A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
time were temporal itinerants who deserved their neighbors’ distrust. That was Franklin’s supposition, for example, when he suggested that royal governors could not be trusted to be other than arbitrary because they ruled America without having American fathers to venerate or American sons to protect. They come and go but “leave no family behind them.”14
A fundamental rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that worthy men situated themselves in intergenerational time. They respected their birthright of liberty and proved themselves worthy of it by procreating and nurturing sons and by defending and extending liberty to new generations. They thereby achieved personal honor, social reputation, and the symbolic immortality associated with enduring family dynasties. In contrast, men who existed outside intergenerational time were not worthy of their birthright; nor were they likely to be trusted by other men. Instead, they were presumed to be selfish individuals who recognized no obligations to the past or future. They lived in the present where they unleashed lust, played out passion, and indulged impulse to disgrace their fathers’ memory and procreate nothing better than bastards.
Manhood and Space
The next episode in the founders’ story of America concerned fertile men giving birth to a new land. American men could procreate children and pass on liberty only if they cultivated sufficient land to support their offspring and sustain their independence. Property was a precondition for families and freedom. Benjamin Franklin believed that an abundance of land was America’s greatest resource. Young men were not afraid to marry early or raise large families because they could acquire enough land to provision their offspring and be confident that, when their children were grown, there would be “more land to be had at rates equally easy.” Thomas Jefferson agreed. That was why he thought “the immense extent of uncultivated and fertile lands” called Louisiana was crucial to America’s future.15 In general, the founders equated abundant land, early marriage, large families, rapid population growth, and economic prosperity with the national strength that guaranteed men’s liberty and security.
What made the founders’ story about men and land unique was the extent to which they injected manhood into real estate. John Locke made a mixture of men’s labor and land the source of property value and ownership. The Americans, however, concocted a mixture of men’s blood and land. They portrayed America’s “fathers” as procreative pioneers and fertile farmers who impregnated a virgin continent with their blood to give birth to a new land and prosperity. Franklin asserted that America’s European settlers were men who “purchased or conquered the territory at the expense of their own private treasure and blood.” Jefferson described early settlers as men whose “own blood was spilt in acquiring lands for their settlement.” A metaphoric measure of property value was the volume of blood that Americans spilled to acquire, defend, and bequeath it. George Duffield considered the continent extremely valuable because “America’s choicest blood had flowed in liberal streams” during the Revolution and thus America’s “soil [was] made fat with the blood of her children.”16
“Fat soil” was more than an economic instrumentality. The founders saw fertile land as a field for manhood. It was the landscape for what Washington called “the manly employment of agriculture.” What was “manly” about it? Agriculture tested men’s physical and mental abilities to survive and thrive in nature, endure hardship and adversity, recognize and reap the rewards of opportunity. It was the economic basis of manly independence. Agriculture also beckoned men to procreate prosperity to prolong their family dynasties. Thus, eastern men often tried to solve the problem of too many sons and too little land by speculating in western property to ensure future family access to farmland. For John Taylor, agriculture was the vocation of worthy men who dared to “subdue sterility” and convert “a wilderness into a paradise” able to support manly freedom and family heirs.17 Fathers and farmers alike procreated the future.
The founders regularly linked the image of the republican farmer to manly virtues such as simplicity, benevolence, friendship, and patriotism. Jefferson went further by endowing men’s relationship to the land with religious meaning: “Those who labor in the earth are the chosen people of God . . . [in] whose breasts he has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. It is the focus in which he keeps alive that sacred fire, which otherwise might escape from the earth.” He complemented his pastoral idyll with a contrasting image of American males cast out of paradise. His list of fallen men included unsettled, dependent Americans such as urban laborers, immigrants, itinerants, strangers, emancipated slaves, and nomadic Indians who survived by hunting. None of these men practiced the “agricultural and domestic arts” that fostered “improvement of the mind and morals”; none invested themselves in a particular piece of land or a settled community; none were stable men of character. Rather, they were among the perpetual migrants that John Taylor would blame for having fled “their natal spot” for new climates, only to fuel America’s social and political decay.18
Most founders believed that a worthy man was someone who occupied a fixed place in continental space. Leaders such as Washington, Adams, and Jefferson broadcast this belief each time they announced their yearning to exit the public stage and retire, respectively, to Mount Vernon, Braintree, and Monticello. Certainly, these declarations were politically expedient. It was wise for ambitious men to protest public service as a sacrifice of their personal desire for a simple agrarian life. Garry Wills suggests that Washington’s repeated pleas to forgo high office for farming constituted a major factor in his immense popularity. Still, more than politics was involved in the founders’ oft-expressed yearnings for a life on the land. They agreed with contemporaries that a man’s dignity and dynastic aspirations required him to settle down in one place—under his vine and fig tree—to enjoy his freedom, family, and farm.19
The linkage between manhood and settled space played a part in the conflict leading up to the Revolution. Early on, American colonists complained that they were unjustly stigmatized when the British treated them as itinerants who had ripped up their European roots to wander the New World. One colonial author asked fellow Americans to compare themselves to their English brethren: “Are you not of the same stock? Was the blood of your ancestors polluted by a change of soil? Were they freemen in England and did they become slaves by a six-weeks voyage to America? Does not the sun shine as bright, our blood run as warm? Is not our honor and virtue as pure, our liberty as valuable, our property as dear, our lives as precious here as in England?”20 The colonists denied their itinerancy and instead portrayed themselves as patriotic men who extended the British Empire, tamed a continent, and fixed a place for themselves and their families in the New World. That made them worthy men who deserved the rights of Englishmen.
The irony of the British stigma, according to Daniel Dulany, was that America’s most worthy men—those who successfully settled a piece of land and fixed a place for their families in the New World—were effectively precluded from citizenship. A citizen had to vote in person in Great Britain. Therefore, an American freeholder could exercise a citizen’s suffrage only “upon the supposition of his ceasing to be an inhabitant of America and becoming a resident of Great Britain.”21 The result was that America’s most notable men and their offspring were refused the manly dignity of political independence and full citizenship. This refusal encouraged many of America’s wealthiest and most influential colonists to express their sense of alienation by joining and leading escalating colonial protests against British authority.
The founders’ concern for the relationship between manhood and space resurfaced at the Constitutional Convention in a debate over immigrant eligibility for U.S. Senate seats. James Madison supported immigrant eligibility by arguing that meritorious men who migrated to America and settled there “would feel the mortification of being marked with suspicious incapacitations though they should not covet the public honors.” James Wilson’s supporting argument concluded, “To be appointed to a place may be a matter of indifference. To be incapable of being appointed is a circumstance grating and mortifying.” The founders presumed that men who settled a place for themselves in America deserved full citizenship; and such men were justly aroused to anger when denied the right to vote or run for office, regardless of whether they intended