Republicanism and the American Gothic

American Gothic

Marilyn Michaud

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781783163595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire gothique, romantique et horrifique

1

Republican Historiography

In 1985, the American Quarterly devoted an entire issue to the topic of republicanism and in the following year, the William and Mary Quarterly indexed the term for the first time in its ninety-four year history. The addition of the category ‘republicanism’ in these two eminent journals of history and culture reflects the intense interest and often-acrimonious debate orbiting the term since the 1960s. As one critic observed, republicanism was the one concept that could unlock the riddles of American politics and culture.¹ It represented an agreeable substitution for the increasingly pejorative term ‘national’ and a new found interest in language and ideology as an expression of the American political and cultural condition. Yet, for others, it was imbued with vagueness and contradiction:

[t]o insist on the ‘essence’ of republicanism had the effect of driving the term republican into the realm of metaphor and uncertainty, making it vulnerable to a host of alternate and conflicting definitions. It would be available to signify almost anything so long as it was nonmonarchical. It would become rich in overtones, useable in alternate contexts: we find ourselves speaking of republican religion, republican children, republican motherhood.²

By the 1980s republicanism had become a ‘protean concept’, a ‘vocabulary’ and an ‘ideology’, useable for a host of interpretative needs: ‘The recent discovery of republicanism as the reigning social theory of eighteenth-century America has produced a reaction among historians akin to the response of chemists to a new element. Once having been identified, it can be found everywhere.’³ The interest in republicanism represented a sea change in how historians approached revolutionary history and eighteenth-century American culture. The change took place after the Second World War and the coming of the cold war when the values and beliefs that had clarified American political and social culture were being re-evaluated and reformulated in what historians have called a ‘paradigm shift of major proportions’.⁴ Whether viewed as the rhetoric of classical political theory or an explanation of how ideas actually shaped events, the shift revealed that the concept of republicanism is ‘bound up . . . with a complex of theories about language and consciousness . . . and has surreptitiously inserted into our history the conviction that reality is socially constructed’.⁵

In order to grasp the magnitude of this change, a short overview of the prevailing approaches to American history during the interwar and post-war years is useful. Certainly, interpretations of the American Revolution and the early national period have undergone numerous transformations from the beginning when participants began to record their impressions of what was happening to subsequent views of the revolution in the setting of British imperialism. However, in the first half of the twentieth century, ideas, or the intellectual context, of early American culture receded from view and new methodologies emerged to explain the character of the nation. From the socioeconomic theories of Carl Becker and Charles Beard to the liberal consensus model advanced by Louis Hartz, Daniel J. Boorstin and Richard Hofstadter, revolutionary historiography was decidedly anti-ideological. For Progressives, who combined Marxist and Freudian thought to understand the underlying drives and interests that determine social behaviour, the revolution and the formation of the constitution was explained primarily as a conflict between different power groups where ideas were seen as merely rhetorical disguises for some hidden interest, detached from the material conditions that produced them.⁶ In his introduction to An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution, Beard claimed that ideas were ‘entities, particularities, or forces, apparently independent of all earthly considerations coming under the head of “economic”’.⁷ In this evaluation, ideas were simply rationalizations modified to suit the needs of the elite and the extravagant language used to express their interests could not be taken seriously. Claims that the Tories were all ‘wretched hirelings, and execrable parricides’; George III, the ‘tyrant of the earth’, a ‘monster in human form’; that British soldiers were a ‘mercenary licentious rabble of banditti’ did not represent reality but merely a form of calculated deception.⁸ Moreover, Americans knew very little about past republics and what they did know was ‘clearly irrelevant to the discussion of the origins of republican institutions in America’. After the restoration in 1660, republican and democratic ideas ‘passed into unpopularity and oblivion . . . not to be revived and re-popularized until the nineteenth century’.⁹ For Progressives, the ideas of the great republican authors of the English Civil War were dead until after the American Revolution. John Locke dominated American thought and the impetus to republicanism emerged with Jefferson only after confederation:

The colonists already had textbooks of revolution in the writings of Englishmen who defended and justified the proceedings of the seventeenth century—above all, John Locke’s writings, wherein was set forth the right of citizens to overthrow government that took their money or their property without consent.¹⁰

