The Traumatic Colonel

The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr

Michael J. Drexler, Ed White

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479875795
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

InAmerican political fantasy, the Founding Fathers loom large, at once historicaland mythical figures. In The Traumatic Colonel, Michael J. Drexler andEd White examine the Founders as imaginative fictions, characters in thespecifically literary sense, whose significance emerged from narrative elementsclustered around them. From the revolutionary era through the 1790s, the Founderstook shape as a significant cultural system for thinking about politics, race,and sexuality. Yet after 1800, amid the pressures of the Louisiana Purchase andthe Haitian Revolution, this system could no longer accommodate the deepanxieties about the United States as a slave nation.

Drexlerand White assert that the most emblematic of the political tensions of the timeis the figure of Aaron Burr, whose rise and fall were detailed in theliterature of his time: his electoral tie with Thomas Jefferson in 1800,the accusations of seduction, the notorious duel with Alexander Hamilton, hismachinations as the schemer of a breakaway empire, and his spectacular treasontrial. The authors venture a psychoanalytically-informed exploration of post-revolutionaryAmerica to suggest that the figure of “Burr” was fundamentally a displacedfantasy for addressing the Haitian Revolution. Drexler and White expose how thehistorical and literary fictions of the nation’s founding served to repress thelarger issue of the slave system and uncover the Burr myth as the crux of thatrepression. Exploring early American novels, such as the works of CharlesBrockden Brown and Tabitha Gilman Tenney, as well as the pamphlets, polemics,tracts, and biographies of the early republican period, the authors speculatethat this flourishing of political writing illuminates the notorious gap inU.S. literary history between 1800 and 1820.

1. The Semiotics of the Founders

Where did (or do) the Founding Fathers come from?

There are two default answers that seem to prevail. The first understands the elevation of the Founders as a natural phenomenon, the result of some determinable combination of moral or social complexity, political superiority, and/or practical efficacy. Thus, we remember Thomas Jefferson because of his leadership of the Democratic Party, his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, the hallmarks of his presidency, his exceptional intellect, his tortured grappling with slavery, and so on. Or we commemorate George Washington because of his military leadership, his combination of virtues, his special status as a “first” president, his Farewell Address, and the like. By this reasoning, the lesser status of second- and third-tier figures (the Patrick Henrys, Silas Deanes, or Light-Horse Harry Lees) simply reflects their lesser abilities or achievements. A second, more complex explanation for the Founders’ status focuses on their construction by contemporary and subsequent cultural productions. We honor a Benjamin Franklin because of his thorough self-promotion and an extensive array of portraiture, poems, parades, and so forth, which have been glossed and perpetuated for more than two centuries. That both of these explanations—a quasi-Darwinian natural selection of great men or the concerted efforts of cultural hegemony—seem commonsensical and, often enough, compatible speaks to the tremendous cultural power of the Founders, so dominant that they corral nature and history to justify their genealogies.

The most basic objection one might raise to such explanations is their profoundly tautological nature. Is it not possible that we perceive the achievements of the Founders precisely to the degree to which they have already been elevated? That the gist of our explanations is already the fruit of their status, rather than the cause? One of the remarkable details about Washington is his symbolic elevation before he had really done anything—Washington Heights on Manhattan Island, for example, was named after the general in 1776, and he received an honorary LLD from Harvard the same year, as he arrived in Boston to command the Continental Army. Thus, by early 1777, John Adams (a perpetually baffled wannabe yet insightful reader of the Founders phenomenon) was addressing, in Congress, “the superstitious veneration which is paid to General Washington.”¹ Or, to consider another example, in Richard Snowden’s popular post-Revolutionary history of the war, The American Revolution: Written in the Style of Ancient History (and later sometimes subtitled Written in the Scriptural, or Ancient Historical Style), we find the Declaration of Independence buried in chapter 14, between the British military landing at New York City and the battle for Long Island: “Then they consulted together concerning all things that appertained to the provinces, and they made a decree”—here a footnote explains this to be the “Declaration of Independence”—“and it was sealed with the signets of the princes of the provinces. And the writing of the decree was spread abroad into all lands; and when the host of Columbia heard thereof, they shouted with a great shout” (101).² This scant attention—fifty-nine words in two volumes—not only registers the insignificance of the Declaration (at this moment a formal resolution of fleeting impact) but also anticipates how the Declaration achieved significance: through the elevation of Jefferson. We must resist, then, the natural-historical explanations for the Founders, as their status often preceded their so-called causes. We celebrate the Declaration not because it was significant but because Jefferson became important and secondarily elevated the Declaration. We know about Valley Forge because of Washington’s significance, not vice versa: he became important not because of his military or political exploits—the debate about his military achievements catches a glimmer of this—but the other way around.

