The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

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СКАЧАТЬ as political commentary and presenting an informal characterological theory of political partisanship—this is the moment we typically recognize as the birth of the US party system. From our perspective, the primary cultural work of the party framework was the translation of political disputes into characterological terms, as parties came to be defined not so much by political and theoretical positions or the economic interests of their member groups as by individuals or personality profiles. A good illustration of this emerging analysis can be found in William Laughton Smith’s 1792 pamphlet The Politicks and Views of a Certain Party, Displayed, which began by marveling at the attacks from Freneau’s paper on measures “sanctioned by the Man we all love and revere”—Washington, of course.⁴² The ensuing narrative of votes translated the economic debates of 1790–92 into a tale of this congressman expressing shame and remorse, these congressmen voting in secret in committee, and those who “never openly avowed” their views (11). Hamilton’s particular positions were recast as indices of his historic stature as a minister of state (“his reputation traversed the ocean and in distant climes his Name was mentioned among the great ministers of the age”); criticisms were therefore the result of “Envy” begotten from “Fame” (12). Deliberative disagreements over the duration clause in the banking bill were now described with reference to “solemn threats, sulky looks, big works and great Guns” (17). This political breakdown coincided with “the arrival in this Country of a certain Personage” (3)—Jefferson’s return from France—and this “personage,” later called “the Generalissimo” (with Madison, his “second in command,” known also as “the General”; 22), is the subject of the final third of the essay.⁴³ In these pages, we find one of the first character sketches of this next moment of the Founders:

      Had an inquisitive mind in those days [1790] sought for evidence of his Abilities, as a Statesman, he would have been referred to the confusions in France, the offspring of certain political dogmas fostered by the American Minister, and to certain theoretical principles only fit for Utopia: As a Warrior, to his Exploits at Monticelli; as a Philosopher, to his discovery of the inferiority of Blacks to Whites, because they are more unsavory and secrete more by the kidnies; as a Mathematician, to his whirligig chair. (29)

      Elsewhere Jefferson is cast as “a certain tall and awkward Bird which hides its head behind a Tree and supposes itself unseen tho’ its posteriors are publicly displayed” (32–33), as “this philosophical Patriot, or patriotic Philosopher” (35), and as the devious sponsor of the “Poetaster” (Freneau) given a position as a translator in the State Department (33).

      Contributing to this partisan polarization was the well-known international conflict between the two global powers vying for hegemony. The catalyzing role of the French Revolution provided a lexicon for accelerating and polarizing the semiotic unfolding. In early 1793, the execution of Louis XVI (January) and the declaration of war against Britain (February) set the stage for recurring crises with France through the next two decades. If students of American history even today have a hazy familiarity with a series of proper nouns from this period—Genet, the Jay Treaty, the XYZ Affair—it is because each name denotes a scandal that momentarily clarified and advanced the semiotic polarization, ostensibly around the polar terms of England and France. If events during the Jefferson and Madison administrations revealed the ephemeral nature of this distinction, this did not make it insignificant.

      Finally, we must add that Federalist rule clamped down on popular political outlets. Popular instruction had already been discouraged during the first Congress (August 1789), but the crucial moment came with the formation of the Democratic-Republican Societies (spring 1793), concurrent with the arrival of Genet. These societies’ association first with Jacobinism and then with the so-called Whiskey Rebellion led to their condemnation in Washington’s Message to the Third Congress (November 1794) and a military expedition led by Washington himself, with Hamilton at his side. After the suppression of the insurrection—which itself had a tremendous chilling effect—popular political engagement was increasingly displaced to the press and the party. The frenzy over the XYZ Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 further stifled popular political activities, while increasing the political significance of the national partisan papers. Again, we miss the important structural and cultural transformations of the moment if we see these events as “tap[ping] into a widespread, deep-seated, and preexisting animus towards such ideas”; as Seth Cotlar has argued, the reverse is the case—this moment “led to the rapid crystallization of a xenophobic and explicitly anti-revolutionary vision of American politics.”⁴⁴

      The extensive political conflicts and mobilizations, their complex and esoteric formulations, the international polarization, an electoral system consolidating a two-party complex, the rise of the partisan press and the diminution of vernacular political organization—all of these meant that the 1790s would see the reactivation of the Founders constellation. We should be clear: we are not arguing that the Founders were the inevitable cynical production of propagandists seeking to mobilize supporters. Propagandists were at work and accentuated the partisan inflections, to be sure, but the symbolic imperative and its effectivity betoken a cultural phenomenon beyond political manipulation. As the Arnold-André pairing showed, the symbolic constellation did not need to be confined to the macropolitical sphere, as the iconic portraiture of the later nineteenth century was to demonstrate, with constellations that incorporated Native Americans and prominent African Americans. But in the 1790s, this characterological activity was concentrated in the political sphere, as we saw with William Laughton Smith’s 1792 pamphlet. For Smith selected and assembled many of the details that would allow for a range of different inflections—for example, the significant gendering and sexualization of the Founders evident in allusions to Jefferson’s cowardice. If Hamilton, in 1792, was already privately writing that Jefferson and Madison “have a womanish attachment to France and a womanish resentment against Great Britain,” it was works such as Smith’s that established this semiotic code firmly in public discourse.⁴⁵ It is equally worth noting that Hamilton (with whom Smith was in agreement) has only the vaguest contours in Smith’s pamphlet—it was through the corresponding attacks on Hamilton that his positive and negative qualities themselves coalesced. Again, when contemporary works of Founders Chic excitedly declare that the great Founders were subject to vicious personal attacks, they obscure the very role of such attacks in creating the Founders as a system—it is not despite such personalized insults that the great Founders emerged but in part because of them.

      We may now spell out the constellation that emerged over the 1790s. Washington, who was originally a figure of executive restraint in contrast to George III, now took on partisan inflections—from a Federalist viewpoint, cautious, nonaligned government-building, or from a Republican viewpoint, Anglophilic passivity exploited by underlings. Franklin, originally a figure of republican illumination in contrast to Lord Bute, now emerged as a marker of radical cultural mobilization, either deluded or virtuous, depending on one’s party. (The competition between these inflections, we may note, heuristically guides the attempts, in today’s scholarship, to locate a figure such as Franklin politically—such attempts continue the posthumous constellational work of the 1790s.) These two positions could then generate two new positions using the semiotic material associated with the Jefferson and Hamilton portraiture. The former emerged as the embodiment of action rendered as knowledge—Doing becoming Knowing. He was the Philosopher-President, associated, increasingly, with the Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Constitution, Notes on the State of Virginia, the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, and eventually the forming of the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia. Ensconced in his hilltop plantation estate of Monticello, he pursued governance through retreat, again with positive or negative variants. For Republicans, he was the theorist of democracy who withdrew from the Washington (and later Adams) administrations, to direct an opposition through ideas. For Federalists, he was the coward of 1781 (the famous flight from the British), now ridiculously theorizing racial difference while exploiting slave labor, then shuffling about in his slippers playing with his inventions. Hamilton, meanwhile, СКАЧАТЬ