A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
and propagate our species.” Carole Pateman observes that Hobbes and Locke fought the battle against divine kingship in fantasies about states of nature that attributed to men the “generative power” to create “new physical life” as well as “new political societies.” Whether such claims stemmed from male identification with God the Creator, unconscious fears of women’s power to give birth, or men’s desire to avoid dependence on women, Western thinkers have defined manhood as much in terms of procreation as of virtue or reason.5
The American founders reaffirmed myths of male procreativity each time they invoked the state of nature to justify their claims to liberty. Reflecting the misogynist fantasies of Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow as well as Richard Ames, they constructed all-male states of nature which assumed that men could reproduce the species without women. John Leland was unusual because he was explicit. His state of nature began, “Suppose a man to remove to a desolate island and take a peaceable possession of it. . . . In the process of time from this man’s loins ten sons are grown to manhood.” Occasionally the founders populated nature with men, women, and children. Almost immediately, however, they made the women and children perish. Here is John Adams’s disappearance act: “When a number of men, women, and children are simply congregated together, there is no political authority among them. ... To leave women and children out of the question for the present, the men will all be free, equal, and independent of each other.”6 Adams left women out of the question for the future too because his main concern was to stabilize relationships among men.
The emblem of stable male relationships was the blood bond that joined procreative fathers to their sons and grandsons. George Washington explained that men had a divine duty to engage in the “agreeable amusement of fulfilling the first and great commandment, increase and multiply.” Men especially hoped for sons who would transmit their bloodline along with their family name, estate, and social standing into the next generation. Better yet, they wanted grandsons to perpetuate their families for several generations. One grandfather referred to his grandchildren as “Our life, while we live!—Our hopes, when dead.”7 A family patriarch could expect to achieve personal dignity, social recognition, and symbolic immortality by siring respectful, resourceful heirs. He assumed a paternal obligation to protect, provision, educate, and provide patrimony for his sons and grandsons. In turn, his male offspring acquired a filial obligation to respect their father and, eventually, to honor him by siring, protecting, provisioning, educating, and providing patrimony for yet another generation. The ultimate goal of procreative manhood was to propagate, preserve, and prolong family dynasties.
Intergenerational blood bonds played a pivotal part in patriot politics. Colonial leaders constructed heroic histories of Americas first “fathers” to encourage filial opposition to the British. Jonathan Mayhew applauded colonial ancestors as courageous men who refused to be victimized by old-world tyranny. They were hardy “adventurers” who uprooted their families, ventured their fortunes, and risked their lives by hazarding an Atlantic voyage, investing “their money, their toil, their blood” in the land, and joining together in agricultural platoons and military brigades to provision and protect their families against hostile forces. These accomplished ancestors earned “their rights or their dearly purchased privileges, call them which you will.” Pamphleteers such as Thomas Fitch called them “the purchase of their ancestors . . . [the] reward of the merit and services of their forefathers . . . the best inheritance they left to their children.” John Adams proclaimed, “Our fathers . . . earned and bought their liberty.”8
If “our fathers” fulfilled their part of the intergenerational bargain by purchasing liberty for their offspring, how did sons and grandsons who inherited liberty as a birthright demonstrate their manly merit? Sheldon Wolin reminds us that a birthright may carry with it “an inherited obligation to use it, take care of it, pass it on, and hopefully improve it.” The founders argued that each generation had an obligation to protect, nurture, and enhance ancestral liberty in order to transmit it to the next generation and the next. Indeed, only men who acted to defend and extend liberty truly deserved it. Accordingly, Mercy Otis Warren told the story of the Boston Tea Party as a parable of patriots who proved themselves worthy sons of liberty. Governor Thomas Hutchinson imperiled ancestral liberty when he attempted to enforce the tea tax by using stealth and deception to “disarm his countrymen of the manly resolution that was their principal forte.” Fortunately, Bostonians demonstrated manly resolution by their “extraordinary exertions” in defense of liberty.9 The patriots proved themselves their fathers’ equals; they inherited but also merited liberty.
The founders called on the dictum that each male generation was obligated to prove its worth as leverage for recruiting colonists to the cause of liberty. In 1768, Silas Downer instructed Americans “manfully to oppose every invasion of our rights” so as to preserve and deserve their fathers’ legacy:
Our fathers fought and found freedom in the wilderness; they clothed themselves in the skins of wild beasts and lodged under trees among bushes; but in that state they were happy because they were free. Should these our noble ancestors arise from the dead and find their posterity trucking away that liberty . . ., they would return to the grave with a holy indignation against us. . . . We cannot, we will not, betray the trust reposed in us by our ancestors by giving up the least of our liberties.10
The same year, Daniel Shute contrasted “the first renowned settlers” to a modern generation of “degenerate offspring” that was guilty of “prostitution of patrimonial privileges” and “criminal want of philanthropy” because its members were loath to defend liberty “for millions yet unborn.” In 1773, John Allen asked colonists to recall “the right of liberty which their forefathers bought with their blood” as motivation for their own struggles. Again in 1775, Moses Mather challenged Americans to measure up to their heroic fathers, who earned liberty “at their own risk and expense and by their own sword and prowess.”11 Most founders presumed that worthy men would not be willing to suffer the personal shame and social disgrace associated with squandering their fathers’ legacy or forfeiting their sons’ liberty.
The Revolution amplified the voice of heroic fathers commanding their sons to preserve and pass on liberty. Thomas Jefferson ushered in the Revolution by declaring, “Honor, justice, and humanity forbid us to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.” Samuel Cooper encouraged American men to maintain support for the Revolution by memorializing “our venerable fathers” as men marked “by all the manly virtues and by an unquenchable love of liberty,” and also as men who “call on us ... to perpetuate the honor of their liberty.”12 One reason the founders developed what Douglass Adair sees as “an almost obsessive desire for fame” was that they felt pressured to measure up to the reputations of their pioneering ancestors. That they did measure up was evident a few decades later, when they themselves were remembered as gallant ancestors. Stanley Griswold, for example, attacked factionalism in turn-of-the-century Connecticut by asking, “Where are our fathers? Where are our former men of dignity, our Huntingtons, Shermans, Johnsons, and Stiles who in their day appeared like men, gave exaltation to our character, and never descended to a mean thing? It appears to me ... we are dwindled and more disposed to act like children than men.” Griswold’s injunction was “Let the spirit of our fathers come upon us. Be men.”13
American males who obeyed Griswold’s injunction to “be men” could expect a triple reward. First, they robbed mortality of its finality. Benjamin Franklin asked, “What old bachelor can die without regret or remorse when he reflects upon his death bed that the inestimable blessing of life and being has been communicated by father and son through all generations from Adam down to him but in him it stops and is extinguished?” Men who met their intergenerational obligations could live on through their sons and in the memory of their sons. Second, men who defended liberty for their families could expect to be praised by Spartan women who urged them to fight and then honored their heroism. Judith Sargent Murray told the story of “Artemisia, wife of Mausolus,” who “rendered herself illustrious” by building the Mausoleum to honor and immortalize her brave husband. Third, men who honored family obligations and defended liberty merited fraternal trust. They were reputed to be stable