A Republic of Men

The American Founders, Gendered Language, and Patriarchal Politics

Mark E. Kann

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 1998
• ISBN:
  9780814748473
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie politique

What role did manhood play in early American Politics? In A Republic of Men, Mark E. Kann argues that the American founders aspired to create a "republic of men" but feared that "disorderly men" threatened its birth, health, and longevity. Kann demonstrates how hegemonic norms of manhood–exemplified by "the Family Man," for instance--were deployed as a means of stigmatizing unworthy men, rewarding responsible men with citizenship, and empowering exceptional men with positions of leadership and authority, while excluding women from public life.

Kann suggests that the founders committed themselves in theory to the democratic proposition that all men were created free and equal and could not be governed without their own consent, but that they in no way believed that "all men" could be trusted with equal liberty, equal citizenship, or equal authority. The founders developed a "grammar of manhood" to address some difficult questions about public order. Were America's disorderly men qualified for citizenship? Were they likely to recognize manly leaders, consent to their authority, and defer to their wisdom? A Republic of Men compellingly analyzes the ways in which the founders used a rhetoric of manhood to stabilize American politics.

1

The Culture of Manhood

Judith Sargent Murray once instructed her readers, “Let every American play the man for his country.”¹ The phrase was a common one. Writers and speakers employed it to motivate young males to quit their disorderly ways, measure up to standards of manhood, and fulfill their duties as citizens. What did “play the man” mean? How did manhood relate to politics? In the last half of the eighteenth century, the American culture of manhood was a complex discursive arena composed of contested ideals and consensual norms that the American founders molded into a relatively coherent “grammar of manhood” that defined citizenship and legitimized leadership in the new republic.

The Traditional Patriarch

Early Americas dominant ideal of manhood was the traditional patriarch who devoted himself to governing his family and serving his community. E. Anthony Rotundo describes the traditional patriarch as “a towering figure... the family’s unquestioned ruler.” He exhibited exemplary self-control and little visible emotion. He might express “approval or disapproval in place of affection or anger” and govern family dependents through “persuasion and sympathy,” but he also could issue edicts and enforce his will with coercive power and corporal punishment. The traditional patriarch governed his “little commonwealth” by supervising his wife’s piety and productivity, and by managing his sons’ education and children’s marriages to perpetuate his family line. Though his authority was nearly absolute, a family father was accountable to church officials and civic leaders, who sought to ensure the “good order in the home” they thought essential to social harmony and the public good.²

American culture encouraged young males to discipline desire, marry early, sire legitimate offspring, and mature into traditional patriarchs. Protestant clergy counseled youth on marital duty as an alternative to sexual promiscuity or priestly chastity. During the Great Awakening, Susan Juster reports, Congregational ministers worried that New Light spiritual individualism, disregard for authority, and emotionalism fostered “a kind of sexual anarchy,” “a potential for sexual libertinism,” and “a sexualized climate” subversive of family stability and public order. The proper way to transform male lust into virtue was to channel it into monogamous marriage and sublimate it into family responsibility. Secular wisdom also urged young men into marriage. A Virginian communicated common sense on the subject in 1779 by stating, “No man who has health, youth, and vigor on his side can when arrived to the age of manhood do without a woman.” In turn, marriage focused male passion on family duty. Nancy Cott observes, “Marriage was seen as a relationship in which the husband agreed to provide food, clothing, and shelter for his wife, and she agreed to return frugal management, and obedient service.” Fundamentally, “to ‘act like a man’ meant to support one’s wife.”³

Not all young males could act like a man. Mary Noyes Silliman counseled her sons to “lay a foundation in subsistence” before contemplating marriage. That was especially difficult when fathers withheld the land and patrimony that sons needed to support a family, or when fathers had little or no realty to transmit to their sons. Still, few writers saw economic want as prohibitive. Benjamin Franklin argued that any poor, hardworking young man could acquire enough land to start a family. George Washington applauded the opening of the Ohio Valley as an opportunity for “the poor, the needy, and the oppressed” to own land and start families. Thomas Jefferson justified the Louisiana Purchase, in part, as enabling “everyone who will labor to marry young and to raise a family of any size.” The choice of marriage was a different matter for servants, apprentices, and slaves, who needed their masters’ permission to marry; but masters such as Thomas Jefferson approved of dependent marriages as a means to tame male passions and make male slaves more obedient and reliable.⁴