However, after the Second World War, this progressive interpretation of the early national period came under assault. The shift from what has been called a Beardian paradigm to a liberal interpretation occurred just as the nation moved from political isolationism to the international arena, from the rhetoric of national exceptionalism and the concentration on social movements to the asocial politics of consensus. No longer seen as a struggle between economic interests, for liberal consensus historians American history was, and always had been, dominated by class harmony centred on self-interest. Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America: An Interpretation of American Political Thought since the Revolution, Daniel Boorstin’s The Genius of American Politics (1953) and The Americans: The Colonial Experience (1958), and Richard Hofstadter’s The Progressive Historians: Turner, Beard, Parrington outlined the new liberal interpretation for a post-war generation. To these post-Progressives, American thought was Lockean in its marrow:‘Locke dominates American political thought, as no thinker anywhere dominates the political thought of a nation. He is a massive national cliché.’¹¹ Americans took to Locke, they argued, because American society was individualistic, ambitious, protocapitalist or, in a word, ‘liberal’.¹² The ubiquity of Locke’s theories of the sanctity of property and of self-regarding individuals voluntarily restraining their passions in the face of a multiplicity of interests helped to explain the reasonableness of the revolution. As Hofstadter wrote, Locke represented ‘the legalistic, moderate, nonregicidal, and largely nonterroristic character of the American Revolution’.¹³ The revolution was not an accumulation of seething class conflicts but a moderate and rational compromise where all demonstrations of conflict short of a Jacobin or Bolshevist revolution vanished in an all-pervasive liberal consensus.¹⁴

At the same time that liberal historians were working to modify the view of early American history, another form of revision was taking shape. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a series of essays began to challenge the primacy of the consensual mode of history by exploring the influence of English libertarian thought on the American revolutionaries. For these historians, neither Beard’s economics nor Hartz’s Lockean individualism were the driving force behind the revolution and the early national period. Instead, they argued that colonial Americans drew their political and social attitudes from the libertarian thought of the English ‘commonwealth’ or ‘country’ polemicists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain. In 1947, Caroline Robbins looked towards Sidney’s Discourses rather than Locke’s Essays as a significant influence on American thought.¹⁵ Acknowledging the contemporary ignorance of Sidney’s writings and the frequent coupling of his name with Locke’s, Robbins set out to uncover the nature of his influence during the revolutionary years. She revealed that like many of his contemporaries, Sidney voiced a popular theory of government against the divine right of any ruler or form of government. In his Discourses Concerning Government, Sidney suggested:

As impostors seldom make lies to pass in the world, without putting false names upon things, such as our author endeavour to persuade the people they ought not to defend their liberties, by giving the name of rebellion to the most just and honourable actions that have been performed for the preservation of them; and to aggravate the matter, fear not to tell us that rebellion is like the sin of witchcraft. But those who seek after truth, will easily find, that there can be no such thing in the world as the rebellion of a nation against its own magistrates, and that rebellion is not always evil.¹⁶

Unlike the ‘principles of the wise and moderate Mr. Locke’, Sidney justified rebellion and conspiracy in the face of tyranny and authoritarianism: ‘For the radical, rebel, or revolutionary, the passionate and partisan Discourses provides an inspiration lacking in Locke’s more temperate Essays.’ Moreover, Robbins’s essay revealed that while Sidney’s inspiration faded in England after the revolution, in America his stature only increased. Conceived of as a seventeenth-century hero and martyr, his motto was adopted by various states, his story was retold in popular history books and his Discourses became one of the political textbooks along with the works of Milton, Harrington, Ludlow, Marvell and Locke, among others. Robbins suggests that the lack of interest in commonwealth doctrine in the contemporary ‘post-Marxian world’ occurred because the writings of these men did not bring about any significant constitutional change in eighteenth-century Britain, nor were they interested in issues of social and economic equality. For post-war Progressives and Liberals alike, Sidney’s writings did not fulfil an interpretative need and therefore were largely ignored.¹⁷

Continuing her assessment of the influence of English reformers on America, Robbins followed her essay on Sidney with an examination of the republican bibliophile and philanthropist, Thomas Hollis. Another largely forgotten figure in post-war historiography, Hollis spent his life defending the seventeenth-century republican tradition and dedicated himself to the private service of English liberty. According to Robbins, Hollis ‘became the most persistent and one of the most effective propagandists for radical Whig doctrines operating in the British Empire in the 1760’s’.¹⁸ While Samuel Johnson’s Tory circle described him as a ‘bigotted Whig or Republican’, and a spreader of ‘“Combustibles” of sedition’, Robbins uncovered his importance to eminent Americans such as Benjamin Franklin who commended Hollis’s service to the cause of American liberty:

Good, not only to his own nation, and to his contemporaries, but to distant Countries, and to late Posterity; for such must be the effect of his multiplying and distributing copies ...