A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann

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      The founders promoted the idea that men should be enthusiastic in the cause of liberty but restrained in the exercise of liberty by elaborating a grammar of manhood. Their grammar drew on hegemonic norms of manhood to encourage disorderly men to conform to a standard of manly conduct conducive to individual self-restraint, good citizenship, and public order. Their grammar of manhood also articulated consensual criteria for sorting out the ranks of men, restoring order to them, and legitimizing leadership authority in the new republic. The founders’ main motivation for deploying the grammar of manhood was to encourage men to discipline democratic desire; a crucial consequence of their use of it was to develop and disseminate ideas of citizenship and leadership that precluded women from political participation.

       Manhood in Time

      George Washington saw the American Revolution as a test of whether Americans could “act like men and prove themselves worthy of the blessings of freedom.” What did it mean to act like men? The founders drew on consensual norms embedded in the culture of manhood to emphasize male independence and family responsibility in opposition to female dependence and slavery. They sang “The Liberty Song” in praise of “worthy forefathers” who “bequeathed us their liberty,” and they committed themselves to protect and perpetuate liberty “for our children.” When “each manly breast” was “call’d to bleed” in defense of liberty, those who answered the call made themselves “dear to every free-born mind” and eligible for “deathless fame,” while those who exhibited fear or lethargy deserved to be “stripp’d of their freedom,” “robb’d of their right,” and shamed by patriotic “Daughters of Liberty.” To act like men, concludes Philip Greven, meant to inherit, defend, and transmit the liberty that enabled citizens to be “self-assertive and self-willed in public,” not dependent, effeminate, or enslaved.⁴ The founders elaborated this hegemonic vision of manhood in an autobiographical story about procreative men giving bloody birth to a new people, land, fraternity, leadership, and nation.

      The founders’ saga was based on the ancient assertion that fertile males procreated children. Gerda Lerner recalls that the Bible told of man generating woman from his rib and planting the active seed of life “in the passive receptacle of woman’s womb.” Anna Jønasdøttir adds that Greek philosophers elevated the status of the male seed by asserting that “light and beautiful male seminal fluid” was the source of humanity’s higher sensibilities and the conduit of civilization from generation to generation. Seventeenth-century Englishmen idealized male fecundity. For example, satirist Richard Ames fought the battle of the sexes in a fantasy about a homosocial Eden where men could “procreate like trees, and without women’s aid—promote 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, СКАЧАТЬ