A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
disorder.22
Concerns about manhood, space, and citizenship were tied to women’s economic contributions. The law of coverture granted husbands control over family property, whether or not wives brought that property into the marriage. Without economic independence, married women were thought to lack the unencumbered mind and independent will essential to citizenship. They were “civilly dead.” Nonetheless, women contributed to the property and wealth that supported men’s independence and citizenship. Women worked family space. They kept gardens and livestock, manufactured items for the household and marketplace, took in boarders, prepared and preserved food, assumed responsibility for childbearing and rearing, conducted welfare activities, and often transmitted family property from generation to generation. In practice, Robert Gross suggests, husbands and wives “were partners in a common enterprise, although, in the end, only one was chairman of the board.”23 Alas, only the “chairman of the board” could achieve manhood and merit citizenship.
The second rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that meritorious men mixed their blood with the land to acquire and settle space for themselves and their families. Their ownership of property was a fixed foundation for maintaining liberty and independence, governing other family members, taming nature, and claiming citizenship. Worthy men might migrate—from Europe to America or from a father’s farm to the wilderness—if their goal was to acquire and settle new land. At times, the durability of intergenerational dynasties depended on younger sons claiming and clearing new land. As Michael Lienesch puts it, “Movement through time would invariably be influenced by movement across space.” Conversely, the founders doubted the merit of men who failed to establish a fixed place for themselves. They were “strangers” who wandered the land, suspects who threatened to disrupt decent society. Caleb Lownes, who administered Philadelphia’s prisons in the 1790s, announced that the city streets were safe—except for the crimes perpetrated by “strangers ... on their way to the westward.”24
Manhood and Fraternity
The founders told a tale about fathers and farmers who sought to transform a continent of strangers into the fraternity known as civil society.25 They assumed that the organic bonds joining American men to their sons and estates were sufficiently strong to motivate relatives and neighbors to protect their communities. That assumption was borne out by the eight father-son teams that manned the local militia to fight the British at Lexington, and by the complex kinship network of fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, brothers, cousins, and in-laws that mustered at Concord. When America’s parochial protests escalated into a continental revolution, the founders faced the more formidable challenge of forging unity among American men from diverse and distant communities. How could these strangers learn to trust each other? Would they cooperate in war and then contribute to a harmonious peace and shared prosperity?
The founders generally characterized men as social creatures. True, most men were selfish, but they also wanted to be respected by other men. They earned that respect by measuring up to consensual norms of manhood, most dramatically, by defending and extending manly liberty. Accordingly, colonial leaders called on Americans to enlist in the struggle against Great Britain to merit manhood and earn continental respect. Samuel Adams challenged Bostonians: “If you are men, behave like men.” Moses Mather rallied opposition to Britain by imploring Americans “to nobly play the man for our country.” Men who served with honor deserved public acclaim. Thus, Oxenbridge Thatcher complimented Virginia legislators for their resolutions against the Stamp Act by declaring, “Oh, yes. They are men!” Samuel Sherwood congratulated his courageous countrymen by praising “this manly, this heroic, and truly patriotic spirit which is gradually kindling up in every freeman’s breast.” By 1775, more and more American men were heeding the fraternal call to “fight manfully for their country.”26
The founders’ injunctions to “behave like men” and “play the man” and “fight manfully” had contingent meanings. Initially, such phrases suggested that American men should be reluctant to take up arms against their British brethren. James Otis, Jr., advised colonists to protest the Stamp Act but also to recognize Parliament’s authority and exhibit “loyalty, patience, meekness, and forbearance under any hardships,” insofar as these traits were “consistent with the character of men.” John Dickinson counseled Americans to exercise self-restraint in their protests and to remember that the British were still brethren “by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relations, language, and commerce.” He also warned patriots to avert the bloody consequences of separation: “Torn from the body to which we are united, ... we must bleed at every vein.” Worthy men restrained martial ardor to balance claims of liberty against established loyalties. Thomas Jefferson exemplified this disciplined ardor in 1774 when he expressed outrage at British tyranny but continued to plead with the king to reaffirm “fraternal love and harmony.”27
With the onset of armed hostilities in the mid-1770s, patriot leaders began to urge men to war against their treacherous British brethren. George Washington condemned the British for subverting “the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself, in the establishment of which some of the best blood of the kingdom has been spilt.” John Witherspoon expressed disgust that men who were “the same in blood, in language, and in religion should notwithstanding butcher one another with unrelenting rage.” Joseph Warren saw separation as a forgone conclusion and issued a call to arms: “Our all is at stake. . . . An hour lost may deluge your country in blood and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who survive the carnage.” Thomas Paine announced that the time for talk was done. His message to the pitiful men who pined for peace rather than arming for war was, “You are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, and lover and ... you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.”28
The founders used consensual norms of manhood to judge men’s conduct during the war. For example, they argued that British peace overtures that promised to restore fraternal harmony at the price of American men’s liberty were deceitful seductions that meritorious men must reject. Paine called Lord Howe’s proposals “cruel and unmanly.” Abigail Adams suggested that Americans who favored peace without independence had “neither the spirit nor the feeling of men.” Meanwhile, Jefferson attacked the British for destroying the trans-Atlantic bonds of brotherhood by committing fratricide and then compounding their treachery by using “Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and deluge us in blood.” Washington often mentioned Britain’s use of mercenaries. He refused several proposals to talk peace with the explanation, “I am satisfied that no [peace] commissioners were ever designed except Hessians and other foreigners.” The proper response to Britain’s unmanly conduct, he argued, was for Americans to engage in a “vigorous and manly exertion” consistent with “our character as men.”29 Overall, the founders prided themselves on having vindicated their character as men in dealing with Great Britain. They sought liberty but respected British authority. Their fraternal loyalty to Britain faltered only when fratricide and mercenary activity made unity impossible. Finally, they declared independence, raised a respectable army to defend liberty, and refused peace without honor.
When the founders declared independence, they initiated a process of procreating a distinctive American fraternity. War catalyzed the process. Wilson Carey McWilliams suggests that men are usually encouraged during a struggle against a common enemy to set aside small differences and “find solidarity” with one another. That was David Ramsay’s explanation for early national unity: “A sense of common danger extinguished selfish passions [and] local attachments were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism.” But fraternities forged in battle are fragile. They depend on the presence of a common enemy or danger rather than on shared values and visions. Jefferson made a similar point during the Revolution. He predicted that from the conclusion of the war onward, American men were likely to forget the struggle for liberty and equality and “forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money.”30 The founders’ fear that wartime fraternity would falter lent urgency to their efforts to fortify American unity.
The exigencies of revolution and nationhood burst open the issue of membership in American society. What qualified a man to fit in? How early did he have to join