A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann
infant, Independence” was to support ratification of the U.S. Constitution.45
The imagery of an infant nation seeking the maturity of manhood pervaded the ratification debates. Jeremiah Hill likened the “glory of this young empire” guided by a new Constitution to a “fair, healthy, promising boy rising to maturity.” Simeon Baldwin summed up federalist optimism by recalling the “effusions of genius [that] distinguished the infancy of this nation.” He awaited with delight “what we may expect when she [sic] shall ripen into manhood!” Mercy Otis Warren, for her part, turned federalist imagery on its head when contrasting the “manly exertions” of revolutionary patriots and the “manly feelings” of antifederalists to the childish federalists who resembled “a restless, vigorous youth, prematurely emancipated from the authority of a parent, but without the experience necessary to direct him with dignity and discretion.”46
Movement toward national manhood was debated for another decade. In 1790s, Judith Sargent Murray observed “the budding life” of an “infant constitution” invigorated by “luminous rays of manly hope,” but warned that factionalism was “murdering in the cradle so promising an offspring” and bringing forth in its place “hell-born anarchy.” Bishop James Madison praised the United States for its “progress from infancy to manhood” but Peres Fobes recalled, “We saw a nation born in a day [and] felt the pangs and pleasures of the parturition of a new empire” only to have it infected by male licentiousness. Jonathan Maxey added that America’s democratic politics had become “a capricious offspring of a moment, perpetually exposed to destruction from the varying whim of popular frenzy or the daring strides of licentious ambition.” In the early nineteenth century, Noah Webster compared the unstable new republic to young men who have “more courage than foresight and more enthusiasm than correct judgment.” Fisher Ames complained that the U.S. Constitution was conceived “with all the bloom of youth and splendor of innocence . . . gifted with immortality,” only to fall prey to “licentiousness, that inbred malady of democracies that deforms their infancy with gray hairs and decrepitude.”47
Many founders saw themselves as participants in what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” the action of founding and sustaining political bodies in anticipation of an influx of new generations. Their self-portraits depicted men of exceptional merit who procreated a new nation, protected its infancy from democratic excess, nurtured it to mature manhood, shielded it from death, and, by way of exemplary thinking, innovative constitutions, and a federal republic, improved the future for all posterity. To borrow Nancy Hartsock’s language, they regarded themselves as “pregnant in soul.” They certainly ranked themselves among history’s great nation builders and felt they deserved the respect shown by men who called them “fathers of their country.” In effect, the founders expropriated the idea of natality from women. They did not give much weight to female reproductive powers. Judith Sargent Murray understood that women’s public standing would not result from their biological powers but instead invested hope in their cultural productivity. Women needed to emulate “manly fires” of wisdom, develop the “fertile brain of the female,” and exhibit their “creative faculty” to achieve a public presence. Nevertheless, the founders did not include creative women in politics as founding mothers, republican citizens, or national leaders. Often, they even failed to consider women as noteworthy subjects or significant spectators.48
The final rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that exceptional or heroic men contributed to the birth and nurturance of a republic. They were the fathers of the country and the future. They invested their fame in the fate of the public and posterity, rather than solely in their own families and estates. Unworthy men were sterile men or destructive men. They felt no connection between themselves and future generations; they were innocent of dreams of distinction; or they were licentious men who imperiled national birth, retarded political maturation, and endangered the newborn republic. The most worthy men sought a fame borne of procreating a glorious future, whereas the most unworthy males acquired infamy by sapping other men’s political potency.
Order in the Ranks of Men
The Boston colonists who resisted royal authority set a lasting precedent when they “chose to hazard the consequences of returning back to the state of nature rather than quietly submit to unjust and arbitrary measures.”49 Henceforth, most founders feared, American men exhibited a propensity to claim unlimited rights and hazard disorderly conduct whenever they opposed public measures, even those enacted and administered by their own representatives. The founders developed and deployed the grammar of manhood to encourage American males to engage in self-sacrifice in defense of liberty and to exhibit self-restraint in the exercise of liberty, to support and consent to deserving leadership, and thereby to promote order in the ranks of men.
The founders’ grammar of manhood consisted of hegemonic norms and rules meant to move the hearts of men. Its main message was that a male worthy of self-esteem, social respect, and civic dignity achieved manly independence, family status, and governance of women by fulfilling intergenerational obligations, fixing a settled place for himself and his heirs, fitting into fraternal society, recognizing and deferring to worthy leaders, and helping to father a new nation. This message was steeped in blood. Manhood was a matter of blood bonds between fathers and sons, the investment of blood in land and liberty, the kindred blood that defined fraternal society, the innocent blood that linked ancestral sacrifice to future happiness, the risking and shedding of blood that tested citizens and leaders, the bloody birth of the body politic, and the factional bloodletting that imperiled the Republic’s survival.50
The grammar of manhood offered little direct guidance regarding male-female relations. However, the founders assumed that women motivated men to risk their blood and defend liberty, bore their children, contributed to family provision and comfort, and supported men’s fraternal relations and nation-building ambitions. Ongoing patriarchal domination ensured women’s assistance in American men’s procreative mission to shape the course of history. The founders saw themselves as autonomous historical agents, the fathers of a new people, land, society, and republic destined to change the world for the better. They inflated the value of their natality, in part, by devaluing female sexuality. They instituted a new republic in which the prior identification of women with bloody childbirth and men’struation would gradually give way to the Victorian era’s bloodless images of female passionlessness and political innocence.51
The founders communicated challenging standards—and they were convinced that many males did not measure up to everyday expectations about manly courage and self-restraint. Cowards and libertines betrayed ancestors and offspring, transformed liberty to license, engaged in deceitful and criminal conduct, and fueled the factionalism that mobilized mobs and leveled republics. Worse, the example of a few licentious men threatened to awaken within America’s more sober family men dormant passions, impulses, and interests that threatened to destroy social harmony and political legitimacy. The founders generally believed that only the most mindless democrat would advocate the rights of man and citizen for disorderly males who acted like children. They did not deserve the rights of men. Nor could they be trusted to participate in politics. Like women, they needed to be governed to ensure public order.
3
The Bachelor and Other Disorderly Men
The founders used the stock figure of the Bachelor to identify the lowest rung of manhood. The Bachelor symbolized the dangers of democracy and the corruption of patriarchy. He was the male who failed to invest liberty in responsibility, only to foster disorder in the ranks of men. He refused to assume the family obligations of the traditional patriarch or participate in the benevolent governance of women and other dependents, as required by republican manhood. Sometimes he exhibited the manners of aristocratic manhood to mask his lustful desires, and often he wore the guise of self-made manhood to justify his selfishness. The Bachelor broke all the rules in the grammar of manhood. He was unsettled in intergenerational time and continental space, unfit for fraternal society and estranged from its natural leaders, and destructive of republican virtues and institutions. The founders associated him with the promiscuity, licentiousness,