Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
seething class conflicts but a moderate and rational compromise where all demonstrations of conflict short of a Jacobin or Bolshevist revolution vanished in an all-pervasive liberal consensus.14
At the same time that liberal historians were working to modify the view of early American history, another form of revision was taking shape. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a series of essays began to challenge the primacy of the consensual mode of history by exploring the influence of English libertarian thought on the American revolutionaries. For these historians, neither Beard’s economics nor Hartz’s Lockean individualism were the driving force behind the revolution and the early national period. Instead, they argued that colonial Americans drew their political and social attitudes from the libertarian thought of the English ‘commonwealth’ or ‘country’ polemicists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. In 1947, Caroline Robbins looked towards Sidney’s Discourses rather than Locke’s Essays as a significant influence on American thought.15 Acknowledging the contemporary ignorance of Sidney’s writings and the frequent coupling of his name with Locke’s, Robbins set out to uncover the nature of his influence during the revolutionary years. She revealed that like many of his contemporaries, Sidney voiced a popular theory of government against the divine right of any ruler or form of government. In his Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney suggested:
As impostors seldom make lies to pass in the world, without putting false names upon things, such as our author endeavour to persuade the people they ought not to defend their liberties, by giving the name of rebellion to the most just and honourable actions that have been performed for the preservation of them; and to aggravate the matter, fear not to tell us that rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft. But those who seek after truth, will easily find, that there can be no such thing in the world as the rebellion of a nation against its own magistrates, and that rebellion is not always evil.16
Unlike the ‘principles of the wise and moderate Mr. Locke’, Sidney justified rebellion and conspiracy in the face of tyranny and authoritarianism: ‘For the radical, rebel, or revolutionary, the passionate and partisan Discourses provides an inspiration lacking in Locke’s more temperate Essays.’ Moreover, Robbins’s essay revealed that while Sidney’s inspiration faded in England after the revolution, in America his stature only increased. Conceived of as a seventeenth-century hero and martyr, his motto was adopted by various states, his story was retold in popular history books and his Discourses became one of the political textbooks along with the works of Milton, Harrington, Ludlow, Marvell and Locke, among others. Robbins suggests that the lack of interest in commonwealth doctrine in the contemporary ‘post-Marxian world’ occurred because the writings of these men did not bring about any significant constitutional change in eighteenth-century Britain, nor were they interested in issues of social and economic equality. For post-war Progressives and Liberals alike, Sidney’s writings did not fulfil an interpretative need and therefore were largely ignored.17
Continuing her assessment of the influence of English reformers on America, Robbins followed her essay on Sidney with an examination of the republican bibliophile and philanthropist, Thomas Hollis. Another largely forgotten figure in post-war historiography, Hollis spent his life defending the seventeenth-century republican tradition and dedicated himself to the private service of English liberty. According to Robbins, Hollis ‘became the most persistent and one of the most effective propagandists for radical Whig doctrines operating in the British Empire in the 1760’s’.18 While Samuel Johnson’s Tory circle described him as a ‘bigotted Whig or Republican’, and a spreader of ‘“Combustibles” of sedition’, Robbins uncovered his importance to eminent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin who commended Hollis’s service to the cause of American liberty:
Good, not only to his own nation, and to his contemporaries, but to distant Countries, and to late Posterity; for such must be the effect of his multiplying and distributing copies of the Works of our best English writers on Subjects the most important to the Welfare of our Society.19
For Hollis, the American colonists represented true revolutionary principles, the faith of the real Whigs, and his benefactions of books, coins and illustrations to Harvard University reflected his support of their fight for an American Bill of Rights.20
Robbins’s contribution to an understanding of the transmission and influence of libertarian thought to America propelled a series of essays that helped focus attention on an intellectual and ideological approach to American revolutionary thought and society.21 While these nascent works often failed to offer an obvious relationship between English and American ideas or to define republicanism in an American context, they each helped to erode the orthodox view that ideas, particularly republican ideas, played no part in the revolution or the formation of the constitution. The turning point for republican historiography came with the publication of Robbins’s 1959 groundbreaking work The Eighteenth-Century Commonwealthmen, the first detailed attempt to describe the English libertarian heritage that Americans drew upon. From the ideas of the Commonwealthmen, Robbins revealed the libertarian drive responsible for keeping alive the ideas of the ‘Real Whigs’, Harrington, Nedham, Milton, Ludlow, Sidney and Marvell who, while believing in the English constitution, also supported the separation of powers, freedom of thought and the sovereignty of the people in the face of increasing corruption and tyranny. As Robbins demonstrated, it was through the ideas of these ‘Real Whigs’, filtered through the writings of Robert Molesworth, John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, that Americans developed a profound distrust of power and a fear of usurpation of liberty from the people.22
Following Robbins’s work, the republican paradigm was fully realized with the publication of three landmark texts: Bernard Bailyn’s Pamphlets of the American Revolution: 1750–1776, Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787, and J. G. A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment.23 These volumes each contended that the breach between Britain and the colonies was to be explained primarily by understanding the circumstances as the participants perceived them. According to Pocock:
in tracing history in terms of contemporary self-understanding – which is what the history of ideology really amounts to – one is not playing a barren game of pitting one cause against another cause, or one factor against another factor; one is exploring the contemporary perception of possibilities and impossibilities, and the limitations of that perception.24
Labelled the ‘neo-Whig’ or ‘idealist’ approach, these historians clarified the influence of English dissenting thought in America and the implications for American society on the intellectual life of the revolution. More significantly, they outlined the language and conceptual framework of republicanism and revealed the inherent concerns of the revolutionary generation which progressive and liberal historiography had tried to dismiss or contain. The revolution was not a smooth transition to republicanism, they argued, but an experiment punctuated by fear and despair. In this context, the classical dialects of virtue/corruption, liberty/tyranny, past/progress and authenticity/deception became the key terms to unlocking the meaning of eighteenth-century thought. For the neo-Whig historians, one solution to understanding this critical period is an awareness of the differences in political and social principle between the anti-Federalists and Federalists and, in particular, the dispute over the degree of balance between equality and the authority of the central government. Certainly, it was a generation deeply divided over its definition of social and political life. However, more important than the rivalries between opposing political parties was the fascination of the revolutionary generation with political ideology and, specifically, the ideology of republicanism. These historians viewed the whole revolutionary era as a continuing effort by the American people to decide exactly what republicanism meant to them. Arguments between Federalists and anti-Federalists were not to do with whether to have a republic, but rather what type of republic they envisioned and two modes of thought competed strenuously for the establishment of republican liberty: Protestantism and American legal thought. The oppositional rhetoric of clergymen provided revolutionary Americans with a forceful moral dimension to the nation’s fight against the British Empire, while the idea of law, reworked for an American republic from English common law and the legal treatise of the European Enlightenment, ‘defined the