimately led to his imprisonment in Philadelphia. Husband was always perceived as representing the views of poor farmers at that meeting, which led to his uneasy relationship with his coconspirators William Bradford and the Princeton-­educated lawyer, poet, and journalist Hugh Henry Brackenridge. While one can dismiss Husband’s preaching and pamphlet writing as outmoded seventeenth-­century practices, he expressed the democratic and religiously nonconformist beliefs of the men and women who had ratified the Articles of Confederation at the beginning of the American Revolution as opposed to the elite philosophical views of the men who participated in the Constitutional Convention in establishing a republic. As Holt explains, the common people of western Pennsylvania “had no difficulty understanding the New Jerusalem because it was what they needed and longed for.”17 Radical egalitarians across the Atlantic, too, registered America as the site for the possibility of this alternate Enlightenment. During the same years that Husband would wander the woods of the Alleghenies dreaming of a postmillennial Empire of Liberty stretching to the Pacific, thousands of miles across that other ocean the famous poet and artist William Blake also had visions: The Guardian Prince of Albion burns in his nightly tent, Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America’s shore: Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent night, Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green; Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albion’s fiery Prince.18

Blake adds that “The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision.” For Blake, as for Husband, the American Revolution, and indeed the more radical and bloody French Revolution that would follow, was an act in the unfolding of human history that could be traced back to the prophecies of the book of Daniel. For Blake, Jefferson’s “trinity” of Bacon, Locke, and Newton was the exact opposite; they were an infernal trio. And yet Blake was no counterrevolutionary or reactionary; like Husband, he was an intense radical. Indeed Blake’s vision was arguably one of the most radical of the era, with the poet embracing not just political and economic revolution but abolition. Blake, moreover, was not just against slavery but also stridently 108

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opposed to every form of tyranny over man, as he urged man to famously break the “mind forg’d manacles” that Blake believed kept all in bondage. For Blake and Husband, revolution was a religious imperative: they both intuited that the only means for resistance was fundamentally theological, and yet the irony was that the only systems worth resisting were also theological.19 Before the Revolution, Husband corresponded with Benjamin Franklin and considered him a hero, and he preached that George Washington was a latter-­day Joshua. But as federal troops, led by the first president, marched on western Pennsylvania at the suggestion of Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton, Husband changed his opinions.20 Whereas once the revolutionary leaders of the young United States were millennial figures, Husband now saw them as hypocritical vipers who had betrayed all of the eschatological promise of America as a millennial and utopian society. And as much as Blake had celebrated “Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green” rising from the Atlantic Ocean and facing down the British king, he also found his belief in revolutionary promise foiled by the inevitable call to conservative moderation. The literary historian Cathy Davidson, comparing the Constitutional Convention of Philadelphia in 1789 to the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660,21 argues that both events heralded the end of progressive optimism toward genuine political change; in its stead, both societies imposed a hierarchical, centralized state that governed from the top downward. In the earlier case, the Restoration of Charles II signaled the end of the political ambitions of the Puritans, although the excesses of Cromwell and the Interregnum government had already dissolved much of the promise of the late 1640s and early 1650s. Religious and political radicals like Gerard Winstanly and John Lilburn saw their radically democratic, if not anarchistic, visions upended when the monarchy was restored at Westminster. Likewise, the convention in Philadelphia ended a little less than a decade of radical political experimentation in the former colonies, where direct, and sometimes vibrant, democracy was resisted by the landed classes, who were upset by the degree of independence exercised on the frontier. In this way, the establishment of a federal government by the Philadelphia convention marked a kind of end to direct American democracy in some areas. Despite our contemporary fetishization of the U.S. Constitution, then, many Americans, including the frontier farmers of western Pennsylvania, were every bit as disappointed by the centralization of power as Blake was across the ocean. The crux of my argument centers on three major points. First, a figure like Husband provides a perspective into an alternate Enlightenment that 109

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owes its more radical political, religious, and sociocultural views to a dissenting nonconformism as practiced in mid-­seventeenth-­century Britain and associated with the various radical sects that emerged during the years of the English Civil Wars. Second, I argue that this alternate Enlightenment and the radical democracy it promoted is a type of secularized religion that is best understood through the critical vocabulary of the German twentieth-­ century philosopher Carl Schmitt,22 and that these ideologies are fundamentally phrased in the language of political theology. That is, Husband had a radical political perspective that was heavily pro-­revolution, but that also justified itself through recourse to religious language, biblical prophecy, and millennial rhetoric. It would be easy to assume that any discussion of religion beyond pro forma types of national patriotic civil religion are by definition reactionary, but I argue that the antinomian metaphysics and ethics of Husband are radical precisely because they use the traditionally oppressive language of religion against itself, prefiguring the secularization thesis of many modern-­day theorists of political theology who understand most cultural phenomena as inherently theological. Because Husband fundamentally believes that religion suffuses all manner of life, the only means of resistance to something unjust must also be religious. Finally, I argue that Husband and Blake, while fascinating, are not unique. This sort of radically religious understanding of revolutionary Enlightenment Europe appears across thousands of individuals, dozens of denominations and countries, and two continents. The “alternate Enlightenment” of which they are representatives, therefore, is not a party of two—­rather, it includes the “prophets” who saw the American Revolution as the coming of Daniel’s Fifth Monarchy; the Frankists, members of an obscure antinomian and apocalyptic-­minded Jewish sect who saw Napoleon as the messiah; and even the infamous and decadent “Hell-­Fire Clubs,” who fused anticlericalism, antinomianism, Thelemite ethics, libertinism, and unconventional sexuality as means of resistance against oppressive social mores.23 I hope to demonstrate the dimensions of this “alternate Enlightenment” not only through recourse to historians such as Israel but also as a literary scholar through the method of close reading texts. I must emphasize that I am not claiming that either of these figures had any knowledge of or influence on the other—­indeed it is unlikely they were aware of each other’s existence. Certain similarities in terms of revolutionary enthusiasm, disappointment, and justification tie them together, providing the geographic spread of this movement. My argument should not be read as a rejoinder to the secularization theses of scholars like Jon Butler, Bernard Bailyn, and 110

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Gordon Wood.24 These historians’ arguments on the fundamentally secular nature of the magisterial Revolution remain crucial. Yet my emphasis on political theology as an interpretative framework does not allow me to view any human ideology as unambiguously “secular,” and, thus, I encourage the use of political theology as a critical disposition, method, and field for the analysis of revolutionary activity during the so-­called “Age of Reason.” I want to stress that Blake is less a citizen of this new industrialized world of which he famously despaired for its “dark Satanic mills” than he is the last of a particular breed of early modern religious nonconformists whose political theology constitutes the contours of this potential alternate Enlightenment. Blake’s early modern intellectual roots are perhaps obscured by how profoundly radical he seems relative to his contemporary poets on the verge of the Romantic era. Because one can discern the influences of metaphysical poets of a century earlier, like Henry Vaughan and especially Thomas Traherne, or even more provocative writers like the nonconformist Abiezer Cope, in Blake’s works, he seems further removed from his peers, like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley. He represents the fruition of a different strain of intellectual thought, for British and particularly colonial American poetry of the eighteenth century operated under the long shadow of Augustan neoclassicism. Blake’s radical departure from those conservative aesthetic principles may ironically overstate his exceptionality, for he was working in a tradition that seemingly no longer existed.25 Biographers from E. P. Thompson onward have demonstrated the religious heterodoxy Blake absorbed in youth.26 Thompson hypothesized that Blake had been raised a Muggletonian, part of an idiosyncratic religious sect that seemed to anticipate so-­called radical deconstructionist “Death of God” theology by a few centuries.27 More recent scholarship seems to indicate that the young Blake may have attended a Moravian church with his mother, a sect known for its particular mixture of pre-­Reformation Hussite Wycliffitism and a Lutheran Pietist mysticism that bordered on extremely unconventional ideologies.28 Its leader, Nicholas Zinzendorf, preached egalitarian, feminist, and quasi-­communistic theology as a means of social reorganization; its strongly erotic interpretation of biblical typology scandalized conventional eighteenth-­century Christians. Zinzendorf also engaged in influential missionary work in Europe, the American colonies, the Caribbean, and the North Atlantic.29 It seems most likely that Blake absorbed a variety of these influences in the promiscuous environment that was religiously unconventional London and that these absorptions would contribute to his brilliant mythology. 111

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These hypotheses about Blake’s religious upbringing and subsequent references to it in the conception of his own complex religious system appear important for two reasons. First, a relative lack of awareness of the context of early modern nonconformism and its influence on Blake is what has resulted in the misapprehension of him as some sort of ex nihilo figure who created his own system entirely independent of any sort of historical precedent. Second, while Blake may be the most poetically stunning example of a poet influenced by these philosophies—­sort of the culminating aesthetic figure and bard for a counterreligious tradition that first realized its potential during the English Civil Wars a century before—­he is by no means the only one. His prominence in the English literary canon, of course, goes unquestioned, but he also serves as the terminus of a tradition of religious iconoclasm that includes Husband. The bulk of my close readings will focus only on Blake’s depiction of key political figures in the American Revolution like Washington, Paine, Greene, and Franklin. While the poem itself may express certain mythopoeic themes, the representations of these ostensibly secular and temporal figures as almost living deities prove amenable to the political theology of philosophers like Carl Schmitt, John Gray, Simon Critchley, and Slavoj Žižek.30 Blake, in theologizing secularity, also secularized theology, and we can find important clues to the idiosyncratic nature of the alternate Enlightenment that emerged in the seventeenth century; this countertradition, rooted in the eighteenth-­century Enlightenment in Europe and America, remains influential, if understudied, throughout all forms of modernity. To shed light on this tradition, in the rest of this essay, then, I will consider Blake’s prophetic books, America: A Prophecy, using the terminology of the so-­called “New Theological Criticism.” Contemporary currents in Continental philosophical political thought also inform my readings, although I will treat them in terms of Blake’s own political theology in the context of the historical events of the American Revolution. That is, this particular religiously dissenting nonconformism constitutes a type of alternate Enlightenment as seen in Blake and Husband, the latter of whom has often been labeled a backwoods eccentric but who more properly can be classified as being part of the same tradition as the great English poet. Blake is not a poet who lends himself to easy close reading; his prophetic books prove especially abstruse. The oft-­anthologized lyric poems of the writer are a good deal more accessible, but the prophetic books with such exotic names as The Book of Thel (1789), Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), The Book of Urizen (1794), The Book of Los (1795), The Four Zoas 112

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(1795), Milton, a Poem (1804–­10) and Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant Albion (1804–­20) have remained an enigmatic corpus in the English literary tradition, at times seemingly impenetrable. For Blake himself these were among his most important works, and similar to his approach to other authors’ works (such as for Dante’s Divine Comedy or Milton’s Paradise Lost), he used his own distinctive lithography skills to illustrate his dense compendium of his own personal mythography. Among the prophetic books are the continental prophecies, including America (1793), Europe: A Prophecy (1794), and The Song of Los, which treats Africa and Asia as its subject matter. Throughout all of the prophetic books, continental and otherwise, Blake employs a seemingly standardized though incredibly complicated invented mythology that reflects upon his own ideology, an ideology grounded in the radicalism of the eighteenth century even if represented by the most esoteric of invented semiotic systems. The primeval man in Blake’s system is Albion, drawing his name from the ancient Celtic term for Britain and roughly existing as a sort of godlike Adamic figure. From Albion emanate the four zoas, aspects of Albion’s personality, which include Urizen and Luvah. They are two of the central figures who make an appearance throughout the prophetic books (though certainly not the only characters). Urizen is often conflated with what Blake sees as oppressive reason—­seemingly in rejection of the declared and supposed “Age of Reason.” Urizen serves as the functional equivalent of a gnostic demiurge, a being identified with the creation of the fallen material world (which in true gnostic fashion Blake sees as in some sense corrupt, but as a result of which can be engaged with an antinomian or even libertine’s passion) and who tyrannically rules over this world with the oppressive laws of reason. Blake identifies this worldview with rational scientific positivism. Indeed, Urizen is most often depicted as a stereotypically idolatrous image of God—­as a bearded and infirm old man. Urizen is contrasted with Luvah, a Christ-­figure who redeems and liberates humans from oppressive reason (which Blake identified as one of the ideological structures inherent in burgeoning capitalist industrialism). Yet Luvah sometimes incarnates into Orc when he rebels. Luvah can be identified in some sense with Christ, but Orc is clearly a Luciferian figure. Part of the gnostic paradox of Blake is this conflation of what would seem to be two radically disparate figures, and yet it mirrors much of early second-­through fourth-­century gnostic thought, which sees the demiurge (often identified with Yahweh and similar to Urizen) as an oppressive figure that Lucifer and Christ both rebelled against in support of the higher and more true God. 113

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Lucifer attempts this rebellion with the felix culpa of Eden, and Christ with his new covenant overthrows the presumed legalism of the old. In The Book of Los, Orc is explicitly mentioned as the serpent of Genesis, and indeed in the earlier America the conflation of the serpent with Orc is a reference both to that primeval story as well as to the Gadsden flag of the American Patriots. Orc is first responsible for the American Revolution in America, initially encouraging a transcendent and spiritual rebellion that then manifests in the temporal revolution of actual history; he is also responsible for the French Revolution in Europe. Albion views Orc as an anti-­Christ, but the poem celebrates the vital, passionate, egalitarian, world-­turned-­upside-­ down aspect of Orc. Indeed, as a figure, Orc is not unlike other millennial antinomian pseudomessiahs of the alternate Enlightenment, from Lodewick Muggleton and Laurence Clarkson in the seventeenth century, who saw themselves as the two witnesses of Revelation, to the Jewish mystic Jacob Frank at the end of the eighteenth. It may be strange to think of people believing that Washington and Franklin could be explained to others by recourse to a character like Orc; but Orc is not an anomaly. Narrative elements and rhetorical tropes evoke him throughout texts from the alternate Enlightenment from Husband to Frank. Orc remains the most famous only because of his aesthetic significance. Though perfunctory, this brief overview of Blake’s system at least provides some context for the temporal-­historical aspects of the America: A Prophecy; for Blake’s characterizations reflect a particular political theology that alters the traditional interpretations surrounding Enlightenment rationalism and radicalism. The overall setting of the poem, shared by most of his prophetic books and in particular the continental prophecies, is of timeless, eternal, mythopoeic reality beyond the veil of lived history. America: A Prophecy operates on two narrative levels: on one level, we have Blake’s complex mythology, presented with Orc as the main character, who like Prometheus, must liberate himself from Albion (a representative of British imperial power). On another level, Blake presents real historical figures and events. The poem endows contemporary politics and economics with mythopoeic grandeur to imply a degree of transcendence beyond experiential reality. In stanza 3, he writes that “Sullen fires across the Atlantic glow to America’s shore: /  Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent night, / Washington, Franklin, Paine & Warren, Gates, Hancock & Green; / Meet on the coast glowing with blood from Albion’s fiery Prince.” The word “sullen” suggests a degree of melancholy to revolutionary beginnings; “sullen” modifying the noun “fires” does not just personify fire but it also conveys a sense of 114

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inevitability of the same disaffection at home in Britain appearing across the ocean. Moreover, the passion implied by “fires,” a metaphor for revolutions, is tempered by “sullen” so as to make the revolutionary impulse less historically contingent and more the result of a preordained teleological process. The preposition “across” seems to indicate spatially the direction of America in relation to Britain, but that these fires must “glow to America’s shore” indicates that America herself does not provide the source of the fires. Instead, like Britain, those fires extend to America from some other source. Indeed, the source of the fire is the Atlantic, where Orc finds himself liberated. Blake then changes the metaphorical consistency of the fire image, telling readers that this force is “Piercing the souls of warlike men, who rise in silent night.” The word “Piercing” alters the metaphoric vehicle to something arrow-­like, as fire is not something we think of as having the ability to pierce, while the tenor retains the sense of (violent) revolutionary liberation for which fire was originally the vehicle. The “rising” of political figures parallels Orc’s rising from the Atlantic, and the verb “rise” connotes an awakening, especially with the diction of the alliterative “sullen” and “silent.” Blake, seemingly coincidentally, then mentions three of Husband’s heroes, “Washington, Franklin, [and] Paine.” Recall that Husband originally viewed Washington as a sort of latter-­day Joshua, and here Blake enlists the wealthy, land-­and slave-­owning Virginia aristocrat as a symbol of redemptive Luciferian liberation as well. Franklin, with whom Husband had corresponded for years, would have been an obvious choice for a European such as Blake to follow owing to the scientist’s incredibly popularity throughout the Continent. And for Blake, Paine seems a natural ally as both were raised in nonconformist households (critics, in fact, have often identified Paine as the origin of much of Blake’s particularly incendiary revolutionary rhetoric within this poem).31 “Warren” is Dr. Joseph Warren, the governor of the Massachusetts provisional congress; this allusion proves notable in that the British often (correctly) viewed New England in general and Boston in particular as hotbeds of revolutionary activity—­something that is explicitly implied and celebrated by Blake later in the poem.32 “Gates” refers to Horatio Gates, the military victor at the Battle of Saratoga and the general responsible for the Patriot loss at Camden. “Hancock” is a reference to John Hancock, and “Green” is General Nathanael Greene, the genius of the Patriot army’s southern front who outwitted Cornwallis and in large part was the actor responsible for American victory in the southern colonies. This list of names is notable for other reasons as well. For one, with the exception of Franklin and Paine (who would have been famous to a 115

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European audience), they are all military men. Blake is writing at a time when much of the unfolding of the American Revolution and its consequences had already transpired, including the Treaty of Paris, the early years of the country under the Articles of Confederation, the Constitutional Convention, and Washington’s election. Indeed, the poem was published after the first president’s response to the Whiskey Rebellion, a rebellion supported by Husband. Husband abandoned his onetime Joshua as counterrevolutionary, and Blake felt that the American Revolution had become fundamentally conservative, and yet the historical Washington of that war is still a hero in this passage. Considering that Blake was well aware of recent episodes, his omissions appear noteworthy. With the exception of Washington, every figure is a northerner; so while Washington because of his influence, significance, and prominence would be impossible to ignore, other southern Patriots are not mentioned. Particularly significant could be the omission of Thomas Jefferson, whose own Jacobin sympathies would theoretically endear him to Blake, but his history as a slave owner likely offended the poet’s profoundly abolitionist beliefs. Notice also that Alexander Hamilton goes unmentioned, one of the figures most prominently identified with the consolidation of federal power, and who was in many ways seen as the central nemesis in the Whiskey Rebellion by both Husband and others. Finally, he depicts the blood that flows onto the coast as luminescent, “glowing,” an ominous image that connects to Albion’s “fiery Prince,” or King George III. America: A Prophecy purposefully mingles and confuses the sacred level of the mythology surrounding Orc as a figure with the profane realm of current temporal political and military events. The narrative structure of the poem, for example, describes Orc’s emerging from the Atlantic in language that evokes the historical figures; yet the imagery gestures at larger socioeconomic movements: Swelling, belching from its deeps red clouds & raging Fires! Albion is sick. America faints! enrag’d the Zenith grew. As human blood shooting its veins all round the orbed heaven Red rose the clouds from the Atlantic in vast wheels of blood And in the red clouds rose a Wonder o’er the Atlantic sea; Intense! naked! a Human fire fierce glowing, as the wedge Of iron heated in the furnace; his terrible limbs were fire With myriads of cloudy terrors banners dark & towers Surrounded; heat but not light went thro’ the murky atmosphere

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Blake’s language signals his often negative and sometimes ambivalent relationship to modernity and in particular industrialization. Because it conjures his infamous “dark Satanic mills,” his rhetoric evokes the nascent industrialization to which Blake would have been witness in Lambeth on the edge of London. “Belching” and “raging Fires” call to mind nothing so much as a factory: “iron heated in the furnace,” “towers,” and a Miltonic “heat but not light” remind one of hell and a polluted “murky atmosphere.” With the awe and terror connected to Orc’s emergence, Blake, then, seems to portray his liberation with ambivalence. This industrialization means that “Albion is sick,” while America only “faints” at the vision of Britain’s current developments and of America’s potential future one. Indeed, the condemnation is ecological even if it participates in what the critic Henry Nash Smith refers to as the “Virgin Land” hypothesis; that is, the view that America represents an Edenic, prelapsarian, and Arcadian paradise contrasts with the mechanization and industrialization one sees in Europe. At the same time that Blake suffuses the poem with these images of industrialization, he engages with a deep set of organic discourses, including “vast wheels of blood,” “red clouds” that are blood-­like, and a “naked” yet “Human” figure who glows. These organic images seem to stem from the violent industrial imagery. Yet Orc’s emergence in the Atlantic is terrifying to the British; as quoted earlier, “The King of England looking westward trembles at the vision” and its implications. The next reference to the actual political leaders of the American Revolution occurs in stanza 9, where Blake writes “there stands Washington / And Paine and Warren with their foreheads reared toward the east / But clouds obscure my aged sight. A vision from afar! . . . Ah vision from afar! Ah rebel form that rent the ancient / Heavens; Eternal Viper self-­renew’d, rolling in clouds / I see thee in thick clouds and darkness on America’s shore.” Here Blake focuses on perhaps the three most important figures of the six he mentioned before: Washington, or Husband’s Joshua; the radical pamphleteer Paine; and Warren, the leader of the seditious and proud New Englanders. In depicting the figures as facing the “east,” Blake emphasizes by contrast their presence in the west, and thus takes part in the tradition of translatio studii et imperii, which sees the west as the natural course that civilization must take and which was a common eighteenth-­century belief as seen in Bishop George Berkley’s poem “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America” with its famous line “Westward the course of empire takes its way.” But for Blake this westward course of faith, learning,

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civilization, and power is not a foregone conclusion; indeed, “clouds obscure my aged sight,” which is “rolling in clouds,” and though there is a vision, it is obscured by “thick clouds” leading to “darkness on America’s shore.” But yet this remains a “vision from afar.” The section also reinforces the sense of Luciferian energy, with the revolutionary generation described using Miltonic language. They are a “Rebel form that rent the ancient / Heavens,” seemingly referencing Lucifer’s rebellion in Heaven. An “Eternal Viper,” moreover, evokes both Gadsden’s coiled “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, of which Blake most likely would have been aware, and the serpent in the garden. Remember that Blake’s borderline gnostic theology and cosmology allow for a felix culpa and that Lucifer is in many ways a heroic figure. After all, in his poem Milton Blake writes approvingly that the seventeenth-­century poet was “of the devil’s party without knowing it.” The American revolutionary figures are mentioned again in stanzas 12 and 14, with references throughout to specific American locales. Interestingly, Britain and British figures prove less well-­defined. While the poem mentions George III and London in particular, these references do not match the visceral specificity of his American locations; he, for example, writes: “The citizens of New-­York close their books & lock their chests; / The mariners of Boston drop their anchors and unlade; / The scribe of Pennsylvania casts his pen upon the earth; / The builder of Virginia throws his hammer down in fear.” This American provincialism seems the origin of a revolutionary universalism: “Stiff shudderings shook the heav’nly thrones! France Spain & Italy,” seats of clerical episcopacy, which for Blake was the religious equivalent of political tyranny. When he mentions London, Blake describes it in language that echoes descriptions of Hell’s capital of Pandemonium from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Blake writes: To this deep valley situated by the flowing Thames; Where George the third holds council. & his Lords & Commons meet: Shut out from mortal sight the Angel came; the vale was dark With clouds of smoke from the Atlantic, that in volumes roll’d Between the mountains, dismal visions mope around the house.33

Both Blake and Husband articulate a certain current of theo-­political discourse that was radical in its ideology and that found its origins among the dissenting groups of the seventeenth-­century English Civil Wars. In the eighteenth century, these strands constituted a sometimes incredibly radical political platform. The debates over the religiosity of the American Revolution, and over whether classical rhetoric, British empiricism, and 118

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continental philosophy are more central to the American Revolution than Christianity prove a false distinction. Figures like Blake and Husband illuminate how radicalism could be simultaneously profoundly theological and more revolutionary than ostensibly secular perspectives; but we must also complicate the idea of “secular perspective.” Carl Schmitt wrote that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts,” and his intellectual descendent John Gray has written that utopianism is “a continuation of religion by other means.”34 It is obvious that Blake and Husband have a political theology, but so did Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and Hamilton. Blake’s theology is more recognizable as such, but that does not mean that the secularized ideologies of the more conventional Enlightenment are not political theologies in their own right. The tired debates about whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation” miss the point. Historically, while the United States is not legally defined by the confines of a premillennial dispensationalist evangelical and Protestant fundamentalist theology (which anachronistically would not begin to define itself until a good century after the American Revolution), the argument for a purely secular founding—­as politically desirable as some may find it—­is also untenable. Unlike the simply inaccurate views of right-­wing apologists for American theocracy, the secular view has a simplistic understanding of the very word “secular” and the problematics in its definition. Charles Taylor has shown how what we think of as “secular” is more complicated than assumed.35 The United States was not founded as a Christian nation; rather it was founded as a nation built on a type of secularized Christian heresy. Like all nations, the civil religion that justifies its existence and operation is at its core theological. In Blake and Husband we simply have a more heterodox manifestation of that burgeoning American faith. According to tradition, General Cornwallis made his band of grenadiers play the radical Leveller hymn “The World Turned Upside Down” upon his surrender to Washington at Yorktown. This telling anecdote provides a golden thread over a hundred years, linking the radical tradition of English nonconformism to the American Enlightenment. While Cornwallis despaired, Blake and Husband would have smiled—­at least for a while.

Notes 1. See Mark H. Jones, “Herman Husband: Millenarian, Carolina Regulator, and Whiskey Rebel” (PhD diss., Northern Illinois University, 1982). 119

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2. Wythe Holt, “The New Jerusalem: Herman Husband’s Egalitarian Alternative to the United States Constitution,” in Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Founding of a Nation, ed. Ray Raphael et al. (New York: Vintage, 2012), 261. 3. Ibid., 258. 4. Ibid., 254. 5. Indeed, the historian Christopher Hill did when he borrowed the title of his seminal study of early modern English heterodoxy after a seventeenth-­century broadsheet. 6. See Mary Elinor Lazenby, Herman Husband, a Story of His Life (Washington, DC: Old Neighborhoods, 1940). 7. See William Hogeland’s The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). 8. Thomas Jefferson’s most admired trio of men, and for William Blake an Unholy Trinity of Rationalism. 9. The classic and still unsurpassed study on these groups is Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas in the English Revolution (New York: Penguin, 1984). See also Andrew Bradstock’s Radical Religion in Cromwell’s England: A Concise History from the English Civil War to the Time of Commonwealth (New York: Tauris, 2011). 10. A similar comparison was made by Kevin Phillip’s The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, Civil Warfare, and the Triumph of Anglo-­America (New York: Basic, 1998) and by David Hackett Fisher’s Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 11. Eliga Gould, Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 13. 12. Jonathan Israel, A Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011). 13. For an example, see Richard J. Evans’s Altered Pasts: Counterfactuals in History (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2014) for a critical argument on behalf of the academic utility of the mode. 14. See Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) for an analysis of how the internal tensions within the conventional Enlightenment generate both secularism, and the contemporary postsecular reaction to secularism. 15. Holt, “The New Jerusalem,” 263. 16. Ibid., 260. 17. Ibid., 261. 18. William Blake, “America: A Prophesy,” in The Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake, ed. David Erdman et al. (New York: Anchor, 1982), 52. 19. A variation of this argument can be found in Edward Simon’s “Preachers from the Palace of Wisdom, or: Ranterism in the UK,” Revealer, 27 April 2015, wp​.nyu​.edu​ /therevealer. 20. See Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007) to get a sense of the popular discontent with the Constitutional Convention. 120

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21. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 22. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, ed. and trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 23. See Michael Lienesch, “The Role of Political Millennialism in Early American Nationalism,” Western Political Quarterly 36, no. 4 (1983): 445–­65; Powell Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–­1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015); and Geoffrey Ashe, The Hell-­Fire Clubs: Sex, Rakes, and Libertines in Eighteenth-­Century Europe (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton, 2000). 24. Jon Butler, Awash in a Sea of Faith: Christianizing the American People (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992); Gordon Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1993). 25. For a comparison between the Augustan conventions of the eighteenth century and Blake, see my essay, “Joel Barlow’s Miltonic Epic and Western Directional Poetics,” in Milton Studies: Milton in the Americas, no. 58, ed. Angelica Duran and Elisabeth Sauer (College Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016). 26. E. P. Thompson, Witness against the Beast: William Blake and the Moral Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 27. Thomas J. J. Altizer, The New Apocalypse: The Radical Christian Vision of William Blake (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1967). 28. See Jay Hopler and Kimberly Johnson, Before the Door of God: An Anthology of Devotional Writing (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013). 29. See Craig Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2012). 30. John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008); Simon Critchley, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (New York: Verso, 2014); Slavoj Žižek’s The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2009). 31. Robert Essick, “William Blake, Thomas Paine, and Biblical Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism 30, no. 2 (1991): 189–­212. 32. Samuel Forman, Dr. Joseph Warren: The Boston Tea Party, Bunker Hill and the Birth of American Liberty (Gretna, LA: Pelican, 2012). 33. Blake, “[Cancelled Plates of ‘America’] Plate b,” in The Complete Prose and Poetry of William Blake, 58. 34. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36; Gray, Black Mass, 2. 35. Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

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Charlotte Corday’s Gendered Terror Femininity, Violence, and Domestic Peace in Sarah Pogson’s The Female Enthusiast M I RANDA A . GREEN-­B ART EET

In 1807, Sarah Pogson published The Female Enthusiast, a five-­act play that recounts Charlotte Corday’s life immediately before and after her assassination of Jean-­Paul Marat, one of the Jacobin leaders of the French Revolution.1 Born in England, Pogson arrived in the newly formed United States, as Amelia Howe Kritzer recounts, in Charleston, South Carolina, shortly after the American Revolution ended in 1793. She seems to have left England at the encouragement of her older brother, Milward Pogson, who was the rector of St. James Church in Goose Creek, South Carolina,2 between 1796 and 1806.3 After settling in Charleston, Pogson began writing, and she published several plays, two novels, numerous essays, and a long poetic work, many of which were published together in her collection Essays Religious, Moral, Dramatic, and Poetical in 1818. While few other details about Pogson’s life have been uncovered, her best-­known play, The Female Enthusiast, has been reprinted at least twice since the 1990s, both times in collections focusing on early American women writers.4 That Pogson’s play has been reprinted in two notable collections in the last two decades suggests that her reimagining of Charlotte Corday5 speaks to the cross-­fertilization between Americans’ response to the French Revolution in the early republic and American conceptions of womanhood. Representing Corday’s rationale for and murder of Marat, the play depicts France in the midst of the Terror, yet Pogson does not focus on the events of 1793–­94 under the Revolutionary Tribunal. Rather, she considers the impact of the violence and the Revolution, in general, on women, the domestic sphere, and their roles within that sphere. The critic Angela Vietto argues that Charlotte’s assassination of Marat grows out of her concern for the home and her anger at Marat for endangering the domestic sphere and thus women’s abilities to perform their sacred roles as wives and mothers. 122

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For Vietto, Charlotte’s anger is “a natural outgrowth” of her adherence to her domestic role, a reading that is supported by early nineteenth-­century perspectives on women.6 However, I contend that Pogson’s Charlotte contradicts other contemporary representations of her. Charlotte is concerned with what Sharon M. Harris describes as “domestic peace for women.”7 Charlotte—­and, by extension, Pogson—­understands “domestic” to refer to both home and nation. Pogson is, therefore, equally concerned with the peace of the home and the peace of the nation. As the critic Amy Kaplan reminds us in her essay “Manifest Domesticity,” “domestic has a double meaning that not only links the familial household to the nation but also imagines both in opposition to everything outside the geographic and conceptual border of the home.”8 Kaplan asserts that domestic and domesticity are “related to the imperial project of civilizing, and the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery.”9 Through domesticity, moreover, the home works to contain the “wild or foreign elements that must be tamed” as domesticity “monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage” while it simultaneously “regulates the traces of the savage within itself.”10 Kaplan’s theorization of domesticity is applicable to my reading of Pogson’s play for several reasons. First, Kaplan sees women as actively involved in nation building. Although it is unlikely that Pogson would credit women with nation building, she certainly values women’s roles as republican mothers and how that role aided, in Kaplan’s words, in creating and “defining the contours of the nation.”11 Further, Kaplan recognizes the complexities of domesticity and its implicit purpose in distinguishing “civilization from savagery” as it sought to develop a specific view of civilization. For Pogson, developing and maintaining what she perceived to be a just and peaceful republican government—­one that ensured women were able to fulfill their private responsibilities in safety—­was a noble goal, one that women could and would take up if men failed to achieve it. Whereas Kaplan explicitly critiques the violence of domesticity, I suggest that Pogson, in fact, portrays aggression as permissible if its purpose is to protect civilization. Pogson willingly embraces the contradiction of using violence to restore peace so long as doing so allows men and women to return to their gender-­specific roles within the public and private realms once the violence has subsided. In The Female Enthusiast, Pogson considers what role women play in governing a nation, arguing that women’s primary role is to preserve the sanctity of the home at all costs; in fact—­and perhaps paradoxically—­the sanctity of the home absolves the violence committed in the name of preserving it. When the state 123

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of the nation affects the state of the home, women must act—­even if doing so contradicts their primary roles within the private sphere. In this essay, I trace the gendered dimensions of violence and peace in the early republic along with perceptions of gender. Although the men in Pogson’s play declare that Charlotte was “unnerved” and “deluded,” conceptions shared by French revolutionaries, I contend that Pogson uses Corday to argue that women will act violently to protect their sacred roles of wife and mother, their homes, and their nations.12 In fact, Pogson implies that women are uniquely poised to use violence to maintain peace—­both in the home and for the nation; even if they are consigned to the private sphere, they can still affect conditions beyond its boundaries. Pogson rejects the gender binaries that dictated that women could not play active roles in politics; yet she does so only to restore and affirm women’s ability to fulfill their domestic roles. Pogson’s play hinges, then, on a paradox: women can and will act violently to protect their homes and restore peace to their nations. In representing Charlotte Corday as transgressing the boundaries of early republican womanhood only to reify the importance of those boundaries, Pogson unwittingly questions the very categories she seems to value, as she interrogates the definitions of masculine and feminine, public and private, violent and nonviolent. Further, Pogson also considers the ways that both the American Revolution,13 in which women were portrayed primarily as filling nonviolent roles, and the French Revolution, in which many women fought alongside men, shaped nineteenth-­century attitudes toward women and their place within the public sphere. Ultimately, Pogson argues that peace is essential if women are to fulfill their duties to their families and, in turn, their nations. Pogson sees America as the country best equipped to develop a lasting republic, as it offers all its citizens, but especially its women, “domestic ease” and “tranquility” (212). Pogson, however, never discusses race in The Female Enthusiast. As a resident of Charleston during the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Pogson would have been intimately acquainted with slavery, and her family likely participated in slavery, although no historical record confirms this. Pogson, like other writers from this period, assumes that the responsibilities and privileges of citizenship and womanhood were only granted to white, middle-­and upper-­class individuals. In addition to using Charlotte Corday to remind her readers that women and men alike contributed to maintaining domestic peace, Pogson employs The Female Enthusiast to present what Harris calls “a comparative study of her sense of the failure of the French Revolution and the success of the 124

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American Revolution.”14 Through her presentation of Charlotte as both devoted to her gender role and willing to transgress that role to protect others’ ability to perform it, Pogson establishes the importance of the republican mother to late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century society. The men of the play do not esteem republican virtues to the extent Charlotte does, and therefore they fail to see that Charlotte has acted in defense of France and its citizens. They decide she is mad and promptly execute her. With Charlotte’s execution, Pogson contends that neither her fictionalized version of France nor the country itself can develop or sustain a lasting republic.

Republican Mothers Pogson’s concern with women and their relationship to the nation was shared by American politicians and political theorists following the Revolution. The historian Linda K. Kerber’s “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—­An American Perspective” has long dominated discussions about women’s political agency in the early United States. Kerber argues that a “careful reading of the main texts of the Enlightenment in France, England, and the [American] colonies reveals that the nature of the relationship between women and the state remained largely unexamined.”15 In fact, many Enlightenment philosophers, including Henry Home, Lord Kames, and Jean-­Jacques Rousseau, argued against women’s participation in politics, suggesting that they did not think women had a strong connection to their nations.16 Both believed that women’s relationship to their country “is secondhand, experienced through their husbands and sons.”17 Rousseau and Kames seem to fear the masculinization of women. For them, and numerous other Enlightenment philosophers, Kerber maintains, “women existed only in their roles as wives and mothers.”18 After the Revolution, however, a changing economy forced American politicians to reevaluate women’s roles in and relationship to the newly formed republic. As Clifford Edward Clark Jr. notes, the economy of colonial America reflected “the ideal of a balanced and well-­ordered family” and a community working toward shared purposes.19 This was due, in large part, to the emphasis on agriculture and home manufacture. As the nation slowly shifted to a more industrial economy, work moved from the private sphere to the public. The historian Carol Berkin asserts that fathers, who had been “responsible for the moral education of their sons and daughters,” were increasingly called upon to move their work outside their homes.20 In 125

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turn, much of the household production for which women were responsible “was contracting” due to industrial production and city markets in the North and slave labor in the South.21 Therefore the political and economic changes in the nascent republic forced politicians to develop “a definition of women’s relationship to the state” that simultaneously attempted to address and define women’s roles,22 to recognize the changing economy, and to account for lapses in political theory.23 The role that emerged was termed “republican mother.” The enduring notion of the republican mother relied upon “the classical formulation of the Spartan mother who raised sons prepared to sacrifice themselves to the good of the polis.”24 The ideal seemingly integrated women’s long-­standing domestic responsibilities with “political behavior” by emphasizing the importance of female education to both domesticity and the developing republic.25 The ideal, then, offered women an active role in the republic while ensuring that role be performed only within the domestic realm. As Benjamin Rush, a well-­known eighteenth-­century Philadelphia doctor, asserted in his 1787 essay, “Thoughts upon Female Education,” female education is a necessity as women “must be the stewards, and guardians of their husbands’ property.”26 In particular, women take on “a principal share of the instruction of children” and must be “qualified to a certain degree by a peculiar and suitable education, to concur in instructing their sons in the principles of liberty and government.”27 As Rush suggests, educating women for their roles as wives and mothers benefits all citizens, and he emphasizes that husbands and sons need women to execute properly the responsibilities of governing. Rush clearly lays out the benefits and responsibilities of the republican mother, yet his description leaves out a great deal. While Rush emphasizes the need for female education and how it would benefit American society as a whole, he does not, as Berkin notes, “break free from the demands of gentility.”28 Rush calls for women to “know enough about government and politics, about past republican experiments and the causes of their failure, about science and its empirical mode of thinking, and about moral philosophy to socialize their children for citizenship in the new nation.”29 Thus, women were not to be educated in moral philosophy, history, or political theory simply as a way “to experience personal growth and self-­exploration.”30 Their education was to be practical and socially important. Republican mothers were to nurture and sustain republican children. Women were also meant to soothe their husbands, to protect them from the daily stresses of domestic life, and to bring comfort and “solace” to them 126

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while rearing their sons.31 As definitively as Rush outlines how women are to be educated in order to teach their sons and to support their husbands, he does not—­nor do any of his contemporaries—­consider how women might respond if their roles as republican mothers are threatened. In contrast, Pogson, with her examination of Charlotte Corday, does.

