The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

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      With the Revolution receding, however, both “Washington” and “Franklin” drifted into a somewhat bland period when their significance seemed to lose definition. Perhaps the best illustration of this loss of symbolic force is the poem written by young Charles Brockden Brown, titled “Inscription for Benjamin Franklin’s Tomb Stone.” When Philadelphians circulated the poem and learned that Franklin wanted to write his own epitaph, Brown’s brother apparently sent the poem to the State Gazette of North Carolina, where it appeared as “An Inscription for General Washington’s Tomb Stone”—Washington’s name was simply inserted in place of Franklin’s. If the references to the “Shade of Newton” and “Philosophy’s throne” today seem baffling, it appears that generalized platitudes about “American’s favorite . . . / Whose soul for the want of due room, / Has left us to range in the skies” could fit the one as easily as the other.³⁸

      As the war continued into the early 1780s, there had been signs of the generation of new positions emerging. The strongest versions of new positions centered on the figures of Benedict Arnold and Major John André. If Richard Snowden’s aforementioned The American Revolution ignored the Declaration of Independence, it gave great attention to Arnold, whose crucial turn is announced toward the end of the second volume: “And it came to pass, in the one thousand seven hundred and eightieth year of the Christian Hegira, in the ninth month, on the twenty-first day of the month, that Satan entered the heart of Benedict” (2.148–49). The final verses of the chapter speak of “the fatal fruit of treachery” and how “the monuments of thy victory on the plains of Saratoga, serve only to blaze forth the death of thy fame” (2.158). It is tempting to see in Arnold simply a crude evil counterpart to Washington, the Satan to the latter’s Christ—self-promoting in contrast to Washington’s self-denial and so forth. But again we must consider the Arnold position in relation to André, introduced by Snowden as “valiant in war, and where the brave were, there was he” (2.150). It is this positive coding that gives meaning to the full André narrative, in which two details were important. First, he was captured by American sentries who had misidentified themselves as Tories—“they spake in the subtilty of their hearts,” as Snowden puts it (2.153). Second, when tried by the Americans, he maintained his integrity—“he answered with dignity, composure, and truth; his magnanimity did not forsake him, in the hour of extremity” (2.155–56). Perceiving the prisoner as “a shining model of all that was excellent!” the Americans want to save him but execute him from a sense of duty (2.156). This drama is still more pronounced in William Dunlap’s 1798 play André, strongly declared a tragedy in the introduction: in Dunlap’s drama, the ranking American figure, the “General,” struggles to do his duty according to his larger cause and reluctantly orders André’s hanging.³⁹ The André figure thus requires a more complex relational understanding of Arnold, for the concern of this tentative constellation of the mid-1780s was not crude demonization but a formulation of sin and treason in a framework of Revolutionary republicanism. André was on the side of evil, was himself a good man, showed signs of great culture, was tricked by the American sentries and abandoned by Arnold—in all these details, this figuration attempted to express the moral challenges of postmonarchical justice in a politically divided society of patriots and tories. André’s position was important precisely because of its association with, and difference from, the Arnold position. The problem posed by the pair, then, was not one of evil but an important revision of the Washington and Franklin positions. Washington signified reluctant action, but Arnold represented less its opposite, after the fashion of George III, than the dangers of the Washington position for the ambitious and valiant: Arnold was less Washington’s antithesis than a figure generated from the Washington position, so constrained by the rigors of selflessness as to be driven to the enemy. André, meanwhile, signaled an important variant of Franklin—the cultured intellectual, a careful conduit of information, a figure of virtue . . . but for the wrong side. Relative to Arnold, André became the tragic traitor but perhaps more importantly allowed a vicarious staging of an encounter between Washington and Franklin. In any case, the historical persistence of these figures, especially of Arnold, should be read as a trace of this brief moment when the emergent Founders’ constellation was still largely military in orientation and the nascent national semiotics were organized around questions of loyalty.

      But if the Arnold-André pair marked a brief detour of the 1780s, a different and more decisive constellation was to emerge in the 1790s. Washington and Franklin were symbolically reinvested in important ways, and two different figures emerged. How did this happen? We would stress here three concurrent phenomena. The first Washington administration witnessed a series of political conflicts over national economic development and the related role of the government therein. In each instance, the stakes were high, while the terms of debate were abstract—concerned with constitutional hermeneutics, for example, or with the unintended consequences of state interventions in economic subsystems. The year 1790 witnessed a debate around Hamilton’s February “First Report on Public Credit,” concerned with the retirement of national debt; the following year saw this conflict extended to include the problems of banking and currency, this time focused on Hamilton’s “Report on a National Bank” (submitted December 1790); and 1792 saw yet another conflict, this time over mercantilism and the interpretation of the Constitution’s “general welfare” clause and triggered by Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” (submitted December 1791). Each of these conflicts was accompanied by a substantial body of print argument—not just Hamilton’s theses but a number of essays, pamphlets, and editorials, not to mention internal Cabinet memoranda. Each conflict was narrowly decided in favor of the northern financial classes, and none of these conflicts could, in its own turn, activate the semiotic resources to mobilize mass political action, instead leaving the elites deadlocked. Consequently, these years also witnessed a series of interventions to break this deadlock and translate these conflicts into an iconic repertoire, whereby political disagreements could be reconfigured symbolically.

      Critical here was the rise of a new form of political press. In the summer of 1791, for example, Jefferson and Madison, having led and lost the battle against the bank, began urging Philip Freneau to relocate to Philadelphia to launch a national newspaper capable of answering John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, founded at Hamilton’s instigation in 1789; Freneau’s paper, the National Gazette, began publishing in late October 1791. From that moment, print played an increasingly important role in ironizing political discourse. There had already been partisan newspapers, to be sure, but now competing discourses were coordinated and synchronized by national papers. Both papers continued to publish essays of political theory—indeed, Hamilton and Madison wrote scores of tracts during these years—but the classic essay of the deliberative public sphere was increasingly complemented by new forms influenced by Revolutionary propaganda. Freneau’s satire “Rules for Changing a Limited Republican Government into an Unlimited Hereditary One” (July 1792) beautifully illustrates this transition. Presented as a series of proposals for subverting the Revolutionary heritage, the essay’s main achievement was the construction of the persona of a devious conspiratorial monarchist. The essay concluded ominously:

      Should it be found impossible, however, to prevent the people from awaking and uniting; should all artificial distinctions give way to the natural division between the lordly minded few and the well-disposed many; should all who have common interest make a common cause and shew an inflexible attachment to republicanism in opposition to a government of monarchy and money, why then * * * * *—⁴⁰

      This abrupt conclusion not only confirms the semiotic priority granted to character over plot but typographically denotates the symbolic space to be filled in the next few years. Whatever the subject matter of public discourse, character would become a regular part of political debate. In 1791, the publication of The Rights of Man prompted a huge body of secondary literature not simply on Paine’s arguments but on Paine himself, giving us the legendary caricature of the rabid, drunk womanizer.⁴¹ A decade later, it was routine for the Federalist newspapers to publish long mocking analyses of the president’s writing style, as if his character and policies could be ascertained by his elaborate and effeminate diction and sentence СКАЧАТЬ