A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann

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СКАЧАТЬ “the lewder sort of men out of love with matrimony,” and legislators should enact “compulsive laws” to force bachelors to marry. One satirist suggested that a twenty-four-year-old bachelor should be taxed to defray costs resulting from his failure to procreate freeholders, and a twenty-five-year-old bachelor “ought to be reckoned superannuated and grown an old boy and not fit to be trusted with what he had, as not knowing the use and benefit of riches.” Regardless of actual age, “a bachelor is a minor” who “ought to be under the government of the parish.”⁵

      Critics hoped to hasten the Bachelor’s progress to marriage by reforming male manners and female morality. Locke’s protégé, the third earl of Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper), praised the “man of sensibility” who claimed “manly liberty” to unite “a mind subordinated to reason, a temper humanized and fitted to all natural affections ... with constant security, tranquillity, [and] equanimity.” Unlike flatterers, seducers, and bullies, the genteel man knew that marriage to a good woman wed virtue to happiness.⁶ Others emphasized women’s morality. David Hume saw male lust as an immutable reality. What prompted men to accept the “restraint” of marriage and “undergo cheerfully all the fatigues and expenses to which it subjects men” was their egotistical desire to clone themselves by siring legitimate sons. Men could satisfy that desire only if they could find faithful wives. Accordingly, the Bachelor was more likely to choose marriage when female fidelity was fortified.⁷

      Where education and remediation failed, the Bachelor was apt to embroil himself in family feuds, gambling debts, and crime. He often escaped harm’s way by being sent to or enlisting in England’s standing army. John Trenchard complained, “Our prisons are so many storehouses to replenish [the king’s] troops.” Trenchard considered the marginal males who composed the army’s rank-and-file redcoats to be rogues and mercenaries whose anarchist bent was commandeered by corrupt, aristocratic officers using draconian discipline to mold the army to the king’s despotic will. Critics accused the officer corps of synthesizing libertinism and brutality into an instrument of monarchical tyranny.⁸

      Observing the standing army in peacetime, William Prynne asked, “What do these soldiers do all day?” He answered, “These lusty men spend their time eating, drinking, whoring, sleeping and standing watch . . . make off with wives and daughters and leave not a few great bellies and bastards on the inhabitants of the country’s charge.” Trenchard noted that the army rendered “men useless to labor and almost propagation, together with a much greater destruction of them, by taking them from a laborious way of living to a loose idle life.” That loose idle life encompassed “the insolence of the officers and the debaucheries that are committed both by them and their soldiers in all the towns they come in ... and a numerous train of mischiefs besides, almost endless to enumerate.” John Toland listed among redcoat mischiefs “frequent robberies, burglaries, rapes, rapines, murders, and barbarous cruelties.” Andrew Fletcher accused libertine officers of “debauchery and wickedness” as well as “frauds, oppressions, and cruelties.”⁹

      If the Bachelor’s wickedness was evident in his tendency to see a woman’s ruin as “a step to reputation” as he built “his own honor on her infamy,” the Redcoat’s vices were manifested in his tendency to speak patriotism but practice selfishness. Toland noted, “If one . . . who would pass for a patriot has an interest separate from that of the public, he is no longer entitled to this denomination; but he is a real hypocrite that’s ready to sacrifice the common good to his private gain.” The idea that only “sober, industrious freemen” in the militia (as opposed to “ignorant, idle, and needy” redcoats) were sufficiently trustworthy to bear arms was the basis for a century-long attack on the standing army as an engine of anarchy and tyranny. That attack often returned to the Bachelor. Demobilized soldiers were mostly single males, many of whom traveled to London where they joined “loose fellows” engaged in antisocial activity and criminal behavior.¹⁰

      Toland condemned the Bachelor and the Redcoat for being estranged from the deepest stirrings of manhood, the desire for symbolic immortality that inspired self-sacrifice from the procreative father, industrious freeholder, and patriotic militiaman. He wrote:

      All men would live somewhere eternally if they could, and they affect to become immortal even here on earth. To have their names perpetuated was the true spring of several great men’s actions; and for that only end have they patiently undergone all manner of toil and danger. But this inclination never discovers itself so plainly as in the care men take of their posterity. Some are content to live beggars all their days that their children after them may be rich, for they look upon these as their own persons multiplied by propagation; whence some as had none themselves adopted the children of others to bear their names.¹¹

      English critics stigmatized the Bachelor and the Redcoat for sterility. They demonstrated no commitment to family, friends, or nation. They procreated nothing of public value. They were destructive children who lived solely in the present, where they generated social disorder and fostered political tyranny. Like minors, they needed to be governed.

       America’s Vilest Race of Men

      The English introduced the Bachelor into American discourse as early as 1623, when Sir George Ferrars condemned Virginia colonizers as “unruly sparks, . . . poor gentlemen, broken tradesmen, rakes and libertines, footmen.” Sir Edwin Sandys hoped to calm colonial disorders by sending women to America to marry these disorderly men and make them “more settled.” Colonial administrators experimented with land incentives to encourage men to marry and penalties to discourage lengthy bachelorhood. Nonetheless, a 1708 missionary report criticized the inhabitants of Carolina as “the vilest race of men upon the earth . . . bankrupts, pirates, decayed libertines, sectaries, and enthusiasts . . . of large and loose principles.”¹²

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