The Female Enthusiast With her play, Pogson offers “an imaginative account of Charlotte Corday’s murder of Jean-­Paul Marat.”32 As Sharon M. Harris suggests, Pogson represents Corday much differently from her contemporaries. In Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, Angela Vietto explains that the French, specifically Marat’s Jacobin followers, depicted Corday as “unsexed” and “down played her agency by claiming she acted” at the behest of “male Girondins.”33 Based on Harris’s and Vietto’s assertions, it seems that the French accounts portrayed Corday as simultaneously masculine and easily manipulated by men. In contrast, British accounts typically feminized Corday, but these versions “also gave her personal motivations, depicting her as avenging the death of a lover.”34 Like these early historical reports, Pogson’s play is far from factual; however, Pogson’s Charlotte can be seen as an embodiment of the merging of feminine virtue and republican idealism. As Pogson describes her, Charlotte leads a typical life for a young, aristocratic woman. She runs her widowed father’s household, and she appears to enjoy her traditional role as nurturer and helpmate to her father and her brother, Henry. Jacques, their family’s servant, offers a telling description of Charlotte in the play’s first scene, when he comes upon her crying and says: “Thy gentle heart / Should rejoice in gladness, for it is kind, / And ever feels for poor folks when they suffer” (160). Jacques’s characterization is key because it shows Charlotte to be thoughtful, empathetic, and kind to “poor folks.” Jacques’s description alludes to what Charlotte demonstrates throughout the play: she cares equally for everyone and sees it as her duty to protect all French citizens, even those not of her class. From the opening scene of the play, therefore, Pogson establishes Charlotte as a model of womanhood. She fulfills her feminine responsibilities out of a strong sense of duty but also out of genuine concern for her fellow citizens. For his part, Monsieur Corday has educated Charlotte according to republican ideals, and he and Henry include her in all their political discussions. The critic Chantal Thomas states that the historical Monsieur Corday valued education for women and encouraged his daughter to read; he sent 127

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her to a convent school, where she “was just as enthusiastic about her religious education” as she was about Rousseau’s writings, which she discovered in the convent’s library.35 It was at the convent school where Corday claimed to have first become a republican.36 In contrast, Pogson’s Charlotte does not discuss her education; rather, she claims to have inherited her ideals solely from her father and brother, as she repeatedly declares that she shares their preference for “true liberty” and “the welfare of France” (182). Monsieur Corday, despite his obvious influence on Charlotte, is a minor character. His children speak of him often, but he appears in only one scene. His shadowy presence suggests that in the play her father inhabits the role of “republican mother,” more a background player than a dominant one. He has taught Henry and Charlotte to be good republicans, to love France, and to recognize and challenge injustice; however, as an elderly man, he can neither defend France nor lead the country into the future. Monsieur Corday represents the past, while his children, particularly Henry, represent the future. Pogson depicts Henry as a healthy, intelligent, patriotic young man. He loves France and wants peace to be restored, and he is committed to rebuilding his country according to republican ideals. He has joined the army at his father’s request to promote the impression that he feels “devoted / To the pursuit of arms and fair renown” (164).37 He reveals to his friend Belcour that “They know not that the bias of my mind / Fondly inclines to sweet domestic life.” Although his principles and “love of true liberty” prompt Henry “To every action” that will end the violence that consumes France, Henry declares his preference for domestic life (164).38 He declares that he would “serve [his duty] in another field / Than that of carnage” (164). Henry values diplomacy and the law more than military force. As he tells Belcour: “I could face a cannon undismayed; / Yet I do not desire the dangerous honor, / And would rather be the generous statesman / Planning the happiness, prosperity, / And peace of my countrymen than leading / To battle—­even like a Julius Caesar!” (165). Here, Henry both upholds republican ideals, with his desire for peace and prosperity established through rational discourse, and questions eighteenth-­century conceptions of masculinity, with his discomfort with violence and preference for domesticity. By highlighting this apparent dichotomy and aligning Henry more with feminine ideals than masculine ones, Pogson begins to question the gender roles that dictate that men are violent and women are peaceful. While both eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century masculinity and femininity were seemingly well defined, manhood and womanhood were both “contested concept[ions]” and were “in transition in the decades after 128

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the [American] Revolution.”39 According to Vietto, the ideal American man “contributed to the well-­being of his community”; further, “his acceptance of the will of God led him to act with moderation.”40 In describing Henry as a man who dislikes but does not fear warfare and who values his talents as a statesman above his skills as a soldier, Pogson positions Henry as the ideal man. His love of domesticity includes both the home and the nation; indeed, his declared preference for a “sweet domestic life” can be read two ways. As I have discussed, this sentiment reveals that Henry values a quiet, private life, but it also demonstrates that he values a stable nation. In Kaplan’s terms, Henry wants a domesticated nation, one in which “the project of civilizing” is complete.41 He exhibits, therefore, more interest in governing once civilization has been established than in the process of domestication. Pogson posits Henry, with his desire to eschew violence and his preference for republicanism, as the type of man who will rebuild and restore France after the violence of the Revolution has ended. He is the future of France, and Pogson suggests that such men must be protected if republicanism is to succeed. Rather than establishing Charlotte as a foil for the virtuous character Henry, Pogson instead likens her outlook and disposition to Henry’s. She too loves “domestic harmony” and possesses a strong sense of duty (160). Like Henry, she cherishes liberty, virtue, and peace above all things. Indeed, the opening scene, as I have already stated, positions Charlotte as a model woman of the republic. In this scene, she laments the violence that ravages her country, mourns for those affected, and questions why the Terror continues unchecked. As she expresses her concerns and frustrations, her friend Estelle assumes Charlotte is agitated out of fear for her fiancé, De Vernueil, who is a soldier, and for Henry, who has recently taken a commission. While Estelle correctly identifies Charlotte’s worry for her lover and brother, she overlooks Charlotte’s anger. As her brief soliloquy reveals, Charlotte is overcome with anger because her home life and the lives of her fellow citizens have been affected by the violence sweeping through France: Had duty never called De Vernueil hence, Here I had stayed in peaceful ignorance—­ That duty which led me first to ask of wars, And governments and other scenes than those Enfolding sweet domestic harmony. Then to a wider field my views were opened. Simplicity retired, but my heart throbbed With keenest sensibility—­alive 129

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To virtue and humanity. Doth it not Loathe a foe to either—­mourn that on earth Such foes exist, to wound mankind’s repose? Repose? If that were all! But oppression Stalks abroad, and stains even the peaceful Paths of life with blood! Merciless ferocity Sways, with an uncontrolled dominion! A monster spreads destruction! And while he Desolates, calls out aloud, “Tis liberty!” Why do his black deeds go unpunished? Is there not one avenging hand to strike? (160–­61)

Here, Charlotte proclaims that she was, initially, unaware of the political events that ignited the Revolution. As Vietto points out, Charlotte’s anger and her act of murder are “framed as a natural outgrowth of [her] sentimental devotion to the domestic sphere” as she bemoans that it was only “because her fiancé was called to public service that she became aware of larger public issues.”42 In her reading, Vietto considers only one meaning for “domestic”—­the private sphere. Given Charlotte’s knowledge of history and Enlightenment philosophers, it seems likely that “domestic” also refers to the nation, to France. “Enfolding sweet domestic harmony,” then, is both the peace and tranquility that Charlotte experienced in her own home as well as the peace the French people experienced prior to the start of the Revolution.43 Considering “domestic” in both senses justifies Charlotte’s intense, physical reaction to the Revolution. She is not upset merely because her fiancé has gone into service; she is devastated by what is happening to her country and her people, and she holds a single person accountable: Marat. In her soliloquy, Charlotte refers to Marat in the abstract: he is “a foe” and “[a] monster” that “spreads destruction” (161). That she does not refer to him by name highlights his infamy: he and his crimes against the French people are so well known that he does not need to be named. Charlotte goes on to enumerate his atrocities. Marat has “wound[ed]” France’s tranquility, and he has spread “oppression” far and wide, a sin that she deems his most heinous. Charlotte makes it clear that she sees Marat as a threat to peace and liberty, despite his own claims that he acts for the cause of freedom (161). Her diatribe against Marat emphasizes that she blames him for much of the violence, but the final two sentences suggest that Charlotte—­and by extension Pogson—­holds others responsible for allowing Marat to amass so

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much power. In asking, “Why do his black deeds go unpunished? / Is there not one avenging hand to strike?,” Charlotte demands to know why the men of France, specifically those claiming to value republicanism and peace, have not acted (161). She questions why they refuse to uphold their responsibility to protect their families and their country. That Charlotte asks these questions underscores her commitment to France and republican motherhood. She values her family and willingly fulfills her domestic responsibilities to her father and brother, as I have stated, yet these questions and this soliloquy demonstrate that Charlotte believes her responsibilities extend beyond the confines of the private sphere and her own family, particularly in moments of national crisis. As she sees it, the men have been unable—­or unwilling—­to end the crisis. Public concerns are affecting private ones; thus, “The private bosom from the public chaos / Convulsive rends” (162). Here, Charlotte suggests that the public and private spheres are not as clearly bifurcated as her fellow citizens might suggest. Indeed, as numerous scholars, including Linda K. Kerber, Cathy N. Davidson, Jessamyn Hatcher, and Millette Shamir, have noted, the divisions between the spheres were not neatly divisible.44 Women often took on public roles, out of both economic necessity and political ambition. Charlotte seemingly recognizes what the men of the play do not: the spheres are intimately connected and profoundly affect one another. If one—­in this case, the public sphere—­is out of control, the other will soon follow. Further, something must be done to regain control, and if men fail to take on what Charlotte sees as a traditionally masculine role—­governing the country and maintaining peace—­then women must be prepared to act, as she asserts in her next soliloquy. In her second soliloquy, Charlotte determines how peace can be restored, claims responsibility for these tasks, and considers what her actions mean for her as a woman. She believes that her strong, almost violent reaction to Marat’s influence over the revolutionaries and their brutal methods testify to her femininity: “Strong are they claims, O nature! Now do I / Feel them with an iron force grasping my heart” (169). Nature, or her innate feminine qualities, guides Charlotte with a force she finds difficult to challenge. The passage is significant—­it evokes an image of a heart being gripped forcefully in an iron fist—­because the image asserts that one’s nature is too powerful to transgress even when one feels compelled to do so for the benefit of many. In the next two lines, Charlotte expresses how her feminine nature is in conflict with her desire to stop Marat and the violence he

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sanctions: “As if some cruel power was tearing from / My bosom its vitality while nature, / Unwilling to forego its long abode, / Struggles with rude convulsing violence” (169). The passage validates Charlotte’s dedication to her gender, specifically her role as a republican mother. To murder Marat, Charlotte must overcome her feminine nature, which dictates that she, and all women, be “incline[d] to sweet domestic life” (164). Considered in a different light, “Struggles with rude, convulsing violence” could also indicate that Charlotte demurs the “rude, convulsing violence” committed by Marat and his followers. She cannot quietly accept this violence without comment because, unchecked, it challenges the domesticity that she values and that her nature guides her to protect. Her nature, then, compels her to act to end the violence and to do so because no one else opposes it. Charlotte does declare “The monster’s name / Steals every thought, and female weakness flies,” which suggests Charlotte’s femininity and her single-­minded dedication to her domestic responsibilities (169). She has banished “her female weakness,” but she has privileged her “vitality,” her “strength,” and her “mighty energy,” all characteristics that can be attributed to republican mothers (169). Charlotte does challenge gender norms, but her intent is not to transgress conventional roles. Rather, her stated purpose is to ensure that “the countless list of victims” will not grow and to guarantee “The innocent shall again walk in safety” (169). Her decision to commit an act of violence avows her dedication to the domestic in all senses: the home and the nation. As numerous historians have noted, in revolutionary France it was not acceptable for women to act outside of their prescribed gender roles. James McMillan states that “most male revolutionaries, whether moderate or radical, objected not only to counter-­revolutionary women but also to female revolutionary activists.”45 Women who spoke publicly for or against the Revolution were seen to be violating the strict boundaries between the spheres. Madelyn Gutwirth argues that “the French Revolution offers so fascinating an example of how the vicissitudes of gender interact with other impulses toward radical change.”46 Although French women “profited by their freedom of expression and action relative to the women of some other national cultures,” they have not escaped “a heritage of savagely misogynous denigration” even as they were shown “greater toleration of their participation.”47 Women could, and were often encouraged to, participate in the Revolution’s violence. For example, “women could denounce men or women; mobs of them could hunt down antagonists . . . and taunt them, spank them, or even do them grievous bodily harm; in a mob of men and women, they 132

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might wield daggers along with the rest and help dismember or disembowel its victims. They might act as the inspiritors of destruction, through their yells and exhortations.”48 Gutwirth’s implication here is clear. Women could behave violently so long as their acts were against other women or they were acting alongside men. Women could not, however, commit violent acts against men. Those women, like Corday, who did so challenged their femininity and undercut men’s masculinity. Thus, male-­approved and male-­ initiated violence against women or other men was sanctioned. This point is key because mob violence operated as “an external sign of manhood.”49 Men who incited other men and women demonstrated their masculine power, but men who were the victims of violent women were emasculated. Violent women threatened the gendered divisions that governed society. Further, mobs of frenzied women threatened not only men’s roles as protectors but also their conceptions of women. As Gutwirth asserts, men valued the allegorical republican mother far more than they valued real women.50 In other words, women were expected to be docile bodies. Michel Foucault describes a docile body as one “that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.”51 A docile body is controlled through a “calculated manipulation of its elements, its gestures, its behaviors.”52 Following this formulation, women of the eighteenth century were docile bodies as a result of social conditioning and familial expectations. Because violent women challenged social codes and were expected to endure rather than enact violence, they represented a dichotomy that men could not resolve: violent women, especially those acting independently of men, could not raise virtuous citizens because they were not virtuous themselves. Thus, women must be controlled to prevent them from destabilizing both social mores and French national identity as it is underpinned by women who have been taught to be passive. In the two scenes immediately preceding Charlotte’s assassination of Marat, Pogson presents Marat’s and Charlotte’s interpretations of republicanism. Pogson represents Marat as a powerful figure who seeks to achieve freedom for all French people and institute a republican government at any cost. He is willing to kill those who oppose him, telling the “motley crew,” he addresses at the beginning of act 3 to “stain your swords with the purple tide flowing / From dying conspirators. Let the foes / Of our liberty bleed. They are vipers. / Let not bread which should nourish true Frenchmen / Be wasted on them! No! Destroy—­destroy!” (180). Marat then declares that he “will not spare one aristocrat” and that his “breast harbors eternal enmity” to those who oppose “the sentiments of pure republicanism” (181). Pogson 133

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presents a power-­hungry and narcissistic Marat who describes himself as “a demigod” (181). Pogson does emphasize Marat’s devotion to republicanism, but her portrayal of him as willing to execute anyone opposing him is juxtaposed against Charlotte’s determination to prevent more death. In the moments before she assassinates him, Charlotte reminds the audience that all others have refused to act and that she is protecting France: No other hand will rise. No other eye Will throw death’s fiat on the subtle serpent. No more shall guileless innocence be stung By his envenomed tongue and thirst of blood; Nor shall those brave men his savage sword condemns Add to the mound of butchered victims. (182)

For Pogson, Marat appears to represent the worst of masculinity as he values politics and power above everything, whereas Charlotte is the epitome of republican motherhood, educating and protecting her charges while sacrificing the self. Further, Pogson signals that Charlotte’s gender and men’s perception of women enable Charlotte to gain access to Marat. Charlotte gains access to Marat so easily, I argue, because she is a woman. Having written to Marat, explaining that she has news “Of circumstances highly important” (182), Charlotte is permitted to meet with him. Marat agrees to meet with her in the hope that her information “will aid our cause” because his “whole ambition is to serve it” (181). Charlotte enters Marat’s private bedchamber as he prepares to bathe.53 She is alone, and Marat’s guards do not search her.54 Because Charlotte is a woman, neither Marat nor his guards perceive her as dangerous. Should she threaten him, he can immediately call for help, and his guards could easily subdue her. French beliefs about her gender and her femininity, therefore, make her the perfect terrorist. Inside his private chamber, Charlotte approaches Marat and gives him a packet of papers, telling him it “is full of information / Of a well-­ planned and deep conspiracy” (182). As he opens the packet, Charlotte stabs him, proclaiming, “Die, monster! There is an end to thy destructive curse” (183). In one brief, violent motion, Charlotte stabs Marat, the “murderer of prisoners—­of priests defenseless—­/ Of helpless women” (182).55 She succeeds in assassinating him because he, his men, and the rest of France fail to recognize the power of women. While Charlotte—­and all French women—­has been underestimated, the men fail to recognize that women are as invested in the politics of the nation as they are.

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In the play, one can surmise that if anyone murdered Marat, particularly if the assassin attacked him in close proximity to his guards, he would have been killed in turn. In this case, Charlotte’s gender affects the guards’ response. Because she is a woman, Marat and others express disbelief as her actions are wholly unexpected. Marat asks, “How didst thou find this courage?” (183). Chabot, Marat’s close friend, cannot believe that Charlotte is in her right mind, as he demands to know, “Girl! What hast thou done? / Did madness seize thee?” (183). Even in the midst of the violence of the Revolution with women protesting in the streets for food, neither Marat nor Chabot can accept that a sane woman would murder a man. Further, Chabot cannot believe that Charlotte has acted alone, insisting she tell him “What instigated thee to such an act?” (183). Chabot seems to expect Charlotte to reveal that she has acted at the behest of a man. Charlotte, however, acted alone; she conceived, planned, and carried out the assassination autonomously, all of which makes her actions more terrible. In an eighteenth-­ century context, women were not encouraged to think independently, nor were they thought to be able to handle “the loneliness of autonomy.”56 Kerber contends that the major philosophers of the period, including Locke, Rousseau, and Montesquieu, equated being alone with being male, and they invariably described women “in relationship to others” because “women existed only in their roles as mothers and wives.”57 Ironically, Charlotte devised and carried out her plan for “The cause of virtue” in a manner that is consistent with her responsibilities as a wife and mother (184). While Marat, Chabot, and even her father and brother are convinced that she transgresses these gendered expectations, Charlotte believes she has acted for the cause of liberty and has shown “generous love toward [her] country” (184). In killing Marat, Charlotte has not exceeded her gendered role. Rather, she has shattered men’s image of women, forcing them to question their conceptions of femininity, violence, patriotism, and even their own masculinity. To further complicate their understanding of her crime, Charlotte also denies the only other explanation the men seem willing to accept: insanity. She has calmly and methodically assassinated the man she sees as culpable for the violence facing her country, and in so doing she has confounded everyone’s expectations of a woman. Despite the men’s belief that she has acted as a man, Charlotte’s explanation only stresses her commitment to the ideal of the republican mother: “A woman’s arm, when nerved in such a cause, / Is as the arm of the avenging angel” (184). Despite her declaration, the men in the play continue to inscribe their own explanations on her actions.

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The differences between Charlotte’s and Marat’s death scenes also suggest that women are more powerful than they appear to be. Marat was murdered in private, in the presumed sanctity of the domestic sphere. Indeed, I have argued that Charlotte was able to assassinate him with relative ease because she was granted access to his private chamber. Further, that she murders him in such an intimate moment, while he is bathing, suggests that women only have power within the domestic sphere even as her act has significant repercussions for the French nation. Marat is vulnerable in private, whereas Charlotte is empowered. In contrast, Charlotte is publicly beheaded by the guillotine. The play presents her public execution as a routine example of the Revolution’s violence; she has killed a leader, so she must pay with her life. The public aspect of her death, however, is anything but routine. Her immediate and public execution suggests that she continues to pose a threat. If she were simply a woman “unnerved” and “deluded,” the leaders of the Revolution could imprison her or execute her privately (184, 190). In executing her publicly, Chabot and the other leaders clearly try to exert their power and control in a moment of political chaos. However, they also acknowledge her ongoing power, and in executing her publicly and swiftly, they attempt to subdue others who may share Charlotte’s convictions. In so doing, they unwittingly acknowledge Charlotte’s—­and, by extension, all women’s—­political efficacy. Most of the play’s male characters cannot reconcile Charlotte’s act with their notion of womanhood. They refuse to accept that Charlotte may have acted alone to restore peace, nor can they consider her actions outside their perceived limitations of her gender or femininity. They do, however, connect her act to what they perceive to be the instability of her female mind and body. For example, Chabot sees her as nothing more than a “mad enthusiast,” and her father describes her as a “poor, deluded girl” (190, 193). Despite Charlotte’s numerous assurances that she has acted to save France, that she has acted when men like her father, brother, and fiancé failed to, her explanations go unheard. They cannot accept that she has behaved as she believes any republican mother would—­to restore peace so that women can return to the business of being good wives and mothers. As Kerber reminds us, “The Republican mother’s life was dedicated to the service of civic virtue; she educated her sons for it; she condemned and corrected her husband’s lapses from it.”58 In Charlotte’s mind, she has upheld her obligation to her family and to her country—­she has violated her gendered role only to ensure that other French women can fulfill theirs. Charlotte has, nevertheless, unwittingly upended the tenuous and constructed balance 136

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between men and women, public and private, chaos and calm. In her quest to restore peace and virtue, Charlotte has demonstrated that women can and will act when they believe men have shirked their duties. Ultimately, however, Charlotte proves unsuccessful in restoring peace, but she reminds men, particularly her brother Henry, of their responsibilities in maintaining domestic peace. In her final conversation with Henry, Charlotte announces she was driven, through men’s inability to act, to her extreme actions: I waited, looked in vain to see some arm Hold forth that glittering sword of vengeance, And from the face of the earth exterminate Its pestilence, Marat. No sword appeared. The people bled; not ceased the copious stream. My heart bled for them, while its keen feelings, Bursting the bands which mark the female course, Called on revenge and dared to act the Roman! (203–­4)

Here, Charlotte conveys that if she has taken her role as a republican mother too far, her brother—­and all the men of France—­are to blame.

Revolution in America and France Pogson also uses The Female Enthusiast to encourage her readers—­both men and women—­to remain active in maintaining domestic peace and to consider the success of the American Revolution alongside the failures of the French. Specifically, Pogson argues that America is better equipped to build and sustain a lasting republic, one that values and protects women’s responsibilities as republican mothers. The French Republic fails, Pogson suggests, because the men leading the Revolution do not value republican virtues as much as Charlotte does; thus, they cannot see that Charlotte has acted within the scope of republican motherhood—­to protect her people. The men decide she is insane and promptly execute her. With Charlotte’s death, Pogson questions France’s ability to develop a republic in any form. Aside from Charlotte, only Henry, his fiancée’s father Duval, and his friend LeBrun seem to recognize that the Revolution has failed to secure the liberty its instigators promised. Instead, it has threatened domesticity and forced women to act against their natures. As Duval tells his daughter, there is a place where women are safe and protected, and “It is America. / There, in the conjugal or single state—­/ In affluence or pale-­cheeked poverty—­/ Each female who respects herself is safe” (186). While here Duval also addresses 137

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his daughter’s perceived disobedience, his message regarding America is clear: it offers women a “life secure” (186). There, women are “Surrounded by an host of glittering arms”; thus, their virtue is preserved and cherished, so they have no reason to act beyond their sphere (186). Henry agrees with this view and convinces LeBrun and Belcour to leave France with him and Estelle, whom he has recently married in secret, for America, where they can “Seek that repose we cannot here possess” (186). With Henry’s declaration that America offers the “domestic ease” and “tranquility” amid “the sons of true-­born liberty” (212), he attests to what many Americans living in the early republican era believed—­that they were “situated in a unique historical moment” and that “the creation of the United States on republican values was exemplary of human progress.”59 Like Charlotte before him, Henry draws on the double meaning of domestic; in America, both the home and the nation are at ease. For Pogson, America seems to be “a land of safety for women, regardless of their class, so long as they are virtuous.”60 Because she represents Henry—­whom Charlotte has described as the best man able to lead France once peace is restored—­emigrating from France to America, Pogson reveals the extent to which she believes the French Revolution failed to secure the safety of homes specifically and the nation generally. Pogson seemingly believes that women can—­and perhaps should—­“play a major role is defining . . . the nation,” albeit through their domestic roles.61 The young American republic, then, with its emphasis on motherhood as a “civic imperative,” serves as a nation dedicated to protecting women’s virtue and their roles.62 Just as Pogson overlooks the fact that Charlotte does question the limits placed upon women, she also fails to notice the many ways the American Revolution, by consigning women to a mediated role through their influence on husbands and children, actually limited women’s ability to engage in activities of civic importance. In stressing women’s roles as wives and mothers, American political theorists focused, almost exclusively, on “women’s emotional and intellectual energies on the small circle of domesticity.”63 Following the Revolution, American women proved they were capable of taking on roles beyond the domestic sphere. As Carol Berkin states, “they had shown themselves and their fathers, husbands, and sons that they could ‘make do,’ take over the management of farms and businesses, defend home and children from danger, and cope with physical dislocation and devastating reversals of fortune.”64 Rather than encouraging women to contribute the skills they acquired as a direct result of the Revolution, men granted women the role of republican mothers, binding them to a “feminine character that would 138

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endure, rather than defeat, adversity.”65 They were told that “patience, endurance, frugality, [and] fortitude” were the virtues that they had to develop and maintain to ensure the success of the newly formed nation (157). In offering these roles and virtues to women, which seems a direct result of the way women responded to the violence of the American Revolution, America developed as a nation that valued women and their honor, at least white women of a certain class. In contrast, the French Revolution forced women to transgress their roles and forsake their virtue. Through Charlotte, Pogson asserts that women’s roles and honor must be protected at all costs. While Pogson presents women as bearing a responsibility to maintain and even to restore domestic peace, she insists that women can take on this duty only when men fail to do so. Pogson then argues that women can challenge their prescribed roles only in order to protect them. Rather than question the ways women were seemingly excluded from the public sphere or advocate ways that women could build on the independence they exerted during the American Revolution, as many women including Judith Sargent Murray and Abigail Adams did, Pogson validates American men’s determination to limit women’s influence to the domestic sphere. For Pogson, boundaries can be disrupted on one continent and restored on another. Pogson does not realize, however, that America is far from ideal and that, once disrupted, a boundary can never fully be restored. Although her intent may have been to uphold American republican motherhood as the ideal for all nations, at least in the democratic West, Pogson ultimately challenges the very gendered constructions that she appears to have valued. In turn, she implicitly questions how long the American republic can succeed without women, who possess innate love for and desire to protect “domestic ease,” taking active roles in the nation.

Notes 1. Pogson is occasionally referred to by her married name, Sarah Pogson Smith; however, as most of her works were published under “Pogson” and she was unmarried at the time The Female Enthusiast was published, I refer to her as Pogson. 2. Goose Creek is a small city located approximately twenty miles northwest of Charleston. 3. “Records Kept by Rev. Milward Pogson,” South Carolina Historical and Genealogical Magazine 29, no. 2 (1928): 164. 4. The Female Enthusiast appears in Sharon M. Harris’s Women’s Early American Historical Narratives (2003) and Kritzer’s Plays by Early American Women, 1775–­1850 (1995). 139

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5. To distinguish between Charlotte Corday the historical figure and Pogson’s imagined version of her, I use Corday when referring to the historical Corday and Charlotte when referring to Pogson’s dramatic heroine. 6. Angela Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America (New York: Ashgate, 2005), 63. 7. Sharon M. Harris, introduction to Women’s Early Historical Narratives, ed. Harris (New York: Penguin, 2003), 156–­57. 8. Amy Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” in No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 183. 9. Ibid., 184. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Sarah Pogson, The Female Enthusiast, 1807, in Women’s Early Historical Narratives, ed. Sharon M. Harris (New York: Penguin, 2003), 184, 190; subsequent parenthetical citations are from this edition. 13. The fact that the American Revolution was fought in and around American cities and towns, especially those of New England and the middle Atlantic colonies, meant that American women were in close proximity to many battles. As Carol Berkin reveals, many women joined their husbands in camp. Although some thought that the presence of women in camp distracted the soldiers, and numerous generals referred to them as “necessary nuisances,” leaders of the Continental Army were forced to allow women to follow the camps for fear of losing soldiers who might return to their wives and families. As Berkin explains, there was a “grudging recognition” that “these women had a place” in American “army camps and forts and even in the heat of battle: as cooks, washerwomen, seamstresses, nurses, scavengers for supplies, sexual partners, and occasionally as soldiers and spies.” In many cases, having women perform these duties, particularly cooking, laundering clothes, and sewing, enabled more men to fight than would have otherwise been able (Carol Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers: Women in the Struggle for America’s Independence [New York: Vintage, 2005], 51, 51–­53). 14. Harris, introduction, x. 15. Linda K. Kerber, “The Republican Mother: Women and the Enlightenment—­An American Perspective,” American Quarterly 48, no.  2 (1976): 187–­205. Reprinted in Toward an Intellectual History of Women: Essays by Linda K. Kerber, ed. Kerber (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 42. 16. Kerber specifically points to lines in Rousseau in which he asserts that women “ought not to be part of the political community” because those “who seek to do so deny their sexual identity” and do “violence to [their] own characters.” And, according to Kerber, Lord Kames echoes Rousseau’s sentiments as he “explicitly denied that women have a direct responsibility to their nation” (51). 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 52. 19. Clifford Edward Clark Jr., The American Family Home, 1800–­1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), 13. 20. Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 153. 140

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21. Ibid., 154. 22. Again, I want to emphasize that these definitions applied almost exclusively to white women of the middle and upper classes. As Berkin notes, these shifts were primarily seen in “prosperous women’s familial role[s],” not in immigrant, working-­class, or enslaved women’s roles (ibid.). 23. Kerber, “The Republican Mother,” 42. 24. Ibid., 42; all italics are original unless otherwise noted. 25. Ibid. 26. Benjamin Rush, Thoughts upon Female Education (1787), in Transatlantic Feminisms in the Age of Revolutions, ed. Lisa L. Moore, Joanna Brooks, and Caroline Wigginton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 207. 27. Ibid. 28. Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 155. 29. Ibid., 154–­55. 30. Ibid., 155. 31. Ibid. 32. Harris, introduction, xi. 33. Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, 3. 34. Ibid., 63. 35. Chantal Thomas, “Heroism in the Feminine: The Examples of Charlotte Corday and Madame Roland,” in The French Revolution 1789–­1989: Two Hundred Years of Rethinking, ed. Sandy Petry (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989), 69. 36. Ibid. 37. Numerous biographical sketches of Charlotte Corday appeared from the mid-­and late nineteenth century. Only one, A Cyclopaedia of Female Biography, edited by Henry Gardiner Adams and Sarah Josepha Hale, mentions Corday’s siblings. According to the unnamed author of Corday’s biographical entry, she was the fourth of five children; the names of her siblings are not recorded. The entry also states that she was the second daughter and that her brothers were soldiers (Adams and Hale, eds., A Cyclopeadia of Female Biography, Consisting of Sketches of All Women Who Have Been Distinguished by Great Talents, Strength of Character, Piety, Benevolence, or Moral Virtue of Any Kind [London: Groombridge and Sons, 1857]: 203–­4). 38. Ibid., 164. 39. Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, 39. 40. Ibid. 41. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 184. 42. Vietto, Women and Authorship in Revolutionary America, 64. 43. Pogson does not offer any historical framing or discussion of the Revolution’s causes. This lack of context suggests either that Pogson assumes that readers were already familiar with the French Revolution, or that Pogson herself was uninformed about the Revolution or France’s history leading up to it. 44. See Linda K. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place: The Rhetoric of Woman’s History,” in No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 29; Davidson and Hatcher, introduction to No More Separate Spheres!, 141

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10; and Millette Shamir, Inexpressible Privacy: The Interior Life of Antebellum American Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 24. 45. James McMillan, France and Women 1789–­1911: Gender, Society, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2000), 27. 46. Madelyn Gutwirth, The Twilight of the Goddesses: Woman and Representation in the French Revolutionary Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992), xvi. 47. Ibid. 48. Ibid., 312–­13. 49. Ibid., 321. 50. Ibid., 322. 51. Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage, 1977), 135. 52. Ibid., 138. 53. Marat suffered from a mysterious skin disease, which he treated with frequent medicinal baths (Coto-­Segura et al., “The Skin of a Revolutionary,” JAMA Dermatology 147, no. 5 [2011]: 539). 54. Marat often received visitors while he bathed, as his frequent baths limited his ability to meet beyond the confines of his home (ibid.). 55. Immediately after Charlotte stabs him, Marat cries out: “In sin’s lowest depths, alas, I perish! / Thy friends, young woman, are too well avenged . . . I dare not pray; / My prayers would be impious mockery. / The sighs of others never reached my ear; / Can those from my remorseless heart e’er reach / The mighty throne omnipotent?” (183). His diction and tone suggest that he wants God’s forgiveness but that he knows he will not be granted mercy. His self-­awareness in this scene complicates Pogson’s earlier portrayal of him as self-­important, pompous, and ruthless. 56. Kerber, “Separate Spheres, Female Worlds, Woman’s Place,” 52. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 58. 59. Harris, introduction, xvi–xvii. 60. Ibid., xvii. 61. Kaplan, “Manifest Domesticity,” 184. 62. Berkin, Revolutionary Mothers, 156. 63. Ibid. 64. Ibid., 156–­57. 65. Ibid., 157.

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Part II

SECRET HISTORIES AND REVOLUTIONARY AFTERLIVES

D

Soldiers, Politics, and the American Revolution in Ireland and Scotland M ATTHEW P. DZI ENN IK

The effect of the American Revolution on the global British Empire is increasingly better understood. While the idea of a gravitational “swing to the East” and the foundation of a Second British Empire after 1783 can now be dismissed as missing earlier global linkages, Britain’s defeat in North America helped reroute key networks of people and ideas that produced new imperial ventures.1 As several scholars have recently pointed out, the “transcontinental reach” of imperial Britain expanded in the aftermath of the American Revolution and gave the empire a “clarified sense of imperial purpose.” The empire that emerged from the American Revolution—­while more open and accommodating toward its subject peoples—­was also more authoritarian and hierarchical than it had been in the early eighteenth century.2 It is interesting to note, however, that the two locations that had been most problematic for the Hanoverian monarchy in the years before the American crisis—­Ireland and the Highlands and Islands of Scotland—­do not fit this broad narrative. Distinguished from the rest of Britain by language, religion, ethnicity, and economy, the Gaels of Ireland and Scotland had provided the exiled Stuart monarchy with their most consistent support since the Glorious Revolution of 1688. A Jacobite army of mostly Episcopalian Highlanders had marched within 125 miles of London in late 1745, spreading panic in the Hanoverian capital. The orgy of state-­orchestrated repression that accompanied the end of the rebellion sought to eradicate the social and cultural distinctiveness of the Gàidhealtachd and turn Scottish Gaels into “very Usefull [sic] and Necessary Members of the Commonwealth.”3 In Ireland, plantation, rebellion, and the civil wars of the seventeenth century had left a legacy of dispossession and exclusion. British rule in Ireland rested on a small number of Anglo-­Irish elites, adherents of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who dominated the political and economic life of the island despite making up no more than 10  percent of the 145

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population.4 Anglo-­Irish dominance was sustained by a system of penal laws—­encompassing inheritance, legal rights, political opportunities, and religious freedom—­that excluded both Catholics and Protestant Dissenters from public life. While, as we shall see, the idea that Ireland was ready to rise up against British rule does a severe injustice to eighteenth-­century realities, it was the case that British authority in Ireland balanced on a precarious knife edge of Catholic dispossession and Protestant discontent.5 Nevertheless, when the ripples of the American Revolution lapped at the shores of Scotland and Ireland, it was localism and the interests of regional elites—­not the interests of centralized imperial authority—­that won out. Laws passed by the Westminster Parliament in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion were repealed, and notable Highland families were restored to their estates. In Ireland, the process of repealing the penal laws—­which had only begun in 1772—­accelerated during the American war. Anglo-­Irish pressure also forced the North government into major political and economic concessions. The Navigation Acts, which restricted Irish overseas trade, were lifted in 1779, and the Irish Declaratory Act, which had defined the constitutional status of the Irish legislature as subordinate to Westminster, was repealed in 1782.6 Revisions to the long-­standing Poynings’ Law gave the Dublin Parliament legislative independence that would last until the catastrophic rebellion of 1798. This loosening of metropolitan control leads scholars to reflect on the local specificities of global trends encouraged by the American Revolution. Lynn Hunt reminds us that the best global histories engage with broader trends without losing sight of local and national perspectives.7 In examining interactions between Scotland, Ireland, and the American Revolution, this essay suggests that, while the impact of the American Revolution tends to be seen in ideological or conceptual terms, the most important effects were often local and politically contingent.8 The Revolution did not define a new age of popular politics; nor did it awaken Gaels from an assumed political primitiveness.9 Its power was more prosaic, but it was no less important for that. The American Revolution, as a global event, was viewed through a local lens and was integrated into preexisting debates within the British state. As massive contributors to the British military, Irish and Scottish elites used the War for American Independence to renegotiate their connections with the imperial state. An examination of these connections helps us understand how both local and state actors understood and articulated political authority in colonial environments. Such a study does not reveal 146

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comprehensive and autonomous trends toward hierarchy and authoritarianism but rather a reactive and pragmatic approach by the state to regional interests. The state needed manpower—­Protestant as well as Catholic—­and the American Revolution afforded the providers of human capital with new means of accessing political and economic patronage. Rather than undermining preexisting political connections, the Revolution enhanced them and strengthened the bargaining position of regional elites in both Gaelic Scotland and Anglo-­Irish and Catholic Ireland. A comparative examination of Ireland and Scotland supports the importance of local perspectives. While commonly identified by the offensive appellation of the “Celtic Fringe,” Scotland and Ireland had (and have) very different historical trajectories and complex relationships with the British state.10 As such, ascribing cultural commonalities to Ireland and Scotland based on supposed resistance to Anglo imperialism has the potential to disguise more than it reveals. Elites in both countries used the provision of manpower to advantage their relationships with the British state; but these arguments were drawn from different interests and applied to different ends. The significant global impact of the American Revolution need not suggest broad or consistent patterns of historical change, even within regions that possessed some commonalities or shared constitutional positions. The cases of Scotland and Ireland reveal how the American Revolution’s greatest impact was not ideological or theoretical but specific and contingent. When armed resistance to parliamentary policies broke out in 1775, many revolutionaries assumed that conflict with the mother country would find willing allies among the Irish and Scots. Perceiving the Revolution as a continuation of resistance to English occupation or the religious tyranny of the Stuart monarchy, revolutionaries appealed to non-­Anglo communities on both sides of the Atlantic. The Continental Congress assured the people of Ireland in July 1775 that their quarrel was with the “British ministry” and that “Your parliament had done us no wrong.” The revolutionary aim of creating an “asylum from poverty, and . . . oppression also” was outlined as being of the greatest relevance to Ireland, where “the tender mercies of Government had long been cruel to you.”11 Gaelic Scots, who had arrived in the colonies in increasing numbers in the 1760s, were likewise the subject of several congressionally and state-­funded appeals that sought to explain “the nature of our Unhappy Controversy with Great Britain.”12 The provincial press was equally clear that Gaelic immigrants should support the revolutionaries from their shared understanding of oppression. Scotus 147

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Americanus declared, in an article published in the Virginia Gazette, that: “No people are better qualified than you, to ascertain the value of freedom.”13 Shared historic oppression was not the only reason for revolutionary optimism in Gaelic support. Scottish learned men had educated several of the Revolution’s key leaders, and Scottish Common Sense moral philosophy—­the identification of moral truths based on emotional responses to experiences—­provided one of several intellectual frameworks used by the revolutionaries to set out the morality of their resistance to parliamentary policies.14 The Church of Scotland’s evangelical “New Lichts” had grave misgivings about parliamentary policies in the colonies. John Erskine, the Presbyterian minister of Old Greyfriars in Edinburgh, attacked the war on humanitarian, constitutional, and ideological grounds, warning in a 1769 pamphlet (republished in 1776) of the dangers of a state-­sponsored conspiracy to suppress Dissenting churches.15 William Thom, the minister of Govan, was similarly sympathetic to the American position and published three critical sermons on the war in the colonies.16 There were even greater hopes of Irish sympathy. Efforts to extend Westminster oversight to Ireland in the 1760s had generated vigorous defenses of Irish rights by “Patriots” in the Dublin Parliament.17 In many respects, arguments emanating from the colonies were old hat to Irish leaders well versed in the intricacies of constitutional politics. But the aggressive approach taken by American Patriots spurred on Irish Whigs. The Freeman’s Journal, one of a number of Whig newspapers sympathetic to revolutionary arguments, published a letter in 1774 suggesting that measures would soon be adopted in Ireland “with the same spirit as the brave Americans have done.”18 Figures such as Sir Edward Newenham, who openly championed the American cause, gained large followings, and there were (unsuccessful) efforts in the Irish Parliament to declare the House’s disapproval of the use of force to suppress the rebellion.19 Support for American independence within immigrant Irish communities was particularly strong. More than one hundred thousand Ulster Presbyterians—­the descendants of plantation-­era Scottish Lowlanders—­had arrived in the colonies in the sixty years preceding the Revolution. These immigrants had little time for Crown efforts to restrict white settlement in Indian country and resented the power of eastern elites, whose Atlantic trade connections made them less disposed toward political independence.20 The Ulster Presbyterians’ Dissenting traditions also made them fearful of the supremacy of the established church and government efforts to extend Anglican hegemony over the colonies.21 148

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Many British commentators conceived of the Revolutionary War not as a colonial rebellion but as a radical Presbyterian conspiracy to wrest control of America from the Anglican Church. One Anglican minister reported that “Itinerant Presbyterian preachers traverse this country Poisoning the minds of the People—­Instilling Democratical and Commonwealth Principles into their minds . . . Especially that they owe no Subjection to Great Britain—­that they are a free People.”22 Other Loyalists declared “that the whole was nothing but a scheme of a parcel of hot-­headed Presbyterians,” while the Earl of Dartmouth was informed in 1776 that “Presbyterianism is really at the Bottom of this whole Conspiracy.”23 Ulster Presbyterian support for the Revolution has led some historians to identify Irish interests with those of the revolutionaries and to assert that the “American Revolution was an Irish revolution in America.”24 Presbyterianism and radicalism are often interpreted as synonymous and unsophisticated forays into a popular history that continues to attribute American success to “Celtic” immigrants.25 The problem with arguments based on geographical origins or grounded in ethnic chauvinism is that they offer a very poor guide to political affiliation in revolutionary America. The misattribution of loyalty on the basis of geography reflects a broader problem of attempting to identify American political attitudes by reference to Old World cultures, which are often misunderstood.26 It is unclear, for example, whether Ulster immigrants were naturally imbued with an inherited distain of the British state and its Crown. With ties to the Church of Scotland, the constitutional ideal of most Ulster Presbyterians was contractual monarchism on a Scottish model, not republicanism. In the justly scathing critique by Vincent Morley, “impressions to the contrary are an effect of the Anglocentric perspective that pervades so much of Irish historiography.”27 Scotland and Ireland were both highly diverse, divided between English-­ and Gaelic-­speaking regions and, in the case of Ireland, a predominately Catholic population ruled by an Anglican minority. Any widespread support for the Revolution among one of these groups often implied an equal rejection of the Revolution among other communities. Anti-­Catholicism, for example, was a crucial part of revolutionary rhetoric.28 Catholicism’s association with Absolutism and Stuart tyranny made it an inveterate threat to Anglo liberties in both Ireland and America. The passage of the Quebec Act was identified with conspiratorial efforts by Britain to tolerate “the Papistical religion,” and many colonists believed that “To submit to such a law would be betraying our religion, to oppose treason and rebellion, the consequence of which would be loss of life, confiscation of goods, corruption 149

