A Republic of Men. Mark E. Kann

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СКАЧАТЬ relied on family name, education, talent, wealth, generosity, and reputation to achieve personal honor, social dignity, and political authority. Meanwhile, commoners’ subordinate status was compromised by America’s abundance of land, its opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, and the rapid population growth that encouraged young men to seek opportunity on the frontier or in the city. American colonists sustained a fragile balance between male hierarchy and social fluidity until their opposition to the Stamp Act overspilled the boundaries of political protest. Thereafter, Bernard Bailyn suggests, “Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.”⁵¹ Any systematic effort to impose order on the ranks of men by subordinating some men and elevating others was sure to provoke public consternation.

      On the one hand, Americans were enthusiasts for liberty. Indeed, they claimed exceptional liberty against hierarchical authority. James Otis, Jr., argued in 1764, “The colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties, and privileges as the subjects of the mother country and, in some respects, to more.” Why more? American farmers and English freeholders were born with identical natural and constitutional rights; but American men merited exceptional liberty because they had carved a new world out of the wilderness while Englishmen wallowed in old-world corruption. In particular, Americans demanded extraordinary “natural, inherent, and inseparable rights as men and citizens” to individual liberty against royal governors and to local political autonomy against parliamentary authority. Anyone who appeared to deprive American men of their exceptional liberty stood accused of seeking to emasculate and enslave them.⁵²

      On the other hand, many leaders feared that this enthusiasm for liberty generated what David Ramsay called “undecided claims and doubtful rights” that were likely to be abused by disorderly men, who excelled at “disturbing the freest governments that were ever devised.” Disturbances often took the form of mob action. John Adams complained in 1774, “These private mobs I do and will detest. ... these tarring and featherings, this breaking open of houses by rude and insolent rabble ... in pursuance of private prejudices and passions must be discountenanced.” George Washington was outraged in July 1776 when a celebration of independence ended with soldiers toppling a statue of George III. His “General Orders” stated, “Though the General doubts not the persons who pulled down and mutilated the statue . . . were actuated by zeal in the public cause, yet it has so much the appearance of riot and want of order . . . that he disapproves the manner and directs in the future these things shall be . . . left to be executed by proper authority.”⁵³ Leaders worried that most men recognized no proper authority.

      How could men reconcile democratic desire and political authority? Ideally, men showed self-restraint in the exercise of liberty and voluntarily obeyed their chosen leaders. However, John Adams felt that patriots’ demands for liberty were so excessive that self-restraint and obedience were doubtful. In 1776, he used Abigail’s plea to remember the ladies as an occasion to express his fear that Americans’ revolutionary claims jeopardized all authority: “We have been told that our struggle has loosened the bonds of government everywhere; that children and apprentices were disobedient; that schools and colleges were grown turbulent; that Indians slighted their guardians, and Negroes grew insolent to their masters.” Decades later, Adams argued that claims to liberty had become so extreme that men refused to defer to superior authority or even recognize their superiors. “Some years ago,” he explained, “a writer unfortunately made use of the term better sort. Instantly, a popular clamor was raised and an odium excited which remains to this day to such a degree that no man dares to employ that expression at the bar, in conversation, in a newspaper, or pamphlet, no, nor in the pulpit.”⁵⁴ Critics lambasted Adams for saying aloud what many leaders quietly believed: American men were too disorderly to be trusted with liberty unless they learned to temper democratic passions and defer to the better sort.

      American intellectuals were brilliant at making abstract distinctions between liberty and license to persuade men to temper passion and defer to authority. But their philosophical analyses had a little impact on men’s willingness to exercise self-restraint or obey government. Abstract political language had become so slippery that it was as easily used against as in favor of authority. Terence Ball, J. G. A. Pocock, and Joyce Appleby point out that concepts such as “liberty” and “equality” or “republic” and “democracy” were contested, revised, and recoined during the founding era. Most intellectuals did little to clarify their language. They were part of what Jay Fliegelman identifies as an “elocutionary revolution” that encouraged speakers and writers to de-emphasize the clarity, logic, and evidence that appealed to men’s minds and instead to emphasize the theatricality, metaphor, imagery, myth, and body language that moved men’s passions. Political leaders seeking to counteract democratic disorders needed to employ language and concepts that appealed to men’s passions, indeed, to their very identities as males.⁵⁵

       The Politics of Coercion and Consent

      The American founders encompassed several generations of thinkers, speakers, writers, ministers, activists, soldiers, and statesmen who conceived and contributed to the struggle for independence and the creation of the Republic. They included local and national political elites who opposed the old regime and constructed new ones. Though a diverse lot, the founders shared an enduring and sometimes obsessive fear that disorderly men would generate chaos in society, endanger hard-won liberty, and imperil the Republic. They hoped to fend off democratic disorders by stabilizing gender relations and by promoting hegemonic norms to stigmatize disorderly men and reward stable men.

      First, the founders stabilized gender relations by depoliticizing opposition between men and women and by reinforcing the ideal of the traditional patriarch. They mostly restricted gender turbulence to the cultural sphere and thereby fostered fraternal politics. They regularly discussed and debated men’s liberty, equality, citizenship, and leadership without mentioning women; they often heaped honors on patriotic men who fought the Revolution without giving much recognition to patriotic women who participated in it. When the war ended, “Women disappeared from the public eye.”⁵⁶ Thereafter, the founders framed a new republic without considering women’s place in it or experiencing much pressure to question women’s exclusion from it. They could perpetuate women’s subordination because republican and liberal ideology invited them to do so, male misogyny and uncertainty gave them an incentive to do so, and their political priorities urged them to do so.

      Republican ideology equated absolute kingship with absolute corruption. Republican thinkers were much less critical of family patriarchs, whose power was ostensibly limited by law and softened by affection. As such, their criticism of monarchy did not necessarily apply to domestic patriarchy. Liberal ideology widened the chasm between politics and family life by separating public and paternal power. It made the language of liberty and equality appropriate for the public sphere but allowed a traditional idiom of natural hierarchy to persist in the domestic sphere. The founders took advantage of these ideological openings to defy political tyranny and depoliticize men’s authority in their families. Revolutionaries fought against monarchy, not family patriarchy. Legislators disputed aristocratic laws, not patriarchal laws. Governors forfeited royal prerogative over men, but fathers and husbands maintained patriarchal prerogative over women’s bodies, behavior, and property. The result was that misogynists remained free to vent patriarchal rage against women, and ambivalent males were cued to resolve uncertainties about manhood in favor of the traditional patriarch, who retained the coercive authority “to intimidate, not to accommodate” women.⁵⁷

      Simultaneously, the founders’ political priorities urged them to keep women off the public agenda. Most founders feared that disorderly men threatened to destroy liberty by unleashing the twin evils of mob anarchy and demagogic tyranny. Accordingly, they focused much of their intellectual and political energy on encouraging men to defend liberty and show great restraint when exercising it. The founders would have had to compromise their focus on male mobilization and quiescence to debate women’s rights or deal with prejudices regarding public women. СКАЧАТЬ