The reputed “taming effect” of marriage threatened to subject young men to the manipulative powers of potentially domineering women. John Gregory’s popular advice book A Father’s Legacy to His Daughter admonished against women’s tendency to abuse their power “over the hearts of men,” and Pennsylvania Magazine sounded an alert against “bad wives [who] flatter and tyrannize over men of sense.” Alas, marriage exposed men to female tyranny. One counterresponse was to define manhood as tyranny over women. American fiction embodied figures such as Hannah Webster Foster’s Peter Sanford, a coxcomb who saw overcoming obstacles to the sexual conquest of an innocent girl as “the glory of a rake,” and Judith Sargent Murray’s Sinisterus Courtland, a rogue who squandered his patrimony, fell into debt, and tried “to extricate himself by . . . deluding some woman whose expectations were tolerable into an affair of the heart.”⁵ A fictive war of the sexes was waged by seductive coquettes and deceitful libertines.

Mainstream culture condemned both the coquette and the libertine but condoned the notion that men needed to restrain disorderly women. The preferred means of restraint were parental education and marital supervision. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes that colonial parents sought to instill in their daughters virtues such as “prayerfulness, industry, charity, [and] modesty.” At an appropriate age, young women were to marry and submit to their husbands’ authority. A well-bred wife did not tyrannize over her husband; nor did a manly husband fear “bondage” from his wife. Benjamin Franklin asserted that “every man that really is a man” would be “master of his own family.” If he married a “difficult girl,” he still was expected to “subdue even the most restless spirits” and transform an unruly spouse into a virtuous “helpmeet” who practiced piety, gave birth, nursed infants, educated children, cooked, healed, manufactured, managed servants, grew food, tended livestock, traded in the marketplace, worked in the family shop, took in boarders, or engaged in paid employment. The precise nature and degree of a husband’s authority varied by religion, race, ethnicity, class, and region, but the legitimacy of his family sovereignty was everywhere secured by law and custom.⁶

A major motive for young men to marry was to procreate legitimate sons. John Demos explains that the traditional patriarch sired, raised, and educated sons to continue his “accomplishments, indeed his very character, into the future.” The Reverend John Robinson noted that grandfathers often were “more affectionate towards their children’s children than to their immediates as seeing themselves further propagated in them, and by their means proceeding to a further degree of eternity, which all desire naturally, if not in themselves, yet in their posterity.” A concerned father made sacrifices to provision and protect sons and, in turn, expected to achieve a sense of immortality through his children. Contemporary testamentary practices indicated that northern men tried to extend family dynasties for one generation and southern men hoped to perpetuate them even longer. The conviction that fathers were deeply devoted to their posterity suggested that they had an enduring stake in the community that justified citizenship. Accordingly, New York artisans proposed in the 1760s that “every man who honestly supports a family by useful employment” should have the right to vote and hold office.⁷

The traditional patriarch’s performance as husband and father was his main contribution to the community. Men with marital responsibilities disciplined their passions; husbands who were masters of a household restrained women’s disorderly conduct; and responsible fathers produced sons likely to mature into trustworthy citizens. Also, the traditional patriarch represented his household in the various hierarchies that ordered the larger society. This meant, among other things, that he recognized, respected, and deferred to his superiors—the “fathers” and “tender parents” of his communal family.⁸

Destabilizing Traditional Patriarchy

The ideal of the traditional patriarch was destabilized between 1750 and 1800 when, Jay Fliegelman suggests, Americans began to surrender “an older patriarchal family authority” in favor of “more affectionate and equalitarian” family relationships.⁹ English Whig ideology and disputed gender relations, a gap between American patriarchal ideals and actual gender relations, and dynamic economic change contributed to a weakening of the traditional patriarch as the dominant ideal of manhood. The result was not the elimination of the old ideal but the emergence of several alternative ideals.