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of blood, and a reducing to beggary wives and children.” The people of Stamford, Connecticut, saw British measures as “an attempt not barely to destroy our civil liberties, but as an open declaration that our religious privileges, which our fathers fled their native country to enjoy, are very soon to be abolished.”29 Supporting colonial liberties often implied strident anti-­ Catholicism; or, at the very least, a rigid defense of Protestant political and religious privileges. Scotophobia was equally likely to inhibit Scottish support for the Revolution. The elevation of Lord Bute to the position of prime minister in 1762 had unleashed a barrage of English fears that their liberties were soon to be crushed by incoming Scottish Jacobites.30 Whig fears about the threat posed by Scots to English liberties became sharper in a colonial setting where the defeat of the Jacobites in 1746 had been widely celebrated.31 American Patriots reported that Scots were “the contrivers and supporters of all measures against . . . [Congress]. Nor will they ever desist while the English have a penny to be plundered or a man sacrificed.” George Washington described the Scots as “universal instruments of tyranny.” Ezra Stiles, the future president of Yale, believed that “the whole of this war is so far chargeable to the Scotch Councils, & to the scotch as a Nation.”32 Even Benedict Arnold’s defection in 1781 was taken as evidence of Irish and Scottish treachery. When news broke of Arnold’s betrayal, Patriot newspapers were quick to debate whether he had been born in Ireland or the Scottish Highlands, even in newspapers printed in his home state of Connecticut.33 This is not to say that many Irish and Scottish immigrants did not support the Revolution; many clearly did. The British officer William Fielding believed that over half the Continental Army was made up of Irish and Scots, with far more of the former than the latter.34 But enlistments, in and of themselves, tell us little about the political attitudes of Gaels in the Americas. Immigrants were equally common in Loyalist units.35 Charles Neimeyer makes the case that Irish enlistments occurred because American-­born colonists were not eager to enlist and so military responsibilities were shifted onto poor and dispossessed immigrants.36 In other words, environmental/socioeconomic factors and the experience of settlement in the colonies were far more important than geographical origins in the choice of political allegiance. Understanding these complexities is crucial if an accurate assessment of the impact of the American Revolution on a global environment is to be made. Far from encouraging resistance to parliamentary authority, Irish and Scottish connections with the British state were renewed by the challenge of 150

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American revolutionaries. This was partly ideological. Irish and Scottish understandings of the British constitution were as sophisticated as those that animated their Whig opponents. From the perspective of many Irish and Scots immigrants, the universalism of political ideals espoused by revolutionary institutions disguised a particularism that singled them out—­along with enslaved peoples and Indigenous Americans—­as enemies of the Revolution. As one Philadelphian reported: “Believe me . . . [support for independence] are the sentiments of all degrees of men in British America, a few tattered Scotch Highlanders excepted, who have lately emigrated, and whose ignorance, feudal notions, and attachment to names, keeps them servile and wholly at the beck of their Chiefs.”37 For non-­English communities, the Revolution could appear to contain not the seeds of universal liberty but the destruction of privileges that protected the Gaelic or Catholic other from the “lawless” and “arbitrary tribunals” of Anglo-­dominated colonial society.38 Many Gaels held no deep love for the Hanoverian monarchy, but they associated the Crown with certain protections that were not guaranteed under an alternative Whig regime. For Irish Catholics, government policies, particularly the Quebec Act, seemed to offer proof of the benevolence of Crown rule that appreciated a monarchy that “did not enforce the [penal] laws already made, or suffer new laws to be made against them.”39 By contrast, the Crown was closely associated with the provision of protection and access to material security. Land grants in the colonies were crucial in this regard. These grants—­which had been used to settle Gaelic soldiers in the Americas since the 1740s—­took on an ideological significance as a source of liberty that protected them from the arbitrary hand of landlordism and extortionate rents. The British state was not ignorant of the benefits of associating Crown authority with the liberties of Gaelic immigrants, and royal governors were soon offering land in return for military service against the revolutionaries. As a recruiting poster aimed at young Gaels advertised in 1776: “The lands of the rebels will be divided amongst you, and every one of you [will] become lairds.”40 More important than ideology, however, was an existing relationship between rural Ireland and Scotland and military service. Scottish and Irish soldiers were disproportionately represented at all levels of the British army. The enlisted strength of British army in North America in 1757, for example, was comprised of 55 percent Scottish and Irish manpower. The officer corps was over 62 percent Scottish and Irish.41 By the 1770s, one-­third of British officers were Irish Protestants.42 These figures are all the more 151

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remarkable given official sanctions against the recruitment of Irishmen. Permission to recruit Irish Protestants had only been granted in 1745 and only then with the understanding that these soldiers would not be taken out of Ireland.43 These orders were widely ignored, and recruiters were frequently reminded to “enlist no Irishman on any account whatsoever.”44 The recruitment of Catholics remained illegal (see below), but recruiters were even less inclined to adhere to stipulations regarding Catholics. While it is impossible to know how many Catholics were recruited, the number is likely to have been high. In 1771, it was said that almost the entire rank-­and-­file of the Fifteenth Foot was Catholic.45 Recruitment was supported by political mechanisms that drew Irish and Scottish elites into ever-­closer connections to the imperial state. The ability of the patronage-­rich fiscal-­military state to offer otherwise cash-­ poor elites access to financial support and political clout directed many minor gentry into the ranks. The policy of shipping regiments to Ireland to hide their cost from Parliament also transferred control over commissions to the viceroy, who openly used this source of patronage to cultivate Anglo-­ Irish support for the Castle administration. Sociological assumptions that Gaelic elites maintained an authority over the rural poor that had been lost in England—­a supposition widely manipulated by regional elites—­also ensured that recruiting efforts became focused on Scottish and Irish elites. The principle of recruiting-­for-­rank, whereby the gentry were granted commissions upon the enlistment of a certain number of soldiers, was common, especially in the Scottish Highlands, and represented a public-­private partnership in military recruitment that defied the centralizing tendencies of the fiscal-­military state. Indeed, the fiscal-­military state, far from being imposed from the top down, was built on the willingness of regional elites to trade human capital for its political variant.46 Gaelic and Catholic soldiers therefore played a prominent role in British efforts to suppress the American rebellion. This situation caused widespread disquiet on both sides of the Atlantic. One British pamphleteer announced that the use of Catholic soldiers “shocks and alarms me” and blamed “Highland Chieftains” and “Papists” for the violence in the colonies.47 For the revolutionaries, the use of Catholic troops was taken as evidence of the British government’s treachery. In the seventh of Alexander Hamilton’s string of essays known as the Monitor series, published in the New York Journal between November 1775 and February 1776, it was suggested that Englishmen were unwilling to fight against their brethren in America, so much so “that the Ministry are constrained to give particular encouragement to 152

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the Papists, who alone seem inclined to the service.”48 An Address to the Inhabitants of the American Colonies (1775) made the same argument: “Their principal muscular strength, at present, consists then in a number of mercenary, hackneyed, tattered Regiments, patched up by the most abandoned and debauched of mankind, the scum of the nation, the dregs of Irish and Scottish desperadoes.”49 Thomas Jefferson famously accused George III of sending “Scotch & Foreign mercenaries” to “invade & deluge us in blood.”50 Despite widespread public condemnation, the state became increasingly dependent on non-­Anglo soldiers—­a category that also included enslaved Africans, Indigenous Americans, and central and eastern Europeans—­as the war progressed. Why was this the case? Viewed from the perspective of the state, the answer is simple: the need for soldiers. It is essential, however, to appreciate that the state’s demand for soldiers could be satisfied only if there were communities willing to provide military labor; and they only did so at a cost. Elites on the British margins were less inclined to see the Revolution as an ideological cause for all of mankind—­in the manner espoused by Thomas Paine—­but more as a political problem from which concessions could be drawn. Historically, both Ireland and Scotland lacked the centralized authority and homogeneity of the English state. As a result, people residing in both nations tended to view the state within a participatory model of government whereby elites could expect certain privileges in return for their loyalty. The provision of Celtic manpower to the British state was thus conceived as a contractual arrangement. For Anglo-­Irish Patriots, the key issue was the reestablishment of the legislative independence of the Irish Parliament. Dublin Patriots had initially resisted the dispatch of four thousand troops from the Irish Establishment to America, and it was only by inserting the orders into the Irish money bill that pro-­government supporters were able to overwhelm Patriot opposition. This measure deeply offended the attorney general, who deemed it “unnecessary and improper” as the king already had absolute authority to dispatch forces wherever he wished.51 The dispatch of a third of the Irish garrison worried Irish Protestants, who began to establish units of armed volunteers over which Dublin Castle had little control. Ostensibly designed to ensure security from invasion and maintain law and order, the presence of some sixty thousand armed Volunteers undermined Anglo-­Irish dependence on London for their security. With this vital crutch of the relationship broken, the question of Ireland’s legislative inferiority and her adherence to the Navigation Acts became topics of negotiation.52 By 1779, there was 153

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the very real risk of clashes between the British army and the Volunteer movement, and, on 4 November, the Dublin Volunteers paraded en masse demanding free trade between Britain and Ireland. The government had no option but to concede and remove trade restrictions. With this victory, Irish Patriots managed to achieve a majority in Parliament and pushed for legislative independence. A mass meeting at Dungannon in February 1782, where armed Volunteers endorsed demands for Irish legislative independence, demonstrated the strength of Irish resolve. Defeated in America, the incoming Rockingham government, always more sympathetic to Irish arguments, repealed the Declaratory Act. Rockingham’s decision was made easier because few Anglo-­Irishmen endorsed armed rebellion against the Crown. The Anglo-­Irish struggle for political rights was about Anglo-­Irish political rights, not the rights of the people of Ireland as a whole. Armed rebellion would have required support among the majority population, and few Anglo-­Irish leaders were ready to extend rights to their Catholic neighbors. Even administrators in Dublin Castle recognized that, while there was a risk of the American conflagration spreading across the Atlantic, Ireland was nowhere near as vulnerable to widespread discontent for precisely this reason.53 If the American revolutionaries could be criticized on account of the failure of their actions to match their rhetoric—­a point made with regard to slavery by British observers such as Samuel Johnson54—­they were certainly more willing to subvert the established order in pursuit of ostensibly universal rights than many Anglo-­Irishmen.55 Once key Anglo-­Irish demands had been met, the appeal of armed demonstrations diminished, and a further Volunteer parade in support of parliamentary reform in September 1783 was not as widely supported. With the state’s need for Irish manpower diminished as a result of the peace treaty, the government could safely ignore the Volunteer movement as it went into sharp decline. Ireland’s Catholics were no less cognizant of the wartime opportunities they might exploit. In the 1750s, leading Catholic pamphleteers such as Charles O’Conor and John Curry had begun to push for declarations of loyalty toward the British Crown in the hope of a relaxation of the penal laws. The establishment of the Catholic Committee in 1756 provided a vehicle for such declarations, and both the king and his viceroys were subsequently greeted to obsequious pronouncements of Catholic loyalty. Disaffection and Jacobitism was still the major creed among the rural poor, but Catholic elites noted with interest the increased willingness of the government in

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London to repeal anti-­Catholic legislation despite widespread Protestant opposition.56 The war in America was vigorously supported—­rhetorically at least—­by a number of Catholic gentry and religious figures. Despite the entry of Catholic France into the war in 1778, this support remained consistent. In 1779, the Catholic Committee made clear its “unabated zeal for the success of your majesty’s arms against the combined enemies of the British Empire.”57 The activist Arthur O’Leary reminded his fellow Catholics that they had more to gain from loyalty to the Hanoverians than from an alliance with invading Frenchmen, although it must be acknowledged that O’Leary’s text may have been as much aimed at reassuring Irish Protestants as convincing poorer Catholics.58 By 1778, the loyal approach seemed to be bearing fruit. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 permitted Catholics to lease land for 999 years and to inherit property. Initially passed in Westminster, it faced vigorous opposition from the Protestant Association under Lord George Gordon, who preventing its enactment in Scotland and sparked the largest civil disturbances in London’s history during the Gordon Riot of 1780.59 It was, however, successfully steered through the Irish House of Commons and, despite applying only to those who accepted an oath—­a mechanism devised by the Protestant bishop of Derry to divide Catholic opinion—­it was welcomed by many in the Catholic establishment. The Catholic archbishop of Dublin, John Carpenter, encouraged his flock to “be impressed with the deepest sense of gratitude” to George III for its passage.60 The trump card for Catholic elites was manpower. By 1778, the government was desperate for soldiers, and Irish Catholics represented “a weapon of war yet untried,” in the words of one supporter.61 The recruitment of Catholics was still illegal, but the outbreak of the war witnessed numerous offers to raise Catholic troops.62 Major Boyle Roche and Lord Kenmare were active in the west of Ireland, though their efforts were criticized by a colonial press that saw the recruitment of “Papists” by “Popish Bishops” as further evidence of British tyranny.63 No recruiters were as active, however, as Sir John Dalrymple, who successfully campaigned to allow Catholics to ignore Protestant oaths upon enlistment. The first Catholic regiment of the British military, the Loyal Irish Corps, was dispatched to Jamaica under the command of Dalrymple’s brother in 1778. Dalrymple also pushed—­less successfully—­for a mixed-­race corps of Catholics and “the bravest and most ingenious of the black slaves” in Maryland.64

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There are grounds for understanding Catholic relief in 1778 as a quid pro quo between Catholic elites and the government. Luke Gardiner, long a proponent of Catholic enlistment, steered the bill through the Irish Commons while, in Scotland, leading Catholics such as Bishop George Hay and Lord Linton explicitly offered to recruit one thousand troops in return for Catholic relief.65 We should be wary, however, of drawing too clear a line between recruitment and Catholic relief. As Vincent Morley explains, while direct evidence supports such negotiations in a Scottish context, the evidence for Ireland is more circumspect. It is, for example, unclear how Catholic leaders might have used relief to funnel Catholics into the armed forces. More likely, Catholic relief represented a mechanism for developing long-­term Catholic support.66 The effectiveness of recruitment among poorer Catholics is also open to question. Recruiters were disappointed in the extreme with efforts at the beginning of the war.67 While we cannot discount a general disinterest toward military service among the rural poor, it is important to note that poorer Catholics remained far more opposed to the Hanoverian settlement than their wealthier counterparts. Irish Gaelic song of the period continued to evidence support for Jacobitism and celebrated American victories over British forces.68 Nevertheless, Catholic recruitment represents a clear example of Gaels exploiting the needs of the state, even though they did not in fact command the influence or resources to make good on their promises. That the government believed in Gaelic elites to recruit men reveals the significance of the American Revolution in the structures of power in Britain. The Earl of Buckinghamshire, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, made the case directly, arguing that recruitment in Ireland would be far more effective if the Westminster government paid loyal elites to raise new regiments rather than augmenting existing regiments. As he explained: “I should have no doubt of the men being soon enlisted, and as they would serve under Gentlemen of weight and influence in their Country, there would be no danger of Desertion.”69 Raising regiments was largely a public-­private partnership whereby colonels possessed proprietorial control over the regiments and operated them as a political and financial investment. Colonels could exploit surpluses from the public money granted to them for the subsistence of their regiments and continued to control the appointment of officers, the sale of commissions, the training, and even the aesthetics of their regiments.70 While the general trend had been toward the Crown limiting proprietorial 156

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control, the demands of the American war renewed the appeal of allowing local elites significant control over regimental patronage. Robert K. Donovan even argues that elite opposition to Catholic relief may have emerged not necessarily because of anti-­Catholicism but because it represented a decline in the government’s control over recruitment.71 Scotland provides the most explicit evidence of patronage seeking through recruitment. The government’s difficulties here were much reduced owing to the overwhelmingly Protestant composition of most Highland districts, fear of residual Jacobitism notwithstanding. Recruiting-­for-­rank was well established in the Scottish Highlands, where regional elites worked hard to cultivate an imagery of inherent martial skill to enhance their access to government largesse. For an important minority, political considerations were crucial. An amnesty for rebels in 1754 had seen a number of former Jacobites enter the British army. Over a third of the officers of the Seventy-­ Eighth Foot, raised in 1757, had Jacobite connections.72 For some of those who took the amnesty, the reclaiming of ancestral lands was a major part of their motivations. The colonel of the Seventy-­Eighth Foot, Simon Fraser, whose father was executed in the aftermath of the 1745 rebellion, became a key operative for the Hanoverian government in the postrebellion Highlands. Thanks in no small part to Fraser’s recruiting efforts, the Lovat estate was restored to him in 1774, and he raised another two thousand soldiers for the War of American Independence. Duncan Macpherson of Cluny, whose father had been a key Jacobite leader, commanded a regiment at Yorktown in 1781 and was rewarded with the return of his family’s estate in 1784.73 A more general concern was the lifting of the 1746 Act of Proscription. Passed in response to the military effectiveness of the Highland Jacobites, the act had controversially banned the traditional dress of the Highlands on the basis of its supposed warlike uses. Both Jacobites and Whigs in the Highlands railed against the indiscriminate nature of the act, and many locals failed to enforce it.74 While Highlanders did not enlist for the purpose of lifting the Act of Proscription, Gaelic military contributions to the state were used to challenge the act. The Highland Society of London, formed in 1778 with a large military membership, took as its first objective the repeal of the Act of Proscription and deployed the argument of conspicuous loyalty to back their case.75 Archibald Fraser suggested during the parliamentary debate on repealing the act that as many of his constituents had “bled so freely, so loyally, and so usefully to this empire . . . they, of themselves, have construed their service a sufficient toleration, even under legal prohibition, for wearing [the] dress.” He went on to emphasize his desire that Parliament 157

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cherish the Highlander from “a political view of their utility,” a remark Fraser grounded in the context of the war in the colonies.76 The lifting of the ban in 1782 was widely celebrated in Gaelic song and was interpreted as a restoration of the dignity of the Highlander.77 Gaelic elites were well aware that the Revolution also gave them a new political framework in which to exploit government fears and prejudices. As early as 1773, one anonymous pamphleteer, styling himself “Highlander,” had warned that the economic policies pursued by landlords in the Highlands would again raise the specter of the Gael as a military threat: “They will make excellent partizans for the first enterprizing genius that shall aspire to form an independent establishment in America.”78 After the government failed to tackle anti-­Catholic rioting in February 1779, Bishop Hay warned: “Roman Catholics . . . will naturally consider themselves to be given up as a prey to their Enemies, and on that account will undoubtedly choose to fly from their Country entirely. . . . I have very great reason to believe that the Scotch Catholicks . . . will not stay much longer in a Country where they are little better than the meanest slaves, but seek refuge abroad, where they will be most kindly received.”79 Gaels, too, well understood that there was more than one way to skin the English political cat. During the American Revolution, commentators began to emphasize the inherent monarchism of the Gael.80 British politicians were only too happy to read Highland Loyalism as proof of the Gaels’ natural attachment to hierarchy and could not help contrasting this with the seemingly nonmartial and corrupted political principles of industrializing England. An agent commissioned by the secretary of state was happy to report in 1779 that the “natural Ardour [of the Highlanders] is at present, happily and strongly against the American Rebellion.”81 The forces unleashed by the Revolution had seemingly helped turn the most maligned regions of the Atlantic Archipelago into the only incorruptible bastions of monarchism in an increasingly complex world. The American Revolution was unquestionably a pivotal moment in world history. The social and political forces that transformed a monarchical society into one founded upon the principles of popular sovereignty began a wider assault on ordained government and hereditary privilege that defined the Age of Revolutions. We must be careful, however, of attributing too much change to these forces. The application of new political principles to colonial society in no way implied their easy transference to Old World or extra-­European environments. The impact of the Revolution was highly 158

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contingent and any attempt to distil the event into a singular narrative of universal liberty does a disservice to the multitude of conflicting perspectives in the British Atlantic world. Gary Nash reminds us that “we need to be cautious about overstating the aftershocks of the American Revolution.” Likewise, Jeremy Adelman points out that conflicting principles of political order, including those of hierarchical and monarchical imperialism, continued to prove appealing and, indeed, grew in strength in this period.82 These varied responses proved to be the case in Ireland and Scotland. There were those who were genuinely radicalized by the American Revolution and who committed themselves to the overthrow of the British regime in the 1790s.83 By and large, however, the peoples of Ireland and Scotland found ways of exploiting an imperial system whose legitimacy remained very much intact. By trading what they had in abundance—­human capital—­for what they lacked—­political and economic capital—­Gaelic and Catholic leaders used the Revolution to advantage their relationship with the British state. Fully understanding the state’s need for manpower, Irish and Scottish leaders developed a means of exploiting fiscal-­militarism in order to both enhance regional autonomy and redirect state patronage to the margins of the British world. The British state had little option but to accept the limits of its rule and grant concessions and privileges to key groups whose loyalty it required in order to sustain the war effort. Far from destabilizing British rule, however, the alliance between the state and regional elites—­a relationship from which both benefited—­helped undergird the British nation as it faced an even greater threat in the form of the French Revolution. In that conflict, regional elites enacted an opportunistic and conditional loyalty that, nevertheless, ensured the triumph of the British state in its war with France.84 The American Revolution directly strengthened the political bonds of the British union by making the state less, not more, authoritarian. These were the contingent and often contradictory impacts of the American Revolution. Viewed from the margins of the Atlantic archipelago, the impact and legacy of the Revolution appears very different to conventional narratives centered on the creation of the new republic. Herein lies the great appeal of global approaches to history. Any truly global history of the American Revolution must acknowledge that the American Revolution—­just as it was at the time—­is open to multiple and conflicting interpretations.

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Notes 1. Jonathan Eacott, Selling Empire: India in the Making of Britain and America, 1600–­1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016); H. V. Bowen, Elizabeth Mancke, and John Reid, eds., Britain’s Oceanic Empire: Atlantic and Indian Ocean Worlds, c. 1550–­1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); P. J. Marshall, The Making and Unmaking of Empires: Britain, India, and America, c. 1750–­1783 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005). 2. Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary War (New York: Vintage, 2011), 342; David Armitage, “The First Atlantic Crisis,” in Early North America in Global Perspective, ed. Philip D. Morgan and Molly A. Warsh (Abingdon, England: Routledge, 2014), 323. See also Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan, eds., The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012); Keith Mason, “The American Loyalist Diaspora and the Reconfiguration of the British Atlantic World,” in Empire and Nation: The American Revolution in the Atlantic World, ed. Eliga H. Gould and Peter Onuf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 239–­57. 3. James Allerdyce, ed., Historical Papers Relating to the Jacobite Period (Aberdeen: New Spalding Club 1895), 1:176. 4. Anglicans owned around 90 percent of Irish land while the Catholic population, over 70 percent of the population, owned just 3 percent (see R. F. Foster, “Ascendency and Union,” in The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R. F. Foster [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 137). 5. The best overviews are provided by Ian McBride, Eighteenth Century Ireland (Dublin, Gill and Macmillan, 2009); and S. J. Connelly, Divided Kingdom: Ireland, 1630–­1800 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 6. For Irish frustration with the Navigation Acts, see [Anon.], A Short but True History of the Rise, Progress, and Happy Suppression of Several Late Insurrections Commonly Called Rebellion in Ireland (Dublin, 1760), 11. 7. Lynn Hunt, “The French Revolution in Global Context,” in The Age of Revolutions in Global Context, c. 1760–­1840, ed. David Armitage and Sanjay Subrahmanyam (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 35. 8. For Scotland, see Dalphy I. Fagerstrom, “Scottish Opinion and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 11 (1954): 252–­75. For Ireland, see Neil Longley York, “The Impact of the American Revolution on Ireland,” in Britain and the American Revolution, ed. H. T. Dickinson (New York: Longman, 1998), 205–­32. See also essays in Simon P. Newman, ed., Europe’s American Revolution (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 9. For the false assertion that Gaelic political engagement was inhibited by language, poverty, or political culture, see Jack Rakove, Revolutionaries: A New History of the Invention of America (New York: Mariner, 2010), 46–­47, 70; Jenni Calder, Scots in the USA (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 77; S. J. Connolly, “Varieties of Britishness: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the Hanoverian State,” in Uniting the Kingdom: The Making of British History, ed. Alexander Grant and Keith Stringer (London: Routledge, 1995), 194; David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America (Oxford: 160

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Oxford University Press, 1989), 663; Christopher Moore, The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984), 21; Maurice R. O’Connell, Irish Politics and Social Conflict in the Age of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1965), 32; and William H. Nelson, The American Tory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 90. 10. Michael Hechter, Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–­1966 (London: Routledge, 1975); W. R. Jones, “England against the Celtic Fringe: A Study in Cultural Stereotypes,” Journal of World History 13 (1971): 155–­7 1. For useful examinations—­and reservations—­about shared Scottish and Irish experiences, see Martyn J. Powell, “Celtic Rivalries: Ireland, Scotland and Wales in the British Empire,” in Wales and the Overseas British Empire, ed. H. V. Bowen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011), 62–­86; Wilson McLeod, Divided Gaels: Gaelic Cultural Identities in Scotland and Ireland, c.1200–­c.1650 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Steven G. Ellis, “Why the History of the Celtic Fringe Remains Unwritten,” European Review of History 10, no. 2 (2003): 221–­31. 11. The Declaration by the Representatives of the United Colonies . . . and Their Address to the People of Ireland (London, 1775), 25–­31. 12. Colonial Records of North Carolina, ed. William Laurence Saunders (Raleigh: P. M. Hale, 1886), 10:173–­74, 338. 13. Scotus Americanus was most likely the pen name of the Islay immigrant Alexander Campbell of Balole (see Alexander Murdoch, “A Scottish Document Concerning Emigration to North Carolina in 1772,” North Carolina Historical Review 67 [1990]: 438–­49; and Peter Force, ed., American Archives, Fourth Series [Washington, DC, 1853], 3:1649). 14. The case for Scottish influence on American independence is made most directly in Gary Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York: Doubleday, 1978). For an extremely useful critique, see Ronald Hamowy, “Jefferson and the Scottish Enlightenment,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 36 (1979): 503–­23. For the wider influence of Scottish thought on the American colonies, see Gideon Mailer, “Nehemias (Scotus) Americanus: Enlightenment and Religion between Scotland and America,” Historical Journal 54, no. 1 (2011): 241–­64; Roger L. Emerson, “The Scottish Literati and America, 1680–­1800,” in Nation and Province in the First British Empire: Scotland and the Americas, 1600–­1800, ed. Ned C. Landsman (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2001), 183–­220; Ned C. Landsman, From Colonials to Provincials: American Thought and Culture, 1680–­1760 (New York: Cornell University Press, 1997); Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten, eds., Scotland and America in the Age of the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Archie Turnbull, “Scotland and America,” in A Hotbed of Genius: The Scottish Enlightenment, 1730–­1790, ed. David Daiches, Jean Jones, and Peter Jones (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1986), 137–­53. 15. John Erskine, Shall I Go to War with my American Brethren? (London, 1769); see also Erskine, The Equity and Wisdom of Administration, in the Measures That Have Unhappily Occasioned the American Revolt (Edinburgh, 1776). 16. Robert Kent Donovan, “Evangelical Civic Humanism in Glasgow: The American War Sermons of William Thom,” in The Glasgow Enlightenment, ed. Andrew Hook and Richard B. Sher (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1995), 227–­45. 161

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17. Thomas Bartlett, “The Townshend Viceroyalty,” in Penal Era and Golden Age: Essay in Irish History, 1690–­1800, ed. T. Bartlett and D. W. Hayton (Belfast: Ulster Historical Foundation, 1979), 88–­112. 18. The Public Register; Or, Freeman’s Journal, 24 March 1774. 19. E. A. Coyle, “Sir Edward Newenham: The 18th Century Dublin Radical,” Dublin Historical Record 46 (1993): 15–­30. 20. Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian War Transformed Early America (New York: Norton, 2008), 227–­60. 21. Kevin Phillips, The Cousins’ Wars: Religion, Politics, and the Triumph of Anglo-­ America (New York: Basic, 1999), 79–­268; Richard Gardiner, “The Presbyterian Rebellion” (PhD diss., Marquette University, 2005). 22. Richard J. Hooker, ed., The Carolina Backcountry on the Eve of the Revolution: The Journal and Other Writings of Charles Woodmason, Anglican Itinerant (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1953), 240–­41. 23. “Minutes of the Committee of Safety of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, 1774–­1776,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 15 (1891): 266; Henry Ippel, “British Sermons and the American Revolution,” Journal of Religious History 12 (1982): 193; James G. Leyburn, The Scotch-­Irish: A Social History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1962), 305. 24. T. H. Breen, American Insurgents American Patriots: The Revolution of the People (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010), 5. 25. Michael J. O’Brien, A Hidden Phase of American History: Ireland’s Part in America’s Struggle for Liberty (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1919); John R. Alden, The American Revolution, 1775–­1783 (New York: Harper and Row, 1954), 61; Nancy J. Curtin, The United Irishmen: Popular Politics in Ulster and Dublin, 1791–­1798 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 18–­19. For popular approaches, see Jim Webb, Born Fighting: How the Scots-­ Irish Shaped America (New York: Broadway, 2005), 123–­76; and Arthur Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World (New York: Broadway, 2001), 195–­226. 26. This approach is exemplified in the “Celtic thesis” (see Forrest McDonald and Grady McWhiney, “The South from Self-­Sufficiency to Peonage: an Interpretation,” American Historical Review 85 [1980]: 1095–­118; and Fischer, Albion’s Seed). 27. Vincent Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 1760–­1783 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 30. 28. Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967), 22–­54; Owen Dudley Edwards, “The Impact of the American Revolution on Ireland,” in The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad (Washington: Library of Congress, 1976), 132; Francis D. Cogliano, No King, No Popery: Anti-­Catholicism in Revolutionary New England (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1995). 29. American Archives, Fourth Series, 2:100; 1:827. 30. John Brewer, “The Misfortunes of Lord Bute: A Case-­Study in Eighteenth-­Century Political Argument and Public Opinion,” Historical Journal 16, no. 1 (1973): 3–­43. 31. Jonathan Hawkins, “Imperial ’45: The Jacobite Rebellion in Transatlantic Context,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 24, no. 1 (1996): 24–­47. 32. Francis Wharton, ed., The Revolutionary Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States (Washington, DC, 1889), 3:95–­96; John C. Fitzpatrick, ed., The Writings 162

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of Washington from the Original Manuscript Sources, 1745–­1799 (Washington, 1935), 4:454; F. B. Dexter, ed., The Literary Diary of Ezra Stiles, vol. 2 (New York: Scribner, 1901), 185. 33. American Journal, 18 July 1781; Norwich Packet, 20 July 1781. 34. Marion Balderston and David Syrett, eds., The Lost War: Letters from British Officers during the American Revolution (New York: Horizon, 1975), 33. 35. Mary Beacock Fryer, The King’s Men: Soldier Founders of Ontario (Toronto: Dundurn, 1980), 34; Philip Ranlet, The New York Loyalists (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986), 102. 36. Charles Patrick Neimeyer, America Goes to War: A Social History of the Continental Army (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 27–­43. 37. Margaret Willard, ed., Letters on the American Revolution 1774–­1776 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1925), 314. 38. See Donald Macdonald’s appeal to Loyalist recruits in 1776 in State Records of North Carolina, 10:429–­30. 39. Father James White quoted in John Ferrer, The History of Limerick (Limerick: A Watson and Co., 1787), 360. 40. Matthew P. Dziennik, “Through an Imperial Prism: Land, Liberty, and Highland Loyalism in the War of American Independence,” Journal of British Studies 50 (2011): 346. 41. Stephen Brumwell, Redcoats: The British Soldier and War in the Americas, 1755–­1763 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 318–­19. 42. Alan J. Guy, “The Army of the Georges 1714–­1783,” in The Oxford History of the British Army, ed. David G. Chandler and Ian Beckett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 104. 43. Thomas Bartlett, “ ‘A Weapon of War as Yet Untried’: Irish Catholics and the Armed Forces of the Crown, 1760–­1830,” in Men, Women, and War, ed. T. G. Fraser and Keith Jeffrey (Dublin: Lilliput, 1993), 68. 44. National Records of Scotland [NRS], GD170/3457, Recruiting instructions for Seventy-­Eighth Foot, 21 July 1781. 45. Wayne E. Lee, “Subjects, Clients, Allies, or Mercenaries? The British Use of Irish and Amerindian Military Power, 1500–­1800,” in Britain’s Oceanic Empire, 195. 46. Andrew Mackillop, More Fruitful Than the Soil: Army, Empire and the Scottish Highlands, 1715–­1815 (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 57–­59; Matthew P. Dziennik, The Fatal Land: War, Empire and the Highland Soldier in British America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 49–­52, 79–­81. 47. [Anon.], A Letter to the Author of a Pamphlet Entitled Considerations upon the Different Modes of Finding Recruits for the Army (London, 1776), 38–­39. 48. The Monitor VII, New York Journal; Or The General Advertiser, 21 December 1775. 49. American Archives, Fourth Series, 3:1588. 50. Frank Whitson Fetter, “Who Were the Foreign Mercenaries of the Declaration of Independence?,” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 104, no. 4 (1980): 508–­13. 51. William L. Clements Library [WLCL], George Germain Papers, vol. 4, Wedderburn to Germain, 2 January 1776. 163

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52. Sarah Foster, “Buying Irish: Consumer Nationalism in Eighteenth Century Dublin,” History Today 47, no. 6 (June 1997): 15–­22; James Kelly, “The Politics of Volunteering, 1778–­1793” Irish Sword 22, no. 88 (2000): 139–­57. 53. [Sir George Macartney], An Account of Ireland in 1773 (London, 1773), 55. 54. Samuel Johnson, Taxation No Tyranny (1775). 55. H. T. Dickinson, “Why Did the American Revolution Not Spread to Ireland?” Valahian Journal of Historical Studies 18–­19 (2012–­13): 155–­80. 56. Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 64–­66, 86. 57. R. Dudley Edwards, “Minute Book of the Catholic Committee,” Archivium Hibernicum 9 (1942): 40. 58. Arthur O’Leary, An Address to the Common People of the Roman Catholic Religion (Cork, 1779). 59. Brad Jones, “ ‘In Favour of Popery’: Patriotism, Protestantism, and the Gordon Riots in the Revolutionary British Atlantic,” Journal of British Studies 52, no. 1 (2013): 79–­102. 60. Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 187. 61. Sir John Dalrymple, Three letters from Sir John Dalrymple . . . to the Right Honourable Lord Viscount Barrington (London, 1778), 10. 62. The National Archives of the United Kingdom [TNA], WO1/682, f. 185, Lord Weymouth to Barrington, 24 September 1778. 63. American Archives, Fourth Series, 3:169–­70. 64. WLCL, Germain Papers, vol. 4, Memorial of Captain William Dalrymple, [1775]; WLCL, Germain Papers, vol. 4, Project for Strengthening General Howe’s operations, n.d. 65. R. K. Donovan, “The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme of 1778,” Historical Journal 28 (1985): 79–­102. 66. Morley, Irish Opinion and the American Revolution, 188. 67. TNA, WO3/5, f. 40, Harvey to Cornwallis, 6 July 1775. 68. Eamonn O’Ciardha, Ireland and the Jacobite Cause, 1685–­1766 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004), 347. 69. WLCL, vol. 9, Buckinghamshire to Germain, 17 January 1779. 70. Alan J. Guy, Oeconomy and Discipline: Officership and Administration in the British Army, 1714–­1763 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985), 137–­61. 71. Donovan, “The Military Origins of the Roman Catholic Relief Programme,” 98–­102. 72. Huntington Library, LO6324, List of officers, 1757. 73. The estates were only returned up on the payment of substantial sums to cover the debts on the estates and government expenditure since their annexation, see NRS, E413, Debts on Forfeited Estates; E769, Lovat Estates; E745, Cluny Estates. 74. Angus Macleod, ed., Songs of Duncan Ban Macintyre (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1978), 15; J. L. Campbell, ed., Highland Songs of the Forty-­Five (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1984), 155–­68, 249–­56. 75. Sir John Sinclair, An Account of the Highland Society of London (London: B. McMillan, 1813), 6. 76. The Parliamentary Register; or History of the Proceedings and Debates of the House of Commons (London, 1782), 7:235–­36. 164

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77. Campbell, ed., Highland Songs of the Forty-­Five, 281–­86. 78. [Highlander], The Present Conduct of Chieftains and Proprietors of Lands in the Highlands of Scotland, Towards Their Clans and People, Considered Impartially (Edinburgh, 1773), 7. 79. TNA SP54/45, f. 767, Hay to Weymouth, 1 May 1779. 80. For examples, see John Rylands Library, BAG5/1, f. 140, James Maclagan to Lord John Murray, 12 July 1777; and John Macdonald, Letterbook of Captain Alexander Macdonald of the Royal Highland Emigrants, 1775–­1779: Collections of the New York Historical Society for the Year 1882 (New York, 1883), 319–­20. 81. TNA, SP54/47, f. 79, Walker to Suffolk, February 1778. 82. Gary B. Nash, “Sparks from the Altar of ’76: International Repercussions and Reconsiderations of the American Revolution,” in Age of Revolutions in Global Context, 3; Jeremy Adelman, “An Age of Imperial Revolutions,” American Historical Review 113, no. 2 (2008): 319–­40. 83. The best example is James Napper Tandy, a former Dublin Volunteer who became the first secretary of the Society of the United Irishmen. 84. J. E. Cookson, The British Armed Nation, 1793–­1815 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Austin Gee, The British Volunteer Movement, 1794–­1814 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).

