A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann

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СКАЧАТЬ broadcast this belief each time they announced their yearning to exit the public stage and retire, respectively, to Mount Vernon, Braintree, and Monticello. Certainly, these declarations were politically expedient. It was wise for ambitious men to protest public service as a sacrifice of their personal desire for a simple agrarian life. Garry Wills suggests that Washington’s repeated pleas to forgo high office for farming constituted a major factor in his immense popularity. Still, more than politics was involved in the founders’ oft-expressed yearnings for a life on the land. They agreed with contemporaries that a man’s dignity and dynastic aspirations required him to settle down in one place—under his vine and fig tree—to enjoy his freedom, family, and farm.¹⁹

      The linkage between manhood and settled space played a part in the conflict leading up to the Revolution. Early on, American colonists complained that they were unjustly stigmatized when the British treated them as itinerants who had ripped up their European roots to wander the New World. One colonial author asked fellow Americans to compare themselves to their English brethren: “Are you not of the same stock? Was the blood of your ancestors polluted by a change of soil? Were they freemen in England and did they become slaves by a six-weeks voyage to America? Does not the sun shine as bright, our blood run as warm? Is not our honor and virtue as pure, our liberty as valuable, our property as dear, our lives as precious here as in England?”²⁰ The colonists denied their itinerancy and instead portrayed themselves as patriotic men who extended the British Empire, tamed a continent, and fixed a place for themselves and their families in the New World. That made them worthy men who deserved the rights of Englishmen.

      The irony of the British stigma, according to Daniel Dulany, was that America’s most worthy men—those who successfully settled a piece of land and fixed a place for their families in the New World—were effectively precluded from citizenship. A citizen had to vote in person in Great Britain. Therefore, an American freeholder could exercise a citizen’s suffrage only “upon the supposition of his ceasing to be an inhabitant of America and becoming a resident of Great Britain.”²¹ The result was that America’s most notable men and their offspring were refused the manly dignity of political independence and full citizenship. This refusal encouraged many of America’s wealthiest and most influential colonists to express their sense of alienation by joining and leading escalating colonial protests against British authority.

      The founders’ concern for the relationship between manhood and space resurfaced at the Constitutional Convention in a debate over immigrant eligibility for U.S. Senate seats. James Madison supported immigrant eligibility by arguing that meritorious men who migrated to America and settled there “would feel the mortification of being marked with suspicious incapacitations though they should not covet the public honors.” James Wilson’s supporting argument concluded, “To be appointed to a place may be a matter of indifference. To be incapable of being appointed is a circumstance grating and mortifying.” The founders presumed that men who settled a place for themselves in America deserved full citizenship; and such men were justly aroused to anger when denied the right to vote or run for office, regardless of whether they intended to exercise suffrage or stand for election. Judith Shklar reminds us that civic indignity is important because men who feel “dishonored” and “scorned” can cause significant 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 СКАЧАТЬ