Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
in political orientation as Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and John Taylor may have differed over the specifics of political theory, they nonetheless shared a common body of assumptions about republican political society. At its most basic level, all agreed that republicanism implied an absence of both a monarchy and an English-style aristocracy and the establishment of a government directed by the will of the people. But this usage of the term was always vague and ambiguous. It appears only once in the constitution, and in The Federalist, James Madison offered only a general meaning:‘we may define a republic to be, or at least may bestow that name on, a government which derives all its powers directly or indirectly from the body of the people; and is administered by persons holding their offices during pleasure, for an unlimited period, or during good behaviour’.26 The term also encompassed a whole range of ideas regarding republican government which influenced the nation’s manners and institutions. The first was that all republics were dependent on a broad distribution of virtue among its citizens. In the classical republican tradition, man was by nature a political being, and public or political liberty meant participation in government. However, liberty was only achieved when citizens were virtuous – that is, willing to sacrifice their private interests in favour of the public good.‘What is called a republic’, wrote Thomas Paine, means the ‘public good’, or the good of the whole, compared with a despotic form, which makes the good of the sovereign or of one man the only object of government.‘Every government that does not act on the principle of a Republic, or in other words, that does not make the res-publica its whole and sole object, is not a good government.’27 The eighteenth-century classical values of public or civic virtue were not only American conceptions: virtue, and other values such as honour and sincerity that accompanied it,
lay at the heart of all prescriptions for political leadership in the eighteenth-century English speaking world. Throughout the century Englishmen of all political persuasions – whigs and tories alike – struggled to find the ideal virtuous leader amid the rising and swirling currents of financial and commercial interests that threatened to engulf their society.28
In the American context, public virtue or disinterestedness combined with the private virtues of industry, simplicity and sincerity to define the dimensions of republicanism; and it is because republics required such moral sacrifice that they are fragile polities, vulnerable to corruption and decay. The revolution had tested and refined the power of American virtue, but by the 1790s, when the crisis was over, men reverted to their naturally selfish, ambitious and extravagant ways. The greatest danger to virtue, both private and public, was commonly recognized as wealth and luxury, passion and competition, and with the return to prosperity after the economic disorder of the revolution, virtue was under threat. Profoundly aware of the historical fact that republican government never lasted for long, and challenged by the rapidly expanding commercial culture, American revolutionaries worried that the moral prerequisites of a republican order were difficult if not impossible to maintain. From their readings of both ancient and contemporary texts, they knew that all republics were vulnerable and impermanent; outside of a few European principalities, no other republican government prevailed at the time of the American Revolution. Because republican political society is characterized by individual liberty and the absence of a dominating authority, they were vulnerable to hostile attacks from without, and corruption and decay from within.
Another central idea was that the spirit and principle of a genuine republic was the promotion of equality of property among its citizens. Equality meant that no individual should be dependent on the will of another, and property made this independence possible. Americans concluded that they were naturally fit for republicanism precisely because they were ‘a people of property; almost every man is a freeholder’.29 But it was equally true that ‘Power follows property’, and as wealth increased, so too the tendency for power to consolidate in the hands of the few. The growing aristocracy of wealth led to the problem of faction, the internal rupture of society into competing political groups. As John Howe observes, ‘Faction was virtue’s opposite’, and in the resulting struggles, ‘passions were further aroused, internal divisions deepened and ultimately civil conflict was brought on. Such was the deadly spiral into which republican government too often fell.’30 These fundamental assumptions reveal that rather than sunny optimism, American revolutionaries were preoccupied with fears of tyranny, corruption and national degeneration. The truth was that the once great and illustrious ancient republics were no more and Americans studied and used this knowledge to diagnose the problems of eighteenth-century England, as well as to prevent their own burgeoning nation from succumbing to a similar fate.
One of the first works to detect the pessimistic strain underlying eighteenth-century republican discourse was Bernard Bailyn’s groundbreaking Pamphlets of the American Revolution. For Bailyn what was original about the revolution was not its social disruption but the alteration of American values, the way they looked at themselves and each other. From the agencies of newspapers, books, pamphlets, correspondence, as well as pan-Atlantic interest groups, the flow of information between Europe and the colonies was continuous, and for Bailyn the most important of these were the writings of the English dissenters:
In every colony and in every legislature there were people who knew Locke and Beccaria, Montesquieu and Voltaire; but perhaps more important, there was in every village of every colony someone who knew such transmitters of English nonconformist thought as Watts, Neal, and Burgh; later Priestly and Price . . . In the bitterly contentious pamphlet literature of mid eighteenth-century American politics, the most frequently cited authority on matters of principle and theory was not Locke or Montesquieu but Cato’s Letters.31
Believing the American Revolution to be an ideological and constitutional struggle, Bailyn expected to find the influence of Enlightenment theology, common law, classical literature, as well as a certain amount of rhetoric and propaganda embedded in revolutionary writing. What he did not expect to find were those strands of thought that many historians had traditionally denounced as irrelevant, nonexistent or simply ‘obtuse secularism’.32 The first of these patterns of ideas was the pervasive influence of European Enlightenment theory and theology on the revolutionary generation. Not only were these influences relevant, he claimed, they revealed that ‘[c]itations, respectful borrowings from, or at least references to, the eighteenth-century European illuminati are everywhere in the pamphlets of Revolutionary America’. The ideas and writings of reformers such as Locke, Voltaire, Rousseau and Beccaria, as well as conservative thinkers such as Montesquieu, were ‘quoted everywhere in the colonies, by everyone who claimed a broad awareness’.33 The second discovery was a pattern of ideas and attitudes that flowed directly from the British tradition of radical social and political thought transmitted to the colonists by libertarians, disaffected politicians and religious dissenters whose anti-authoritarianism was bred in the upheaval of the English Civil War. Nourished by the seventeenth-century political writings of John Milton and Algernon Sidney, early eighteenth-century libertarians such as John Trenchard, Thomas Gordon, Benjamin Hoadly and Robert Molesworth, and the contemporary writings of Richard Price, Joseph Priestly and Thomas Paine, the revolutionary pamphleteers revealed an astonishing engagement with the language of radical and anti-establishment thought. This tradition, Bailyn noted, had never been applied to the origins of the American Revolution, and it was in the context of identifying and classifying these references and sources that he saw new meanings in the language of revolutionary literature. What Bailyn discovered was a lexicon of fear and suspicion, a ‘vivid vocabulary’ of ‘slavery’, ‘corruption’, ‘conspiracy’, expressed over and over in the profusion of arguments, replies, rebuttals and counter-rebuttals that made up the literature of the revolutionary period. This language was not merely the propaganda of completing interests groups, but represented a genuine fear of rising tyranny and corruption:
These inflammatory words were used so forcefully by pamphleteers of so great a variety of social statuses, political positions, and religious persuasions; they fitted so logically into the pattern of radical and opposition thought; and they reflected so clearly the realities of life in an age in which monarchical autocracy flourished, in which the stability and freedom of England’s ‘mixed’ constitution was a recent and remarkable achievement, and in which the fear of conspiracy against constituted authority was built into the very structure