England transmitted to America a mixed image of manhood. On the one hand, seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Englishmen legitimized the traditional patriarch and authorized him to rule family dependents with almost “absolute authority.” He managed a wife whose lot was “perpetual pregnancy” to multiply her husband’s person “by propagation.” He supervised his sons’ upbringing to ensure they would mature into responsible stewards of the family dynasty. The exemplary patriarch spoke with an upper-class accent, but his authority trickled down so that even “lower-class household rulers” were considered more manly and mature than “peers who were still in service and lacked families of their own.” English writers agreed that a “well-ordered family,” with an “orderly head” and “orderly members,” was “the basis of the entire social order.”¹⁰

On the other hand, the Whig attack on absolute kingship generated doubts about all absolute authority. Algernon Sidney, James Tyrrell, and John Locke vested familial authority in the traditional patriarch but they also sought to limit paternal power to prevent domestic tyranny. They experimented with the idea of marriage as a negotiable contract that could be terminated in divorce; they emphasized a husband’s duties toward his wife; and they declared adult sons to be fully free and equal men. Also, they allowed for occasional state intervention to prevent and punish patriarchal abuses and even contemplated instances when female sovereignty and filial rebellion were justified.¹¹

Popular pamphleteers pushed further in this direction. Mary Astell compared tyrannical husbands to tyrannical kings and suggested that wives in families deserved the same rights that Whigs claimed for men in politics. Other writers complained of “foolish, passionate, stingy, sottish” husbands who thought themselves “free from all restraints.” They needed to be less authoritarian and more respectful and loving toward their wives. In the changing family, writes Lawrence Stone, “The authority of husbands over wives and of parents over children declined as greater autonomy was granted to or assumed by all members of the family unit. There were the beginnings of a trend toward greater legal and educational equality between the sexes. . . . Although the economic dependence of these women on their husbands increased, they were granted greater status and decision-making power within the family.”¹² This emerging companionate ideal suggested a new model of husband-wife relations, plus a new understanding of father-son relations.

The Whig notion that fathers and adult sons were equals weakened paternal authority. Fathers had only a few years to leave an imprint on sons before the latter became autonomous men. Unfortunately, that imprint was often one of neglect and abuse. James Harrington reported that “innumerable children come to owe their utter perdition” to fathers who ignored them and thereby exposed them to excessive maternal indulgence. John Locke was particularly appalled by fathers whose poor parenting skills “weaken and effeminate” their sons. He proposed a theory of psychological fatherhood to strengthen intergenerational bonds, so that a father could train a son to mature into a proper heir and an “affectionate friend when he is a man.” The traditional patriarch’s strict authority over his sons was gradually transformed into mere influence over them.¹³

Gordon Schochet concludes that the Whig “rejection of absolute fatherly authority” was more symptomatic “of what was coming rather than . . . [of] what had already taken place.” What was coming finally arrived when Americans adapted Whig rhetoric to local conditions. In 1764, James Otis, Jr., resurrected a century-old line of questioning: “Are not women born as free as men? Would it not be infamous to assert that the ladies are all slaves by nature?” A decade later, Thomas Paine denounced men who abused patriarchal authority to play the “tyrant” and keep women “in a state of dependence” akin to slavery. He urged men to give more recognition and respect to women. The next year, Abigail Adams called it indisputable that men had been “naturally tyrannical” to women. She wanted husbands to “give up the harsh title of master for the more tender and endearing one of friend” and to treat wives not as “vassals” but as “under your protection.”¹⁴

In America as in England, Whig rhetoric generated skepticism of vast authority.

