Republicanism and the American Gothic. Marilyn Michaud
the colonists, the real danger to America was the violation of those principles upon which freedom rested. By 1763, Britain’s ‘mixed constitution’, the balance of social and governmental forces was seen to be under threat by ‘Jacobite remnants’, ‘effeminising luxury’ and ‘festering corruption’. In addition, there appeared to be evidence that ‘nothing less than a deliberate conspiracy launched surreptitiously by plotters against liberty’ was being perpetrated against America.
While conspiratorial fears were latent throughout colonial history, beginning with the Nonconformist’s suspicion of the Church of England’s ‘formal design to root out Presbyterianism’, the smouldering belief in a hidden plot directed against American liberties ignited with the institution of British policies in civil affairs: the passage of the Stamp Act, the Townsend Duties, the weakening of the judiciary and, especially, the implementation of standing armies, viewed by many as the keystone of arbitrary government, all confirmed for the colonists that the constitution was being undermined by what John Adams called the ‘serpentine wiles’ of the English administration. In the wake of the Boston Tea Party, Parliament ‘threw off the mask’ of legality and initiated a series of acts, intended to cripple the economic base of Massachusetts: the Administration of Justice Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Quebec Act and the Quartering Act. Once this interpretation of events took hold in the minds of the colonists, ‘it could not be easily dispelled: denial only confirmed it, since what conspirators profess is not what they believe; the ostensible, for them, is not the real; and the real is deliberately malign’. It was this belief, according to Bailyn, that transformed the colonists’ struggle and that in the end propelled them into revolution.35
Although Bailyn’s work does not use the term republicanism directly, it emphasized the transatlantic influences on American institutions and employed the key terms by which republicanism would come to be identified. It was Bailyn’s student Gordon Wood who would advance the view of a developing republican ideology in revolutionary America. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, while less deterministic than Bailyn’s Pamphlets, registered a similar note of surprise at the patterns of thought and conceptual language of the American patriots:
my reading opened up an intellectual world I had scarcely known existed. Beneath the variety and idiosyncrasies of American opinion there emerged a general pattern of beliefs about the social process—a set of common assumptions about history, society, politics that connected and made significant seemingly discrete and unrelated ideas.36
Following Bailyn’s description of revolutionary language meaning something ‘very real’ to both writers and readers, Wood also interprets the words of the generation not as hyperbole and propaganda but as genuine fears rooted in their culture and education. For Americans,
the Revolution meant nothing less than a reordering of eighteenth-century society and politics . . . a reordering that was summed up by the conception of republicanism . . . Republicanism meant more for Americans than simply the elimination of a king and the institution of an elective system. It added a moral dimension, a utopian depth, to the political separation from England—a depth that involved the very character of their society.
According to Wood, the one source of republican inspiration acknowledged by all Whigs, English and American alike, was classical antiquity where all the great republics had flourished. The profusion of classical allusions, references, iconography and language that ran through the colonists’ public and private writings revealed their investiture in creating an American neo-classical age. From their readings, Americans conceived of the ideal republic as one that avoided the downfall of the first and the sacrifice of individual interests to the greater good of the whole formed the essence of republicanism and the idealistic goal of their revolution. This ideology came to represent a final or even desperate attempt ‘to realize the traditional Commonwealth ideal of a corporate society, in which the common good would be the only objective of government’.37 Its most exact English equivalent was commonwealth, or a state belonging to the whole people rather than the crown. The people were a homogenous body, linked organically to the state and while the state was viewed as one moral whole, any clashing interests or factions were regarded as perversions and signs of sickness in the body politic.38 Republicanism, in Wood’s view, was profoundly traditional, embodying the ideal of the good society from antiquity through to the eighteenth century. Individual liberty and the public good were reconcilable because in Whig ideology liberty was public or political emphasizing not private rights against the general will but, more importantly, the public right against the interests of their rulers. This willingness to sacrifice private interests for the public good, this patriotism or nationalism was in the eighteenth century termed ‘public virtue’.39 Republics were vulnerable because in a polity that rested solely on the authority of the people, an extraordinary moral character was required. It was every man’s duty to be benevolent, to subordinate their individual loves to the greater good of the whole. However, there existed an inherent conflict in this theory. Liberty means the security of property, but the security of property also begets wealth, and wealth is the source of luxury and degeneration; therefore, any attempt to regulate wealth is to restrict liberty. It is this conundrum, according to Wood, which is at the centre of republican ideology.
Wood also contends that the failure of the revolutionaries to identify a natural aristocracy resulted in the federal crisis of the 1780s and the ‘end to classical politics’. The vocabulary that animated the revolutionaries in 1776, he claims, did not possess a timeless quality, and by 1787 the meaning of terms such as liberty, democracy, virtue or republicanism had undergone fundamental change:‘The Americans of the Revolutionary generation had not simply constructed a new form of government, but an entirely new conception of politics, a conception that took them out of an essentially classical and medieval world of political discussion into one that was recognizably modern’.40 It was a shift, in other words, from republicanism to liberalism, from the classical theory of the individual as civic or active to one where the individual is primarily concerned with his own interests. According to Wood, as Federalist theory moved away from the paradigm of virtue toward self-interest, it abandoned the rhetoric of republicanism:
Once the people were thought to be composed of various interests in opposition to one another, all sense of a graduated organic chain in the social hierarchy became irrelevant, symbolized by the increasing emphasis on the image of a social contract. The people were not an order organically tied together by their unity of interest but rather an agglomeration of hostile individuals coming together for their mutual benefit to construct a society.41
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