165

Franklin’s Mail Gun Trafficking and the Elisions of History M ARIA O’M ALLEY

Early in Herman Melville’s American Revolution satire Israel Potter (1855), the ill-­fated title character attempts to sail to Amsterdam at the beginning of the war but finds himself shuttled from one ship to the next in the West Indies. On a ship from St. Eustatius, or Statia, a Dutch West Indian island among the Lesser Antilles, the “unsophisticated Israel” is transferred to another American brig that sends him to Antigua instead of Holland.1 Thinking he is on his way to Puerto Rico, he somehow ends up back in St. Eustatius once again. Eventually, the well-­meaning hero descends into ignominious exile in Great Britain, despite his bravery at Bunker Hill. Focusing on Potter, Melville represents the gap between the ways in which wars unfold and how they are commemorated. Indeed, he dedicates the novel to the Monument to Bunker Hill (unveiled in 1843) to reinforce his skepticism about nineteenth-­century memorializing of the American Revolution, including the aggrandizement of the Revolution’s larger-­than-­life figures, such as Benjamin Franklin and John Paul Jones. Along with his irreverent portraits of these great men, Melville gestures toward an aspect of eighteenth-­ century life that may be lost on modern readers. Melville’s allusion to the island of Eustatius, a vortex for maritime commerce, in the first pages of the novel highlights a neglected epicenter of the American Revolution. As the political scientist Peter Andreas contends, during the American Revolution, “St. Eustatius had been operating as virtually a fourteenth colony, devoted largely to smuggling and other related illicit commercial activity” that sustained the American troops.2 Historians concur that without the island’s involvement, the British army would have easily overtaken the colonists, who had, among other shortages of capital and weaponry, no gunpowder reserves by the end of 1775. Sites such as St. Eustatius are often overlooked despite their major role in facilitating the colonies’ victory over Great Britain. The few references to the tiny West Indian island’s involvement in the Revolution always seem to mention that Benjamin Franklin 166

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had his mail routed through the island to ensure its safe delivery during the conflict. Yet this constant repetition of one innocuous fact belies the much greater role Franklin himself envisioned and ensured for St. Eustatius, as part of the Committee of Secret Correspondence, in furthering the colonies’ fight against the British. Israel Potter serves as a useful launching point for examining the global dimensions of the American Revolution because the novel follows the concomitant rise of the nation-­state and the rise of the individual as incommensurable with the diffusion of capital and people in the modern age. By looking toward political and economic developments abroad with which the Anglo-­American Crisis intersected, one avoids a tendency to focus on neat ideological trajectories or national teleologies; instead, seemingly arbitrary, contingent factors emerge that contributed to the colonies’ success. “Liberalism,” “democracy,” and “republicanism” then are no longer cast as inevitable but rather as precarious ideologies amid the realignment of geopolitical power and social arrangements in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Melville provides an unflattering, if amusing, portrait of Benjamin Franklin to mock Americans’ tendency to glorify revolutionary figures.3 However, this essay’s interest in Franklin lies in his power of both unmasking and deploying tropes. The analogies, metaphors, and other figurations of the Revolution, ultimately, lay bare the rhetorical maneuverings that conceal globalism. While global markets include legitimate trade, I argue that the laundering of money as well as the hiding of supply chains through which goods circulate operates as commercial analogues to these rhetorical strategies. Like figurative language, products, in short, shed local, concrete associations from their point of origin as they transverse markets. Even as this essay traces how a focus on individual actors serves as a distraction from the diffusion of nodes within networks of global commerce, it rests uneasily upon the figure of Benjamin Franklin. Although Franklin may embody history as the story of great men, his various modalities of self render him an appropriate figure for sorting through shadow sites. Despite a public life, scholars seem fascinated and sometimes flummoxed by his cunning, mendacity, and adroit manipulation of public appearances.4 To ease the paradoxical tension between Franklin as familiar and yet unknowable, I look again to Israel Potter, which features the common nineteenth-­century criticism that Franklin was too utilitarian. In a famous passage, Melville writes: “Printer, postmaster, almanac maker, essayist, chemist, orator, tinker, statesman, humorist, philosopher, parlor man, political economist, professor of housewifery, ambassador, projector, maxim-­monger, herb-­doctor, 167

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wit:—­Jack of all trades, master of each and mastered by none—­the type and genius of his land. Franklin was everything but a poet.”5 The appealing rhythms of Melville’s list as he names Franklin’s seemingly endless professional, scientific, civic, and philanthropic enterprises contrast with the final bon mot that Franklin, despite his wit, is not a poet. By describing him with nouns (essayist) rather than by actions (writes essays), he presents Franklin as discrete and interchangeable totalities rather than conveying any overlap or reciprocity among Franklin’s various interests. Though Melville succinctly captures the contradictory place Franklin holds as both “type and genius of his land,” ultimately, it is my supposition that Melville is wrong: Franklin was a poet, notwithstanding the overwrought sensibility that Melville attributes to the word. Indeed, the inability to see Franklin as a poet—­his chosen vocation but one his father refused to sanction—­signals the intractability of the fiction of the self-­made man in which a collective society is subsumed by the singular. Franklin’s canny use of metonymy, for example—­a device that hides the chains of associations—­elides (global) interdependencies and signals his own passion for imperial might. That is, the rise of mass-­produced consumer goods, whose circuits are erased, occurs simultaneously with the individual (who can do every job himself) and the “rise of the nation-­state.” For Melville, the nation inscribes on individuals its ideology and, therefore, they cannot exert their agency or forge relationships with others to affect the collective. I find a connection between the master trope of metonymy and how Franklin and others sought to erase global supply lines to shore up state sovereignty. Unlike metaphor with its association with border crossings—­metaphor literally means, “to carry across”—­metonymy, by troping “within” rather than across distinct categories or realms, manifests the illusion of insularity. Indeed, metonymy often relies on intersubjective associations that are readily recognizable among discourse participants or “inside jokes” or references. Franklin’s reliance on metonymy appears in his account of the lead-­up to the Seven Years’ War. As a member of the Pennsylvania Assembly, Franklin worked with others to build up armaments despite the sizable number of Quaker residents who opposed war and preparations for it. In his Autobiography, he describes the comedy of maintaining the appearance of peaceful neutrality (for the Quakers’ sake) while raising funds for a militia: “Hence a Variety of Evasions to avoid Complying, and Mode of disguising the Compliance when it became unavoidable.”6 In one instance, “The common Mode at last was to grant Money under the Phrase of its being for the King’s Use, and never to inquire how it was applied.” When 168

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pressed to raise money for gunpowder, the Pennsylvania Assembly twists the semantics to acquire the necessary votes for purchasing gun powder. At first, Quaker Assemblymen chafe at supplying gunpowder to the government of New England, because it was “an Ingredient of War.” Yet Franklin details how the assembly provides money “for the Purchasing of Bread, Flour, Wheat, or other Grain” and thus that money could also purchase gunpowder. Even when some object to the provision because it is “not the Thing [the governor] demanded.”7 The governor himself replies, “I understand very well their Meaning; Other Grain is Gunpowder.” By referring to gunpowder as grain, the assembly and the governor not only poke fun at Quaker histories but also erase the supply chains that make it available to the British colonials. Franklin details how he applied the lesson he learned from the gunpowder purchase. When the Quakers bristle at the idea of purchasing a cannon, he again manipulates words’ meaning to obfuscate the preparations for putting together an armed militia. He asks them instead for money to buy a “fire-­engine” under the auspices of the civil fire station to fight local fires even though the money will be used to cover the acquisition of a cannon “which is certainly a Fire-­engine.”8 Yet Franklin’s adroit manipulation of language makes him impatient when others try to employ it, because he understands the dangers of (figural) language when it not only disguises but also sheds its literal meaning and therefore devolves into chicanery. Looking at Franklin’s newspaper writings prior to the conflict—­as opposed to his other works—­I find that he clearly maps out global supply chains, in particular ones that involve St. Eustatius that undermine the rise of national identities. However, once armed conflict begins, he goes silent on St. Eustatius’s special role as is probably fitting for someone serving on the Continental Congress’s Committee of Secret Correspondence. Yet these blanks in Franklin’s correspondence nudge one to look elsewhere. In particular, filling in these blanks returns us to Franklin’s biting assessment in the 1770s of the dangers of conflating commercial transactions with national identity in an era of restrictive trade policies.

The Fourteenth Colony Later in this essay, I analyze Benjamin Franklin’s published writings and letters in the lead-­up to the Anglo-­American conflict as he establishes St. Eustatius as an intermediary site to obtain goods and transact with European powers when they were not quite ready to align with the thirteen colonies 169

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against Great Britain. With St. Eustatius, Franklin capitalizes on its singularity as a nation that practices “free trade.” In The Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith draws upon St. Eustatius as one of only two sites (the other, Curaçao) with open markets in the late eighteenth century. Earlier in 1760, Edmund Burke remarked upon the anomalies of an island that generated great wealth but had no natural resources: “St. Eustatius is but one mountain of about twenty miles in compass; it is amongst the Leeward islands; but though so small and inconveniently laid out by nature, the industry of the Dutch have made it turn out to very good account, and it is fully peopled. . . . They raise here sugar and tobacco; and the island, as well as [Curaçao], is engaged in the Spanish contraband trade.”9 Its lack of fertile lands created some ironies since its port was bustling. Linda Rupert explains that “the combined value of the transatlantic trade from the two barren islands, virtually all of it contraband, consistently outstripped that of the locally grown products that were sent to the Netherlands by the Dutch plantation colony of Suriname.”10 The island, in fact, generated the greatest total profits in the colonies for the Dutch. Its open harbors offered a glimpse of the profits capitalism could generate, especially as credit markets enriched those not trading in goods, products, or services, but in borrowing and lending through what we now call “financial instruments.” St. Eustatius, therefore, was uniquely positioned to act as an unacknowledged “fourteenth” colony because of its policy of free trade. In 1779 William Bingham writes to Franklin describing St. Eustatius as “the greatest Mart of Commerce in these seas.”11 Historian Douglas Comer describes how, “as the nexus for international trade in the Atlantic World during the latter eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, St. Eustatius provided the single largest and most efficient conduit for people, news, correspondence and trade items during this time.”12 Its access across mercantilists’ barriers also made it attractive to those wishing to distribute contraband or to evade trade tariffs. Bernard Bailyn puts it succinctly: “Smuggling was ‘almost [the] raison d’etre,’ of the Dutch Antilles.”13 According to Jonathan Dull, in what might be an understatement, “tracing this trade is as difficult as tracing today’s trade in illegal drugs.”14 My attention to a shadow site like St. Eustatius aligns with recent scholarship that illuminates the Anglo-­American crisis’s less celebrated participants. For some time, American studies scholars (like Sean Goudie, Edward Larkin, and Gretchen Murphy) have opened up the geographies of the early republican period. Their scholarship exemplifies a movement away from chronological history in order to enfold the sometimes outsized role 170

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of far-­flung islands and regions. As Lisa Lowe explains, “What some have represented as a linear temporal progression from colonial abjection to liberal freedom actually elides what might be more properly conceived as a spatial dynamic, in which forms of both liberal subject and society in the imperial center are possible only in relation to laboring lives in the colonized geographies or ‘zones of exception’ with which they coexist, however disavowed.”15 St. Eustatius operated as a zone of exception in several ways: it was a Dutch colony but settled largely by Jews, who were legally barred from Dutch citizenship; the biggest proportion of colony’s population was slaves who also did not have status as citizens but rather as property; and as noted, the colony was one of only two sites not subject to restrictive trade practices. Later as part of the Committee of Secret Correspondence formed in July 1775, Franklin was instrumental in setting up intermediaries and allies in Amsterdam to aid in contracting with colonial merchants and ship captains who would go through St. Eustatius to procure armaments and gunpowder for Washington’s army. These matters were carried out with complex directions for veiling their efforts, not only to protect ships but also to conceal from British forces the precariousness of the Americans’ situation, especially its paltry supply of gunpowder. According to Orlando Stephenson, “It appears therefore that well over 90 percent of all the powder available for carrying on the Revolution during the first two and a half years of the struggle for independence was obtained from outside the country.”16 Although the point of origin for the powder may be vague, almost all of it was routed through St. Eustatius or Martinique before reaching the colonies. The diminishment of Eustatius’s role in the Anglo-­American Crisis creates a lot of unnecessary confusion. For instance, the literary critic Mary Weatherspoon Bowden is skeptical that Philip Freneau’s famous poem “The British Prison Ship,” which records his radicalization after his firsthand experience of British brutality, was inspired by his actual presence on the Aurora, a ship taken by the British navy in 1777.17 Because her research into ship records finds discrepancies, she wonders if Freneau was ever taken prisoner or if he concocted the story he tells in the poem for propaganda in support of the American cause. According to lore, Freneau was en route to St. Eustatius in a privateer disembarking from Philadelphia when British frigates captured the ship. Bowden finds convincing evidence that the experience of the Aurora was added later to the poem. However, the ship’s passage to St. Eustatius might clarify the contradictory records that Bowden finds. For instance, the historian Franklin Jameson reports how one ship “embarked in 171

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ventures to the neighboring Dutch emporium, careful however to take out separate policies of insurance on the two voyages from England to St. Christopher and from thence to St. Eustatius.”18 Stephen Blakemore speculates that “Freneau and the Aurora were on a hostile mission during wartime, and Freneau suppresses this significant detail.”19 As Blakemore observes, “The mention of St. Eustatius simultaneously registers his covert patriotic venture to those in the know, while maintaining the fiction of the brutal assault on the innocent virgin ship.”20 References to St. Eustatius become metonymic for doctored records and clandestine military operations. St. Eustatius proved essential to the Americans in the war’s final months as well. Historians surmise that the British loss at Yorktown was in part caused by the admiral, George Rodney, who toppled St. Eustatius; instead of sailing to the mid-­Atlantic to reinforce British troops, Rodney dallied for six months in looting the island and terrorizing its Jewish inhabitants. By the time the fleet made its way to the colonies in November 1781, Cornwallis had already surrendered. While Rodney’s delay was certainly detrimental to British efforts on the mainland, if Great Britain had crushed the island earlier, the Americans could not have continued to launch an offensive in the first place because they were dependent on the contraband that was sent via the island. Rodney writes in a letter to his wife, Lady Rodney, after taking possession of the island: “This rock of only six miles in length and three in breadth, has done England more harm than all the arms of her most potent enemies, and alone supported the infamous American rebellion.”21 According to historians, the wholesale destruction of Eustatius was anomalous for the period; it evidences how the dispossessed people who lived on the island proved expendable to reinforce European national identities. In fact, exactly because they enabled the fiscal-­military state, their erasure (imaginative or otherwise) seems necessary. Jameson, for example, reports how during Rodney’s raid: “The hardest measure of all was meted out to the Jews. Not only were they deprived of their property and laid under sentence of banishment, but they were given but a day’s notice for their departure, and were told that they were to go without their wives and children. They assembled the next day, to the number of 101. Forthwith they were confined in the weigh-­house and strictly guarded. They were stripped, and the linings of their clothes ripped up in search of money. Eight thousand pounds sterling were obtained in this way.”22 The systematic procedures involved in rounding up Dutch Jews on the island bear the hallmark of subsequent anti-Semitic persecutions in Europe. Despite widespread violence meted out to ordinary landowners either by Patriots or Loyalists to 172

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those who opposed them back in the colonies, the conduct of the British in St. Eustatius seems particularly egregious. Jameson goes further to state that the insidious and unprecedented move to take possession of the Jewish merchants’ individual property led the British navy to linger (“three months and a day”) and thus gave the American forces an advantage that ultimately led to their victory. Jameson conjectures, “Yorktown itself might never have happened if this juncture of the French had not been effected, and in all probability it would not have been effected if Rodney, with his whole fleet, had been where Hood wished him to be, to windward of Martinique.”23 That is, ironically, the effort to foster British national identity enabled the formation of another (American). The abuse directed at the people St. Eustatius did not go unremarked. Even as an act of war, it seemed excessive; the colony, in fact, never recovered after the British attack. As with the Jewish community, the destruction of the island in the name of Anglo-­Dutch hostilities erased the diasporic African community. Because of the island’s rocky environment, most ships never set port on St. Eustatius; instead, a lot of the work involved changing shipments in boats near the shore. It is unclear who sometimes helped move cargo or what part slaves played in the smuggling operations. In fact, not much is known about what happened to the people who worked as slaves in St. Eustatius except that the British navy took them as war spoils. Henry Laurens writes to Franklin in 1782 bitterly condemning the English response to the burning of St. Eustatius on 24 June of that year: “Sir George Rodney’s adventitious Success has absolved him from all the Sins, ‘wittingly,’ ‘deliberately,’ ‘inhumanly,’ ‘wantonly,’ committed at St. Eustatia—­the Volunteer determined—­Inquisitors of his mal-­practices, who enter’d upon their enquiry from ‘pure motives of Justice and in order to wipe out a stain upon national Character’ have adjourned the Inquest, sine die, and are become his Panegyrists—­notwithstanding all this.”24 Great Britain’s refusal to condemn Rodney’s actions as a war crime contributed to the eclipse of St. Eustatius’s contributions to the war. In sidelining St. Eustatius, the United States appears self-­sufficient and the British “national character” remains untarnished, having bested the Dutch. When the British admiral burned St. Eustatius to the ground, crippling its economy and displacing its residents, his orders also led to the destruction of the written records of the island’s involvement in the American war. Indeed, Britain’s destruction of St. Eustatius remains recorded instead as part of the ongoing Anglo-­Dutch Wars (the fourth to be exact) of the late eighteenth century. While free trade loosened the island’s ties to the United Provinces and thus exposed the sometimes 173

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dubious links between countries and its global commerce, the island’s obscurity, nonetheless, shored up the national identity of the United States as it emerged as a sovereign state.

The West Indian Theater of War The erasure of St. Eustatius and other shadow sites furthers the impression of US insularity. There is a tendency in American studies to situate the United States as entering geopolitics or constructing its identity in an international context after the formation of the republic. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon identifies the 1790s as the decade when the United States shapes its identity in relation to other nations: “The internal stability of the nation . . . I would argue, was closely related to the status of the nation in the world and to the term used by the nation to construct and secure its identity and authority both internally and externally.”25 Dillon, like other scholars, ties the construction of U.S. identity to international disputes related to the captivity of Americans in Algiers in the last decade of the eighteenth century. My contention is that this “remapping,” and the cohesion it conferred, happened earlier, specifically in 1778, once the United States became “treaty worthy,” that is, deemed by other nations as a sovereign state with which they could transact directly.26 The year 1778 marks a crucial turning point in which the united colonies operated singularly in a global marketplace. At that point, the colonies could no longer rely on France’s West Indian holdings. Before 1778, “practically all the powder imported during the first two and a half years of the war came from France by way of the West Indies, many of the carrying ships merely touching at those islands on their way to colonial ports.”27 With France drawn into war with Britain, the colonies had to forge other alliances. Amid the shifting political landscape in Europe, the United States became less dependent on and more interdependent with European allies. Volo explains the shift: “After the alliance with France in 1778—­and then Spain (1779), and finally Holland (1781)—­the American war became a worldwide naval conflict with campaigns carried out on a grander scale than the Americans could muster. The war at sea spread from the Atlantic Coast, to the West Indies, to the Straits of Gibraltar, to the West African coast, and even to the Indian Ocean.”28 Communications about the war’s progress sent to Congress demonstrate how the emerging nation entangled itself into Old and New World networks. A letter from its chief Dutch agent illustrates the colonists’ claims 174

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as contingent on other European struggles. Charles-­Guillaume-­Frédéric Dumas, who procured goods for the American war effort from Holland, reports to the Committee of Secret Correspondence in July 1778: “War has been declared in Germany. The Dutch envoy to Berlin has reported the King’s declaration of his position and of his spurned efforts at compromise; Prussian troops have reached Dresden, and the King has broken camp in Silesia. The States General will reconvene tomorrow, to consider instructions to their envoy in London about the British seizure of two Dutch ships returning from St. Eustatius.”29 Questions about how to respond to Britain’s attempts to thwart Dutch business transactions are but one node in the Dutch political situation. The letter makes no explicit mention of the Anglo-­American hostilities; instead Dumas’s reference to St. Eustatius implicitly refers to the Dutch’s commercial involvement in the American Revolution. St. Eustatius provides an important entry point for considering these shadow sites and how the United States became enmeshed in global conflicts in the late eighteenth century. Despite European powers’ reticence to recognize the United States as a sovereign state at the beginning of the war, their willingness to engage with the United States through their West Indian colonies reveals how colonized sites operate neither as proxies nor spots that supersede the metropole; rather their “free markets” provide cover for the Europeans to pivot should the hostilities favor Great Britain or the colonies as the war unfolded. Although Franklin’s vivid diplomatic role in France during the Revolution (from 1776 to 1785) continues to circulate throughout American culture, his responsibilities while still in Pennsylvania before his departure to France in October 1776 evidence Americans’ intricate commercial involvements across the globe, especially the colonies’ reliance on complicated routes of illegal smuggling. Historians have long reported that Franklin was profoundly influential in procuring arms for the Yankee regiments during the first few years of the American Revolution. The long list of Franklin’s inventions includes an eighteen-­inch pike he designed for troops because muskets were scarce. Less attention has been paid to Franklin’s instrumental part in establishing some West Indian islands as remote sites to traffic weapons and gunpowder, even laundered money, in particular through St. Eustatius. Franklin’s writings before the war provide more information on his attitude toward trade barriers and how they relate to U.S. nationhood. In December 1765, while still living in England, Franklin published an anonymous editorial in reply to an article credited to an Englishman writing under the 175

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pseudonym “Vindex Patriae.” Vindex Patriae wrote scathing indictments of the colonies in English newspapers, especially about their flagrant violations of British trade law. At this time, Franklin indicated no support for separating from Great Britain. He opens his editorial, for example, by wondering: “I would fain know what good purpose can be answered, by the frequent invectives published in your and other papers against the Americans. Do these small writers hope to provoke the nation by their oratory, to embrue its hands in the blood of its, perhaps mistaken children?”30 The pronouns in the letter may cause confusion because writing under the pseudonym N. N., Franklin masks himself as a fellow Englishman, and thus “we” refers to England and “them” to the colonists. Franklin unsettles the contemporary commonplace that the United States was spoken into being by declaring independence, as proposed by some, like Jacques Derrida and Christopher Looby. Instead, Franklin cites the oratory of the English as nudging the Americans toward independence. As always Franklin is attuned to the damage public expressions can do, especially how they can exacerbate minor problems into larger ones. Franklin continues with some rhetorical questions to pick apart the logic of those who criticize the colonists’ resistance to the Stamp Act: “Can it be supposed that such treatment will make them [the colonists] rest satisfied with the unlimited claim set up, of a power to tax them ad libitum, without their consent; while they are to work only for us [the English], and our profit; restrained in their foreign trade by our laws, however profitable it might be to them; forbidden to manufacture their own produce, and obliged to purchase the work of our artificers at our own prices?”31 Franklin clarifies how distrust resulted from trade regulations, which Britain had rigged to position the colonists as customers for English products. By framing the situation as a trade dispute he seeks to contradict Vindex Patriae’s notions that “their refusing submission to the stamp-­act, proceeds only from their ambition of becoming independent; and that it is plain the colonies have no other aim but a total enfranchisement from obedience to our Parliament.”32 Franklin pinpoints instead trade regulations as increasing tensions because it reminds Americans that they exist to reinforce the metropole; however, by insisting on these regulations, Britain sparks the diffuse allegiances as Americans come to understand how important trade is to establishing the nation. Requoting an indictment of the colonists that “The sugar, teas, and other commodities, says he, which [Americans] daily buy from St. Eustatia and Monte Christi, in particular, are too convincing proofs, that they have no tenderness for their mother country,”33 Franklin casts the consumption of 176

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consumer products from non-­English or East India Company sources as not necessarily indicative of someone’s voice—­political or otherwise. According to Vindex Patriae, the colonists’ consumption of foreign products serves as a sign of the colonies’ disloyalty to Britain. Franklin belittles national “tenderness” as tied to the consumption of minor luxuries and draws attention to how such arguments obfuscate the complex issues of political autonomy. Franklin refuses to allow the writers their metonyms that reduce the conflict to the drinking of tea from St. Eustatius and Monte Christi. One cannot demonstrate political allegiance simply through the consumption of goods because this act, in fact, always gestures toward the wider global markets. Franklin rebuts the arguments that tie consumption to colonial unrest by demystifying the supply chains of the late eighteenth century: “May one ask this profound writer; are sugar and teas [bought via St. Eustatius and Monte Christi] the produce of the mother country? does not [Britain] herself buy her teas from strangers?”34 Great Britain may designate some products as “English” because British companies procure them, but Franklin insists that these designations overrepresent British involvement. For him, in fact, this metonymic substitution resembles the situations of colonists who—­under the umbrella term of subjects—­seem like they enjoy certain rights but are subject to Parliament without any representation. Franklin homes in on the word “fiction” in the editorialists’ lambasting of America. Franklin asks rhetorically, “Do [the English newspaper writers] expect to convince the Americans, and reduce them to submission, by their flimsey arguments of virtual representation, and of Englishmen by fiction of law only, mixed with insolence, contempt, and abuse?”35 If the colonists are not English but “fictional” ones, who require only “virtual,” as opposed to direct representation, in Parliament, then it seems that the British Crown seeks to treat the thirteen colonies no differently from other satellite countries, as the Dutch treat St. Eustatius or the French Monte Christi. National identity and belonging are a fiction, easily absorbing distant others to forge merely “imaginary” relations just like the imaginary source of “English” products. The colonists are imaginary Englishmen in the same way their molasses via Bermuda is really “English” molasses. Globalized trade ruptures the imagined communities of the nation-­state and, furthermore, disrupts loyalty to anything other than the lowest possible price to consume commercial goods, like sugar, tea, and textiles. What Franklin derides as “the grocerly argument” for independence encapsulates this situation. One does not reject or develop an affinity for one consumer item, because it is embedded in a complex network of trade 177

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loosely associated with a nation-­state. National identity, in short, cannot revolve around tea—­or any grocery, in part because these products shed their country of origin at arbitrary points in a complex supply chain. He avers, “But the grocerly argument of tea and sugar, is not inferior to the lawyerly argument with which Vindex Patriae demonstrates, that, ‘by a fiction between us and the colonists, Connecticut is in England, and therefore represented in the British parliament.’ ”36 Connecticut is in England and their teas are English even though they are imported from the East Indies and China. Franklin’s repetition of Vindex Patriae’s use of the word “fiction” upends eighteenth-­century territorial claims. Once geographies are subsumed by metonymy—­Englishmen live in Connecticut so it is England—­then the idea of nation becomes yet another fiction. Once the war begins, Franklin proves much more circumspect when he mentions St. Eustatius even in his personal correspondence; often he refers to the island as “a certain place” rather than by name. Back in 1770, though, Franklin, while living in England, clearly describes St. Eustatius as a crucial node in commercial activities.37 In another letter to the newspaper, he dons the mask of an Englishman and refers to himself as “The Colonist’s Advocate.” He describes how foolhardy the British Crown would be to impose a blockade to punish the thirteen colonies, because “Ships are actually fitted out from the Colonies . . . for all parts of the World; for China, by Cape Horn; for Instance, to sail under Prussian, or other Colours, with Cargoes of Various Kinds, and to return loaded with Teas, and other East Indian Goods.”38 In a forthright disclosure of what will become the colonies preferred strategic route, he details how “A Master of a Vessel can go from America to France, can legally charter her from thence at Eustatia ’till Winter, when it will be extremely easy to smuggle them all into all Parts of North American in small vessels.”39 Franklin also admonishes the British for such ignoble preparations for war: “Do you mean, then, to fall upon [the colonists] naked and unarm’d, and butcher them in cold Blood?”40 In fact, political scientists maintain that Britain’s increased efforts to limit the traffic of illicit goods, especially by relying on military force, hastened, if not caused, the colonial rebellion.41 Franklin may broadcast how the West Indies mediates global trade, but once the colonies break with Britain and Franklin leaves for France, he rarely mentions the island in his correspondence except to note where to send his mail. But in August 1775, he writes to American Silas Deane, “It makes one smile to see in the English Papers, the Ignorance of some of their Political Writers, who fancy we cannot continue the Non Importation Agreement; 178

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because if we do it must starve us.”42 Andreas has found, “By the end of 1776, Congress had created a web of American commercial agents linking Dutch and French ports to the colonies via the West Indies.”43 A committee letter, composed by Franklin in October 1776, to Deane, the agent sent to Paris, is laden with vague references: “We make no doubt you have been acquainted with the Negotiations of Monsr. Hortalex and in consequence thereof we conclude that you will be at no loss to obtain the supplies of Goods wanted for a particular department, notwithstanding we know that the greatest part of those Remittances, that were intended you, have been intercepted by one means or other.”44 Knowing that Hortalex was the fake company name for those in charge of smuggling through St. Eustatius makes it clear that the “Negotiations” and “supplies of Goods” and “particular department” refer to transactions involving arms and gunpowder. In the same letter to Deane, though, Franklin is more direct in telling him “that altho we are Stiled Rebels by Britain, yet our Friendship may hereafter be of the utmost importance to those powers particularly that possess American Colonies, and that injuries now done us will not be easily effaced. These hints and arguments you’ll offer as the suggestions of your own mind.”45 For Franklin, “hints” are crucial, especially when issuing threats. “Hints” also allow Deane to speak for the American colonies and only for himself (“of your own mind”) and at the same time to pivot accordingly based on the interlocutors’ response. Franklin frequently relies on indirection to achieve his ends, which has a public performative aspect.46 Writing to Congress in September 1777, Franklin makes a passing reference to “winking” at French trade embargoes. He, along with the Committee of Secret Correspondence, sends Arthur Lee papers to be planted in the newspaper in England and explains how to communicate back to them: “We have written on the Subject of American Affairs to Monsieur C. G. F. Dumas, who resides at the Hague. We recommend it to you to correspond with him, and to send through his Hands any Letters to us which you cannot send more directly. He will transmit them via St. Eustatia.”47 The phrase “American Affairs” refers to their lack of resources to maintain a war. In the same letter, Franklin reiterates, “We need not hint that great Circumspection and impenetrable Secrecy are necessary.”48 In a letter to Dumas, their agent in Amsterdam, Franklin finesses the favors they seek: “We [the United States] have hitherto applied to no foreign power. We are using the utmost industry in endeavoring to make salt-­petre, and with daily increasing success. Our artificers are also every where busy in fabricating small arms, casting cannon, &c. Yet both arms and ammunition are much wanted.”49 His testimony about American industry could indicate 179

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their creditworthiness; it may simply imply that demand for arms may not last long and the Dutch should take advantage of it. He continues by noting the ample financial benefits that would accrue to those who would help: “Any merchants, who would venture to send ships, laden with those articles, might make great profit; such is the demand in every colony, and such generous prices are and will be given; of which, and of the manner of conducting such a voyage. . . . And whoever brings in those articles, is allowed to carry off the value in provisions, to our West Indies, where they will probably fetch a very high price, the general exportation from North America being stopped.”50 Franklin emphasizes that the war itself creates a supply problem that an industrious merchant might want to capitalize upon. He notes all of this as a matter of fact, leaving his recipient to fill in the blanks. Franklin does not ask for anything directly except for some engineers and establishes a point person for relaying messages to him through Arthur Lee. Repeatedly, the need for transmitting mail is paramount. Yet with the mail, one also transports contraband.51 When one spotlights this illegal trade, one can more easily recognize the figurations and performative aspects of so-­ called legitimate enterprises. Said another way, when a trader enters the marketplace, he immediately recognizes the various possibilities and other modes of being that prove inextricable from it.

Global Trade’s Expendable Players Free trade—­even smuggling—­can cause fragmentations among countrymen— ­and by extension the nation. Silas Deane, the agent sent to France, became a controversial figure whose reputation never recovered from aspersions from his colleague Arthur Lee.52 Deane’s chief aim, as the first agent sent to France, was to secure goods for the American army under the guise of trading for the Indian Nations. In France, Deane was instructed to acquire the supplies from the French and to write to C. W. F. Dumas, an agent for the Dutch company named Rodrique Hortalez. But this company, as noted, served as the cover for the Frenchman Pierre Beaumarchais, the popular composer and royal music teacher. Hiding the identity of persons under the name of a company did little but create suspicion among the American agents. Deane himself seemed at a loss because Beaumarchais acted as though he were personally supplying the money; later Deane learned that Beaumarchais acted for the French ministry. These subterfuges led to the smirching of Deane’s reputation.53 Lee did not know that Deane was in contract with French agents (sometimes posing as Dutch) who were 180

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running operations out of Amsterdam to supply the colonists. The misgivings and suspicions that emerged among Deane, Lee, and Franklin while they were all in Europe acting as agents for Congress continue to interest scholars. The well-­born Lee (a Virginian educated at Eton) suspected that Deane was personally profiting from the war, a supposition that drew upon stereotypes of merchants who “could not be both honorable and a merchant.”54 Deane’s exoneration proved difficult to cement because of the nefarious business arrangements of arm shipments. At times, Deane could not make sense of the transactions that Franklin’s committee had set up. For instance, in France, Deane was instructed to gain the supplies from the French and “contact C. W. F. Dumas, the colonial agent in Holland,” and through them “the United Colonies were to bear the full cost” of transporting these French goods “including insurance and risk of capture at sea.”55 But Deane could not always read between the lines to determine who actually bore the costs. The fracas uncovered how many players remained in the dark about exactly what was supplied to the Congress, from where, or by whom. When Deane left government service in disgrace because of Lee’s insinuations, Franklin and others, like the French minister Comte de Vergennes, wrote letters in his defense testifying that he in no way profited from state contracts. Deane’s biographer recounts: “To Beaumarchais went the task of disillusioning Congress, if need be, that the supplies sent by Rodrique Hortalez and Company were not a gift from the French government but a legitimate commercial transaction. For the first time, Beaumarchais informed Congress officially that Hortalez and Company and Caron de Beaumarchais were one and the same.”56 In revealing his true identity, Beaumarchais explains he had started a firm even before meeting Deane, “sufficiently strong and devoted to incur the risques of the sea and of a war, in carrying to you, as I was informed, for the equipment of [Congress’s] troops.”57 Deane’s secretary, Edward Bancroft, was indeed a British spy, but the Committee of Secret Correspondence concealed so many matters that others came to the conclusion that Deane was hiding personal secrets rather than state ones. Later Deane became disillusioned about the war effort. When his letters criticizing America and France were intercepted and published by the English press, he suffered further embarrassment and later exile; he died en route back to Connecticut after the war ended. However, Deane’s public humiliation and the focus on his intercepted letters leave a lot of information unknown. His experience underscores how smuggling illustrates my intervention—­its sensational and romanticized aspects remain amenable 181

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to narratives that characterize it as an exception to “legitimate” enterprises when, in fact, smuggling undergirded the nation. Subsequent generations do not have proper records about smuggled goods, so instead the emphasis turns to the personal and political animosities or affinities among individual actors. Deane remains known more for his indiscreet musings in purloined letters about America’s prospects than for his work as an agent helping to circulate the arms that would lead to the colonies’ victory. As smugglers prove to be “islands” apart from legitimate enterprises, actual islands, too, are obscured or erased in stories of nationhood. The usefulness of disguising supply chains and interdependencies on West Indian islands was not lost on the Americans; some even suggested that the Americans obtain their own island. Stephen Sayre writes to Franklin in 1779 about the United States taking control of a West Indian island using a method both cavalier and highly strategic: “It would be highly advantageous that the State should upon almost any Terms, gain possession of an Island of any dimensions. 2dlly. That great commercial benefits must soon be derived thro’ such Islands, as a Magazine of Commerce, for America. . . . It was also agree’d, that if an Island could be obtain’d under any Terms, short of an open Rupture, it should be attempted.”58 Sayre not only denies these islands sovereignty but characterizes their whole purpose as serving as a “Magazine” for American commerce. Often the phrase “any island” is repeated, as though these spots are interchangeable. Here Sayre refers to “almost any Terms.” His insistence evinces the great riches these islands generate, but, in a contradictory gesture, he issues a wholesale dismissal of them: “an Island of any dimensions.” William Bingham, an American agent in Martinique, reports to Franklin the possibility of taking the island of Tobago in case the Dutch lose Eustatius.59 Even as the colonies depend on the Dutch secretly violating their peace with Great Britain, they imply that if the Dutch should lose Eustatius, the United States could capitalize on its loss by claiming a West Indian territory. Sean Goudie argues, “the United States emerges as a para[-­] site on the scene of European colonialism in the Caribbean, a complicit client nation-­state that aims to benefit economically from the scene of European colonialism without ever having to correct itself—­or its foundational principles—­with overt political sponsorship of those colonies.”60 Ultimately, the colonies did not have the navy to support an effort to “take” a colony, and, furthermore, there were few islands they could claim that would not embroil them in war against a European state. When theorizing the basis for empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have argued that the U.S. Constitution is built upon “the principle 182

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of expansion [that] continually struggles against the forces of limitation and control”;61 this struggle, at times, seems performative. When brokering peace in France, Franklin gives many hints that the only way for Great Britain to alleviate residual animosities over the war and secure lasting peace is to hand over more territory to the new United States. He writes to James Hutton in 1778 in the first years of the war to explain that Britain’s actions against America have left his fellow colonialists no choice but to demand full independence. He advises that in seeking peace, Britain might “by your treaty retain all Canada, Nova Scotia, and the Floridas. But if you would have a real friendly as well as able ally in America, and avoid all occasion of future discord which will otherwise be continually arising on your American frontiers, you should throw in those countries.”62 Franklin as usual relies on the subjunctive to protect his propriety while maneuvering for as much territory as possible. His verb “throw in” casts those countries as unimportant to alleviate the sting of Britain’s loss even as it ignores the people living there. Moreover, by situating his stance as promoting perpetual peace (by claiming that borders lead to war and thus everything that borders the United States should be annexed) he then justifies the expansion of the U.S. empire all the way to the Pacific. As much as Franklin seeks his British counterpart to “throw in” more territory, Franklin is not averse to “throwing out” those sites, like the island of St. Eustatius, after they have served their purpose in achieving American independence. While those displaced after the British navy destroyed the island wrote to Franklin seeking aid, I have not found any evidence of Franklin’s response to them that acknowledges St. Eustatius’s role. Instead, in the first years of the republic, Eustatius was largely forgotten. As Sean Goudie claims, “Franklin urges the continental expansion of Anglo-­America westward while simultaneously trying to reconcile how such expansionism depends on a proliferating Anglo-­American paracolonial presence in the West Indies.”63 In his diplomatic correspondence, Franklin appears unconcerned and rather pragmatic about these paracolonial sites. Still, as late as 1787, former Dutch residents of the island continued to appeal to Franklin for help. Gosuinus Erkelens writes to Franklin from Connecticut in May 1787, asking for a meeting with Franklin to sell him Chinese cobalt. He explains, in faulty English, why he applies to Franklin to sell this valuable good: “nothing but a simphatizing feeling of What this Country has undergo during the War: civily entitles me to that great freedom, and more so, on account of having been burnd out: and plundered out at St. Eustatia by Rodney by Which I came indebted in Europe: and as a Dutch Marchand 183

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may greatest pleasure to pay them: I humbly entreat may the more Apologize for my Liberty.”64 Erkelens leaves unstated the connection between Rodney’s plundering of Eustatius along with his loss of livelihood and the Revolutionary War, which “entitles him” to address Franklin directly. The diction of “burnd out” and “plundered” returns the American Revolution to its origins as a trade war in which merchants enabled cheap molasses, tea, and later gunpowder to flow past British tariffs and trade barriers. Russ Castronovo notices how, during the notorious Hutchinson affair in 1773, Franklin’s stratagems were seemingly uncharacteristic because of his efforts to hide his involvement. The scandal began with Franklin trying to repair Anglo-­American relations singlehandedly by surreptitiously leaking the letters of the governor of Massachusetts to expose the governor’s support of Parliament and its right to tax the colonists.65 Franklin never revealed how he got his hands on the letters. In his initial plan, no one would know that he made the governor’s letters public; moreover, he thought publicizing the letters would hasten a peaceful settlement of the question whether Parliament or the king had authority over the colonies. Franklin only admitted his part in the affair when it looked as if the leaked letters had been pinned on an innocent person and a duel was imminent. Castronovo wonders: “In a perhaps uncharacteristic move, Franklin refuses to occupy the center, instead preferring to sit back in the shadows where, after all, the shadowy work of espionage gets done. The diminishment of agency supplies the tactical advantage.”66 In highlighting his work on procuring armaments during the Revolution, I maintain that Franklin’s sense of when to step forward and when to remain in the shadows was particularly canny, not just in the case of leaking of Hutchinson’s letters. He left many blanks about his life despite the voluminous number of pages that have been written about him. Although his efforts to expose Hutchinson ended in his public humiliation for the ignoble task of reading private letters, his work in trafficking decentralizes Eustatius and the West Indies more generally. In its wake, we are left with the quaint idea of St. Eustatius as the port through which Franklin’s letters passed. Stephen Sayre writes to Franklin after the peace settlement, “I venture to state, as nearly as I can recollect, what pass’d, at a certain place.”67 Eustatius is relegated to a “certain place,” an unnamed locale, between two knowing correspondents. I conclude with Peter Andreas’s observation about eighteenth-­century smuggling, for uncovering it “provides a corrective of sorts to today’s overly alarmist depictions of the illicit dark side of globalization as an entirely new and unprecedented threat to America and the world.”68 In Castronovo’s analysis of 184

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propaganda, including that spread by organizations intent on leaking state secrets, he laments how attempts to decenter the individual to better represent the processes of globalization fall back into familiar historical narratives of the autonomous actor, or what he calls “the sovereign actor.” For instance, Wikileaks, as a borderless network unattached to state power, has been eclipsed by its founder, Julian Assange, in “the role of the heroic political individual”; a tension arises then between narratives of “the demise of an autonomous subject” and how characterizations of these networks “revert to heroic forms of individuality.”69 Perhaps St. Eustatius, in its unheralded part in the American Revolution, embodies the sometimes unseen processes of globalization. As the socioeconomic elites actively work to conceal globalization in order to garner its benefits and provide the illusion that society remains unchanged, they render places and processes into metonyms. St. Eustatius—­everywhere and nowhere—­serves as the case study for these figurations. Its embrace of free trade—­even smuggling—­contributed to its erasure as the networks of commerce and contraband found newer, faster, safer, more versatile routes upon which to circuit. Nevertheless, its Jewish and diasporic African communities—­and the roles they played in not only national histories but also in the larger socioeconomic trajectories of the eighteenth century—­encourage us to uncover other sites that might add nuance to the narratives of American foundations.