And yet we should also be wary of the cultural-constructivist explanation for the Founders—that they are creations. We would mention here a revealing counterfactual—the remarkable elevation of Nathanael Greene, at one time a major general with a reputation as Washington’s most able officer. Histories of the Revolution written in the 1780s and ’90s stressed Greene’s achievements, a tremendous number of counties and towns were named after him, he was depicted in grand portraits by Trumbull and Peale, . . . and then his phenomenal status evaporated. The same is in fact true for many of the Revolutionary heroes or republican statesmen whose names we only vaguely, if at all, recognize today—Horatio Gates, John Stark, Benjamin Lincoln, William Heath, John Laurens, Henry Knox, Israel Putnam, Charles Thomson, and so on. Indeed, any survey of histories of the Revolution or early republican newspapers will reveal a constant, active attempt to construct iconic figures. Were the Founders culturally constructed? Of course, but the constructivist answer does not explain why some of these figures prevailed while others faded away. Indeed, the complementarity of these two explanations—naturalist-historical and constructivist—is essential to the gesture of “debunking” the Founders. One shows the “real” Benjamin Franklin (bawdy, manipulative, skeptical, or whatever) as if to reveal how “constructed” he is as a mythical Founder, but such debunking is in actuality the very constructivist process with updated historical content about sexuality, personality, private secrets, and the like.

Let us assert, then, at the outset that what we call the “Founding Fathers” was (and still is) primarily a literary and symbolic phenomenon—it entailed certain reading practices, narratives, relational logics, constellations, and genres. Given this textual formation, it is especially important to stress that the Founders emerged relationally, not as isolated instances of heroic figures. We discuss later the theoretical implications of the field in which the Founders arose but turn first to the unfolding, from the 1770s into the 1780s, of the first major Founders, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin.

The Royal Field

In a recent study of colonial royalism, Brendan McConville has outlined almost a century of a growing North American celebration of the monarchy, culminating in the intense “monarchical love” of the eighteenth-century imperial crisis.³ In the aftermath of several decades of imperial neglect during the tumultuous years of the English Revolution, the restored Stuarts attempted, unsuccessfully, to transform colonial North American political administration. The Stuarts’ error lay in the focus on royalization and consolidation of colonial charters and governments, attempts at which largely collapsed with the Glorious Revolution of 1688, marked in North America by a series of colonial rebellions in 1689–90. In the aftermath, a very different attempt to assert royal authority followed, with centralizing institutional reforms giving way to a very different “reorganization of political society, public life, and print culture” (48). In other words, the inability to reform political institutions gave way to reforms of political culture, starting with the introduction of annual rites bolstering a “cult of the British Protestant prince” (48). Thus, at the very moment when “parliamentary supremacy became firmly established in England,” the colonies witnessed the emergence of a new political culture in which “the key imperial tie became the emotional one between the individual and the ruler” (50).

One sign of the effectiveness of this new political culture was the introduction of some twenty-six official holidays affirming this monarchical culture, and by 1740, McConville argues, “public spectacles celebrating monarch and empire, involving local elites and military display, occurred at least six times a year in the major population centers, while more modest activities occurred on twenty other days” (63–64). By the imperial crisis, colonial America evidenced a political culture grounded in an intense emotional investment in the king—what McConville at one point calls “the emotional structures” based on “the troika of love, fear, and desire” (106).

From our perspective, what is most notable about this symbolic formation is its relative isolation from other political and social institutions—this is the paradox emphasized by McConville again and again. Where royalist culture in Britain was integrated in “a political order dominated by extensive patronage ties, the state church, long established custom, and a tightly controlled land tenure system,” in the colonies the royalist ties were compartmentalized and passionately intensified in “rites and print culture” (106) and, later in the eighteenth century, in a series of royally marked commodities, from medicines and tableware to iconography in prints and medals.⁴ The result was a more intense royalism in British North America than in Britain itself, a point crucial to McConville’s account of the imperial crisis.

After the initial imperial conflicts of 1764, colonials responded with “a flight to the king’s love and justice” (251). Contrary to whiggish misinterpretations of the Revolution as the gradual repudiation of monarchical prerogative, colonials in the years before the rupture “completely abandoned the perception that strong kings tended to threaten liberty” (253), going so far as to articulate neoabsolutist arguments “relating the king’s person to the entire physical empire” as fundamental to their interpretation of colonial charter rights (256). Thomas Jefferson, for instance, called for a return to the royal veto on parliamentary legislation—a practice unused since Queen Anne’s reign (261). Thus again another paradox: “As counterintuitive as it may seem, the love of the king and country reached its zenith at the split second before imperial collapse” (251). That is, colonials amplified the symbolic position of the king until the monarch was the sole solution to the crisis into the 1770s. “By 1773, all that remained was faith in the king,” as political theory and rhetoric were channeled through this symbolic conduit (250). When King George did not come to the rescue, when the links between king and imperial practices could no longer be denied, the peripety was sudden and dramatic. In fact, the emotional and symbolic investment in the king explains the long and passionate litany of accusations against him in the Declaration of Independence, which is as much a Declaration of Heartbroken Betrayal. Thus, the British colonies had, at the moment of the rupture with Great Britain, almost a century’s tradition of cultic, symbolic investment in a political leader, unique in the empire in being institutionally unmoored and located primarily in print and pictorial representations.

