A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann

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СКАЧАТЬ same year, Daniel Shute contrasted “the first renowned settlers” to a modern generation of “degenerate offspring” that was guilty of “prostitution of patrimonial privileges” and “criminal want of philanthropy” because its members were loath to defend liberty “for millions yet unborn.” In 1773, John Allen asked colonists to recall “the right of liberty which their forefathers bought with their blood” as motivation for their own struggles. Again in 1775, Moses Mather challenged Americans to measure up to their heroic fathers, who earned liberty “at their own risk and expense and by their own sword and prowess.”¹¹ Most founders presumed that worthy men would not be willing to suffer the personal shame and social disgrace associated with squandering their fathers’ legacy or forfeiting their sons’ liberty.

      The Revolution amplified the voice of heroic fathers commanding their sons to preserve and pass on liberty. Thomas Jefferson ushered in the Revolution by declaring, “Honor, justice, and humanity forbid us to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us.” Samuel Cooper encouraged American men to maintain support for the Revolution by memorializing “our venerable fathers” as men marked “by all the manly virtues and by an unquenchable love of liberty,” and also as men who “call on us ... to perpetuate the honor of their liberty.”¹² One reason the founders developed what Douglass Adair sees as “an almost obsessive desire for fame” was that they felt pressured to measure up to the reputations of their pioneering ancestors. That they did measure up was evident a few decades later, when they themselves were remembered as gallant ancestors. Stanley Griswold, for example, attacked factionalism in turn-of-the-century Connecticut by asking, “Where are our fathers? Where are our former men of dignity, our Huntingtons, Shermans, Johnsons, and Stiles who in their day appeared like men, gave exaltation to our character, and never descended to a mean thing? It appears to me ... we are dwindled and more disposed to act like children than men.” Griswold’s injunction was “Let the spirit of our fathers come upon us. Be men.”¹³

      American males who obeyed Griswold’s injunction to “be men” could expect a triple reward. First, they robbed mortality of its finality. Benjamin Franklin asked, “What old bachelor can die without regret or remorse when he reflects upon his death bed that the inestimable blessing of life and being has been communicated by father and son through all generations from Adam down to him but in him it stops and is extinguished?” Men who met their intergenerational obligations could live on through their sons and in the memory of their sons. Second, men who defended liberty for their families could expect to be praised by Spartan women who urged them to fight and then honored their heroism. Judith Sargent Murray told the story of “Artemisia, wife of Mausolus,” who “rendered herself illustrious” by building the Mausoleum to honor and immortalize her brave husband. Third, men who honored family obligations and defended liberty merited fraternal trust. They were reputed to be stable individuals who restrained their passions, checked their impulses, and earned their neighbors’ respect and cooperation. Conversely, men outside intergenerational 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

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