Notes 1. Herman Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855; Evanston: Newberry and Northwestern University Press, 1986), 10. The independent country Saint Eustatius is now named Sint Eustatius, though it is often referred to as Statia. In Benjamin Franklin’s correspondence and Israel Potter, the country is named Eustatia. 2. Peter Andreas, Smuggler Nation: How Illicit Trade Made America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 56. 3. Russ Castronovo explains how an author’s agency dissolves when a texts enters eighteenth-­century print-­publication circuits; however, “these nodes of transmission and circulation have been frequently reconsolidated under more familiar signposts. Historians name such points of dissemination ‘Ben Franklin’ or ‘Sam Adams’ ” (Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 180). 4. Michael Warner has written the most cited analysis of Franklin and his embodiment in print and how that relates to his obfuscating habits (Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-­Century America [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990]). Paul Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–­1860 (Philadelphia: University 185

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of Pennsylvania Press; 2001); Jeff Osborne, “Benjamin Franklin and the Rhetoric of Virtuous Self-­Fashioning in Eighteenth-­Century America,” Literature and History 17, no. 2 (2008): 14–­30; and Christopher Looby, Voicing America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) among others, have expanded upon Warner’s thesis. See Jennifer Baker for a contrary take on Franklin as a public man (Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005], 72, 84). 5. Melville, Israel Potter, 48. 6. Benjamin Franklin, Autobiography in Benjamin Franklin: Writings, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (New York: Library of America, 1987), 115. 7. Ibid., 116. 8. Ibid. 9. Edmund Burke, “An Account of the European Settlements in America,” in The Works of Edmund Burke (Boston: Little, Brown, 1839), 9:253. 10. Linda Rupert, Creolization and Contraband: Curaçao in the Early Modern Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 122. 11. William Bingham to Franklin, in The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. vol. 30, ed. Leonard Labaree et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1958–­2011), 117. Unless otherwise noted, all Franklin’s correspondence, whether sent or received, is cited from this edition. In some cases, the in-­text citation of Franklin’s letters refers to a date. These letters are unpublished but are available through the digital archive of the Franklin Papers on the Web. 12. Douglas Comer, The Archeology of Interdependence: European Involvement in the Development of the Sovereign United States (New York: Springer, 2013), 56. 13. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005), 90. 14. Jonathan Dull, Benjamin Franklin and the American Revolution (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010), 48. 15. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 16. 16. Orlando W. Stephenson, “The Supply of Gun Powder Plot in 1776,” American Historical Review 30, no. 2 (1925): 277. 17. Mary Weatherspoon Bowden, “In Search of Freneau’s Prison Ships,” Early American Literature 14, no. 2 (1979): 174–­92. 18. J. Franklin Jameson, “St. Eustatius in the American Revolution,” American Historical Review 8, no. 4 (1903): 686. 19. Stephen Blakemore, Literature, Intertextuality, and the American Revolution: From Common Sense to “Rip Van Winkle” (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2012), 53. 20. Ibid., 55. 21. Qtd. in Jameson, “St. Eustatius in the American Revolution,” 695. 22. Ibid.,705. 23. Ibid., 707. 24. Henry Laurens to Franklin, in Papers, 37:527. 25. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, “Slaves in Algiers: Race, Republican Genealogies, and the Global Stage,” American Literary History 16, no. 3 (2004): 409. 186

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26. Although some claim it began earlier. James M. Volo relates that “in the 1760s colonial trade with foreign markets in the Mediterranean and West Indies was growing faster than that with British ones” (Volo, Blue Water Patriots: The American Revolution Afloat [Westport, CT: Praeger, 2007], 2). 27. Stephenson, “The Supply of Gun Powder Plot in 1776,” 279. 28. Volo, Blue Water Patriots, 8. 29. Charles-­Guillaume-­Frédéric Dumas to the American Commissioners, in Papers, 27:116. This letter has been translated from the French by Labaree et al. 30. Franklin, Papers, 12:414. 31. Ibid. 32. Vindex Patriae qtd. ibid., 12:145. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid. 35. Ibid., 12:431. 36. Ibid., 12:415. 37. George S. Wycoff explains how Britain, sensing turmoil, warned Holland in the 1760s not to sell smuggled goods, in particular “warlike stores” in the colonies or the British navy would seize them. “Such British effects were openly discussed in Parliament, the sessions of which Franklin sometimes attended,” (“Problems Concerning Franklin’s ‘A Dialogue between Britain, France, Spain, Holland, Saxony, and America,’ ” American Literature 11, no. 1 [1940]: 444). 38. Franklin, Papers, 17:73. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid., 17:74. 41. Andreas, Smuggler Nation, 5. 42. Franklin, Papers, 22:184 43. Andreas, Smuggler Nation, 48. 44. Franklin, Papers, 22:644. 45. Ibid., 22:645. 46. See Andreas, Smuggler Nation, 4. 47. Ibid., 22:296. 48. Ibid., 22:297. 49. Ibid., 22:289–­90. 50. Ibid., 22:290. 51. Some of the Committee’s letters are more direct, such as one that instructs William Bingham, the American agent ensconced in Martinique, to act as smuggler, negotiator, economic planner, diplomat, propagandist, and banker to further the colonies’ cause: “You must consider yourself as authorized by the United Colonies to engage for the Payment of the 10,000 Musquets in Such Articles deliver’d at Martinico (or any other Islands they may fix on) as fast as they can be introduced” (ibid., 22:445). They also explain that if it cannot be done, then he should try Guadalupe or Eustatius. 52. The editors of Franklin’s Papers note that Deane and William Bingham were chosen to act as agents because each “was also doing business on his own,” which would “cover his activity in buying arms and gathering intelligence” (Labaree et al., eds., Papers, 22:443). 187

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53. Even before Deane arrived, Beaumarchais had been arranging for the transport of powder. According to Deane’s biographer, “Vergennes assured Deane that Beaumarchais was capable of fulfilling a large contract” (Coy Hilton James, Silas Deane—­Patriot or Traitor? [East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1975], 17). In Deane’s first meeting, Beaumarchais “offered to ship three million liveres of goods on the credit of Congress” (ibid.). Writing in 1925, the historian Orlando Stephenson notices, “The commercial house of Beaumarchais, under the fanciful name of ‘Roderique Hortalez et Cie.,’ had been in operation many weeks when Deane saw the ‘Watch-­maker to His Majesty’ for the first time, and from that house great quantities of munitions had been sent” (Stephenson, “The Supply of Gun Powder Plot in 1776,” 280). 54. James, Silas Deane, vii. According to Beaumarchais’s biographer, “Given the risks of a dangerous ocean crossing and the possibility of arrest and indefinite imprisonment—­even possible execution—­if captured by the British, they offered [Deane] a 5 percent commission on all purchases. . . . The terms were much the same as those they had offered Arthur Lee for serving as agent in London and, before him, Benjamin Franklin” (Harlow Giles Unger, Improbable Patriot: The Secret History of Monsieur De Beaumarchais, the French Playwright Who Saved the American Revolution [Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2011], 118). Unger speculates that Lee acted vindictively by accusing Deane of profiteering, because Deane’s transactions with Beaumarchais would diminish the amount of Lee’s commissions. 55. Ibid., 12, 10. 56. Ibid., 59. 57. Qtd. ibid., 59–­60. 58. Stephen Sayre to Franklin, in Papers, 13 April 1779. 59. William Bingham to Franklin, in Papers, 30:117. 60. Sean X. Goudie, Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006), 13. 61. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 166. 62. Franklin, Papers, 25:562. 63. Goudie, Creole America, 19. 64. Gosuinus Erkelens to Franklin, in Papers, 1 May 1878. 65. For the most thorough examination of the Hutchinson affair, see Bernard Bailyn, The Ordeal of Thomas Hutchinson (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1974). 66. Castronovo, Propaganda 1776, 50. 67. Stephen Sayre to Franklin, in Papers, 29:291. 68. Andreas, Smuggler Nation, 4. 69. Castronovo, Propaganda 1776, 36. Castronovo argues that Julian Assange and Slavoj Žižek each unwittingly keeps the focus on the individual actor, despite their endorsement of diffuse networks (such as that associated with the early years of Wikileaks). In an aside, though, he sets Franklin apart from them as a counterexample, because Franklin “offers an important counterexample in his many personae let loose across Atlantic epistolary and print exchanges” (ibid., 35).

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“Stuck a Bayonet into the Grave & Renew’d Their Oath” The American Revolution and the First Fleet THERES E-­M ARIE M EY ER

In 2003 Cassandra Pybus’s seminal study of American slaves on the Australian First Fleet sailing into the South Pacific, The Black Founders, established a connection between the penal settlement of Australia and the American War of Independence.1 Beyond the general knowledge of how the fleet transported convicts either here or there, this connection also revealed how events in America influenced Australia’s first British settlers. The colony never became an “asylum to those unfortunate American loyalists to whom Great Britain is bound by every tie of honour and gratitude to protect and support, where they may repair their broken fortunes and enjoy their former domestic felicity,” as the original proposal for the colony by James Maria Matra had envisaged. However, the convict settlement in New South Wales still owed its establishment by the Pitt government in August 1786 to the loss of access to transportation routes after the American War of Independence and to the subsequent overcrowding of prisons and hulks.2 When the First Fleet left Britain in 1787, it dispatched approximately 1,500 people, of whom 736 were convicts. Naval officers, marines and their wives, ships’ crews, and children (some of them born en route) provided more than half of the future population.3 Established as a penal settlement under naval administration, Port Jackson also served possible strategic interests in the British maritime access to the South Pacific. And yet a national bias still informs the historiography of colonial Australia and most American scholars’ work on the Revolution, a bias that prevents full recognition of the global reach of the British in the eighteenth century. To date, no Australian scholar has considered the implications of the American connection for the First Fleet’s officers—­certainly the social group with a military past most affected by such a connection—­and only a few American studies have emerged on the later careers of British generals or Loyalist refugees.4 189

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To gain an idea of the extent to which the American war has to be seen as a background to the penal foundation of Port Jackson, one needs to be aware that nearly a quarter of all officers of the First Fleet, that is, eleven of forty-­three men, had seen military action in the American colonies.5 The military service in America of two of these officers, Captain John Hunter and Major Robert Ross, went back to the Seven Years’ War.6 Of the remaining officers, David Collins, William Dawes, George Johnston, John Shortland, and Watkin Tench had all seen service in the northern theaters of the American Revolutionary War, with Watkin Tench spending three months as an American prisoner in Maryland, while William Bradley, Thomas Davey, and Philip Gidley King had been active in the Caribbean theaters of the same war. As befits their seniority, these veterans of the American war were overrepresented in positions of authority in early Port Jackson, with Robert Ross as Governor Phillip’s lieutenant governor, in charge of all the marines, and David Collins as the head of the judiciary, such as it was, as deputy judge advocate. Hunter and King went on to become governors in New South Wales after Phillip. Robert Ross, as already mentioned, became lieutenant governor (of Norfolk Island), as did David Collins and Thomas Davey (both of Van Diemen’s Land).7 In consequence, it is fair to say that the shared military background of these First Fleet officers must also be seen as relevant to early policy making in colonial New South Wales and indeed to the very establishment of the Australian penal colony. Reading such veteran officers’ accounts of the First Fleet (quite a few of the above men published theirs) against the backdrop of their American experience affords a fresh perspective to these texts and cannot help but inform a great many details of current Australian readings. When David Collins, for example, reports that iron collars were added in 1790 to the usual chains and fetters for convicts found to have stolen food, a practice that was to continue until the 1820s, Australian historians see a regression to medieval methods of symbolic shaming and torture.8 To American historians, however, “iron collars from which projected two spikes of iron about 15.2 cm long” are recognizable as the spiked slave collars that emerged from Antigua in the seventeenth century and were used in the Caribbean and later the southern U.S. states.9 This American model for Collins’s collars is a more likely explanation than a regressive case of colonial medievalism. In the light of the wealth of material and detail from the firsthand accounts, I present here two case studies: one, in which an awareness of the background of the American Revolution clearly helps to make sense of First Fleet reports, with a particular focus on David Collins’s; and a second case study, 190

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the court-­martial of Private Joseph Hunt (1790), that leaves a great many questions open but nonetheless introduces the horizon of a global British naval network, dating back to a shared military service in the American War of Independence. David Collins, deputy judge advocate of Port Jackson, was a veteran of the Battle of Bunker Hill (17 June 1775) and a protégé of General William Howe, Admiral Richard Howe’s brother, and in 1783 he “took part in the relief of Gibraltar.”10 Collins published his Account of the English Colony in New South Wales in two volumes, 1798–­99. I propose first to read a short episode from this account, so far overlooked, against the backdrop of Collins’s Bunker Hill past to show the extent to which his American experience colored Collins’s travelogue. Next, I will discuss in more detail the implications of such a past on Collins’s understanding of his position and his current evaluation by scholars as deputy judge advocate in New South Wales. Bunker Hill has been considered one of the first of many pyrrhic victories of the British, anticipating their ultimate defeat. Attempts to take Charlestown (just opposite the besieged city of Boston) from the seaside, by landing the army under the cover of naval guns and marching in columns up the hill toward the American lines, resulted in so many heavy casualties, particularly of the officer class, that it is seen as a turnaround in the initial British evaluation of colonial forces and military strategy. Though the sheer human mass of the advance uphill won the day, there was an unprecedented scale of losses. “Posterity will with Difficulty believe that about 8 or 10,000 Provincials could make such Slaughter, of well disciplined, regular Troops,” notes an American letter in the aftermath of the battle.11 Hibbert’s description of “the British advancing steadily with fixed bayonets, shouting and screaming, ‘stepping over the bodies of their comrades as if they were logs’ ” echoes older American scholarship.12 Spring, though, makes a point of differing: “Contrary to American mythology, the British battalions that attempted to subjugate the rebellion were not legions of perfectly drilled automata.”13 Hibbert also quotes reports of British surgeons who stated that balls removed from the British wounded were “encrusted with a white matter,” a claim that gave rise to rumors of poisoned shots having been used by the rebels.14 Though the medical practice of the day’s woeful hygiene is quite enough to explain the high rate of mortality among the wounded, these reports are a good example of the near-­paranoia that set in with the British army in the aftermath of Bunker Hill. Psychologically, this battle considerably exacerbated the conflict. “After the battle of Bunker’s Hill [the British soldiers] were so inveterate against the Rebels on account of the dreadful 191

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spectacles that presented themselves after that action, they destroyed everything they could come at without Scruple,” notes Sergeant Thomas Sullivan.15 The problem was one of military strategy, however. The British army’s practice of shooting undirected volleys and advancing in line had to contend with the novelty of American sharpshooters. As an American prisoner in 1776 explains, the British soldiers shot haphazardly: “I observed that they took no aim, and the moment of presenting and firing was the same.”16 The idea of the volley was less to hit than to demoralize the enemy, allowing for the steady advance of the line. In the light of superior British numbers, the importance of guerrilla warfare strategies and the presence of sharpshooters on the side of the Americans cannot be overestimated. At Bunker Hill, these sharpshooters, ducking behind walls and hedges, had been instructed to aim for the British officers’ gorgets to make the British lines falter. The subsequent, disproportionately high losses among the officer class led to a demoralized army indeed; yet it also led to a rush of promotions to fill the void.17 Collins himself received his lieutenant commission the week after Bunker Hill—­unwarranted by any earlier military experience.18 After the battle, General Howe ordered the troops stationed in Boston to start target training,19 in the hope of countering American sharpshooting practice. As Curtis observes pointedly, “these conditions gave rise to the sharpshooter, a man who not merely aimed his musket but aimed it at something or somebody.”20 Additionally, killing with the bayonet rose in importance over the shooting of volleys and was to shape British strategy in the coming war years. Meanwhile, the British soldiers translated their shock into paranoia and an open hatred of the colonists.21 All of this is evident in a letter Collins sends his father after Bunker Hill to apprise him of his recent promotion: I may justly say dearly, for we bought [Charlestown] with the lives not only of our men, but of our senior officers. . . . [T]hey die so fast of their wounds, that nobody as yet has got a true state of the loss; suffice it to say, and dreadful in the recollection, that our loss is considerable. . . . After having served his King with fidelity and success in many an honest laudable career to be at last doomed the victim to a set of wretches to whom it would be an unmerited honour to fall by the hands of English troops. . . . [It were best to] inundate the country with foreign troops and destroy the whole race of Americans.22

An echo of Bunker Hill can be found in an episode of Collins’s journal. On the journey out to New South Wales, the First Fleet paused for a longer 192

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stay at Capetown, where the officers enjoyed their excursions. Collins reports a parade that he attended, and his seemingly harmless comments can be seen to have a strong political implication when read against his Bunker Hill past. The militia consisted of “two corps of cavalry and one of infantry, formed from the gentlemen and inhabitants of the town,” and they were all “reputed to be excellent marksmen.”23 Collins also observes that they were at the governor’s disposal. Yet the reference to marksmen after Bunker Hill must have resonated for Collins, who owed his lieutenant commission and probably a few traumatic memories to such men, and he continues to relate how he observed “these patriotic Africans (for few of them knew Holland but by name) enuring themselves to the toils of war, ‘pro aris et focis.’ ”24 Marksmen brought back echoes of patriotic Americans, who knew Britain but by name, and Collins sees the raising of a marksmen militia by the Dutch governor as an act of naivety, with the governor training his own future rebels for military service: “When colonial spokesmen resisted British projects for the empire, they invariably called themselves patriots or sons of liberty, and they phrased their political dissent in the patriotic language of liberty, the only acceptable language of dissent.”25 Collins’s amusement at the Dutch governor’s expense denotes the smug feeling of watching the Dutch repeat the same mistakes that the British had already made in the former American colonies. “Pro aris et focis” (for altars and firesides) was used in the American Revolutionary War to stress the defense of home territory against the more theoretical Loyalist call “for King and country.”26 In this passage, which clearly recalls his Bunker Hill experience, Collins points out that “patriotic Africans” would prefer using their marksmanship in defense of their colonial liberties instead of to advance their governor’s Loyalist agenda. On Collins’s work as deputy judge advocate there is no contention; Australian historians agree that he was a man trying to do his best. Yet they also agree that he was not up to his position: “Marine Captain David Collins . . . had no legal training whatsoever but he took his job seriously, unperturbed by his ignorance of the law.”27 Lacking the necessary education, Collins is said to have precipitated a move toward ever more brutal punishments “far in excess of the floggings meted out in the Royal Navy.”28 This excess was topped in the so-­called starvation years of 1790–­92, when Collins sentenced convicts to one thousand lashes in instalments for the theft of food. The yardstick to this evaluation is the norm of naval punishments, relentless and brutal in itself but nowhere near as excessive as Collins’s methods appear to be. Yet Collins himself acknowledged having been confused about the 193

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nature of his position: “I do imagine they suppose my performance of that duty is included in my Commission from the Crown which (strange to tell) is entirely a Military Commission and directs me ‘to follow such orders and Directions from time to time, as I shall receive from the Governor for the time being, or any other my superior officer,’ according to the Rules of Discipline of War.”29 Quoting this letter, John Nagle, an Australian historian, is concerned with the legal ambiguity created by a judiciary subject to military rule, a point that resonates because of the later Rum Rebellion’s erection of a half year of military dictatorship. The officers of the First Fleet themselves had, naturally, no such anticipation of future events, yet Collins was already aware of the legal ambiguity of the colonial judiciary. By the time his journal was published, he had resolved this ambiguity for himself by considering the courts as similar to military courts, whereas the judge advocate’s “situation is of a civil nature.”30 Though the colony was not under martial law, the officers’ commissions did state they were under “the Rules of Discipline of War.”31 Collins did not have any experience of the law, yet he did have experience of war, and he could fall back upon his military knowledge in the ambiguous situation in which he found himself. It appears he was not the only one to do so, as Lieutenant Ralph Clark notes in a private letter: I wonder that ther was no Provision or alteration made in the Usual Act of Parliament for the Regulation of the Marine Forces, while on Shore, for our particular Situation heer, the Same, as in the Year 1775, for that part of the Corps as was doing duty in America with the Army (the two Battalions) the[y] were Guided and directed by the Articles of War of the Army as the[y] were included in the Act for the Punishment of Mutiny and desertion amon[g]st the Troops in that country—­an Act of this Kind ought to have been made for our particular Situation and not have sent us out without any Guidance for the Trial of any Officer, or Soldier, by a Genl. Court M.32

Clark himself was not a veteran of the American War. The precedent his letter invokes in such detail must have been discussed by those officers who had spent time in the American colonies. How did Collins’s resolution of legal ambiguity in favor of a martial focus show itself in his judgments? Strikingly, punishments on the First Fleet conformed at first to the naval norm of the day. Private John Easty’s account is partly a stark list of just such punishments. His list shows the rule of sentencing men to, at most, three hundred lashes. Pardons always reduced such figures by a considerable 194

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amount.33 Convicts to whom naval discipline was extended came off comparatively well at first, though Collins apparently took care to make the floggings a mobile spectacle, parading them through Port Jackson: “Friday Feb the 15th 1788 this morning the Sentanced of the Court held yesterday put into Excution 2 Wemen recievd 25 Lashes Each for theft att the Carts tail and one man 45 for theft att the Carts taill.”34 When the threat of starvation in 1790–­92 exacerbated the mood in the settlement, Collins’s experience of the siege at Boston must have been a reminder of just how far the norm of corporal punishment could extend in times of war.35 In besieged Boston on 3 January 1776, General Clinton had announced the court-­martial of Thomas MacMahan, private in the Forty-­Third Regiment, and his wife, Isabella MacMahan, for “receiving sundry stolen goods knowing them to be such.” The punishment was one thousand lashes, with Isabella to receive “100 lashes on the bare back at the cart’s tail in different parts of town, both to be afterwards imprisoned for three months.”36 Thus, far from being regularly excessive or simply callously ignorant, Collins’s sentences during the food crisis conform exactly to those he experienced in Boston, down to the practice of flogging at the cart’s tail. Collins saw himself under the Rule of Discipline of War—­quite rightly, according to his commission—­though he considered his own position as judge advocate a civilian one, which did puzzle him. He also viewed the settlement in Port Jackson and its courts as military. Moreover, as the discussion of precedents shows, the stationing of marines during the American War of Independence afforded a relevant point of comparison: the officers in New South Wales apparently shared and compared their American pasts. Having no legal training, Collins had to rely on his own experience of judicial decisions such as he had encountered for instance in his station in Boston during the Revolutionary War. Most interestingly, this allows us a glimpse at the mood of the early, starving settlement, which, it seems, believed itself to be under siege, isolated, and horribly threatened. It is no surprise, therefore, that once conditions had improved and the siege mentality receded, Collins would try to return to more regular methods of punishment while maintaining the general aim of deterrence: “Example was necessary, and the court . . . finding that the severity of former courts did not prevent the commission of the same offence, instead of the great weight of corporal punishment which had marked their former sentences, directed this prisoner to receive three hundred lashes, his ration of flour to be stopped for six months, and himself to be chained for that time.”37 Collins’s journal here clearly indicates his awareness that the 195

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preceding floggings (of up to one thousand lashes per man) had been too harsh.38 Though he tries to distribute the blame among his fellow officers rather than shoulder it entirely himself, Collins had, by reverting to practices of the American War of Independence, set a judicial precedent in the new colony that resounded. Nagle, unaware of the American martial norm Collins had established, adds the following point in mitigation: “If it had been intended to set up a judicial system properly to serve a free society, it must have been obvious that not only was it inappropriate to appoint a serving soldier as the chief judicial officer of the colony and give him a military title, ‘deputy judge advocate,’ but also that it was unwise to appoint one whose knowledge of law was, to say the least, rudimentary.”39 His comment serves as a reminder of the judicial ambiguity created by the authorities in setting up the penal colony of New South Wales. That Collins should refer to his own military past during the American Revolution in order to cope with his military present and its crisis in New South Wales does not come as a surprise. Of course, there are also examples where the connections between the American Revolution and the Australian penal colony are nowhere near as clear-­cut. The court-­martial of Private Joseph Hunt and its strange global echo, my second case study, raises more questions than it answers. Badly bruised, marine Private Thomas Bulmore died 7 November 1788, after lingering for two days. Private James Scott from the same regiment notes, “in Consequence of a Battel fought With Jams Baker Marine (But, Strongley Suspected to be Ill used by others).”40 At this early point, Scott’s is the only documented reference to such a suspicion of mistreatment at the hands of other soldiers; however, not only the supposed attacker but four other privates were indicted for assault. All were sentenced to two hundred lashes each, for manslaughter on 11 November 1788. The court shared Scott’s suspicion, as the difference between the indictment and the sentence proves.41 Joseph Hunt appeared as witness in this trial: he was a friend to each of these men. In March of the following year, Private Easty, from another regiment, records in his journal another incident in which Hunt confessed that he and others stole from the storehouse: Wednesday March the 18 1789 this Day a key was found Broke in one of the Locks att the Publick Store house for Which Joseph Hunt a marine was confined who was after taking

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as the kings Evidince and impeeched upon Luke Hines Richd asque James Baker James Brown Richd Dukes and Thos Jones Privt Marines who had been with him in Robing the Store house.42

The conclusion to the burglary of the public storehouse is predictable enough—­the men were executed promptly to set an example to others— ­though its impact on the spectators, who all began crying, comes as a surprise. Private Easty notes: Friday March the 27th 1789 this Day att 10 oclock Luke Hines James Baker James Brown Richt Asque Richt1 Dukes and Thos Jones was Excuted between the 2 Store housees when thay all Said that Joseph hunt was the ocation of all thier Deaths as he was the first that bagan the Said Roberry but he Recd a free Pardon thare was hardley a marine Present but what Shed tears offacers and men.43

Easty’s focus on this emotional response to the hangings that united the marines irrespective of rank could be traced to his personal interest, as Joseph Hunt, Luke Haynes, and Thomas Jones had traveled to Australia on the HMS Scarborough with Easty, as had Thomas Bulmore.44 Collins’s journal also confirms the case in all particulars noted by Easty, including the officers’ high esteem for the men hanged.45 The trial reverberated across the military hierarchy, reaching even to the highest levels. When Governor Phillip founded a convict nightwatch and a marine who refused to submit to it was detained, Major Ross interfered to a point that led Governor Phillip to complain in a letter to Lord Sydney: I had pointed out that robberies had been committed by the soldiers, and by whom the stores had been robbed the year round, which could not have been the case, if the watch had then been established, and the little probability there was of detecting a soldier if he was never to be questioned, unless caught in the very act of stealing, but as [Major Ross] persisted in the opinion that it was an insult offered to the corps, and that they were put under the command of convicts, no other alternative was left me but to withdraw the order. . . . [I]t was not to be supposed that soldiers would quietly suffer themselves to be stopped by a convict watchman after such declarations from their commandant, and which were known.46

Hunt’s court-­martial was apparently a matter of debate for years. While the future New South Wales Corps’ exaggerated sense of entitlement and honor is blamed for the corruption of the service in the colony,47 it is evident from

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this very early case of 1788–­90 that esprit de corps shaped the founding of the colony well before the New South Wales Corps came into existence. In fact, this loyalty among soldiers predates the development of an increasingly professional ethos of the British armed forces, which Strachan only dates to the 1830s, by several decades.48 Unusually for the hierarchically aware eighteenth century, this attitude was definitely shared by the marines across ranks, from private to major, to the point where Governor Phillips was forced into concessions. If at all, Australian historians currently assign blame to Major Ross for any such sentiment.49 Yet as Private Easty notes, all marines, officers and soldiers alike, shared a sense of betrayal at Private Hunt’s escape from justice, and they seem to have closed ranks in consequence. At this point, with Governor Phillip’s letter to Lord Sydney, the case seems to acquire its first global reach across the hemisphere. Yet there is another, more mysterious connection to the American War of Independence buried in the case of Joseph Hunt’s trial. The only other source to touch upon the run-­up to Hunt’s trial, Private Bulmore’s manslaughter, is that of Jacob Nagle. Jacob Nagle was an American sailor, born in Philadelphia of German descent. He served in Washington’s army from the Battle of Brandywine to the camp at Valley Forge (1778) and then decided to join the Continental Navy, after which he became a British prisoner in the West Indies and was press-­ganged into the Royal Navy. In the First Fleet, he was on the HMS Sirius serving under Captain John Hunter. It is telling of the global reach of the British navy that the First Fleet service of an American sailor captured in the West Indies should be under the captaincy of a British naval officer who had made his career in 1780 (after leaving Admiral Howe’s flagship, the HMS Eagle) in the same Caribbean theater of war. It was there on the HMS Berwick that Hunter, the ship’s master, became Lieutenant Hunter. Jacob Nagle’s journal entry,50 though written decades later, is strikingly detailed; the circumstances of Joseph Hunt’s case made a strong impression on him. About this time there was a discovery Made of the Store being Robed there was Eight of the prime Soldiers & best Character had a plot & had a Key mad & . . . on Saturday when the Storekeeper Came to Open the dore he Could not enter the Key he gave Information & the lock was taken off & by that Means it was discovered the Store was Robed the Store keeper had often Suspected but Could not be Certain as their was always Sentinel at the dore Night and day the Alarm was given & One of them being Sentry at the Leutent Gov & inform’d him he had Sumthing of Importance to

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Relate to him he Suspected what it was & had him Releiv’d he discovered the Whole & gave their Names in to the Govener as Kings Evedence.51

According to Jacob Nagle, Hunt was not immediately arrested, but he turned King’s evidence to Major Ross as soon as his gang was exposed, anticipating his arrest. This treachery renders him so much more despicable, especially compared to the convict storekeeper’s honesty in giving the report. Jacob Nagle was not in town when Hunt’s trial took place. Yet instead of dismissing his account as “probably from local gossip,” any analysis should consider it precisely because of these circumstances: it is a gauge of contemporary events in the colony’s society. Sailors were go-­betweens, having access to officers, soldiers, and convicts alike, which explains the amount of convict detail in Jacob Nagle’s account.52 Nagle continues his report with Bulmore’s assault and death. Though he does not know the particulars of the date or Bulmore’s name, the events Jacob Nagle reports are striking enough to justify their persistence in his memory: “One Night before the had a frollick & got drunk One of them having a falling out with the Rest & Said he would discover the beat him that he died in a Couple of days & when Burried they Went with a Keg Of liquor & Set on the grave & Stuck a Bayonet into the grave & Renew’d their Oath not to discover by this P Hunt Turning K Evidence the ware all tried Condemd & hung though their was great Application Made to the Govener to Save some of them.”53 Hunt, in Jacob Nagle’s gossipy version, is clearly a turncoat, an oath breaker who has betrayed his brother soldiers to their deaths. Noting the resemblance of this oath on Bulmore’s grave to Hamlet as an aside, we can safely assume the following: the group swore an oath upon the bayonet first—­as Jacob Nagle’s use of “renew’d” indicates—­and once Bulmore had threatened to talk he had been taught his lesson. Asked by the surgeon before his death whether he had been ill-­used, where his bruises came from, and why his pants were so bloodied he had had to change them, he insisted, not very convincingly, that he had caught a cold. This is a “ran against the door” explanation typical of bullied victims forced into silence, and, in fact, the men accused of his assault claimed just that: Bulmore, drunk, had started a fight over a convict woman and knocked his head against the door.54 Such feeble explanations further clarify the decision of the court to sentence the accused of manslaughter. Jacob Nagle’s account of Bulmore’s death is more conclusive by far. There is no discernible intent to Bulmore’s murder; his death might have been

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indeed an accident. Yet as the posthumous execution by bayonet shows, it was felt to be deserved and was the reason for a new oath of allegiance, which in turn makes Hunt an oath breaker twice over. The bayonet emerged as the main weapon of British warfare after the American War of Independence, yet the only other contemporary reference to soldiers swearing an oath upon their bayonets is in the trial of Edward Despard in 1803. Colonel Edward Despard, who coordinated the United Irishmen with English Jacobites, tried to raise a republican rebellion in the British army and to have George III murdered.55 Despard made his rebels swear on the bayonet. In this oath, as a witness testifies, “bayonet” was used synonymously with death and the grave—­“I swore to be true to death/the grave” becomes “true to the bayonet”—­and surprisingly sheds light on that Australian incident of a bayonet stuck into a grave.56 Is it possible Jacob Nagle introduced this dramatic detail decades later in his account to stress the rebellious nature of Joseph Hunt’s little cabal? There is yet another, very odd connection here, which may or may not be coincidence but which is worth mentioning. It concerns Captain John Hunter, posted in 1780 on the HMS Berwick in the Caribbean, and captain of the HMS Sirius, and Jacob Nagle, the American sailor in 1788–­90 in New South Wales. It also concerns Evan Nepean, then secretary of the Admiralty and one of the minds behind the project of a penal colony in New South Wales. Both Hunter and Nepean served under Captain Jervis—­later Admiral Jervis, Viscount St Vincent—­on the HMS Foudroyant. Hunter was ship’s master of the Foudroyant in 1775, while Nepean was Jervis’s purser.57 Warrant officers of wardroom rank were “perceived as being officers but not quite gentlemen.”58 Nepean and Hunter were thus thrown close together: Purser and ship’s master messed together with the other officers, but their sleeping quarters were separate on the quarterdeck.59 After this posting, Evan Nepean moved on to Boston as purser on the HMS Falcon (Sparrow) where, eventually, he met Robert Ross and became “his only effective patron”; Hunter, as mentioned, moved on to Admiral Howe’s flagship, the Eagle.60 The brief contact with Jervis was potent enough to enable both men’s progression up the ranks, evidently in the case of Hunter’s posting on a flagship, less so for Nepean at this point.61 Yet it was Admiral Jervis, much later, who brought Nepean into the Admiralty, testifying to a lasting interest in his former purser.62 Since 1772, Despard had worked as an engineer stationed in Jamaica, eventually in charge of the harbor fortifications in 1780–­82, after his engagement with young Horatio Nelson in the San Juan expedition.63 As such he was bound to encounter Hunter, either in 200

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the latter’s service as a ship’s master in April 1772 on the HMS Carysfort or in 1779 as a freshly commissioned lieutenant on the HMS Berwick, which was wrecked in October 1780 in the Great Hurricane.64 In 1803 all these men were in London. Colonel Despard was on trial for treason, a famous court case attracting considerable public attention. Hunter was in London as a recalled second governor of New South Wales, awaiting an inquiry to clear his name and petitioning Admiral Jervis—­now the First Lord of the Admiralty—­for a pension. Nepean, the secretary of the Admiralty, appeared as Despard’s character witness in the trial, together with Admiral Nelson. Famously, Nepean’s and Nelson’s intervention did not save Colonel Despard from the fate of being hanged for treason on 21 February 1803. Yet the intriguing, lengthy aftermath of First Fleet Captain John Hunter’s experience of the American Revolutionary War remains, as does the echo of a bayonet oath revealed in the court-­martial of Private Hunt. It remains, as well, for future scholarship to shed more light on the global network of the British navy in the late eighteenth century as the ties of Australia’s First Fleet to the American War of Independence run deep.

Notes 1. Cassandra Pybus, Black Founders: The Unknown Story of Australia’s First Black Settlers (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 2006). 2. Qtd. in John Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony (Kensington: University of New South Wales Press, 1996), 11. 3. Robert Hughes, The Fatal Shore: The Epic of Australia’s Founding (New York: Vintage, 1986), 71. 4. See Christopher Moore’s The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1984); Maya Jasanoff ’s Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York: Knopf, 2011); and Andrew O’Shaughnessy’s The Men Who Lost America: British Leadership, the American Revolution and the Fate of the Empire (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014). 5. Cf. Pybus, Black Founders, 93. 6. Hunter served at the reduction of Quebec in 1759 and was made lieutenant the following year. He served on the HMS Eagle in the American War of Independence, the flagship of Admiral Howe, and was therefore present at the peculiar attack of the first-­ever manned submersible by the USS Turtle on 7 September 1776 (Ian Barnes and Charles Royster, The Historical Atlas of the American Revolution [New York: Routledge, 2000], 124; James L. Mooney, ed., Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships [Washington, DC: Naval Historical Center, 1992], 355; Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1714–­1792: Design, Construction, Careers, and Fates [Barnsley: Seaforth, 2007], 105). Hunter also served later at Sandy Hook (1778). He became Admiral Howe’s protégé (Robert Barnes, An Unlikely Leader: The Life and Times of Captain John Hunter [Sydney: 201

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Sydney University Press, 2009], 171), a decisive development in his life at a time when patronage determined a naval career. Robert Ross, a major of the marines and later lieutenant governor of Norfolk Island, had been at the Siege of Luisburg as well as Quebec (an experience he shared with Hunter) and in the American War of Independence had seen action at Bunker Hill (1775), an experience he shared in turn with David Collins, on whom more below. Captured off the HMS Ardent, Robert Ross was a French prisoner of war from 1780 to 1781. 7. All of the above-­listed material on the American postings of First Fleet officers shows up in the Australian Dictionary of Biography entries on these men or in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In the case of those officers who went on to more illustrious careers, it fills half pages in their biographies. Nowhere is it correlated. 8. David Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales (University of Sydney Library Digital Edition, 2003), 1:155; Miriam Dixon, The Real Matilda: Woman and Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present (Sydney: University of New South Wales Press, 1999), 140–­41; Anita Selzer, Governors’ Wives in Colonial Australia (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2002), 141; John Bradley Hirst, Freedom on the Fatal Shore: Australia’s First Colony (Melbourne: Black, 2008), 166. 9. Selzer, Governors’ Wives in Colonial Australia, 141. The spikes deprived slaves of sleep and made eating or dressing difficult (Gabriel Debien, Les Esclaves Aux Antilles Françaises [XVIIe—­XVIIIe Siècles] [Basse-­Terre: Société d’Histoire de la Guadeloupe and Société d’Histoire de la Martinique, 1974], 432–­33). They are the distinguishing marks pointing to an American context compared to the ordinary slave collars, for example, those exhibited for sale in eighteenth-­century England (Alan Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain [London: Pluto, 1984], 58). Unwittingly, Grace Karsken points to America also as providing an agricultural model in Indian maize growing, which “was unknown in England” (Karsken, The Colony: A History of Early Sydney [Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2009], 116), land-­grants (100), and farmers “adopting the bush fallow method, similar to that used in the North American colonies” (116). The layout of the early government farm, sleeping “ten convicts to a hut,” also has more in common with Caribbean plantations than with the model of Lord Dorchester’s Milton Abbas estate that Karsken evokes (ibid., 80–­82). 10. Brian H. Fletcher, “Collins, David (1756–­1810), judge and army officer,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), n.p. 11. Jonathan Williams Austin to John Adams, 7 July 1775, in Massachusetts Historical Society Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed. James Taylor (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2015). 12. Christopher Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels: The War for America, 1770–­1781 (London: Grafton, 1990), 54. 13. Matthew S. Spring, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775–­1783, vol. 19 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), 117. 14. Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, 51. 15. Qtd. ibid., 73. 16. Qtd. in Edward E. Curtis, The Organization of the British Army in the American Revolution (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1927), 20. 202

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17. According to Stephen Conway, the majority of officers originally saw the conflict in the American colonies as “a golden opportunity to obtain rapid professional advancement” and cared little for patriotic or loyalist sentiments (“British Army Officers and the American War of Independence,” William and Mary Quarterly 41, no. 2 [1984]: 276). 18. Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 32. 19. Spring, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only, 208. 20. Curtis, The Organization of the British Army in the American Revolution, 20. 21. On Bunker Hill as an experience to turn British officers into hard-­liners, see Stephen Conway, “To Subdue America: British Army Officers and the Conduct of the Revolutionary War,” William and Mary Quarterly 43, no. 3 (1986): 397–­98; on the impact in the rank and file, see Conway, “ ‘The Great Mischief Complain’d of ’: Reflections on the Misconduct of British Soldiers in the Revolutionary War,” William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 3 (July 1990): 377–­78. 22. Qtd. in Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 33. 23. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 33. 24. Ibid. 25. Moore, The Loyalists: Revolution, Exile, Settlement, 49. 26. See, for example, Alexander Graydon. Memoirs of a Life, Chiefly Passed in Pennsylvania; Within the Last Sixty Years; With Occasional Remarks upon the General Occurrences, Character and Spirit of that Eventful Period. (Harrisburgh: John Wyeth, 1811), 138, or Austin’s letter immediately after Bunker Hill to John Adams, 7 July 1775, in: Massachusett’s Historical Society Founding Families: Digital Editions of the Papers of the Winthrops and the Adamses, ed. James Taylor (Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society, 2015), http://​www​.masshist​.org​/publications​/apde2​/view​?id​=​ADMS​-06​-03​-02​-0040. 27. Pybus, Black Founders, 92. Similar statements come from Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 30, 50; and G. D. Woods, who noted that Collins “generally did his best to act fairly and lawfully” (Woods, A History of Criminal Law in New South Wales, the Colonial Period, 1788–­1900 [Sydney: Federation, 2002], 23). 28. Pybus, Black Founders, 96. 29. Qtd. in Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 49. 30. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 48. John Nagle quotes Wentworth’s complaint of 1819: “The brave appearance of this tribunal has long been odious and revolting to the majority of the colonists. It is disgusting to an Englishman to see a culprit, however heinous may be his offence, arraigned before a court clad in full military costume” (Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 192). 31. When Admiral Howe wrote a letter to Lieutenant Ralph Clark refusing to allow Clark’s wife and young son to accompany him to New South Wales, he phrased his rejection in strikingly similar terms “as the service on which [Clark was] desirious [sic] of being Employed will probably Require as much attention to the military Duties of [his] profession as could be needful in time of War” (The Journal and Letters of Lt. Ralph Clark, 1787–­1792, ed. Paul Fidlon and R. J. Ryan [Sydney: Australian Documents Library, 1981], 243). 32. Ibid., 272. 33. A sample shall suffice here: “a marine belonging to the Same Ship [HMS Alexander] for theft was Sentanced 300 Lashes recied 50 & was forgiven the rest” (John Easty, 203

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Pt Jno Easty. A Memorandum of the Transa of a Voiage from England to Botany Bay in The Scarborough transport Captn Marshall Commander kept by me your humble Servan John Easty marine wich began 1787, State Library of New South Wales: Manuscripts, Oral Histories and Pictures, 13); “James Lee for Disebedence of orders Sentanced 100 Lashes & Luke Hines for fighten with Thos Bullmer Sentenced 200 Lashes received 150 forgiven the rest” (ibid., 31). Bulmore had already once received a battering at the hands of Luke Haynes, before his final assault. 34. Easty, Pt Jno Easty, 89. 35. In tune with Alan Frost’s Botany Bay Mirages: Illusions of Australia’s Convict Beginnings (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1994), Karsken argues that as convicts and soldiers also lived off native food, which they collected, the panic of 1790–­92, when staples nearly ran out repeatedly, was ultimately needless (273). Retrospectively, it is easy to belittle the feeling of geographic isolation and the confusion about the environment (climate, seasons, fauna and flora), which, however, must have been quite daunting for contemporaries without the additional threat of starvation. For instance, in the First Fleet’s surgeon-­general’s Journal, the Australian “environment where abnormality might be the norm” was a case of the “bizarre becom[ing] disturbingly quotidian” (Ross Gibson The Diminishing Paradise: Changing Literary Perceptions of Australia [Sydney: Angus and Robertson/Sirius, 1984], 40). 36. General Order, qtd. in Hibbert, Redcoats and Rebels, 62. 37. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 121. 38. Cf. Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 162. 39. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 49. 40. Qtd. in Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 127. 41. Cf. ibid., 127–­28. 42. Easty, Pt Jno Easty, 111. 43. Ibid. 44. Jonathan King, Australia’s First Fleet: The Voyage and the Re-­Enactment, 1788–­1988 (London and Sydney: Robertsbridge, 1988), 51. 45. Collins, An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales, 84. 46. Qtd. in Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 58. 47. Cf. Pybus, Black Founders, 127–­28. 48. Hew Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy: The Reform of the British Army, 1830–­54 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), 76. 49. Alan Atkinson, “Ross, Robert (c. 1740–­1794), army officer and colonial official,” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 50. I have transcribed the quotations from the original manuscript, scanned by the State Library of New South Wales (Jacob Nagle His Book A.D. One Thousand Eight Hundred and Twenty Nine May 19th Canton Stark County Ohio, 1775–­1802, compiled 1829 [State Library of New South Wales: Manuscripts, Oral History and Pictures]). John C. Dann’s 1988 edition of Nagle’s journal provides a seminal biographical introduction to Nagle (The Nagle Journal: A Diary of the Life of Jacob Nagle, Sailor, from the Year 1775 to 1841 [New York: Grove, 1988], xvi–xxi) but is edited strangely, with Dann claiming that “Nagle’s spelling has been preserved exactly as written in the original, except for obvious ‘slips of the pen’ ” (xxx) and with Nagle’s abbreviations spelled out and amending the/they 204

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and of/off. Yet this is definitely not the case. In the following passage’s first two sentences, for instance, Nagle’s “store” becomes “provision store”, and his “best Character” becomes “best caractors in the rigment” (Dann, ed., The Nagle Journal, 109). Similar embellishments and changes to the original abound, making Dann’s a readable yet imprecise rendition of Jacob Nagle’s journal. 51. Jacob Nagle His Book, 99–­100. 52. Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 137. 53. Jacob Nagle His Book, 100. 54. Cf. Nagle, Collins, the Courts and the Colony, 125–­26. 55. Cf. Clifford D. Connor, Colonel Despard: The Life and Times of an Anglo-­Irish Rebel (Boston: Da Capo, 1999); and Mike Jay, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard (New York: Bantam, 2004); see also the chapter “The Conspiracy of Edward and Catherine Despard,” in Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London: Verso, 2000), 248–­86. 56. Thomas Jones Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings for High Treason and Other Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Earliest Period to the Year 1783, with Notes and Other Illustrations, vol. 28 (London: Hansard, 1820), 457. 57. Barnes seems unaware of this. He lists all ships on which Hunter served including his position on board the Foudroyant in 1775 (An Unlikely Leader, 52) yet has only this to say about Sir Evan Nepean: “He had earlier served in the navy in North America from 1776–­1781 and could well have met Hunter there” (171). John Knox Laughton, “Hunter, John (1783–­1821),” in Dictionary of National Biography 1885–­1900, vol. 28, ed. Sydney Lee (New York: Macmillan; London: Smith, Elder, 1891), 294. 58. Barnes, An Unlikely Leader, 63. 59. Nicholas Blake and Richard Lawrence, The Illustrated Companion to Nelson’s Navy (Mechanicsburg: Stackpole Books, 2000), 89; Barnes, An Unlikely Leader, 63. 60. Atkinson, “Ross, Robert (c. 1740–­1794), army officer and colonial official,” n.p. 61. As Barnes notes, Hunter was appointed to Admiral Howe’s HMS Eagle “at the instigation of someone unknown” (An Unlikely Leader, 70). He speculates it might have been Captain Jervis (71), and indeed recommendations to new positions most often came from an immediate superior rather than by more remote patronage. 62. Vivienne Parsons, “Nepean, Evan (1752–­1822),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, 1967; Alastair Wilson and Joseph F. Callo, Who’s Who in Naval History: From 1550 to the Present (New York: Routledge, 2004), 227. 63. Linebaugh and Rediker, The Many-­Headed Hydra, 258. 64. Linda Groom, A Steady Hand: Governor Hunter and His First Fleet Sketchbook (Canberra: National Library of Australia, 2012), 15; Rif Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 1714–­1792: Design, Construction, Careers, and Fates (Barnsley: Seaforth, 2007), 231; Barnes, An Unlikely Leader, 77; Winfield, British Warships in the Age of Sail, 73.

