A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
and pacifists eligible? Should Catholics be admitted if priests and papists used their “influence in the next world” to turn “the superstitious multitude” against the Revolution? What about clergymen and laymen who were deemed slaves to superstition and avarice? Were they so different from those spiritual souls who participated in “an intercourse of humane, generous kindness and grateful attachment and fidelity which like the vital fluid diffuses cheerful health through the whole political body”?31 Did ethnicity affect membership? James Winthrop felt that ethnic homogeneity in New England “preserved their religion and morals [and] that manly virtue which is equally fitted for rendering them respectable in war and industrious in peace,” but mixed blood in Pennsylvania cost that state its “religion and good morals.” Questions also arose about America’s backwoodsmen. Were they Americans or “a mongrel half-breed, half civilized, half savage?” And how did race factor in? “A Constant Customer” was surprised “that a people who profess to be so fond of freedom . . . can see such numbers of their fellow men, made of the same blood, not only in bondage but kept so even by them.” However, a South Carolinian denied that whites and blacks were “of the same blood.” He equated emancipation to miscegenation and proclaimed, “Let every spark of honest pride concur to save us from the infamy of such a mongrel coalition.”32
The issue of fraternal blood bonds resurfaced in the debate over the Constitution. James Madison invoked “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens” and “the mingled blood which they have shed” to build continental support for a national government. In contrast, “Cato” stressed the local scope of men’s bonds, arguing that America was made of families and fraternities loosely knit together “to provide for the safety of [their] posterity.” He argued that the Constitution promoted an artificial unity that would see Americans “traveling through seas of blood.” Competing images of fraternity and fratricide resurfaced in the 1790s. Madison proposed the Bill of Rights to invite antifederalists into the national fraternity; but Peres Fobes warned that excessive liberty incited men to practice the licentiousness and factionalism that “create jealousies, infuse suspicions, weaken public confidence, kindle and augment the flames of such contention as may desolate a country and crimson it with blood.”33 Transforming a land of strangers into a band of blood brothers proved a daunting challenge.
Several factors fostered fraternal unity despite disagreement and diversity. The founders mostly agreed on what it meant to be a worthy man in search of fraternity. Such a man disciplined his passions, impulses, and avarice to win other men’s respect and establish fraternal membership. He continually earned his membership by exhibiting manly virtues such as the courage, integrity, and civility that attracted other men’s trust and friendship. He also recognized manly merit and deferred to meritorious leaders. Noah Webster suggested that the only alternative to men’s self-discipline, fraternal solidarity, and deference to manly leaders was the chaos and violence of Jacobin France. The founders also agreed that the search for national unity was a male endeavor. Men as men shared responsibility for defending liberty, provisioning and protecting families, fitting into fraternal society, and shaping public life. Women could encourage men to fit into fraternal society and compensate for men’s failure to do so, but they could not transcend their political marginality. Jefferson’s attitude was typical. He applauded American women for having “the good sense to value domestic happiness” rather than to “wrinkle their foreheads with politics,” and he condemned Parisian “Amazons” for hunting social pleasures and fomenting political riots rather than minding their nurseries.34
The third rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that worthy men were social creatures who sought to fit into fraternal society. They respected established loyalties and disregarded minor disputes. When necessary, however, they created new fraternities of self-disciplined, meritorious men. In time of war, they invited strangers to demonstrate manly worth by joining the fraternity of battle against enemies who threatened their liberty, property, and posterity. In peacetime, they sought to sustain fraternal bonds and guard them against the corrosive acids of individualism and avarice. Unworthy men came in three varieties: men alleged to have different blood; selfish egotists and social isolates whose only loyalty was to themselves; and misguided mobs, fratricidal factions, and demagogues who menaced the public good. Most founders thought that America’s social stability depended on persuading the bulk of American men to provide fraternal support for worthy leaders who, in turn, would tame the disorderly passions and counteract the democratic distemper of aliens, egotists, isolates, mobs, factions, and demagogues.
Manhood and Leadership
Could American men procreate a national fraternity without fostering fratricide? The founders agreed that American men were disorderly creatures prone to bloody violence; but they disputed the implications of men’s penchant for bloodshed. Jefferson found redeeming value in the bloody violence of Shays’s Rebellion. He wrote Ezra Stiles, “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people persevere in the spirit of resistance?... What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” But Washington considered Shays’s Rebellion unmitigated evil. He exclaimed, “What, gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct? It is but the other day that we were shedding blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live . . . and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them.”35 These contrasting views were not wholly contradictory. The founders’ grammar used “blood” both as a metaphoric testing ground for manhood in search of fraternity and as a symbol of disorderly manhood in need of fraternal leadership.
Jefferson returned to the relationship between the struggle for liberty and lost lives in 1793, when reflecting on a bloody turn of events in the French Revolution:
In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody. . . . But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying the very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?36
Jefferson took the long view. He saw revolutionary abuses as deplorable but necessary for achieving lasting liberty, implying that men must endure self-sacrifice and bloodshed in fraternal solidarity with future generations. Jefferson’s perspective highlights two major motifs in the founders’ birthing story of America.
First, the founders conceived of blood as a medium for testing men’s membership in society. A man had to invest, risk, give, and take blood to procreate and participate in fraternal society. Crèvecoeur’s American Farmer stated that immigrants who invested their blood in American soil received the title of freemen and the opportunity to “provide for their progeny . . . the most holy, the most powerful, the most earnest wish he can possibly form, as well as the most consolatory prospect when he dies.” The payoff was “a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Washington moved from Crs fraternity of farmersvecoeur’s fraternity of farmers to his own fraternity of soldiers. Following the winter of want at Valley Forge, he paid homage to farmers as men whose labors guaranteed that soldiers’ starvation and suffering would soon end. Meanwhile, “American soldiers will despise repining at such trifling strokes of adversity, trifling indeed when compared to the transcendent prize which will undoubtedly crown their patience and perseverance, glory and freedom, peace and plenty to themselves and the community ... the admiration of the world, the love of their country, and the gratitude of posterity.” Bloodshed and starvation were minor matters to worthy men who willingly paid the price for “being immortalized” as benefactors of posterity.37
Second, the founders suggested that historical necessity challenged Americans to transcend mundane manhood and engage in self-sacrifice to achieve fame. Madison invoked historical necessity to dismiss antifederalist