This special iconic status, inherited by George III, anticipated the domain eventually to be occupied by the Founding Fathers. But a particularly North American occupation of this semiotic space also depended on the emergence of the king’s negative composite during the years of the imperial crisis. Bernard Bailyn long ago noted the oddly persistent significance of John Stuart, the third Lord Bute, in pre-Revolutionary rhetoric, in which he was not only “the root of the evil” of the imperial crisis but also the “malevolent and well-nigh indestructible machinator” behind British politics.⁵ If Bute is now largely unknown in popular Revolutionary lore, he appeared repeatedly in texts of the imperial crisis, from the Stamp Act controversy to the Declaration of Independence. Historian John Brewer has provided the most detailed account of the iconography of Bute,⁶ trying to explain the strange “range and extent of hostility to Bute” by excavating the underlying “theory of politics” motivating this antipathy (MLB 5).⁷ Indeed, Brewer, whose work belongs within the transatlantic “republican synthesis,” argues that the fixation on Bute resulted from a conjunction of whig beliefs about monarchical prerogative, undue nonparliamentary influence, and fears of an unbalanced constitution, going so far as to add that such associations with Bute were unfair and somehow incorrect.⁸ While one should certainly link the figure of Bute with related ideological positions, we should not let this prosaic translation exercise obscure Bute’s tremendous symbolic composition, which Brewer elsewhere discusses. Two qualities seem most important. For one thing, Bute was a centripetal figure combining and channeling other figures. Indeed, other political officials were deemed Bute’s “locum tenens”—his placeholders—in the parlance of the time, such that his distance or absence from the political scene simply provided more proper names to constitute his power.⁹ These secondary figures—considered “‘cyphers’ or agents for the minions of Bute” (FLB 102)—were linked metonymically in discourse: Bute and this or that puppet. But in narrative, these connections were made through the emplotment of conspiracy, whereby secondary characters were metaphorical placeholders of the primary figure. In this framework, Revolutionary conspiracy theories may be read not so much as explanations of events, or indices of theories of historical causality, but rather as maps of semiotic layerings.

Just as important, however, was a countervailing centrifugal or splitting dynamic, whereby Bute gathered together traits, events, and qualities that could not initially be linked with King George. “Clearly, it was argued, responsibility” for absolutist tendencies in government “could not be placed upon a King who it was traditionally claimed ‘could do no wrong’” (FLB 114). Thus emerged a theory of a secret “inner cabinet,” or a “dual system of government”—a public or legitimate or monarchically constrained order, on the one hand, and, on the other, a secret, scheming, and prerogative-driven system (FLB 98, 102); thus also emerged the scandalous accusations that Bute had sexual relations with the Princess Dowager (FLB 111).

We see both of these dynamics in the North American versions of Bute, where he is the central figure in characterological clusters including other figures, most notably Lords North and Mansfield. Thus, we find John Leacock’s satirical, mock-scriptural First Book of the American Chronicles of the Times presenting this composite vision: “Behold, yonder I see a dark cloud like unto a large sheet rise from the north, big with oppression and desolation, and the four corners thereof are held by four great beasts, bute, mansfield, bernard and hutchinson.”¹⁰ When, in 1776, Leacock published his mock metadrama The Fall of British Tyranny, “Mr. bute” would top the list of “Dramatis Personnæ” as “Lord Paramount,” with Mansfield, Dartmouth, North, and others in subordinate roles.¹¹ John Trumbull’s 1775 M’Fingal opened linking its central character with a Scottish rebelliousness that “With Bute and Mansfield swore allegiance / . . . to raze, as nuisance, / Of church and state the Constitutions.”¹² Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s 1776 dramatic poem “The Battle of Bunkers-Hill” envisioned General Gage crying “Oh bute, and dartmouth knew ye what I feel.”¹³ The popular pamphlet series The Crisis, collaboratively written in England but published serially and repeatedly in the colonies, was full of similar references.¹⁴ Bute, for example, “sternly bids North lay another tax,” while anti-American “sentiments are Bute’s by Mansfield’s penn’d”; royal speech, in yet another installment, is “no ordinary composition, it originates from Bute, is trimmed up by Mansfield, adopted by North, and pronounced by a royal Orator.”¹⁵ Similarly illuminating is a 1776 pamphlet, published in Philadelphia, focused on persuading Quakers to join the independence movement. In one scene, four of the main characters—the Irish American “Pady,” the Quaker “Simon,” the Scottish American “Sandy,” and the New Englander “Jonathan”—have largely come to agreement about the imperial crisis but suddenly come to blows as they begin to fantasize that one another are scheming counselors to the king: “Simon: If you were lord North, I would—then fetches Sandy a blow and knocks him over the bench, and breaks his arm;—whilst Jonathan and Pady keeps struggling on the floor, Jonathan cries out if you were lord Bute, but I would—and i...