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The Tea Not Consumed Cultural and Political Meanings of the American Revolution in China, 1774–­1912 J ENG-­G U O CHEN

The American Revolution did not attract significant attention in China until the late nineteenth century, when the Chinese were increasingly occupied with republican and democratic ideas in the lead-­up to the dissolution of the Qing dynasty and the emergence of the Republic of China in 1912. Ten years before the emperor was overthrown by revolutionaries calling for a republic, Liang Qichao (梁啟超), probably the most influential Chinese writer at the time, observed that in the whole vast expanse of China no one knew the importance of American independence, which, along with the French Revolution, was an epoch-­making episode “in the history of the globe.” Although Liang conceded that the American Revolution had little to do with China, his observation highlights the tension between China’s outsize power over European markets in the late eighteenth century and its negligible interest in them, a lack of interest that seemingly led to British encroachments into China’s trading practices in the early nineteenth century.1 To the imperial Qing court and its magistrates, the American Revolution indeed had little to do with China, for it had no impact on the politics in imperial China or its vassals. It, for example, did not endanger the tributary system imperial China endorsed. Nonetheless, the Manchurian Empire in China, as a major source of goods sold in European markets, had been irrevocably entangled as France, Great Britain, and other European countries vied with each other. These countries constituted what modern historians identify as the “proto-­capitalist,” or modern, globalization of the economy, in which goods of mass production such as sugar, coffee, cotton, porcelain, and tea replaced honorific goods like “Kashmiri shawls, Chinese silks, Arab horses, and precious stones”; the trade of these latter goods Christopher Bayly has aptly termed “archaic globalization.” More importantly, the former type of trade involving commercial goods was set into motion by the “arms of mercantilist state powers,” which led to a series of financial and 206

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fiscal crises and international military rivalries, including the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution.2 Yet this essay considers how China was both absent and present in discourses about the Anglo-­American Crisis because of the ways in which independence from Britain was mediated by tea exported from China. It will illustrate how the early state-­driven capitalist system of tea trade was tantamount to the fiscal and, consequently, political crisis in British America in the period 1754–­76. No later than 1754, tea became the most important commodity in the English East India Company’s (EIC) trade to China.3 From 1768 to 1772, the EIC exported no less than 44,141,190 pounds of tea from China.4 In the American colonies, the yearly consumption of Chinese tea went as high as “three-­quarters of a pound per capita.” Lord North believed that the American market would import two million pounds of tea per year if the price was competitive enough to end the practice of Dutch merchants smuggling tea into the colonies.5 The gigantic amount of imported tea was a double-­edged sword to the English state and the chartered company. On the one hand, the tea, having been heavily taxed, contributed a considerable tax income to the English fiscal-­military state.6 On the other hand, the imports took a great quantity of specie directly from the company and indirectly from the English state into China.7 After the Seven Years’ War, the English government found itself under unprecedented pressure caused by the shortage of specie. After the war, the EIC was allowed to establish a government in India. It appointed a governor-­general in Calcutta. In addition to regular payments to its army, the EIC now also had to pay the courts and schools, as well as the clerks; it did so by collecting land revenue based on the diwani rights granted by the Moghul emperor. According to modern studies, though, the land revenue in India was not enough to cover the administration it launched for that purpose, especially in the seasons of famine. Likewise, the British Parliament, determined to strengthen its imperial control over its North American colonies, required more revenues and money to ensure its effective function. Tea importation grew with the first conspicuous enforcement of imperial policies by the British Parliament from 1754 to 1773. Because of the value and popularity of drinking tea, the tea trade could be much more easily taxed than other products, and the money raised through taxes was used to support the first British attempts at exerting imperial control. More important, however, consumption of mass-­produced commodities such as tea, along with porcelains, cottons, and some other goods in Britain and America, bespeaks the purchasing power of the middling classes. 207

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Unlike the objects of “Archaic globalization” that were owned or collected to reveal an individual’s prestige,8 tea was meant not to be collected but to be consumed. Tea and its equipage, the porcelain teapot, constituted not only a new taste in beverages but a type of civil society, or what Jürgen Habermas famously described as the public sphere, in which tea was served, along with coffee, as a part of the ritual of social gatherings; in this sphere, public opinions, information, and agendas were shared, circulated, and discussed. A sizable population in England and North America was, like Samuel Johnson, “a hardened and shameless Tea-­drinker.” Tea changed women’s roles as well; the habit of tea drinking was held responsible for the change in women’s domestic politics in England.9 More significantly, the tea-­drinking habit led to more venues for social gatherings than those in coffeehouses, taverns, and clubs. Such social meetings informed Joseph Addison’s idea of the polite culture, on the one hand, and figured largely into the radicalization of English politics, on the other.10 In American colonial society, inhabitants also witnessed a burgeoning civil society or public sphere intimately related with tea drinking.11 Modern scholars have fruitfully demonstrated that the popularization of print and consumer culture fashioned civil behaviors that destabilized political authority, which contributed to the French Revolution to a significant extent.12 The American colonies anticipated such a cultural and political shift. For instance, a group of protesters in New York in 1770 posted an announcement to the “Public” that urged the city inhabitants “to meet at the Coffee-­House” to “give their Sentiments relative to the Article of Tea.”13 In short, modern globalization shapes and is shaped by a new form of political culture imminent to the lives of the marketplace and public sphere. As a major economy in the eighteenth century, Qing China appeared to create, along with Britain and France, the conditions for the fiscal-­military state and civil society to grow and thrive in Europe and the North America. After American independence was internationally recognized by the Treaty of Paris in 1783, the Americans believed the best strategy for maintaining peace was for the new nation to engage in international commerce.14 Interpretations of the American Revolution circulated in the popular imagination in China neglected to consider China’s substantial role in meditating trade between Britain and the American colonies. The revolutionary movements in Taiwan and then on the mainland in the twentieth century, however, led the Chinese to reinterpret its relation to transatlantic history. This essay presents conceptions of the American Revolution in China in three major but intermittent periods. First, it argues that in the period 208

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commencing from the eve of the Seven Years’ War to the outbreak of American Revolution, China played an important role in the political crises in North America notwithstanding the little notice it garnered from contemporary Chinese and modern historians. Second, it gives an overview of the first historical accounts of the American independence in China in the 1830s as mediated by European and American missionaries. The scatteredness and marginality of the accounts of American history in China resulted from imperial China’s intensified engagement along its western border and its deliberate recoil from the European maritime nations. Last, the essay identifies a buoyant enthusiasm for the American Revolution among Chinese dissidents in the first decade of the twentieth century as they sought to advance republicanism in China. To many Chinese revolutionaries and intellectuals, the American Revolution, striving to break the imperial yoke of Britain, embodied the prototype of a modern free state, a state they yearned to simulate in the struggle against Manchurian rule.

The China Market, the British State, and American Civil Society, 1754–­1773 At the turn of the eighteenth century, the legitimacy and government of the Manchurian Empire in China was firmly consolidated through various means of pacification under the emperor Kangxi (r. 1661–­1722). At the same time, Great Britain, located at the opposite end of the Euro-­Asian continent, began to prosper under a mixed government established after the Glorious Revolution (1688–­89). After the Act of Union in 1707, England and Scotland joined together in expeditions all over the world and overtook the Dutch as the supreme maritime power.15 France, during the reign of Louis XIV (r. 1643–­1715) reached, probably, the zenith of its prestige and power on the Continent.16 The British American colonies during this time were just beginning to coalesce. By 1776, however, these three empires all came to a decisive turning point in their respective histories. The Manchurian Empire in China succeeded in maintaining its prestige and the integrity of its dominant power in Asia. Having adopted an isolationist policy with regard to the outside world, China purposely turned its back on European affairs, whereas Europe was undergoing a sea change in sociopolitical patterns and innovations in philosophy, science, and technology. By the end of the eighteenth century, a keen British observer of the Celestial Kingdom, George Macartney, commented that two British fleets could paralyze all the coast of China.17 Macartney’s remark anticipated the fatal defeat that the Manchurian Empire suffered in the First Opium War (1839–­42). 209

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Britain was a burgeoning world power, and its relentless attempts to raise revenues, in particular after the Seven Years’ War, not only led to the American Revolution but also affected China. In the eighteenth century, European middle and upper classes consumed great quantities of tea, Chinaware, cotton, silks, and some other goods from China. To feed the burgeoning markets in Europe and America, the EIC and other European trading companies poured specie into China. The Chinese market, in fact, devoured about one-­third of the silver annually produced in the Americas.18 Because of the extent of its production, some modern historians describe China as the center of world economic activity at this time.19 As tea boosted the fortunes of both China and Britain, both prominent participants in the global market of the eighteenth century, it became a means to resist the British or assert oneself as an emerging power. According to H. B. Morse, the EIC exported 7,194 piculs of tea from China in 1741. The export amounted to 53,000 piculs in 1764 and 106,000 in 1771, which constituted more than half of the total exported into Europe. In 1774, the EIC found a warehouse in London overstocked with 7,229 piculs of tea.20 Tea not only figured significantly in the British-­Chinese trade but also came to signify resistance and rebellion during the American revolutionary movement. Even before the notorious Tea Act of 1773 that would lead to the Boston Tea Party in December of that year, tea had mediated the colonists’ resistance to the Stamp Act of 1765. Many colonists protested against British revenue taxes, especially the stamp tax, which sought to add a tax on all papers, including newspapers, magazines, and playing cards, on the basis of the Whig principle that no tax should be levied on the colonies without colonial representation in Parliament. In 1766, the market in America saw a type of teapot with the imprint of “No Stamp Act” on one side and “America Liberty Restored” on the other.21 The teapot, made in England, bespoke the British people’s support for the colonists’ protests.22 As drinking tea became a fashionable quotidian ceremony in middle-­and upper-­class life in both Europe and America, the Stamp Act teapot reinforced the image of British imperial governance and later served as a reminder of the former colonies. Tea was brought into the forefront of the American Revolution in 1773. Of the events leading to the outbreak of the Revolutionary War in 1775, the Boston Tea Party played a major role. Britain had repealed all the Townshend duties on the American colonies in 1770 except the tax on imported tea, which was kept as proof that Britain could impose taxes on the American colonies. The British Parliament passed the Tea Act in 1773, allowing the EIC to ship tea directly to the American colonies without being taxed in London. 210

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This act was passed to assist the EIC, which had an oversupply of tea in London warehouses. The EIC imported 5,340 tons of tea that year, which made the overstocking even worse. The Tea Act was aimed at cutting the price of tea in America with the expectation that the EIC would sell more tea to the Americans. This would save the EIC from the brink of bankruptcy; it, moreover, attempted to reduce the amount of tea that had for years been smuggled past custom officials by Dutch merchants. If the Americans accepted this cheaper tea from the EIC, then they would be accepting the import tax that the British Parliament had imposed on imported teas. The colonists therefore recognized that buying cheaper tea from the EIC would undercut their principled objection to revenue acts being imposed upon them by the British Parliament. The Tea Act itself increased the political discontent the Americans felt toward the British. Upon learning of the new tax regulations instituted by the British, many colonists were ready to protest in public. The protesters in Boston acted more radically than their counterparts in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, throwing an entire shipment of Chinese tea belonging to the East India Company into Boston Harbor. British MPs responded to the rebellious acts in 1774 with the Intolerable Acts, as the Americans called them, or the Coercive Acts, as they were called in Britain, which provoked, in turn, widespread resentment among the colonists and directly contributed to the first shots fired at Lexington and Concord and the formation of the First Continental Congress the same year, which was summoned to unite colonial opposition to the Coercive Acts.23 This well-­known history, though, largely neglects to mention the part the producer, China, played in these events; the politico-­economic order that British authority wanted to impose on the Americans could not be realized without the participation of China. Britain was China’s largest trading partner at the time, even if the Qing court did not acknowledge this. A great proportion of the silks, cotton, chinaware, tea, and other merchandise imported into British colonies by the EIC came from China. It is, thus, curious to modern historians why China, which was so “involved” in the global trade with Britain, could be so indifferent or naïve about British politics; almost no news, in fact, about the American Revolution circulated in China. In reminiscences of his childhood, Goethe recalled that when the Seven Years’ War and American Revolution broke out, his family living in Frankfurt considered both of these conflicts as ones about to change the world. Goethe’s family was right, as the modern age has been shaped by the might of the nations involved in these two crises. 211

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In 1776, however, the Qing court or China thought otherwise. Scarcely any news concerning the war permeated into the Celestial Kingdom. Qianlong (r. 1735–­1795) not only consolidated but expanded the empire his ancestors handed down to him. But what the Qianlong Emperor had in mind was terrestrial and nomadic control rather than oceanic. His cavalry carried imperial mandates all over China and the western hinterlands he newly conquered or pacified. But the news coming with the monsoon currents from the seas was rarely transmitted to the imperial court in Beijing. The Qing Empire, nevertheless, did not always reject things European. Qianlong’s grandfather Kangxi (r. 1661–­1722) successfully suppressed internal rebellions, especially the Revolt of the Three Feudatories (1673–­81). He also virtually eradicated the strongholds of Japanese pirates, many of them of Chinese origins, in 1684 by conquering Taiwan, which had heavily taxed the resources of the Ming dynasty. With the Pax Sinica achieved, Kangxi opened four ports for foreign trade. He also employed Jesuit missionaries as royal astronomers and to teach him Western sciences. He received Louis XIV’s royal mathematicians and, reportedly, corresponded with the Sun King.24 But during Yongzhen’s and Qianlong’s reigns, 1722–­1735 and 1735–­1795, respectively, the imperial policy toward European nations became more rigid. For instance, Yongzhen banned Christian missionaries in 1721 after the famous Chinese Rites Controversy, which ended with Pope Clement X’s official disapproval of the Jesuits’ practice of Chinese rites. Qianlong closed down three of the trade ports his grandfather had opened. After 1757, all foreigners were restricted to trading in Canton. In other words, while a globalized trade system grew more extensive, both politically and economically, especially among European powers such as the Dutch, French, and British, imperial China intentionally withdrew from it.25 Qianlong wanted to keep Westerners at bay because his empire, thriving with abundant resources and land, did not rely on global trade for its strength and prosperity. Qianlong instead focused on pacifying or conquering campaigns against neighboring nations and former vassals in order to consolidate the prestige of the Manchurian Empire. Many of the military campaigns occurred concurrently with the Seven Years’ War and the American Revolution. Qianlong twice conquered the Zunghar Khanate in 1755 and 1757. In 1757, Qing China suppressed Muslim riots in Xinjiang. In 1762, Qianlong conquered Burma. Then, in 1776, Qianlong suppressed the rebellions of the indigenous hill people of Jinchuan, who lived on the border of Tibet. Like the Seven Years’ War, those campaigns were costly and detrimental to the finances of the empire. Qianlong did collect considerable 212

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revenue from foreign trade, but it was not enough to cover the costs of his many military campaigns.26 As a great collector of art and curiosities, however, Qianlong made clever use of foreign trade. He ordered imperial officers at Hoppo and Canton to purchase exotic goods, especially clocks and gold-­gilded balls. In one letter, Qianlong emphatically instructed his officers to pay for these purchases with the revenue collected from Hong merchants and “not to concern themselves with prices.”27 Qianlong apparently did not use trade with Western nations to support a fiscal-­military state, even if he raised a series of costly campaigns during his reign. Like many of his literati subjects, Qianlong nurtured a sophisticated culture of collection and patronage, which is more resonant with Bayly’s term “archaic globalization.”28 Boosted by Spanish specie and the Chinese market, the modern marketplace helped produce a civil society involved in the culture of mass production and mass consumption, which, in turn, gave rise to a sense of citizenship. But imperial China was virtually out of touch with the political culture of this new civil society, partly because the ruler of the country did not pursue any aggressive policy of commercial expansion. Nor did he encourage a culture of consumption within his domains. This explains, in part, why Qianlong, as a political leader and the guardian of a tributary system, could decide to close down all other ports involved in foreign trade except Canton. Modern historians refer to this exclusion of foreign trade from the imperial Manchurian Empire as the “Canton System.” As far as economic policy is concerned, the Canton System is a crucial point in which China diverged from the Western nations. If the importance of global trade was inconsequential to the development of China at the level of social structures and (popular) politics, it was certainly instrumental to the development of the British Empire. Tea became an important commodity for the EIC on the eve of the Seven Years’ War. It was by no means a coincidence. The China tea trade tied up no less than 90 percent of the EIC’s trade to China. It contributed 10 percent of the British Crown’s revenue.29 However, the Canton System was an indirect consequence of the Seven Years’ War. Since the beginning of the eighteenth century, resources from the EIC had become increasingly significant for the national treasury of Britain. Thus, the chartered company made ever-­increasing demands for more favorable trading terms with China, in terms of both quantity and efficiency. In the 1750s, the EIC decided to establish a factory in Ninpo (or Limpo) to trade with the Chinese as the taxes were lower there than in Canton, and the colder climate in this area might have increased its sales of English woolen goods. In 1757–­58, the Court of 213

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Directors of the EIC dispatched orders that all supercargoes form one council to enhance its power of negotiation with Chinese merchants, ending the practice of separate and individual negotiations.30 In response to the EIC’s move to Ninpo, the officials at Canton targeted the EIC and urged the imperial court to drive foreign merchants back to Canton to continue their trade. In the difficult circumstances of the Seven Years’ War, to facilitate and increase the China trade, James Flint, a linguist for the EIC, wrote, with the help of a local, a petition to Qianlong; the petition expressed a desire to trade in Ninpo and accused Canton officials of corruption for demanding their “customary charges” from foreign merchants. To defuse Flint’s complaints and to prevent future trouble with Westerners about trade policies, Qianlong issued imperial mandates to his officers addressing the issue: “My direct subjects (neidi ren) who help in writing that petition deserve severe punishment.”31 At the end of the episode, Lin Huai, the Chinese interpreter who helped Flint draw up the petition, was executed. Flint was imprisoned for three years, and the Canton official, Li Yungbiao, whom he accused of corruption was also punished. The incident led to the closing of all Chinese ports except Canton to foreign trade.32 The year of the creation of the Canton System, 1757, deserves further examination. As noted, the Canton System emerged out of Qianlong’s reaction to the British efforts to expand their trade to China, which was first boosted by the Seven Years’ War. Robert Markley persuasively argues that the trade to China presented a profound challenge to many English writers in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Writers from John Milton onward looked to a heathen, but wealthy, country as exhibiting “the golden age of prosperity and social stability,” but the empires of East Asia threatened the narrative that Christian civilizations alone are destined to thrive.33 Trade, with its ephemera of credits, speculations, currencies, and its corruptions and involvement with “heathen nations,” did present great challenges to those who sought to maintain the integrity of English civilization and the hierarchical order of aristocratic society. In the mid-­eighteenth century, nevertheless, after the long germination of mercantilism and statism, the old modes of trade adapted to new economic and geopolitical realities. Without a large population like France, Great Britain was destined to rely heavily on trade in order to achieve its imperial ambitions. Trade, in short, emerged as the British raison d’être. As European nations, especially Britain and France, were ever more avid for overseas goods and resources, they endeavored to establish more trading markets.34 Qing China, in contrast, became virtually indifferent to the affairs of European empires. Qianlong’s 214

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restricted policies and attitude to Western nations evinced his confidence in the imperial power of the Qing court and a willingness to punish those who collaborated with Westerners.35 His policies held sway through the reign of the next emperor until his grandson lost ground to Britain following the Opium War, which shifted trade policy in the Europeans’ favor. Modern historians rightfully remind us that the Americans, especially Boston merchants, already participated in trade with Asia before the control of the EIC in the Indian Ocean in the seventeenth century. In that area, Chinese junks, as its ships were called, also actively bartered with Western buyers. Many Chinese products, especially porcelains, were imported into North America.36 Given this history, it is only too understandable that the Americans would protest against British imperial acts restricting navigation and imposing commercial taxes. But in the turbulent years of the 1770s, the Americans contentiously launched a popular protest against not only the British-­Chinese tea trade but also the consumption of tea. Republican sentiments led people to proclaim that drinking tea was a public evil. The First Provincial Congress of Massachusetts pronounced that to purchase tea in the circumstances was to conduct “high treason against three millions of Americans.”37 Tea, according to Caroline Frank, was as highly politicized as slavery and despotism.38 Many beverage substitutes were suggested in the place of tea that once “civilized” Americans. Materials have never been neutral, just as trade has never been free. Their meanings are subject to political structures even as they come to create varied political cultures through appropriation. As soon as the United States was established as a sovereign state in 1783, and therefore no longer covered by British trade agreement, the nation swiftly sent cargos to establish a trade relations with Manchurian China at Canton.

Introduction of the American Revolution into China The few reports of the American Revolution that circulated in Chinese in the nineteenth century indicate that the Chinese neglected to capitalize on the way it was portrayed overseas. The first description of the American Revolution published in Chinese and in China is, probably, the brief account of American history given by the German evangelical missionary Karl Gützlaff, Anglicized as Charles Gützlaff in China (1803–­1851) in 1837. Having been employed by the EIC as a missionary, Gützlaff edited the Chinese journal Dongxiyangkao meiyuetongjizhuan (Eastern Western Monthly Magazine, 1833–­38), which introduced many Chinese readers to modern European 215

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countries, including the Netherlands, Sweden, Poland, France, Britain, and the British colonies in Africa, among others through evangelizing stories from the Bible. Gützlaff also introduced the United States to Chinese readers. Gützlaff ’s story of the American Revolution in particular—­in its content, perspective, and even tone—­was disseminated widely until the end of the Qing regime. While the Chinese paid little attention to the burgeoning nation, American businessmen leaned upon the economic signifiers of China to signal U.S. sovereignty after the war ended. Trading with China established the United States as an independent participant in the world marketplace without relying upon Britain or its remaining colonies. Gützlaff begins his history of the United States with an anecdote about foreign factories in Canton. A Juren from Jiangxi, who has been to the factory, asks an interpreter of the Hong Merchants what nation the flag of “Huaci” represents.39 The interpreter tells him that it represents the United States of North America. The flag first appeared in Canton factories in 1784. Before the Treaty of Paris was signed in 1783 and the United States had to forge its own trade agreements, a rumor began to spread from Salem to Philadelphia that an American ship had set out for trade with China.40 The rumor only became reality when the Empress of China sailed from New York Harbor bound for China on 22 February 1784, George Washington’s Birthday. After fourteen months and twenty-­four days at sea, John Greene, its commander, ordered a 13-­gun salute to New York upon sailing through the Narrows.41 The fanfare marked American merchants’ ability to bypass trade with the British West Indies. On its way to the Chinese market, the Empress of China was loaded with great quantities of ginseng, a medicine highly valued by the Chinese people and, above all, in the imperial court custom. On its return, the ship brought large quantities of silks, porcelain wares, and teas, especially Bohea tea and Hyson tea.42 The route, the ship’s name, the date of sailing, and the goods of the Empress of China are all full of symbolic meaning and historical significance. The ship’s journey marks the first time the Americans traded with China without the mediation of the EIC. Political independence brought economic liberation and the opportunity to trade with merchants across the world without impediment. Although the appellation of the ship appears to be playful, it duly reflects, if circumspectly, the newfound nation’s self-­ consciousness as a new republic that continues to engage with monarchical countries. In the Declaration of Independence of 1776, the colonists enumerated the misconduct of King George III and denounced him as a tyrant. By calling the first trading vehicle the Empress of China, the Americans 216

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distinguished between the old world of monarchs and the new world of republicanism. But they conscientiously avoided the masculine side of the imperial power and adopted the feminine character of China, that is, the commercial power of the empire.43 David Hume famously argued that commerce softened manners and that civilization was a process of feminizing the nation. As a nation, breaking with the British monarch, the Americans searched for a person or personified object to represent the collective political body. This power was invested in the presidency only in 1789. Sailing on Washington’s Birthday served as an ironic allusion to the royalists’ celebration of the king’s day. To fight physically for interests and dignity is one thing, but to change a culture or a mind-­set is quite another. Despite the inertia of tradition and custom, trading with China without the EIC’s mediation reinforced the legitimacy of the Revolution. The republican Americans drank newly imported Chinese tea that was brought to them unencumbered by British trade laws and tariffs. Gützlaff ’s account of the Revolution focuses on the antagonism over taxation but neglects to point out that the chests of tea dumped in Boston Harbor in December 1773 were all imported from Canton: The British Parliament wanted to tax the people but the Americans resisted. The colonial governor in the colonies coerced the people to comply and imprudently levied maritime custom charges. In the 38th year of Qianlong’s reign, the EIC imported tea to America. The magistrate wanted to tax the tea. Dissenting people boarded onto the ship and threw the tea into the sea. The Parliament of Great Britain decided to suppress the riots. The new citizens (xinmin) came up to resist the coercion with the help of the French, the Dutch, and the Spanish. At last, the British could not but grant the Americans self-­government, making laws for themselves.44

This omission seems to ask readers to focus on the attributes that lay the groundwork for an enviable nation. The account also puts the blame squarely on a repressive government to cultivate sympathy for the newly liberated Americans. In the next issue of the journal, Gützlaff characterizes the U.S. polity as “minzhu” (democratic). Describing American government as a democracy has been a stock in trade since the publication of Tocqueville’s acclaimed Democracy in America (1835). The trinity of republicanism, democracy, and independence is the way that the Chinese public perceived (the legacy of) the American Revolution. Gützlaff creates a fictive Chinese merchant living in America who sends a letter back home to his uncle. The pseudo family letter emphasizes that the United States thrives because of its 217

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foundations in Christianity, commerciality, and democracy. It tells the uncle that “during Qianlong’s reign” the colonies were granted independence. The states deploy liberal policies that allow “the people to live in good order and express their opinions or ideas without censorship or prohibition.” The people also put the emphasis on trade with all nations of the world more than China did. Lastly, it assures that this country is wealthy, well populated, and technologically advanced; yet unlike some of its European counterparts, the people are not at all debauched by affluent conditions because they are morally guided by Christianity.45 In 1838, after the Opium War, Elijah Coleman Bridgeman, an American missionary in Malaya, published Damei lianbang zhilue (大美聯邦志略, A brief history of the great United States) in Singapore, in which the American Revolution is more exhaustively delineated than in the account by Gützlaff. Bridgeman links the Stamp Act and the Tea Act, arguing that the Tea Act was enacted because of the failure of the Stamp Act. Such a narrative gives readers the impression that British authorities constantly harassed and exploited the American colonists for their own interest. Bridgeman provides a vivid historical depiction of the Boston Tea Party, which he describes as the major event that led to the Revolution. He describes how, having been infuriated by the Tea Act, several Bostonians wearing masks boarded the ship and threw 342 chests of Chinese tea into the sea. People in the streets protested that “if the King of Britain demands the custom revenue, we would drink nothing but water.”46 More significantly, Bridgeman was probably the first person to translate the Declaration of Independence into Chinese. It is likely, however, that the majority of the Chinese people were little concerned with Christianity, commerciality, and democracy in the 1830s. These three principal characteristics of the American nation, in fact, were antithetical to the politico-­economic principles of imperial Manchurian China. As the next section will illustrate, however, when Taiwan proclaimed independence from China upon being ceded to Japan in 1895, the American Revolution and its “polity” of democracy served as pivotal inspiration for the short-­lived republic in Taiwan.

The Legacy of the American Revolution in China Gützlaff ’s rendering of the American Revolution, rosy as it was, sank into oblivion soon after its publication. It only reemerged in 1895, when Taiwan, then a province of imperial Manchurian China, sought independence in 218

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order to resist the invasion of imperial Japan. Later in the last decade of the Qing government, Chinese revolutionary societies also circulated the history of the American Revolution. To the revolutionaries, the independence of America served as historical inspiration for the Chinese as they agitated for their independence from the yoke of the Manchu government, on the one hand, and from European imperialism, on the other. Other conflicts emerged that thrust China into geopolitics. The Sino-­Japanese War of 1894 resulted in the humiliating defeat of China and the Treaty of Shimonoseki, in which the Qing government agreed to cede Taiwan and Liaotong Peninsula to Japan, in addition to paying a heavy indemnity of 21 million taels of silver.47 The cession of Liaotong was later revoked because of the intervention of Russia, Germany, and France. Led by the governor of Taiwan, Tang Jingsong (唐景崧), many officials and gentry in Taiwan hoped that Western nations would also intercede in Taiwan’s affairs. Tang Jingsong, Liu Yongfu (劉永福), Chen Jitong (陳季同), and others inaugurated the Taiwan Republic, or Formosan Republic as some Western media called it, on 25 May 1895. Tang was raised to the position of the president. Liu was appointed by Tang as the Grand General (Dajiangjun), Chen the minister of foreign affairs. Tang sent the Declaration of Independence, “Official Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Formosa,” to foreign consuls. The form of this independence declaration mimics, of course, the American one.48 However, the most revealing part about the declaration was its claim that independence was based in realpolitik as it calls for an alliance of foreign powers to help the people in Taiwan to resist the invading Japanese: “If we suffer this [of Japanese rule], the land of our hearths and homes will become the land of savages and barbarians, but if we do not suffer it, our condition of comparative weakness will certainly not endure long. Frequent conferences have been held with the Foreign Powers, who all aver that the People of Formosa must establish their independence before the Powers will assist them.”49 Such a diplomatic strategy of independence is identical with Richard Henry Lee’s famous resolution of independence in the Second Continental Congress on the 7 June 1776, which led to the American Declaration of Independence signed on 4 July. Lee argued that a declaration of independence was the best way to secure foreign assistance in negotiating and battling against Britain. European states would be hesitant to provide economic and military assistance to America if it remained a colonial possession of Britain.50 Tang Jingsong and his associates hoped that Britain and France would intercede. After Britain had proclaimed neutrality, Chen Jitong hoped to 219

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persuade the French to assist, because of his experience in the Chinese embassy in France. On the 21 May 1895, a French ship, the Beautemps Beauprè, arrived in Taiwan, and Chen was invited on board. It is most likely that Chen was responsible for the wording in the Formosa Declaration of Independence.51 Yet foreign aid is tied to whether or not a country’s involvement will maintain or improve its balance of power. While France, of course, sided with the Americans during the Anglo-­American hostilities in the hope that the war would boost France’s position and prestige in Europe, it had no such interest in Asia at that time. Without any assistance from foreign powers, the Taiwan Republic stood as a castle on the sand. On 5 June, Tang returned to the mainland. Liu Yongfu succeeded Tang as the president of Tainan, but he had to concede his failure in resisting the Japanese invasion. He retreated to the mainland as well when the republic fell in October of the same year. On mainland China, interest in the American Revolution ramped up at the turn of the twentieth century. In a short span of two years or so, in 1901–­3, China witnessed numerous publications related to the American Revolution. For instance, Zhang Zongyuan (章宗元) translated Edward Canning’s A History of the United States into Chinese and published it both in Tokyo and Shanghai in 1902. He gave the Chinese version a new title of Meiguo Dulishi (The history of independence of the United States). This thoughtful change probably helped its sale, and the text went into a second edition in three months.52 In 1902–­3, Youxue Yibian (游學譯 編, Miscellaneous translations and compilations of overseas students), a journal established by Yang Du and some other Chinese expatriates in Japan, published a series of short articles introducing the American Revolution and the French Revolution to its readers. The demand for information about the American Revolution increased for practical reasons: China was on the brink of its own political revolution. The years between 1895 and 1900 witnessed a drastic radicalization of politics in China.53 In the devastating aftermath of the Sino-­Japanese War, the young emperor of Guangshu initiated a political reform and prepared for a coup against the empress dowager in 1898. He summoned some critically minded young patriots, including Kang Yuowei (康有為), the mentor of Liang Qichao; Yang Du (楊度); Tan Sitong (譚嗣同); and others to assist him. The coup and the reform failed three months later, however. Six of the young reformers and associates of Guangshu were executed by the empress dowager, while Kang and Liang barely escaped and fled to Japan. Apart from the reformist agenda, Sun Yat-­sen (孫逸仙), Huang Hsing (黃興), Zhang Taiyan (章太炎), Chiu Jin (秋瑾), and many others established revolutionary societies after 1895. They campaigned for a republic, not a 220

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mixed monarchy as Kang and Liang envisioned. After the Boxer Rebellion and the Eight-­Nation Alliance in 1900, radicalization escalated. Anarchism, assassination, and messianism became not uncommon in Chinese politics. As early as 1899, Liang published Ziyoushu (The book of freedom), in which he lauds the United States as ziyou zuguo zhizu (自由祖國之祖, the prototype, or father, of the free fatherlands). His very short description of the founding of the United States is certainly error-­laden in many regards. What is most interesting, though, is that Liang freely paints a picture of the American Revolution in a romantic light and depicts its Rousseauian impulses as consonant with the Zeitgeist of his fin de siècle China. Remember that a handful of ancestors abandoned their boats in the severe gale and heavy snow [in Plymouth] on 22 December 1620, and landed on the stony seashore of the Atlantic Ocean. Their minds had to be full of ideas and dreams, their bodies limitless freedom, and their visions uncluttered and great. This is what we Chinese call creatio ex nihilo. The spirit of freedom gives birth to this New World. Everything that comes into being has its root in causes from one thousand years ago; and this effect will continue one thousand years from now. Should any one of us pay his highest reverence to George Washington, I shall ask my people to venerate him.54

Three years after composing those lines, on the 5 May 1902, Liang Qichao, then in exile, found himself in the United States touring Boston. As the author of Ziyoushu, Liang felt particularly grateful and buoyant about the trip. As he admitted, it had been his dream for years to one day visit the sites of the first American revolutionary campaign. While visiting the harbor where the Boston Tea Party occurred, Liang was ushered to a bronze tablet at Hollis Street on which the story of the Tea Party movement was inscribed.55 Upon reading the tablet, Liang suddenly became emotional. Once he returned home, Liang composed a poem expressing his sentiments at his personal encounter with the history of the American Revolution juxtaposed with his sentiments about the history of China. The former is symbolized by tea, the latter, by opium. As soon as queshe (Teas) are thrown into the sea, the eagle takes off from the land (the symbolic fauna of America), Grazing bronze tablet describing the memorable story [of the Boston Tea Party]. Suddenly piercing into my mind is the century-­old indignation of the Homeland, The opium smoke envelopes the White Swan Pond. 221

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雀舌 (謂茶)入海鷹起陸 (美國以鷹為徽章), 銅表摩娑一美談. 猛憶故鄉百年恨, 鴉烟烟滿白鵝潭.56

In less than ten years after the participants in the Boston Tea Party dumped tea imported from China into the harbor, Americans consumed more tea, now sweetened by liberation and independence. That night, Liang Qichao tasted the bitterness of Chinese tea. China’s late recognition of the centrality of its tea in the history of American independence proves to be intertwined with its late recognition of its vulnerability to the European importation of opium. Liang retroactively binds China’s interdependence with European powers’ imperial ambitions through his lines of poetry.

