Enthusiasms and Loyalties

The Public History of Private Feelings in the Enlightenment Atlantic

Keith Shepherd Grant

• Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9780228014218
• eBook ISBN:
  9780228015215
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

The Enlightenment Atlantic was awash in deep feelings. People expressed the ardour of patriots, the homesickness of migrants, the fear of slave revolts, the ecstasy of revivals, the anger of mobs, the grief of wartime, the disorientation of refugees, and the joys of victory. Yet passions and affections were not merely private responses to the events of the period – emotions were also central to the era's most consequential public events, and even defined them.

In Enthusiasms and Loyalties Keith Grant shows that British North Americans participated in a transatlantic swirl of debates over emotions as they attempted to cultivate and make sense of their own feelings in turbulent times. Examining the emotional communities that overlapped in Cornwallis Township, Nova Scotia, between 1770 and 1850, Grant explores the diversity of public feelings, from disaffected loyalists to passionate patriots and ecstatic revivalists. He shows how certain emotions – especially enthusiasm and loyalty – could be embraced or weaponized by political and religious factions, and how their use and meaning changed over time. Feelings could be the glue that made loyalties stick, or a solvent that weakened community bonds.

Taking a history of emotions approach, Enthusiasms and Loyalties aims to recover and understand the wide range of political and religious emotions that were possible – feelable – in the Enlightenment Atlantic.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Social Affections
• 1 Commonplace Loyalty: Handley Chipman’s British Affections and American Sympathies
• 2 Textual Affections: Handley Chipman and the Emotions of Transatlantic Protestantism
• 3 “Enthusiasm in politicks, as well as religion”: Jacob Bailey’s Emotional History of the American Revolution
• 4 “Not from any remainders of affection”: The Disaffection of Jacob Bailey’s Loyalty
• 5 “A good Degree of Affection in Things of Religion becomes us”: Henry Alline, Jonathan Scott, and the Long Argument
• 6 Unfeeling Enthusiasts: Nova Scotia New Lights as an Emotional Community
• 7 From Enthusiasm to Sympathy: Edward Manning, Heart Religion, and Society
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index