Whig rhetoric also called attention to a gap between the ideal of the traditional patriarch and the everyday reality of gender relations. Kenneth Lock-ridge agrees that traditional patriarchs were expected to control “all things in their households.” However, even within a context of domination and subordination, women were historical agents with “substantial power.” They had leverage over men during courtship as well as in their roles as mothers, household managers, laborers, religious activists, and widows who controlled family estates and minor children. The extent of women’s agency grew during the Revolution, when women assumed de facto family sovereignty, ran farms and shops, participated in America’s political and military life, and thereby blurred the boundaries between the masculine and feminine. For many men, women’s enlarged influence made them appear to be especially dangerous, destructive, and disorderly creatures.¹⁵

The gap between the patriarchal ideal and family reality expanded as republican values seeped into domestic culture. Criticism of husbands’ arbitrary power and abusive treatment of wives was common in eighteenth-century America. In 1743, for example, a poet castigated “the tyrant husband” who imposed “fatal bondage” on his wife. In 1759, Annis Boudinot Stockton declared, “Oh men behave like men,” to insist that husbands stop degrading their wives and instead cherish their virtues. The Revolution’s attack on tyranny in favor of benevolence weakened traditional patriarchal authority and strengthened companionate norms in marriage. Judith Sargent Murray wrote that men “usurped an unmanly and unfounded superiority” over women when they ought to strive for “mutual esteem, mutual friendship, mutual confidence, begirt about by mutual forbearance.” A husband’s respect for his wife was “as tender as it is manly,” implying that it was not the stern patriarch but the loving husband who epitomized true manhood.¹⁶

The dominant ideal was also undermined by economic trends that impaired paternal power. The traditional patriarch monopolized control of land and command of his children’s destinies. However, population growth, economic expansion, and commercial development destroyed this monopoly. Even affluent fathers suffered a diminished capacity to transmit land to sons when their settlements became densely populated. In Dedham, Massachusetts, for example, intensified land use fostered family dispersion. As wealth became more unevenly distributed, poor fathers without land to distribute or bequeath discovered they had little economic clout. They could not “control their sons by promising the gift of a farm later in life.” Finally, young men had options. Some settled western lands to achieve “what only total independence would recognize, the right to shape their own communities.” Others sought their fortunes in towns and cities where commerce opened up new opportunities for income. Many fathers became what scholars call “enlightened pater-nalists” or “friendly paternalists” who relied on Locke’s “subtle, psychological means” to maintain a grip on their posterity.¹⁷

The traditional patriarch’s authority was further eroded by an emerging separation of home and workplace. As men began to leave home to spend their days at separate workplaces, they gradually became part-time husbands and fathers who depended on their wives to manage their households and parent their children. Americans came to believe that men’s days in the marketplace “depleted” virtue whereas women and children’s time in the domestic sphere “renewed” it. With fathers and sons occupying different spatial and ethical worlds, fathers began to lose the capacity to guide their sons into manhood. Some critics questioned whether fathers tainted by social vices should educate their sons, and most agreed that mothers were increasingly responsible for promoting and protecting their sons’ virtue. Eventually, fathers’ parental authority was transferred to mothers.¹⁸

Some Americans reacted to the destabilization of the traditional ideal with what Lockridge labels “patriarchal rage.” A youthful Jefferson filled his commonplace book with quotations indicating a misogynist hatred for women allied to an ongoing fantasy “that men could reproduce without women.” Jefferson’s youthful rage matured into “the subtle and perverse misogyny of the new democratic age” manifested in the nascent doctrine of separate spheres which, Nancy Cott argues, was a means “to shore up manhood (by differentiating it from womanhood) at a time when the traditional concomitants and supports of manhood . . . were being undermined and transformed.” New England shoemakers put the doctrine into effect in the 1780s when they began to set up shops outside their homes, take male apprentices into their shops to teach them the entire production process, and recruit female relatives to perform limited functions from within their homes. Artisans reinforced their authority over production in “men’s sphere” and reaffirmed their prerogative to confine females, control their knowledge, and harness their labor in “women’s sphere.” Some women reacted to persistent patriarchy by opposi...