Notes The author is indebted to Anthony Kuo Tung Chen, Li-­Chuan Dai, Guo Juin Hong, Shang-­Jen Li, Maria O’Malley, Denys Van  Renen, Peter Zarrow, and, particularly, Harry T. Dickinson for their constructive suggestions and help in preparing this piece. 1. Liang Qi-­chao, “Lun Meifei yingdu zhi zhanshi guanxiyuzhongguo” (On the pertinence of the wars between the United States and Philippines and between Britain and Turkey), in Liang Qi-­chao quanji (Collected works of Liang Qichao) (Beijing: Beijing Zhubanshe), 2:949. For Liang’s legacy, see Hao Chang, Liang Ch’I-ch’ao and Intellectual Transition in China, 1890–­1907 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971); and Xiaobing Tang, Global Space and the Nationalist Discourse of Modernity: The Historical Thinking of Liang Qizhao (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 2. “Proto-­capitalist globalization” is a term coined by C. A. Bayly (see Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914 [Oxford: Blackwell, 2004], 41–­44). Maxine Berg describes it as “modern Globalization,” noting that major parts of the world are connected by goods of mass production (Berg, “Britain’s Asian Century: Porcelain and Global History in the Long Eighteenth Century,” in The Birth of Modern Europe: Culture and Economy 1400–­1800 in Honor of Jan de Vries, ed. Laura Cruz and Joel Mokyr [Leiden: Brill, 2010], 136). 3. Hosea Ballou Morse, The Chronicles of the East India Company, Trading to China 1635–­1834 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1926–­29), 1:295. 4. H. V. Bowen, Revenue and Reform: The Indian Problem in British Politics 1757–­1773 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 121. 5. Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party, 1773: Catalyst for Revolution (Boston: Massachusetts Bicentennial Commission Publication, 1973), 5, 9. 6. The tea duty ranged from 25 to 119 percent in the eighteenth century. For the financial revolution and English fiscal-­military state, see John Brewer, The Sinew of the Power (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988). 7. It is hard to ascertain the quantity of the flow of Spanish American silver into China. Some modern historians suggest 75 percent of the silver mined in America flows 222

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into China (Caroline Frank, Objectifying China: Imagining America Chinese Commodities in Early America [Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2011], 171). 8. Ibid., 20. 9. David Porter, The Chinese Taste in Eighteenth-­Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 10. Lawrence Klein, Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politeness: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-­Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Harry T. Dickinson, The Politics of People in Eighteenth-­Century Britain (London: St. Martin’s, 1995). 11. Frank, Objectifying China, 191. 12. T. C. W. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–­1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); Roger Chatier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lynda G. Cochrane (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991). 13. T.  H. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 293. 14. Peter Onuf and Nicholas Onuf, Federal Union, Modern World: The Law of Nations in an Age of Revolutions 1777–­1814 (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1993). 15. Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–­1727 (Oxford: Clarendon, 2000); Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (East Lothian, Scotland: Tuckwell, 2001), 7–­134; P. J. Marshall, The Eighteenth Century, vol. 2 of The Oxford History of the British Empire, 5 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–­1740 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 16. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture; Glenn Joseph Ames, Colbert, Mercantilism and the French Quest for Asian Trade (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1996). 17. J. L. Cramner-­Byng, ed., An Embassy to China: Being the journal kept by Lord Macartney during his embassy to the Emperor Ch’ien-­lung 1793–­1794 (London: Longman, 1962). 18. Some modern scholars suggest that no less than 75 percent of American silver flew into China (Frank, Objectifying China, 7). Another reason for the great flow of silver into China is that silver was more valuable than in Europe when measured against the gold standard. 19. Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: Europe, China, and the Making of the Modern Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000). 20. Morse, 1:282; 5:114, 146, 156, 186. 21. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, “Political Protest and the World of Goods,” in The Oxford Handbook of the American Revolution, ed. Edward G. Gray and Jane Kamensky (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 65–­84. 22. Dalphy I. Fagerstrom, “Scottish Opinion and the American Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly 11, no. 2 (1954): 252–­75; Harry Dickinson, “ ‘The Friends of America’: British Sympathy with the American Revolution,” in Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–­1848, ed. Michael T. Davis (London: Macmillan, 2000), 1–­29. 23. On the causes and consequences of the Boston Tea Party, see Benjamin W. Labaree, The Boston Tea Party (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964); and Benjamin L. 223

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Carp, Defiance of the Patriots: The Boston Tea Party and the Making of America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). 24. Catherine Jami, The Emperor’s New Mathematics: Western Learning and Imperial Authority during Kangxi’s Reign (1662–­1722) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 25. Catia Antunes, Globalisation in the Early Modern Period: The Economic Relationship between Amsterdam and Lisbon, 1640–­1705 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004). 26. For instance, in 1756, the Hoppo collected revenues of 444,957 taels of silver for the imperial house (Qinggong Guangzhou shixanhang dangan jingxuan [Selected imperial files of the Hong Merchants in Canton, 清宮廣州十三行檔案精選] [Guangzhou: Guangdong Jingji Chubanshe, 2002], 105). According to Mark Elliot, foreign trade contributed to the imperial treasury in China no less than 7.5 million taels of silver, or 2.5 million pounds, from 1730 to 1755 (Elliott, Emperor Qianlong: Son of the Heaven, Man of the World [Upper Saddle River, NJ: Longman, 2009], 134). 27. Qinggong Guangzhou shixanhang dangan jingxuan (Selected imperial files of the Hong Merchants in Canton), 109. 28. Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 41. For connoisseur and collection culture in China, see Craig Clunas, Superfluous Things: Material Culture and Social Status in Early Modern China (Honolulu: Hawai‘i University Press, 1991). 29. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong, 135. 30. Kuo-­Tung Anthony Ch’en, The Insolvency of the Chinese Hong Merchants, 1760–­1843 (Taipei: Institute of Economics Academia Sinica, 1990), 30. 31. Qingkong Guangzhou shixanhang dangan jingxuan (Selected imperial files of the Hong Merchants in Canton), 110–­11. 32. Morse, 5:296–­99. 33. Robert Markley, The Far East and the English Imagination, 1600–­1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 71. 34. Jack Greene, The Intellectual Construction of America: Exceptionalism and Identity from 1492 to 1800 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 95–­129; Richard R. Johnson, “Growth and Mastery: British North America, 1690–­1748,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. P. J. Marshall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), ii, 276–­99. 35. Elliott, Emperor Qianlong. 36. Frank, Objectifying China, 27–­57. 37. Breen, The Marketplace of Revolution, 306. 38. Frank, Objectifying China, 185–­202. 39. Juren was a title for those who passed the second level of the imperial civil examination. His great learning in Chinese verses is contrasted here with his ignorance of the outside world. “Huaci” literally means “the flag (ci) of flowers (hua).” It of course refers to “The Star-­Spangled Banner.” The United States was commonly denominated as “Huaci Guo” in the Qing period, along with some other transliterations of America, such as Yamerica, Yamolichia, Amolichia and others. 40. Philip Chadwick Foster Smith, The Empress of China (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Maritime Museum, 1984), 23. 41. Ibid., 206–­7. 224

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42. Ibid., 232. 43. Pomeranz, The Great Divergence. 44. Charles Gützlaff, “Essay,” Dongxiyangkao meiyuetongjizhuan (Beijing: Zhonghua Shuju Chuban, 1997), 231; my translation. 45. Charles Gützlaff, “Zhi waifong shu shu” (Letter sent from a nephew abroad), Dongxiyangkao meiyuetongjizhuan, (Beijing: Zhonghßua Shuju Chuban, 1997), 241. 46. Bai Zhiwen (稗治文, Elijah Coleman Bridgeman), Damei lianbang zhilue (大美 聯邦志略, A brief history of the great United States) (n.p., n.d.), 42. The texts I consulted are photocopies of the ones kept at Harvard University. 47. S. C. M. Paine, The Sino-­Japanese War of 1894–­1895: Perceptions, Power, and Primacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 48. David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Harry J. Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (1968): 739–­62. 49. James W. Davidson, The Island of Formosa: Past and Present (London and New York: Macmillan, 1903), 279. 50. Howard Jones, Crucible of Power: A History of American Foreign Relations to 1913 (New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009), 8. 51. Harry J. Lamley, “The 1895 Taiwan Republic: A Significant Episode in Modern Chinese History,” Journal of Asian Studies 27, no. 4 (1968): 739–­62; Davidson, The Island of Formosa, 279. Ke Ren, in his recent thorough study of Chen Jitong, argues that Chen is not as instrumental in the movement of Taiwan independence (Ke Ren, “Fin-­de-­Siècle Diplomate: Chen Jitong [1852–­1907] and Cosmopolitan Possibilities in the Late Qing World” [PhD diss., Johns Hopkins University, 2014], 259–­67). 52. Yu Danchu, “Meiguo Dulishi zai jindaizhingguo de jieshao yu yingxiang” (Introduction and influence of the American Revolution in modern China), ShijieLishi (World history) 2 (1987): 66. 53. Yu Ying-­shih, “The Radicalization of China in the Twentieth Century,” Daedalus 122, no. 2 (1993): 125–­50; Chang Hao, Chinese Intellectuals in Crisis: Search for Order and Meaning, 1890–­1911 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987); Edward J. M. Rhoads, China’s Republican Revolution: The Case of Kwangtung, 1895–­1913 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 54. Liang Qichao, Ziyoushu, in Liang Qi-­chao quanji (Collected works of Liang Qichao) (Beijing: Beijing Zhubanshe), 1:338; my translation. Liang confused the Pacific Ocean with the Atlantic. 55. This bronze tablet must be the one erected by the Boston Tea Party Chapter, Daughters of the American Revolution, on 17 March 1901, one year before Liang visited. 56. Liang Qi-­chao, Xin dalu yiouji jielu (Selected extracts of the journey to the new continent), in Liang Qi-­chao quanji (Collected works of Liang Qichao), 2:1151; my translation.

225

“Walk upon Water” Equiano and the Globalizing Subject D ENYS VAN RENEN

In his The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789), the author makes two mentions of the American Revolution. In a satisfying aside, Equiano claims that the chaos of the “last war favoured [a] poor negro-­man, and he found some means to escape his Christian master.”1 The American Revolution, then, is important to Equiano insofar that it allows one black acquaintance to live free from the brutalization of slavery.2 Equiano reframes the struggle from supposedly transformational world events—­revolutionaries against the monarchical British state—­to a single person’s declaration of independence. The second reference to the American Revolution appears when he recounts his return to England from the West Indies. Equiano, in passing, mentions that he witnessed the British fleet set fire to an American privateer (219). This skirmish serves as an afterthought, for Equiano’s harrowing deliverance from slavers in the West Indies, with the help of a former crewmember from his Arctic voyage, overshadows it. In Jamaica, he evades the clutches of rapacious New World slave traders “by the means of a north pole shipmate which I met with in the sloop I was in” (215). In a world in which the geopolitical implications of the Revolutionary War seem subordinate to a slave’s freedom or to a reunion of two Arctic sailors in the tropics, Equiano reminds us that overarching narratives about the period do not capture the fluidity of the times or the geographic and ideological horizons of individual actors. On the open seas, Equiano forges affiliations underlining the potential of such spaces unencumbered by the narratological pull of the nation-­state and its attendant ideologies. Equiano’s narrative traces his liberation from not only slavery but also the national and commercial ideologies he is expected to internalize within capitalism. Strangely, the most pivotal moment in Equiano’s life occurs in the Arctic, for it compresses many of the challenges he wrestles with throughout his life. I will argue that only when he encounters the impassable ice of the Arctic—­“this uninhabited extremity 226

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of the world . . . one desolate and expanded waste of ice”—­does Equiano establish a distinct subjectivity that emerges after a spiritual epiphany free from national and capitalist frameworks. Indeed, in the wake of the Arctic episode, he “was determined to work out my own salvation” (178). As Jonathan Bate reminds us, “You cannot fix or predict life in the Arctic: ice is both land and sea, so in the far north (and south) maps, those markers of human mastery, can only ever be provisional.”3 When ice constrains European movements, it simultaneously liberates Equiano to explore his own subjectivity and reengage with his surroundings. Thus, Equiano provides a useful entry point, even if an unlikely one, for thinking through the consuming force of the American Revolution on questions about freedom and subjectivity in the late eighteenth century. While scholars associate Equiano’s slave narrative with the rhetoric of liberty in texts from Thomas Paine and other revolutionaries, I instead focus on how Equiano’s experimentation with various national, regional, and local customs and practices renders him amenable to the epiphany he experiences in the Arctic; that is, no one attitude or ideology leads to this moment. He can, in short, imbibe Catholic beliefs in Spain, low church beliefs in England, and Islam in Turkey, creating not a hybrid subject but a flexible one who can seize his moment in a “favour[able]” place and time. As we have seen in the previous essays, the founding principles of U.S. nationhood proved elastic; sometimes they were appropriated as a sort of temporary garb to usher in long-­standing local beliefs; at others, they proved to surmount ideological and political morasses that result from clinging to Old World beliefs. In the latter case, Dutch and French thinkers went from scoffing at the Patriots’ republican goals to studying them. Even in these cases, one must trace the dissenting views or alternative democratic formations or risk retroactively homogenizing the period as a coherent ideological project. That is, I am both moving away from likening Equiano’s narrative to that of the American Revolution and reentangling them as coextensive. Equiano—­more than any other author—­reminds us of how an individual actor negotiates among ongoing sociocultural and political systems, while specific geographies activate and organize a distinct interpretation of these systems. Instead of studying Equiano as exhibiting a spectrum of eighteenth-­ century attitudes, scholars isolate different aspects of his life. For some, his prominence lies in being “first,” as one of the first authors of a slave narrative; and, for others, he embodies the Enlightenment or the self-­made man par excellence. Paradoxically, then, his willingness to entertain different subjectivities renders him strangely amenable to readers’ telescoping his 227

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worldview at one particular stage in an ongoing process. Similar to the tendency to fix interpretations of the American Revolution, Equiano’s life writing proves susceptible to post hoc formulations that accommodate Western, capitalist, or national ideologies. He therefore offers the potential to broaden conceptions for how people responded to not only the American Revolution but also a range of major and everyday events during the mid-­ to late eighteenth century. His, in fact, seemingly effortless transactions with various lands and peoples—­boundaries of the self and nation prove, in short, permeable—­across the globe enable us to rethink the formation of the United States. In particular, I trace the varieties of his life writing through the ways in which dynamic natural environs, especially waterways, forge sites for self-­transformation and spiritual awakening. In almost Tarantino fashion, water serves as the agent of fantastical revenge in Thomas Day’s poem “The Dying Negro” (1773), from which Equiano quotes liberally: But let revenge, let swift revenge be mine! Be this proud bark, which now triumphant rides, Toss’d by the winds, and shatter’d by the tides! And may these fiends, who now exulting view The horrors of my fortune, feel them too!4

After his master, Captain Pascal, deceives and sells him to Captain Doran, Equiano invokes Day’s poem in a cathartic moment that allows him to calm the “turbulence of my emotions” (98). In this section of “The Dying Negro,” the tides will effect what the slave cannot, namely the destruction of the ships that ply the Atlantic. Specifically, Day imagines slavery as an all-­encompassing and inescapable world: it feels, in fact, like drowning. Revenge can be exacted only by replicating this experience: “And while they spread their sinking arms to thee, / Then let their fainting souls remember me!”5 But the attraction of a supernatural or extraordinary event that can somehow respond to the ways in which slavery seems to contravene nature and religion appears in different forms throughout Equiano’s voyage. On the Arctic voyage and the immediate lead-­up to it, Equiano laments—­but, because it recurs repeatedly, seems fascinated by—­near-­death experiences on a ship. On three separate different voyages, a “black cook” and Equiano almost “accidently” destroy European vessels (170, 171, 173). Tempting fate on the last voyage, Equiano again lights a candle in a room full of “combustibles” (173), even though he was just chastened for almost killing himself and the entire crew. These telling moments in which he almost exacts revenge, 228

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though, seem inadequate. He cannot be the agent of revenge; his recapitulation of his release from slavery necessitates a larger symbolic and almost mythic event that exonerates nature, specifically the ocean, for its role in transatlantic slavery. Throughout the essay, I examine moments of transition that involve Equiano’s encounters with water, including when he witnesses the ocean for the first time; sees snow on his initial visit to England; desalinates seawater into a pure form; and almost drowns during the Arctic voyage in 1773. Elizabeth Bohls asserts how the “mobile persona of the sailor  .  .  . corresponds to the rendering of geographical space in The Interesting Narrative as a fluid connective system.”6 Building upon Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, she observes that the “narrator, criss-­crossing the Atlantic and circulating among its ports, is best understood as a function or effect rather than a positive identity,” yet she concludes that “a life spent en route from one corner of the Atlantic to another carries the weary, wise inflection of a black cosmopolitan—­a citizen of the Atlantic world.”7 I agree that the Atlantic Ocean serves as the crucible that explains these transformations, but we can only understand them if we focus on his experiences with water, especially as advances in European shipping paved the way for its institutionalization of slavery and imperialism on land. Equiano’s narrative rejects the reductive identities offered by aesthetic forms or national and individual identities. Stripped of a past, Equiano self-­ reflexively incorporates the traces of the peoples and places he encounters.8 The emancipated slave does not validate the so-­called American individual; instead, Equiano exhibits or imagines himself in a rotating cast of roles to adapt to various nations or cultures—­an emancipated slave, a trader, even a pope, for example—­but these subjectivities remain unsatisfying. Even when he underlines his immersion and ability to thrive in every culture he visits, as he states many times, he experiences malaise, anxiety—­and fear—­when he travels over the same trade routes or revisits sites. The sea promises him simultaneously to experiment with new subjectivities (when he embarks on new routes) and to remind him of his (blacks’) originary traumatic moments. Hazel Carby insists that Equiano “speaks as a composite subject, a subject inhabiting multiple differences, as African, as black, as British, as Christian, as a diasporic and transnational citizen of the world.”9 Lisa Lowe reframes Carby’s argument, underlining how Equiano, at times, “becomes a liberal cosmopolitan subject of globalization, a mobile world citizen at home at sea,”10 but race always reminds him of the subjugated peoples who provide the labor and capital to undergird global commerce. I want to supplement 229

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these readings by examining in depth Equiano’s relationship to water because he cannot emerge as a composite subject until he separates water from subjugation. The first section describes Equiano’s first exposure to the “element,” Equiano’s word for the ocean. In addition, his baptism, an event he seems to include perfunctorily, is one of the most underdiscussed aspects of this narrative; this scholarly oversight leaves some with the misimpression that his narrative is of a piece with secular processes of emancipation, individualism, and national formation. But spiritual crises permeate the narrative, and they specifically stem from his vexed relationship to water. His Edenic inland life is changed forever when he encounters the “element”—­ the oceanic—­a word and a regime that he cannot seen to verbalize or process. As the site that not only enables slave and commodity traffic but also serves as the motor for sociocultural exchange—­hence it animates and produces different forms of individual and national expression—­Equiano can never achieve manumission, or real freedom from the sites white Western power claims, until he symbolically and imaginatively reclaims the oceanic. The second section interprets how Equiano tries to extricate water—­snow and ice—­from its associations with slavery and white power. Specifically, it offers an analysis of the first time he encounters snow. The final section examines Equiano’s Arctic voyage. Once he reclaims water as a physical substance that serves as an analogue to his own subjectivity, he can begin to recover his past and create a relationship to God. He, in fact, reconciles his personal history as a slave with Christianity. His baptism in the Arctic, then, encompasses and supersedes the agenda Equiano lays out in the first chapter—­to ensconce antislavery principles in the English imagination. After his brief euphoria, his manumission in particular neither resolves his existential dilemma nor establishes him within a community; for Equiano, the passage or transition from one state to another emerges as a means to adopt uncritically a new subjectivity and erase past associations. As emblematic of the change and transitions he undergoes, water operates as his bane and then salvation. Because it exists in various states, water, including liquid, ice, pure, saltwater, and fresh forms, operates as an analogue for the globalizing subject who can transform into manifold states, while retaining the properties of past forms. Equiano establishes a new modality, one that absorbs, much like the American Revolution, the sociocultural and national practices he encounters and adapts them to accommodate his past.

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“An Element I Had Never Before Beheld” Throughout the first chapter of his autobiography, Equiano oscillates between privileging individual identity and collective identity. Despite his claims of exceptionalism in the first chapter, he also celebrates the collective efforts of his “charming fruitful vale, named Essaka” (32). Indeed, on the one hand, he descends from an important family, and he himself is marked out for “distinction” and “grandeur” (32). His name signifies “one favoured” (41). On the other, he describes life in his African village as communal; everyone contributes something to the common stock, and agricultural plenty provides a high standard of living and freedom from the socioeconomic exigencies of neighboring tribes. Somehow, too, village life in Essaka is both Edenic, a pastoral world apart from surrounding African life, and a specimen of it. Equiano informs readers that his ethnographic account of the village will suffice to describe the practices and customs of neighboring communities: “The manners and government of a people who have little commerce with other countries are generally very simple; and the history of what passes in one family or village may serve as a specimen of the whole nation” (32). He, like his readers, wants to fix life—­in this case, African village life—­at one particular stage as a bulwark against the rapid socioeconomic change in the late eighteenth century. Equiano even likens his dress to Highland plaid and Eboe religion to Judaism. Scholars, indeed, note the text’s gestures at forming global communities through Equiano’s acknowledgment of transcultural practices. While an earlier wave of scholarship on Equiano maps the text onto spiritual and “American” narratives of fostering the autonomous self, more recently, Andrew Kopec stresses “the importance of the collective to the Narrative.”11 Ramesh Mallipeddi, too, insists that Equiano privileges “the collective community”;12 Yael Ben-­Zvi even claims that he “recasts the world’s population as a community united by horizontal, nonhierarchic relations.”13 It is very difficult, though, to reconcile these interpretations with Equiano’s adoption of “magic” to deceive indigenous populations or his role as a slave trader and overseer. The simultaneous processes of experiencing repeated dislocations, maturing, acculturating to Britain, aligning himself with the abolitionist movement, and undergoing spiritual conversion demand both more expansive and concrete readings. That is, while one can interpret Equiano’s text as of a piece with abolitionist doctrine, American subjectivity, or British commercial values, this essay focuses on how he synthesizes many different

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identities and how he operates as the preeminent example of the globalizing subject—­globalizing because, throughout his life, he never ceases to absorb different practices and identities. But he still requires a revelatory experience to acknowledge how these different experiences foster a distinct self. In particular, his encounters with water serve as key moments to understand why he eludes assimilation to available Western national or sociocultural identities. Even the much-­discussed transformational moments—­baptism and manumission, for example—­never deliver on their promise—­that is, until he is immersed in water in the Arctic. This expedition (to attempt to chart a Northwest passage) allows him to process his varied life experiences and internalize all the diffuse identities and practices he encountered. Even though, as a slave, Equiano, “ceased to belong in his own right to any legitimate social order,”14 as Orlando Patterson explains, he must incorporate this past to both adapt to British life and his Calvinistic belief system. While his repeated voyages in the West Indies transporting slaves and even establishing a plantation indicate the textual inconsistencies and thus illustrate an impasse to self-­awareness, Equiano’s refusal to obscure his history when convenient demonstrates how he opts, for his own ontological cohesion, to recognize his individual formative experiences rather than attach to larger social, cultural, and national narratives. Unable or unwilling to allow new experiences to erase his past, Equiano encompasses his experiences as a slave and slaver as well as his encounters with Turks, indigenes, and the lower orders of English society. He insists on treating each new experience as an opportunity to complicate and augment his subjectivity, because if he allows a single ideology or practice to subsume the self, he fears annihilation. In the first chapter, for example, he endeavors to make his autobiography visible in a sea of travelogues and autobiographies. He expresses anxiety about the erasure of self and text. His discussion of his book always evokes the instability of subject formation: People generally think those memoirs only worthy to be read and remembered which abound in great or striking events; those, in short, which in a high degree excite either admiration or pity: all others they consign to contempt or oblivion. It is, therefore, I confess, not a little hazardous, in a private and obscure individual, and a stranger too, thus to solicit the indulgent attention of the public; especially when I own I offer here the history of neither a saint, a hero, nor a tyrant. I believe there are a few events in my life which have not happened to many; it is true the incidents of it are numerous. (31)

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While none of these categories exclusively define him, his life, of course, is characterized by all of these descriptions. Attempting to ameliorate the lives of people of African descent, fighting in wars, and working as an overseer and slave runner, he is, alternatively, “a saint, a hero, [and] a tyrant.” Moreover, exposed to numerous dangers, his life seems extraordinary—­for a European. Yet as an individual of African descent, his life and its many hardships and near-­death experiences are commonplace. The book, though, is not an apt metaphor for Equiano’s subjectivity because, as he points out, readers seize on “great or striking events” or privilege the climax over the preceding chapters. The first and last chapters, while historically relevant, are some of the least interesting chapters in the book because their agenda is transparent. The first chapter propounds abolitionist doctrine, and the last chapter ventriloquizes a complementary intention: he urges the English to opt for commercial expansion—­to cultivate Africans customers instead of capturing slaves. The analogizing of water as a forbidden agent of European supremacy and brutalization appears throughout the text, even in the first chapter on Igbo sociocultural customs. Equiano simultaneously attempts to reclaim water as an environment that liberates him from European systems and suggests that it serves as a more far-­ranging obstacle to gratifying emotional and ontological needs. He tells us, in fact, that cleanliness characterizes African religious practices; “we had many purifications and washings” (41), suggesting that this practice is endemic to Igbo life and strengthens rather than erases their ties to their past. In particular, though, he states that he contravenes the purposes of these cleansings (namely, to reinforce Igbo cultural practices): “Those that touched the dead at any time” or menstruating women “were obliged to wash and purify themselves before they could enter a dwelling-­house.” But Equiano “was so fond of my mother I could not keep from her, or avoid touching her at some of those periods, in consequence of which I was obliged to be kept out with her” (42). This description clearly exceeds Equiano’s ethnographic depiction of Igbo culture or the aims of historical fiction or abolitionist texts.15 While Vincent Carretta provided a strong case that Equiano was born in America, these scenes, nevertheless, underscore how Equiano eschews national or ethnic identities.16 His “mother” with whom he tries to reattach proves under threat by the agent of “water,” a metonym for (in this case, Igbo) sociocultural ideologies. Water, in short, enforces sociocultural codes and threatens to wash away, to erase, his originary identity.

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In a perplexing and fascinating passage, Equiano, as he processes the abrupt changes and displacements he experiences, introduces “an element” he “had never before beheld” and only later explains that that element is water, or, more specifically, the ocean.17 His language defamiliarizes the common element for the reader to recapitulate his own halting comprehension. Equiano estranges the “element” in multiple ways. Describing his abduction and journey toward the coast, he uses aposiopesis (“which is inexpressible by me”) and metonymic substitution: “The change I now experienced was as painful as it was sudden and unexpected. It was a change indeed from a state of bliss to a scene which is inexpressible by me, as it discovered to me an element I had never before beheld, and till then had no idea of, and wherein such instances of hardship and cruelty continually occurred as I can never reflect on but with horror” (53). Unable to express his feelings on the occasion, he mentions instead the novelty and terror of what was also present in the scene: the element of water and how the memory of his first discovery of it is infused with the “hardship and cruelty” he endures on it later. On the threshold of leaving the Africa he knows—­he was enslaved to an inland African family who treated him well—­he is abruptly sold to smugglers who trade on the coast. That is, just as he acclimates and even looks forward to life with his “young master,” he “was awakened out of my reverie to fresh sorrow, and hurried away” (53). In his mind, he associates water with “change” and even impugns large bodies of water, including the ocean, as complicit in his slavery and responsible for human degeneration. In water (“wherein”), “such instances of hardship and cruelty continually occurred as I can never reflect on but with horror.” Even the preposition “wherein” tries to contain brutalization within the ocean. Indeed, Equiano, in an effort to understand a practice that contravenes not only basic moral but also religious principles, repeatedly blames the environment: the British, Equiano insists, have “been debauched by the West India climate” (108). In the West Indies, even Equiano falls victim to the physical environment: “All my endeavors to keep up my integrity, and perform my promise to God began to fail; . . . as we drew nearer and nearer to the islands, my resolutions more and more declined, as if the very air of that country or climate seemed fatal to piety” (128). Ingrained economic practices serve as a “natural” medium and overpower morality or individual expression. Equiano demonstrates that, despite his arguments that the environment produces the various races—­the Portuguese, for example, in Sierra Leona “are now become, in their complexion, . . . perfect negroes” (45)—­slavery renders different climes and peoples irrelevant, “for, in all 234

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the different islands in which I have been . . . the treatment of slaves was nearly the same, so nearly indeed, that the history of an island, or even a plantation . . . might serve as the history for the whole” (111). Environmental determinism as a hereditary claim—­how climate, geography, and cultural practices shape physical characteristics and disposition—­no longer seems operable; slavery overrules environmental factors and homogenizes all peoples and systems irrespective of physical environments. Partly displacing human cruelty, he also cedes agency—­and the cognitive and formative processes involved in adjusting to new situations—­to water. His “discover[y]” of the culprit (53)—­the physical substance of water—­in short, partially explains slavery and, simultaneously, cripples his own development (he enters a world that “is inexpressible by me” [53]). If one cannot make sense of a new world, then one will not assimilate to it. Indeed, the oceanic is untranslatable; Equiano describes the littoral zone not as a place of sociocultural exchange but as a site of disintegration and incoherence: “From the time I left my own nation I always found somebody that understood me till I came to the sea coast” (51). Water, in fact, will always be an agent that alienates him and a substance that never allows individuation, impeding his efforts to confront and consciously work through what this element and his interaction with it signify. Water holds the promise of escape and death—­and slaves, if they can, choose to drown themselves. Whites, though, chain the slaves to the boat and this practice amounts to ultimate power—­the control of life and death: “Although, not being used to the water, I naturally feared that element the first time I saw it; yet, nevertheless, could I have got over the nettings, I would have jumped over the side, but I could not” (56). Indeed, in both form and content, Equiano attempts to stem the water systems that enable slavery. He introduces the “element” and then surrounds it with narrative chunks—­islands—­that obstruct the flow of the narrative, as well as the rivers, seas, and oceans that slavers use to transport Africans to the coasts and eventually the Americas. After the passage above, he finally qualifies the “element.” He describes seawater or large bodies of water as alien and menacing: “At last, I came to the banks of a large river. . . . I was beyond measure astonished at this, as I had never before seen any water larger than a pond or a rivulet; and my surprise was mingled with no small fear when I was put into one of these canoes, and we began to paddle and move along the river” (54). And several paragraphs later, he finally divulges the source of his fear: “The first object which saluted my eyes when I arrived on the coast was the sea, and a slave-­ship, which was then riding at 235

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anchor, and waiting for its cargo. These filled me with astonishment, which was soon converted into terror, which I am yet at a loss to describe, nor the then feelings of my mind” (55). Equiano’s diction and syntax suggest that the sea and a slave ship are synonymous (the “first object” denotes both sea and slave ship). Equiano’s meticulously planned life writing showcases his organization, deft switching between adolescent and adult points of view, use of multiple genres, and literary allusions. His emphasis, then, on the “horror” that impedes narrating the “terror” of enslavement demands attention. Few people would be more versed in seafaring and ships than Equiano, but the “terror” and trauma that he first registered when he beheld the ship and sea never dissipate. Retaining vestiges of his former selves, though, is integral to Equiano’s subjectivity. He endeavors to neutralize the associations of water with slavery, as it allows slavers to solidify power and alienate blacks; instead he patterns his subjectivity on the properties of water—­how it both adapts to its surroundings and influences the features it encounters. Most of all, though, while water metamorphoses into different forms—­ice and steam—­its properties never change. Yet, at first, Equiano adopts and dispenses with available subjectivities that would enable his escape from the immediate surroundings or efface the traces of brutal encounters. Because he frequently meets danger, he grows numb to terror and only the most remarkable events make an impression on him: “I ceased to feel those apprehensions and alarms which had taken such strong possession of me when I first came among the Europeans, and for some time after. I began now to pass to an opposite extreme; I was so far from being afraid of any thing new which I saw, that, after I had been some time in this ship, I even began to long for an engagement. My griefs too, which in young minds are not perpetual, were now wearing away” (70). Equiano veers between “extremes”; and, like feeble resistance to a flood, his “griefs”—­and with them, his social commentary—­give way to the excitement of military engagements. Indeed, Equiano, on some level, registers Britain’s circum-­Atlantic brutalization of indigenous peoples but neglects to condemn it. During his service in the Seven Years’ War, he alludes to the annihilation of various cultures and the ways in which colonized groups replicate the victimization they themselves underwent without comment. Namely, the Highlanders, recently colonized after the 1745–­46 Jacobite Rebellion, now do the bidding of their colonizer to brutalize others: “I had,” he boasts, “that day in my hand the scalp of an Indian king, who was killed in the engagement: the scalp had been taken off by an Highlander” (73–­74). 236

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Because Equiano neglects to evaluate the ethics or even the circumstances of Britain’s war making, describing himself as “inured to that service,” he confuses the relinquishment of subject formation with being “happily situated” (77). Immune to the dangers of war zones, Equiano equates the fearlessness he acquires with British national identity: “From the various scenes I had beheld on ship-­board, I soon grew a stranger to terror of every kind, and was, in that respect at least, almost an Englishman” (77). Water imagery reappears when he adopts white British subjectivity: “I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners” (78; my emphasis). That is, (the consumption of) water seems to demystify European culture to him, but he has not yet asserted himself as he remains inundated by western European practices. Eventually, Equiano possesses the wherewithal to process the sublime and the catastrophic; in this section, though, the narrative proves episodic, and lacunae emerge. In particular, instead of processing the original trauma, he attributes his miraculous escapes to divine Providence. He then delays subject formation, causing the inevitable spiritual collapse that occurs in the Arctic. Indeed, the first time he mentions Providence in the narrative proper, he demonstrates how he registers only the “uncommon,” or exactly the circumstances that are incongruous with the rhythms of one’s emotional and private life: “I had a mind on which every thing uncommon made its full impression, and every event which I considered as marvellous. Every extraordinary escape, or signal deliverance, either of myself or others, I looked upon to be effected by the interposition of Providence” (85).18 The narrative of his life and the master narrative of Providence, in short, co­ mingle. In order to reinforce this intertwinement of his personal exploits and God’s plan, he seeks spiritual enlightenment. Yet baptism—­the ritual that cleanses and regenerates the self—­does not produce the effects he expected because it involves water. The book bestowed on him, An Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians, concerning the “Indians, in the Neighborhood of Georgia, and those Parts of America” explains baptism as “an outward Sign or Token, signifying and assuring us, from Christ himself, that as surely as our Bodies are made clean by Water, so surely our Souls, being thus dedicated to God, are cleansed from all their past Sins, and are put into a Way of Salvation, by being admitted into the Church of Christ.”19 How, though, can water both enable slavery through transatlantic trade and cleanse sins? In the same paragraph, he includes what seems to be a new topic: he recalls how he “fell into the Thames” 237

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because some boys forced Equiano from the wherry that he and others commandeered. Rather than experiencing relief after undergoing a ritual that was supposed to assuage his considerable “anxiety” (78), Equiano associates baptism with a harrowing childhood memory: he “should unavoidably have been drowned” (79). This memory, in fact, remains the only noticeable residue of the sacrament as he continues to recount his exploits during the Seven Years’ War. As the site of white power, water acts as an obstacle for Equiano rather than as an agent of transformation or a liminal space. While Equiano seems adept at integrating with the places and practices he visits, his relationship with water always indexes an incomplete hybridization. Said differently, water enables his passage into a new culture, but it almost always exacerbates his alienation: “I had a great curiosity to go into some of their churches, but could not gain admittance without using the necessary sprinkling of holy water at my entrance. From curiosity, and a wish to be holy, I therefore complied with this ceremony, but its virtues were lost upon me, for I found myself nothing the better for it” (168). His superficial religiosity—­“I too, like these great ones, went to those sights, and vainly served God in the day while I thus served mammon effectually at night” (169)—­provides an example of how water, like a drug, provides temporary relief but continues to detach him from his “mother.” In these middle chapters, Equiano is characterized by “a roving disposition” (171) akin to Robinson Crusoe in Farther Adventures, part 2 of Daniel Defoe’s trilogy: he exhibits a volatile subjectivity that experiments with a host of national and religious identities. Indeed, when water functions as both the site of exchange or liminality and as a metonym for slavery, Equiano cannot experience the “virtues” of this “element.” Whether “washing” produces no physical or mental change or water operates as an embodied object on which he displaces the change he should be processing, Equiano’s jaunty attitude still conceals some deep, unresolved issues concerning how he will adapt to his surroundings and assimilate. In a well-­known passage, Equiano includes his vexation at trying to “imbibe” the properties of water—­metamorphoses—­without actually sorting through the mental and emotional issues that his encounters occasion: “I therefore tried oftentimes myself if I could not by washing make my face of the same colour as my little play-­mate [Mary], but it was all in vain; and I now began to be mortified at the difference in our complexions” (69). At the very least, this section encapsulates both Equiano’s belief in the transformational potential of water and its associations with white subjectivity. Until he can decouple water from whiteness, he will repeatedly undergo 238

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the same debilitating experiences. In the next section, I focus on another form of water—­snow and ice—­which first prompts his spiritual awakening and crises.

Snow and Conversion Paying attention to Equiano’s attunement to different environments can dislodge fixed interpretations. As Paul Giles observes, “Several American critics have elected to focus specifically on the latter part of Equiano’s Narrative, where he tells of his conversion to Christianity, since this trajectory makes the book conform with conventional American metanarratives of emancipation.”20 Yet Equiano foregrounds how environments, rather than ideological structures, shape identity. In his single chapter on African cultural practices, Equiano explains that the climate influences an individual’s complexion. He cites theories characterizing how the climate changes complexions; in both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres, Europeans begin to resemble indigenous peoples through exposure and intermarriage: “The Spaniards, who have inhabited America, under the torrid zone, for any time, are become as dark coloured as our native Indians of Virginia, of which I myself have been a witness”; and the Portuguese in Africa “are now become in their complexion, and in the woolly quality of their hair, perfect negroes” (44, 45). He summons a standard argument against racial prejudice; yet his reliance on textual authorities belies Equiano’s layered and visceral transactions with climates and environments. Equiano registers how the weather and natural environments offer opportunities to generate new identities but remain frustratingly subject to British and Western belief systems. On his first voyage to Britain, he arrives in winter at the port of Falmouth; the snowstorm he witnesses not only provides a formative experience but also shows him struggling to disentangle the weather from the socioeconomic system of slavery. As Vincent Carretta notes: “Equiano first reached England during the unusually cold Cornish winter of 1754–­55. . . . [T]he winter of 1754–­55 was one of the two snowiest seasons in southern Cornwall between 1753 and 1772.”21 Despite what seems like a mystical or even epiphanic transition into England as he watches snow blanket the ship and the surrounding countryside, his first snowstorm underscores the imbrication of spirituality with commerce. This physical, mental, and spiritual awakening is deeply intertwined with African and European commercial exchanges. This combination of extreme weather and what Joanna Brooks terms “spiritual matters” is crucial to this essay. As Brooks explains, the role 239

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of religion in Equiano’s narrative is a contentious and underdiscussed aspect of this canonical text.22 Equiano cannot process his surroundings—­and therefore foster a coherent religio-­social subject—­until he neutralizes water as coextensive with European power. This blanketing of snow both affirms his experience with his “little play-­mate,” Mary—­snow will not change the color of his skin—­and undermines it, for the ubiquitous white snow reiterates how whites interpellate all peoples and elements. As such, this solid form of water inhibits any efforts at conversion or acculturation (he is already fixed and cannot experience any development). Equiano’s formative experience reiterates that commerce always subsumes even the most miraculous phenomena: “One morning, when I got upon deck, I saw it covered all over with the snow that fell over-­night: as I had never seen any thing of the kind before, I thought it was salt; so I immediately ran down to the mate and desired him, as well as I could, to come and see how somebody in the night had thrown salt all over the deck” (67). This passage marks a subtle shift in Equiano’s presentation of new phenomena. Equiano frequently aligns the reader with his mature self by providing her with the image or object—­in this case snow—­that is the source of confusion for his young self or others. The reader, then, does not undergo the same maturation as Equiano—­an important point because Equiano stresses that one must experience and appropriate sensory and physical phenomena before they can serve as vehicles for ontological and epistemological development. Later in the autobiography, for example, he states, “On that part of it where we first attempted to land there stood some very large birds, called flamingoes; these, from the reflection of the sun, appeared to us at a little distance as large as men; and, when they walked backwards and forwards, we could not conceive what they were: our captain swore they were cannibals” (152). He specifically names the birds and then states, “we could not conceive what they were” (152). These scenes underline the relationship between subject formation and the ways in which an individual experiences his perceptual worlds. In his first encounter with British weather, Equiano identifies snow as salt, which is a loaded term as it not only reminds readers of the ship’s commercial motives but also shifts the scene to an African socioeconomic landscape. Thus, he produces disenchantment insofar that snow blanketing the ship would, in another context, evoke a magical landscape. As Mungo Park explains in his Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa (1799)—­travels through the birthplace of Equiano—­salt served as currency, enriching African chiefs who traded salt for raw materials from the interior of Africa: “The chief trade of the inhabitants [near the British factory of Pisania, about 240

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200 miles from the coast] is in salt; which commodity they carry up the [Gambia] river in canoes . . . and bring down in return Indian corn, cotton cloths, elephants’ teeth, and small quantities of gold dust.”23 Park repeatedly mentions salt as a sort of pan-­African currency that enables exchanges between coastal African tribes and interior ones and between Moors and Africans: “The Negro slave merchants . . . who, besides slaves, and the merchandize which they bring for sale to the whites, supply the maritime districts with native iron. . . . In payment for these articles, the maritime states supply the interior countries with salt, a scarce and valuable commodity. . . . Considerable quantities of this article, however, are also supplied to the inland natives by the Moors, who obtain it from the salt pits in the Great Desert, and receive in return corn, cotton cloth, and slaves.”24 In Equiano’s Africa, salt is used to exchange for produce, raw materials—­and slaves. While Equiano does discuss African life in the first chapter, the author aestheticizes Africa or provides sentimentalized scenes (after they are kidnapped, he reunites with his sister briefly and holds hands with her over a slaver’s body through the night) to appeal to European readers in the second chapter. His use of an African meaning system to conceptualize a European weather phenomenon demonstrates his lack of absorption in Falmouth, and, by extension, Britain.25 Equiano’s description of snow as salt does not indicate the young boy’s naiveté; instead he demonstrates the shared epistemologies of African and Western culture. Equiano invokes a medium of exchange, thereby reminding readers that even the most majestic scene appears shot through with commercial overtones. While Equiano does not necessarily disenchant his audience (even if he extends the culpability for slavery to his readers), he foregrounds the inevitable entanglements of peoples, socioeconomic systems, and ideas. Yet these entanglements provide a sort of ersatz community through similar systems of signification. Equiano provides the correct interpretation of snow—­it, like salt, is used to integrate him into a larger socioeconomic system—­and, simultaneously, resignifies something foreign (snow) as familiar (salt). Even so, he is not, ultimately, successful at meshing African and Western worldviews, for water (in the form of ice) continues to operate as an impasse to his internalization of his surroundings. Snow in this early scene stimulates an interest in Christianity but does not disclose to him a means to erase its traumatic and debilitating associations. Water is the object that enticingly offers change but withholds it because he still links it with a (white) power outside of his control. Both Africans and Europeans conceptualize the world through commercial practices, but African meaning systems are obscured as European ones 241

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subsume other registers. In a single composite image, Equiano demonstrates how snow prompts his conversion to Christianity and shifts the narrative from a general condemnation of slavery to a story of his individual efforts to extricate himself from master narratives. Snow operates as a metonym for both the seeming omnipresence of European life-­worlds and external environmental stimuli that promise release from them. Equiano draws attention to the unnamed “mate” as a peculiar minister to preside over this miracle: He, knowing what it was, desired me to bring some of it down to him: accordingly I took up a handful of it, which I found very cold indeed; and when I brought it to him he desired me to taste it. I did so, and I was surprised beyond measure. I then asked him what it was; he told me it was snow: but I could not in anywise understand him. He asked me if we had no such thing in my country; and I told him, No. I then asked him the use of it, and who made it; he told me a great man in the heavens, called God: but here again I was to all intents and purposes at a loss to understand him; and the more so, when a little after I saw the air filled with it, in a heavy shower, which fell down on the same day. After this I went to church; and having never been at such a place before, I was again amazed at seeing and hearing the service. (67)

As Equiano represents him, the mate seizes this opportunity to convert a “savage.” In the process of inculcating Western principles, he corroborates Equiano’s ultimately correct appraisal of snow as salt—­snow, after all, is a medium involved in producing the colonized, enslaved, or subjugated subject. Or, in his attempt to erase Equiano’s past, the mate provides a self-­ referential and disabling heuristic: without providing a point of reference, the mate expects an unknown object (snow) to unlock a wider worldview (Christianity). This alienation is as devastating as his initial displacements and dislocations. As Henry Louis Gates puts it, “Under the guise of the representation of his naive self, he is naming or reading Western culture closely, underlining relationships between subjects and objects that are implicit in commodity cultures.”26 In this case, Western meaning systems can never be understood by new arrivals, for one incomprehensible object cannot be the gateway to gain access to a wider culture. Again, water (ice) operates as a (inaccessible) vehicle for change, but continues to thwart his assimilation. Pervading this transformational scene is how, rather than vitalizing the senses, water deadens them. Equiano exercises his bodily senses—­touch and taste—­but centers on a deliberately indifferent, even apathetic, response: “I found [the snow] very cold indeed.” Equiano represents the cross-­cultural 242

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encounter as a sort of parody of the ritual of the Eucharist. Elsewhere, he evokes the crucifixion in order to reinforce the irony of white men who pretend to Christian beliefs while they stage the preeminent example of Christian persecution: “This Christian master immediately pinned [a black man named Emanuel Sankey] the wretch down to the ground at each wrist and ankle, and then took some sticks of sealing-­wax, and lighted them, and dropped it all over his back” (106). Equiano’s transition to/ adoption of Western/Christian practices, then, entails an estrangement from Christianity, a disillusionment from which he recovers only when he has an opportunity to reencounter snow and ice free from Western hegemony and power. Indeed, Equiano represents the transition between the weather event and God as a textual and cognitive discontinuity or lacuna. Although readers may not expect consistently smooth transitions in a book that contains several different genres—­it is “a spiritual autobiography, captivity narrative, travel book, adventure tale, slave narrative”27—­the transition between “same day” and “After this” is deceptively straightforward (67). Equiano seems to describe a cause-­and-­effect relationship; but because he demonstrates a marked disenchantment with the weather phenomena, the decision to seek out baptism as a result of the snowstorm—­a snowstorm he reduces to a prosaic and material event—­characterizes an illusory epiphany. The lacuna after “day” demonstrates how the mate’s ham-­handed attempts to foist Christianity onto him undermine Equiano’s spiritual development. He, in fact, emphasizes a series of absences, culminating in his avowal, “I asked all I could about it; and they gave me to understand it was worshipping God, who made us and all things. I was still at a great loss” (67–­68). While ultimately the snowfall triggers a process by which Equiano seeks knowledge about God, his curiosity—­his ability “to speak and ask about things” (68)—­stems from the largely unexplored associations of (condensed) water. Snow seems the gateway to Christianity, but his reliance on others to unveil the mysteries of his new religion produces incomprehensibility. Rather than the crewmember enhancing the experience, his suggestion that Equiano “taste” or imbibe the snow operates as a simulacrum of embodied experience. The mate’s recipe for integration, in short, never produces any real transformation. When Equiano states that he “was again amazed at seeing and hearing the service” (67), the word “again” points back to his amazement at witnessing snowfall; he then describes an equivalency between weather phenomena and church services. His signifying chain, however, never reveals a tangible 243

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signified. Ultimately, Equiano points back to a loss, an unwillingness or inability to describe an originary moment. In Britain, he emphasizes that he does not share the phenomenology of whites. The odd syntax of his declaration, then, “I was astonished at the wisdom of the white people in all things I saw” (68), describes a fundamental incongruity between white people’s epistemology and his perceptual world. He instantiates his perceptual world—­“I saw”—­by separating it from the “wisdom of white people.” This nuanced distinction underscores how he records events but cannot process them as he lives within a larger system of signification that does not correspond to his experiential world.

Manumission, Desalination, and Spiritual Awakening In chapter 7, midway through his narrative, Equiano narrates his manumission, which, right at the center of the text, should be the emotional and substantive heart of his autobiography. Instead, he provides numerous examples of how it serves as the empty fulfillment of someone else’s life story.28 I take, in fact, the seemingly odd digression into the story of the dying silversmith as Equiano’s authentic reflections on his manumission. The scene records the inflated expectations of his beloved captain to inherit a silversmith’s wealth. He and Equiano nurse the dying man because he “promised . . . to give the captain a great deal of money, having pretended to take a liking to him, and being as we thought very rich” (134). Though promised freedom from everyday exigencies and class mobility, the slave and his master receive an “inheritance”—­a pittance—­of a “dollar and a half.” Equiano, embodying the money and describing it as an existential and ontological dilemma, laments, “While we thought we were embracing a substance, we grasped an empty nothing!!” (134). That is, his fantasies of ontological security, like his baptism, produce no discernible emotional or psychological change. His manumission, in fact, is bracketed by a subsequent scene that also details his disappointment: hopeful that he will enjoy a lucrative voyage, he, instead, “was very apprehensive that my free voyage would be the very worst I had ever made” (142). Yet, like the turkeys he reluctantly brings on board instead of the cattle he was promised, sometimes the unforeseen produces the sought-­after transformation: the fowl unexpectedly yield fantastic gains. And the unforeseen—­real liberation from western beliefs—­occurs when he encounters the “strong northerly gales and rough seas” without the aid of the captain and mate who prove too ill to command the ship (142).

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Yet before he voyages to the Arctic, Equiano develops elaborate meaning systems to evade the underlying source of his trauma. He, in fact, develops a signifying system—­swearing—­that serves to displace any deep reflections on his moral and ethical lapses. After his manumission, out of “gratitude” to Robert King, he embarks once more on a slaving voyage. The new captain, though, proves incompetent and causes the boat to founder on some rocks on Bahama Banks. He describes how in his “impatience” at the monotonous manual labor, he cursed the boat: “I uttered with an oath, ‘Damn this vessel’s bottom out.’ But my conscience instantly smote me for the expression” (148). Equiano’s dream that the boat would fill with water proves prescient: “When I left the deck I went to bed, and had scarcely fallen asleep when I dreamed the same dream again about the ship that I had dreamt the two preceding nights” (148). As in the dream, Equiano is powerless, unable to avert impending disaster. Slavery—­and existence for free blacks—­is characterized by a lack of control of one’s fate, and that condition manifests in this scene. His captain, William Phillips, too, seems strangely unresponsive to his surroundings, for Equiano repeatedly warns him of nearby rocks. Equiano, however, reinterprets the wreck caused by the inept captain as punishment for his sins: “I thought that God had hurled his direful vengeance on my guilty head for cursing the vessel on which my life depended. My spirits at this forsook me, and I expected every moment to go to the bottom: I determined if I should still be saved, that I would never swear again” (149). Equiano finally intercedes when Phillips orders the men to secure the hold in which they were transporting slaves. Rather than risk losing Robert King’s property if the captured people flee, Phillips almost lets them all drown (presumably King possesses insurance in case of shipwreck) until Equiano exerts himself: “When he desired the man to nail down the hatches I thought that my sin was the cause of this, and that God would charge me with these people’s blood. This thought rushed upon my mind that instant with such violence, that it quite overpowered me” (149). In this sequence, Equiano substitutes the relatively minor offense of profanity for slavery. By placing blame on his use of profanity, Equiano creates a compensatory realm for his wrongdoing. In this version of Christianity—­ still one inflected by the priorities of a white, slave-­owning society rather than one that reflects the conditions of his life—­he can be punished for swearing and not for slavery—­still a sanctioned practice. Although he might not recognize his own discursive formations, Equiano underscores the hypocrisy—­the troubling dissonance between supposedly

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cherished beliefs and actual modalities—­that plague Europeans’ lives. One of Equiano’s principal rhetorical moves is his repeated irony describing “nominal Christians”: “O, ye nominal Christians! might not an African ask you, learned you this from your God? who says unto you, Do unto all men as you would men should do unto you” (61). They are Christians in name only and no better than heathens: he “never saw” indigenous Americans practice “any mode of worship among them; but in this they were not worse that their European brethren and neighbors” (206). This is a complicated rhetorical strategy that is more than just chastising whites for their cloak of or hollow Christianity; faith—­and national identity—­has to be an ongoing struggle in order to remain active. Otherwise, one never reconciles available national and social ideologies with one’s individual history. Even as Equiano chastises himself for his language, he links swearing to a white vernacular in the autobiography. Hughes, a white owner of a sloop in the Caribbean, typifies the relationship between a hardened slaver and swearing. His excessive profanity constrains his perceptual world; he swore “exceedingly at me, and cursed the master for a fool that sold me my freedom, and the doctor for another for letting me go from him” (211). Equiano’s representation of the vernacular of this sloop owner allows readers to tie swearing—­expletives express white frustration that words do not operate as absolute commands—­to water. As signifiers of change and multiplicity, language and water function as ambient challenges to slavery. Hughes, in an apoplectic rage, cannot fathom Equiano disobeying his commands: “ ‘Christians! Damn you, you are one of St. Paul’s men; but by G—­—,­ except you have St. Paul’s or St. Peter’s faith, and walk upon the water to the shore, you shall not go out of the vessel;’ which I now found was going amongst the Spaniards towards Carthagena, where he swore he would sell me. I simply asked him what right he had to sell me?” (211). Underneath Hughes’s sarcasm is a worldview that fixes the physical environment as an extension of slavers’ mind-­set. Hughes’s belittlement of Equiano echoes Captain Pascal’s incredulous reaction to seeing Equiano in England after he had sold him many years before. Equiano, savoring the moment when he confronts Captain Pascal, who sold him into slavery after years of faithful wartime service, replies epigrammatically to Pascal’s surprised question, “how I came back”: “In a ship,” the former slave replies. To which Pascal, trying to recover, responds: “I suppose you did not walk back to London on the water” (168). For whites, swearing ultimately reveals how (standard) language cannot accommodate blacks’ self-­expression and liberty. Only extralinguistic registers suffice to represent blacks disobeying whites. But, like water, the world 246

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created by language is fluid: words and syntax evolve to describe the new worlds that humans experience. Both Pascal’s and Hughes’s similar charge that Equiano “walks on water” illustrates their inability to grant Equiano’s appropriation of language and water. These two exchanges, however, indicate a subtle shift; in the first instance, Equiano is satisfied that Pascal thinks some miracle was performed, and, in the second, Equiano implores Hughes to observe how words uttered by another matter: Equiano “simply asked him.” That is, the latter example reveals a self-­assuredness, while the former is characterized by false bravado. How was he able to elude and defy, at least in the minds of his enslavers, the passage by which whites establish their power? Equiano undergoes this transformation in the Arctic zone when he recognizes that water supersedes the power of whites; he is released from its spell and can take control of his well-­being and development. On his return to Britain, he experiences a profound spiritual malaise that culminates in the Arctic. His trip to discover a Northwest passage to the Pacific Ocean is one of the most interesting features of the text, but no one has explored this scene in depth: “Roused by the sound of fame to seek new adventures,” Equiano and the crew sought “to find, towards the North Pole, what our Creator never intended we should, a passage to India” (172). This holy grail of European commercial ventures underlines Britain’s imperial hubris; provides ample opportunity for the crew to use their solitude to contemplate spiritual matters; and allows Equiano to escape from the Atlantic and its associations with slavery. The Arctic voyage connects to Equiano’s initial visit to England, for it was snowfall that occasioned his first spiritual yearnings. All of the registers that I have discussed in this essay—­ontological, commercial, climatological, and spiritual—­converge in this voyage. Moreover, salt reemerges as a principal item of exchange and suffuses the Arctic scenes as well. Here, though, rather than a prized and scarce commodity, salt is a waste product. Equiano, for example, describes his acquaintance, Dr. Charles Irving, a scientist and plantation owner of dubious character, as a well-­known figure, “so celebrated for his successful experiments in making sea-­water fresh” (166). Desalination seems an important, if largely symbolic, part of his growth. After an unhappy return to the West Indies, Equiano arrives in Britain and reconnects with Irving: “I was very happy in living with this gentleman once more; during which time we were daily employed in reducing old Neptune’s dominions by purifying the briny element and making it fresh” (172). This process echoes the mate’s efforts to “desalinate” Equiano: namely, he 247

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neglects to appreciate African meaning systems and fuse them with British socioeconomic practices. I am, in fact, using desalination as a metaphor for Equiano’s anxiety about white technological and geopolitical superiority as well as a racial hierarchy; in a passage I discussed earlier, Equiano describes how he endeavored, in a sense, to replace rather than reconcile a European subjectivity with African practices: “I no longer looked upon them as spirits, but as men superior to us; and therefore I had the stronger desire to resemble them; to imbibe their spirit, and imitate their manners” (78). Desalination provides a metaphor for this erasure of the past. Equiano performs these services on the voyage to Greenland, marking the ominous beginnings of the voyage as a culmination of whites’ mastery of nature: “On the 20th of June we began to use Dr. Irving’s apparatus for making salt water fresh; I used to attend the distillery: I frequently purified from twenty-­six to forty gallons a day. The water thus distilled was perfectly pure, well tasted, and free from salt; and was used on various occasions on board the ship” (173–­74). This unthinking celebration of white technology, as well as the symbolic resonances of “purification,” quickly gives way to disorientation and spiritual malaise as the weather turns “extremely cold” and he views “one continued plain of smooth unbroken ice, bounded only by the horizon” (174). He beholds a vast, undifferentiated, and unmarked landscape, and one that, moreover, nullifies the separation between ocean and land. The Arctic zone, therefore, cannot provide the narratives that both structured and limited his subject formation; he cannot, in other words, “imbibe” any markings of white superiority, and this realization exposes his past efforts. When his ship became “completely fastened in the ice” and his “situation,” “very dreadful and alarming,” worsened, his “extreme dejection” produces profound changes in the narrative and his life. Indeed, in the next chapter, he admits “my last voyage . . . made a lasting impression on my mind” and caused him “to work out my own salvation, and, in so doing, procure a title to heaven; being the result of a mind blinded by ignorance and sin” (178). A near-­death experience on this voyage causes him to think through his salvation; Equiano emphasizes—­almost ironically—­that “the natural state I then was in” triggered his spiritual searchings (175; Equiano’s emphasis). The floating adverb, “providentially,” in the following passage intimates that the disorienting atmosphere led him to realize that the European sociocultural practices of which he intermittently adopted do not provide him with a stable foundation or worldview: “I once fell into a pond we had made amongst some loose ice, and was very near being drowned; but providentially some people were near, who gave me immediate assistance” (175). This 248

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event—­finally—­marks the baptism that causes him to experience lasting change and self-­actualization; previously, he adopted various subjectivities that provided (illusory) ontological stability. While this baptism may cleanse the sins of the past, it involves appreciating his history as giving meaning to the ideologies and places he encounters rather than vice versa. The “ice that set in from the sea” operates ironically: rather than circumscribe the self, it, to Equiano, frees water—­the site of slave trading, degeneration, and death—­from its associations with his initial trauma and slavery: “Our deplorable condition, which kept up the constant apprehension of our perishing in the ice, brought me gradually to think of eternity in such manner as I never had done before” (175). Nature “freezes” European efforts to extend their mastery from the Atlantic to the Arctic, and, therefore, enables Equiano to piece together a narrative outside of European networks. On the threshold, then, between the known and unknown—­in “this uninhabited extremity of the world . . . one desolate and expanded waste of ice”—­Equiano gains an independence he never fully experienced before: he “was determined to work out my own salvation” (178). In the Arctic “even the constant beams of sun, for six months in the year, cannot penetrate or dissolve” the ice (176). When ice constrains European movements and defies even the sun, it simultaneously liberates Equiano to explore his own subjectivity and reengage with his surroundings. While he witnesses and experiences vastly different ambient environments, Equiano never overcomes or resolves his initial disorientation—­until the Arctic. And he realizes that, ultimately, the environment can resist the temporary incursions by Europeans (whom he represents as pollutants into an Edenic Africa). For Equiano, the “light came in” when he recognizes the primacy of the nonhuman environment and decenters the sociocultural matrix that blights it (197). After this episode, Equiano, instead of trying to perform an entirely new subjectivity, reclaims and even privileges his labor as a slave. He, of course, is not legitimating slavery, only refusing to allow these experiences to be erased. The first indication of this revelation occurs when he watches George Whitfield preach in Philadelphia: “I saw this pious man exhorting the people with the greatest fervour and earnestness, sweating as much as ever I did while in slavery on Montserrat beach. I was very much struck and impressed with this; I thought it strange I had never seen divines exert themselves in this manner before” (132). He notes it as “strange,” implying that the “divines” he previously witnessed were not endowed with “fervor and earnestness,” or truly animated by godly spirit. Whitfield’s exertions even suggest that Equiano equates physical toil—­actually producing liquid sweat, 249

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an external by-­product that provides “proof ” of an intangible spirit—­with salvation and grace. Indeed, after his epiphany on 6 October 1774 (189), he memorializes the experience in his “Miscellaneous Verses,” imagining Jesus as a slave owner who manumits him: Yet here, ’midst blackest clouds confin’d, A beam from Christ, the day-­star, shin’d; Surely, thought I, if Jesus please, He can at once sign my release. (196)

The “metaphor of being enslaved to sin” is (xxi), as Carretta notes, a generic convention, but, in his case, Equiano undergoes a hard-­won process by which he bypasses the claims of his white slave owners and interweaves the metaphor with environmental and climatic conditions that have proven instrumental in his manumission. Equiano’s insistence that Jesus “sign my release” reinforces how he necessitated a spiritual epiphany in order to be truly manumitted, or free from the sociocultural influences that destabilize rather than foster his ontological security. The exposure to Arctic elements triggered this “release,” for he was unable to access an interior state and register his surroundings without rejecting the ways in which slavers signified and governed the physical environment. The episode with the Miskito peoples, “brought here [to England] by some English traders for some selfish ends” (202), serves as an alternative life history for Equiano. Its inclusion prompts questions about the artificial and even doomed existence that might have been Equiano’s fate if he did not visit the Arctic or seek peoples who allowed him to work through his spiritual crises following his enslavement. Both the indigenes and Equiano serve, at times, as spectacles as they attempt to negotiate their sense of self-­sovereignty despite their status as subjugated peoples. After a hard-­ won effort to experience grace and salvation, Equiano tries to ease the spiritual journey for these indigenes. Yet, as Equiano proves repeatedly, spiritual growth is replete with dead ends and unforeseen developments—­it cannot be forced. Indeed, Joanna Brooks insists that The Interesting Narrative shows that the “experience of religion,” as well as Equiano’s personal growth and rejection of slavery, is “discontinuous and incomplete.”29 When Equiano returns to the West Indies to serve as overseer for Dr. Irving on his Jamaican plantation, he meets four “Musquito Indians,” one a prince dubbed George, on their way home. The similarities between George and Equiano abound. Yet while Equiano plies him with scripture and Protestant martyrology, the crew “teazed the poor innocent youth” (202, 204). George, though, caught 250

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between two worlds, chooses neither: “He would not drink nor carouse with these ungodly actors, nor would he be with me even at prayers” (204). Eschewing company all together, George rejects Equiano’s advice, and, while Equiano blames the ungodly crew, he contributes to George’s withdrawal as well. In his interactions with George, Equiano seemingly fails to learn from his past interactions and commits some of the same errors that his story addresses. Rather than let George conceptualize his own sensibility about the displacements he endures or reconcile his own life with various experiences, Equiano tries to hasten his development. He, in what seems like a generic analogy, uses a universal problem of bodily ache to illustrate a culturally specific religious system: “As he sometimes had the tooth-­ach, and also some other persons in the ship at the same time, I asked him if their tooth-­ ach made him easy? he said, No. Then I told him, if he and these people went to hell together, their pains would not make his any lighter. This had great weight with him, it depressed his spirits much; and he became ever after, during the passage, fond of being alone” (204). The universal reference point, in short, avoids the errors of the mate Equiano met in Falmouth but introduces some new ones. “[F]ond of being alone” illustrates Equiano’s (here at least) unwitting critique of western European ideologies of individual identity, for, by trying to foist his belief system on George, Equiano creates someone who shuns new stimuli. Equiano’s narrative demonstrates how he fostered a stable subject that incorporates the past and accretes new worldviews—­a process cemented by his voyage to the Arctic, an environment that, paradoxically, frees him from the initial trauma of the transatlantic slave trade. Without it, he might also be “fond of being alone” and impervious to his environment. Trying to imbue the moment with spiritual significance is perhaps laudable, but Equiano does not recognize the singularity of his assorted encounters with humans and nonhumans. George possesses a past with its attendant manifold experiences, episodes, and interactions that, if properly processed, can lead to his own personal salvation. We take Equiano’s clumsy efforts with George as a sort of parable for Beyond 1776. Substituting a ready-­made narrative for George’s life stifles it. It is invaluable to possess Equiano’s life writing, which allows us to reconstruct his history free from the overarching narratives of the period—­but we have lost many other histories (and in this case, one partly at the hands of Equiano) that can enrich our scholarship. This collection assays to revivify a few actors, networks, and relationships that—­like George and his affiliations—­might otherwise have been obscured. 251

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Notes 1. Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 1995), 102; subsequent parenthetical citations are from this edition. Carretta speculates that the French seizure of Montserrat enabled the former slave’s escape (270n296). 2. Cathy Davidson’s elegant description of Equiano’s biography emphasizes how it indexes the thoughts, behaviors, and attitudes of its times: “In its ranging and unpredictable hybridity, in its urgency, in its embrace of trauma and uncertainty as a central trope, and in its high moral purpose coupled with a capacious refusal to adhere to a stable form, The Interesting Narrative resembles the post-­Revolutionary American novel” (“Olaudah Equiano, Written by Himself,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 40, nos. 1–­2 [2006]: 22). 3. Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 55. 4. Thomas Day and John Bicknell, The Dying Negro, a Poetical Epistle, Supposed to Be Written by a Black, (Who Lately Shot Himself on Board a Vessel in the River Thames;) to His Intended Wife (London: Flexley, 1773), 19. 5. Ibid. 6. Elizabeth Bohls, Slavery and the Politics of Place: Representing the Colonial Caribbean, 1770–­1833 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 138. 7. Ibid., 139, 142. See also Shin Yamashiro’s brief treatment of the oceanic in American Sea Literature: Seascapes, Beach Narratives, and Underwater Explorations (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 22–­25. 8. Equiano even fantasizes about becoming pope in Malaga, Spain, a port on the Mediterranean near Gibraltar; a Spanish priest informs Equiano, “if I [Equiano] got myself made a priest, I might in time become even Pope” (200). Equiano unironically includes this praise in his narrative in order to separate himself from the anti-­Catholic nationalism of Britain and America, although scholars sometimes consider this passage the preeminent example of “a method of ego-­building that can be traced to African oral traditions and to black American folk tales and literature” (Angelo Costanzo, introduction to The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano [Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2004], 18). 9. Hazel Carby, “Becoming Modern Racialized Subjects,” Cultural Studies 23, no. 4 (2009): 634. 10. Lisa Lowe, Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 62. 11. Andrew Kopec, “Collective Commerce and the Problem of Autobiography in Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative,” Eighteenth Century 54, no. 4 (2013): 462. 12. Ramesh Mallipeddi, “ ‘A Fixed Melancholy’: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage,” Eighteenth Century 55, nos. 2–­3 (2014): 248. 13. Yael Ben-­Zvi, “Equiano’s Nativity: Negative Birthright, Indigenous Ethic, and Universal Human Rights,” Early American Literature 48, no. 2 (2013): 402. 14. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 5.

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15. See Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography of a Self-­Made Man (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005), 10. 16. Debates over Equiano’s origins (whether born in colonial America or in Africa) or whether he embodies American ingenuity or British subjectivity necessarily obscure key facets of the narrative. 17. As Paul Giles notes, “Equiano’s retrospective vantage point contributes to this process of objectification, where events are not so much recorded experientially but rather framed within a double discourse of displacement and exchange” (Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature, 1730–­1860 [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 192]. 18. In the opening to the readers, he notes, “I regard myself as a particular favorite of Heaven, and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in every occurrence of my life” (31). 19. Thomas Wilson, An Essay towards an Instruction for the Indians (London, 1740), 95. 20. Giles, Transatlantic Insurrections, 194. 21. Carretta, Equiano, the African, 44. The region usually features warm weather: “Influenced by the Gulf Stream, the weather in Cornwall, particularly on its Atlantic coast, is uncharacteristically warm for Britain, so warm in fact that imported palm trees thrive in the mild climate” (44). 22. See Joanna Brooks, “Soul Matters,” PMLA 128, no. 4 (2013): 950. She writes, “Out of the hundreds of scholarly essays published on Olaudah Equiano, about one dozen have substantially engaged the role of religion in his writing” (950). 23. Mungo Park, Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, ed. Kate Ferguson Marsters (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 69. 24. Ibid., 84. 25. For John Bugg, “trifles” encapsulate the discourses that, for a variety of reasons, Equiano is unable to articulate: trifles “absorb the vexed thoughts and emotions that arise from Equiano’s telling of his life story, including anger, revenge, suspicions of the value of freedom, and meditations on the prospect of a black community in Britain” (Bugg, “Equiano’s Trifles,” ELH 80, no. 4 [2013]: 1050). 26. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-­American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 156. 27. Carretta, Equiano, the African, 303. 28. Equiano gains his manumission through his savvy commercial transactions in the West Indies—­but these building blocks to emancipation crumble as he does not enjoy the expected autonomy and self-­actualization. For a different view, see Peter Jaros, “Good Names: Olaudah Equiano or Gustavus Vassa,” Eighteenth Century 54, no. 1 (2013): 1–­23. Specifically, he claims, “Equiano/Vassa’s self-­presentation as commercial author whose value is undersigned by his ‘creditors’ makes him an early exemplar of the new subject whose value is understood in terms of speculation, in both the philosophical and capitalist senses of the word” (10). 29. Brooks, “Soul Matters,” 950.

253

Contributors

JENG-­G UO CHEN is a Research Fellow in History at Academia Sinica in Tai-

wan. His research interest lies in eighteenth-­century British intellectual history and Sino-­British comparative history. His publications have appeared in British Journal for Eighteenth-­Century Studies, Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, and Adam Smith Review, among other venues. MATTHEW P. DZIENNIKis

an Assistant Professor of British and imperial history at the United States Naval Academy, where his work focuses on British colonial recruitment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He is the author of The Fatal Land: War, Empire, and the Highland Soldier in British America (2015) and of several articles appearing in such publications as Past & Present, Historical Journal, and Journal of British Studies. MIRANDA A . GREEN-­B ARTEET is

an Assistant Professor at the University of Western Ontario, where she is cross-­appointed in the Department of Women’s Studies & Feminist Research and the Department of English and Writing Studies. Her research focuses on the ways women writers of varied race and class backgrounds negotiate space and place. She has published on Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps as well as on constructions of race and gender in young adult dystopian fiction. She is the coediter of Female Rebellion in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction (2014) and of a forthcoming collection examining the works of Laura Ingalls Wilder. CARINE LOUNISSI is

an Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Rouen-­Normandie in France and a member of the CNRS-­ sponsored LARCA research team (Laboratoire de Recherches sur les Aires Anglophoes) at University Paris Diderot. Her research interests are the intellectual history of the revolutionary era (American and French Revolutions). She has previously published articles on Thomas Paine, Joel Barlow, and The Federalist. Her most recent book is Thomas Paine and The French Revolution (2018).

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Contributors

is a Lecturer in English at Martin Luther University of Halle-­Wittenberg in Germany. She is the author of Where Fiction Ends: Four Scandals of Literary Construction (2006), an analysis of the textual construction of fictional author identities in Canadian and Australian literary scandals. Her second book project is a genre study of the Australian convict novel, and her German edition of Flinder’s journal of the circumnavigation of Australia was published in 2014. THERESE-­M ARIE MEYER

MARIA O’MALLEY is

an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. Her most recent articles on American literature have appeared in New England Quarterly, Journal of Narrative Theory, and Women Studies. She is completing a book on women and empire in late eighteenth-­and early nineteenth-­century American literature. ED SIMONis

an Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Media Studies at Bentley University, and the Editor-­at-­Large for the Marginalia Review of Books, a channel of the Los Angeles Review of Books. DENYS VAN RENENis

an Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. He is the author of The Other Exchange: Women, Servants, and the Urban Underclass in Early Modern English Literature (2017) and Nature and the New Science in England, 1665–­1726 (2018). He has published widely on long eighteenth-­century British literature; his latest article, on John Milton’s Paradise Lost, appeared in the journal Restoration. WYGER R. E. VELEMAis

Jan Romein Professor of History in the Department of History of the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in the history of eighteenth-­century political thought. He has published widely in this field, including Enlightenment and Conservatism in the Dutch Republic: The Political Thought of Elie Luzac (1993) and Republicans: Essays on Eighteenth-­ Century Dutch Political Thought (2007). Most recently, he coedited Ancient Models in the Early Modern Republican Imagination (2017). LEONARD VON MORZÉ is

an Associate Professor and Chair of the English Department at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. He is the editor of Cities and the Circulation of Culture in the Atlantic World: From the Early Modern to Modernism (2017) and coeditor of Urban Identity and the Atlantic World (2013).

256

Index

Adams, John, 8, 19n13, 31, 46n28, 93; administration of, 34; in Albrecht, 36; correspondence with French intellectuals, 75, 77, 80–­82, 83 Africa, 34, 174, 216, 231–­35, 239–­41, 248–­49; in Blake, 13, 174 agriculture, 56–­57, 78, 90–­91, 93–­95, 125; in Africa, 231; in Australia, 202n9. See also physiocrats Albrecht, Johann, 32, 35–­36 Anglo-­Irish (people), 145–­47, 152–­54 anti-­Catholicism, 145–­57 Arctic, 16, 226–­32, 237, 245–­51 Arnold, Benedict, 89–­90, 92, 150 Articles of Confederation, 55–­56, 108, 116 Australia, 9, 13, 189–­201; New South Wales, 17, 189–­93, 195–­201 Austro-­Hungarian Empire, 4

Columbus, Christopher, as portrayed in Hütter, 33–­34 commerce, 88, 91–­96, 217, 229, 239–­40; global maritime, 170, 174, 182, 185, 208, 229; reform of, 74; tension with republicanism, 12, 15, 78, 82 constitutions: Dutch, 65–­66, 73n84; state, 60–­61, 95; U.S., 10, 12, 46n25, 61–­66, 81–­82, 93–­95; U.S. Constitutional Convention, 9, 38, 108 Corday, Charlotte, 15–­16, 122, 127–­28, 141n37; in Pogson, 123–­39 Cornwallis, General Charles, 9, 20n25, 115, 119, 172 cosmopolitanism, 2, 6, 229 Crèvecoeur, John Hector St John de, 78, 89–­90, 94 Crimea, 4

Batavian Revolution, 14, 52–­54, 62–­65 bayonet, 191–­92, 199–­201 Beaumarchais, Pierre-­Augustin Caron de, 180–­81, 188n53 Black Atlantic, 5, 18, 229 Blake, William, 15, 107–­19, 120n8 Boston Tea Party, 210, 218, 221–­22 Brown, Charles Brockden, 38; Edgar Huntly, 38–­39 Bunker Hill, Battle of, 17, 166, 191–­93, 201–­2n6, 203n21

Day, Thomas, 228 Deane, Silas, 178–­82, 187n52, 188nn53–­54 Declaration of Independence, 15, 33–­34, 54; translated into Chinese 216–­20 Defoe, Daniel, 40–­41, 238 Dutch East India Company, 34. See also East India Company Dutch Republic, 1, 8–­9, 14, 48–­66, 78, 89, 173, 227; Fourth Anglo-­Dutch War, 8, 57, 173; Holland, 49, 50, 77, 83, 166, 174–­75, 181, 187n37, 193

Canton, 212–­17 Capetown, 192–­93 Catholic Committee, 154–­55 Cerisier, Antoine-­Marie, 15, 76–­77, 80–­90, 93, 95–­96, 97n3 China, 9, 18, 178, 206–­22 Collins, David, 17, 190–­97 colonists, 87–­94, 149–­50, 166, 176–­92, 210–­11; German-­speaking, 13–­14, 25, 27–­32, 36, 55

East India Company (EIC), 177, 178, 207, 210–­17. See also Dutch East India Company Empress of China (ship), 216–­17 Equiano, Olaudah, 11, 16, 18, 21n35, 226–­54 federalism, 14, 36, 37, 49, 62, 77, 81, 93–­94, 98n17, 116; Batavian, 62–­66 First Fleet, 17, 189–­201

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flogging, 193–­96 France, 1–­2, 4, 8–­9, 15, 19n13, 25, 28, 30, 34–­35, 37, 43, 48–­51, 63–­64, 74–­96, 155, 159, 174, 180–­83; in Pogson, 122, 125, 128–­38; relations with China, 206–­8, 216–­20. See also French Revolution Franklin, Benjamin, 1–­2, 8, 17, 75, 77, 79–­85, 103n90, 166–­84, 188n69; in Blake, 108–­9, 114–­15; in Hütter, 37 French Revolution, 14–­15, 78, 96, 122, 132, 139, 159, 206, 208; in Blake, 108, 114; in China, 220; in the Dutch Republic, 48–­50, 54, 61, 64, 75; in Hütter, 16, 26, 28, 34, 37, 40, 43; in Pogson, 16, 122, 124, 132, 138–­39, 141n42 Freneau, Philip, 171–­72

Jay, John, 8, 19n13 Jefferson, Thomas, 28, 32–­36, 75, 79–­83, 116, 120n8, 153; engraving of, 31, Husband on, 107–­8; Jeffersonian agrarianism, 93–­95 Kaplan, Amy, 10, 123, 129

Gaelic (language), 145, 149, 160n9 George III, 1, 36, 57, 116–­18, 153, 155, 200, 216 German states, 27, 29, 37–­39, 42 Gibraltar, 4, 17, 174, 191 globalism, 3, 5–­13, 17–­18, 28, 66, 67n2, 146–­50, 159, 167–­69, 175, 184–­85, 222n2, 229–­32; —­, and the British Empire, 145, 189, 191, 198, 201; in Hütter, 25–­26, 37, 42; in Melville, 167; and the novel, 42; and revolutions, 52; and trade, 167–­69, 174, 177–­80, 184, 206–­13, 229 Gould, Eliga, 3, 10 Greene, Jack, 3 Gützlaff, Charles (Karl), 215–­18 Haiti (Saint-­Domingue), 10, 77, 84 Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri, 10, 182–­83 Hilliard d’Auberteuil, Michel-­René, 15, 76–­77, 81–­96, 97n3, 98n15, 103n90 Hunt, Joseph, 190–­91, 196–­201 Husband, Herman, 15, 105–­15 Hütter, Christian Jacob, 14, 26–­47 ice, 248–­49. See also Arctic; water India, 9, 207 Ireland, 16–­17, 145–­59 Israel, Jonathan, 59–­60, 107 Jacobites, 150, 157, 200 Japan, 18, 218–­20

Larkin, Ed, 1, 2, 3 Lee, Arthur, 179, 180–­81, 188n54 Liang Qichao, 206, 220–­22 liberalism, 15, 41–­42, 45n13, 53, 93, 96, 98n17, 167, 218; economic, 42, 75–­78 liberty, 18, 45n13, 49, 50–­65, 90, 105; in Pogson’s play, 128–­38, universal, 151, 159 Locke, John, 107, 108, 135; on liberalism, 53 Loyalists, 6, 86, 149–­50, 189, 193, 203n17 Lutyens, Gotthilf, 28, 38–­42, 46n30 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 15, 63, 76, 81–­82, 93, 98n14 Mandrillon, Joseph, 15, 77, 80–­97, 203n90 Marat, John-­Paul, 16, 122–­23, 127; as portrayed in Pogson, 130–­37 Martinique, 171, 173, 182, 187 Melville, Herman, 166–­68 Middle Passage, 11, 18 military: British, 16–­17, 146, 150–­58, 178, 189–­97, 207–­8, 212; Continental, 50, 175, 198, 140n13; disciplinary practices in, 193–­96; Hessian soldiers, 9 34, 36, 46n24; recruitment, 151–­57, 198; Scottish and Irish in, 150–­53 Milton, John, 11, 113, 118, 214; in Blake, 113, 116, 118 Nagle, Jacob, 196, 198–­201, 204n50 Napoleon, 26, 30, 37; Napoleonic empire, 25, 40–­43, 65 Native Americans, 32, 85, 92, 151, 153, 236–­37, 239, 246, 250 natural rights, 27, 34–­35, 61, 75, 88, 90 networks, 4–­5, 8–­9, 15, 32, 48, 76–­84, 145, 167, 174, 185 New South Wales. See under Australia North Carolina Regulator’s Rebellion, 105, 106

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orphan, United States figured as, 36–­40, 47n35

Stamp Act, 92, 176, 210, 218 Stern, Laurence, 7

Paine, Thomas, 51, 59, 76, 81, 83, 85–­88, 90, 153, 227; in Blake, 108–­9, 112–­17; Common Sense, 15, 85–­88, 90 Patriots, Dutch, 54, 57–­65 Phillip, Governor Arthur, 190, 197–­98 physiocrats, 15, 74–­78, 82, 85, 88–­95 Pogson, Sarah, 15–­16, 122–­25, 127–­30, 133–­34, 137–­39 Presbyterianism, 38, 106, 148–­49 Prussia, 54, 61, 175, 178. See also German states

Taiwan, 18, 208–­12, 218–­20 tea, 18, 176–­78, 184, 206–­18, 221–­22, 222n6 Tea Act, 210–­11, 218 trade, 75, 92, 184, 187n26, 206–­7, 214, 240, 250; book trade, 13–­14; of Chinese goods, 206–­18, 224n26; free, 17, 41, 78, 82, 93–­95, 103n98, 154, 170, 173–­74; illicit, 167, 170, 173–­80, 184–­85, 207; regulation of, 8, 17, 82, 146, 169, 171, 175–­80, 216–­17; slave, 226, 229, 231, 251 Treaty of Paris, 1–­2, 4, 7–­8, 19n13, 83, 183–­84, 208 Turgot, 78, 89; debates with Malby and Adams, 81–­82; reforms of, 74, 75, 96

Qianlong, 212–­14, 217–­18 republicanism, 12, 15, 26, 34–­36, 41–­43; in China, 206, 209, 215–­18; in Dutch Republic, 8–­9, 14, 48–­66, 78, 227; French thinkers on, 76–­78, 81–­96; Husband on, 107; in Pogson’s play, 127–­37; women in, 16, 123–­27, 138–­39 Rodney, George, 172–­73, 184 Ross, Robert, 190, 197–­200, 202n6 Rousseau, 60, 63, 76, 83–­84, 107, 221; on Native Americans, 92; on women in republics, 125, 128, 135, 140n16 Rush, Benjamin, 126–­27 Russia, 4, 8, 219 Schubart, Christian F. D., 34, 46n24 Scotland, 16–­17, 145–­59, 209 Scotophobia, 150 Seven Years’ War, 12, 74, 168, 190, 207–­14, 236–­38 slavery, 13, 14, 91, 106, 189, 226–­30, 234–­50; abolition of, 106, 108–­9, 230; and military service, 153, 154, 155; omitted in Pogson, 124 snow, 230, 239–­42. See also water sovereignty, popular, 4, 17, 48, 57–­61, 78, 158, 168 Spain, 1, 4, 8, 85–­86, 118, 174, 227, 252n8 St. Eustatius, 8–­9, 17, 166–­67, 169–­79, 182–­85

United Provinces. See Dutch Republic Union of Utrecht, 54–­55, 62 Vergennes, Comte de, 1–­4, 19n13, 188n53 virtue, 26, 36, 50–­56, 78, 82, 87, 92–­95, 136–­39; in Pogson’s play, 125–­30 Volunteers (Irish); 153–­54, 165n83 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 5 Washington, George, 46n28, 76, 216–­17, 221; in Blake, 108, 112, 114–­19; Husband on, 109; in Hütter, 25–­43; on Scots, 150 water: Equiano’s relationship to, 16, 18, 228–­30, 232–­49; international rights to, 1, 8 West Indies, 13, 16; commerce in, 166, 174–­84, 187n26, 216; Equiano and, 226, 232–­24, 247, 250, 253n28; military presence in, 16, 198. See also Martinique; St. Eustatius Whig, 12, 82, 86, 148, 150–­51, 157, 210 Whiskey Rebellion, 106, 108, 116 Wikileaks, 185, 188n69 women, 16, 122–­27, 131–­40, 208; in the American Revolution, 139, 140n13; in the French Revolution, 124, 127–­37, 139; and republicanism, 125–­40; writers, 122

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