Beyond 1776

Globalizing the Cultures of the American Revolution

Maria O'Malley, Denys Van Renen, Maria O'Malley, Denys Van Renen

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780813941769
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Frühneuzeitliche Geschichte

In Beyond 1776, ten humanities scholars consider the American Revolution within a global framework. The foundation of the United States was deeply enmeshed with shifting alliances and multiple actors, with politics saturated by imaginative literature, and with ostensible bilateral negotiations that were, in fact, shaped by speculation about realignments in geopolitical power. To reanimate these intricate and often indirect connections, this volume uncovers the influences of people across disparate sites both during and after independence.

The book centers first on the migration of ideas across the Atlantic, particularly among intellectuals and through print. In this section, scholars focus on how various European countries or cliques appropriate the Revolution to reanimate an array of national, local, or cosmopolitan affiliations. The essays in the second section articulate how revolutions fostered surprising exchanges in, for example the West Indies and in the first penal colonies of Australia, along the Celtic fringe and Pacific Rim, and in the vast territories through which goods circulated. Taken as a whole, this collection answers the persistent calls from scholars to move beyond the boundaries defined by the nation-state or periodization to rethink narratives of U.S. foundations. The contributors examine a range of texts, from novels and drama to diplomatic correspondence, letters of common sailors, political treatises, newspapers, accounting ledgers, naval records, and burial rituals (many from non-Anglophone sources).

Beyond 1776 will appeal to scholars seeking to understand contact and exchange in the late eighteenth century. It indexes how different intellectuals in the period deployed the Revolution as a point of connection; follows the dispersal of print books, guns, slaves, and memorabilia; and evaluates literary responses to the new republic. The book puts in conversation scholars of literature, theater, history, modern languages, American studies, political science, transatlanticism, cultural studies, women's studies, postcolonialism, and geography.

Contributors: Jeng-Guo Chen, Academia Sinica, Taiwan * Matthew Dziennik, United States Naval Academy * Miranda Green-Barteet, University of Western Ontario * Carine Lounissi, Université de Rouen-Normandie * Therese-Marie Meyer, Martin-Luther-University of Halle- Wittenberg * Maria O'Malley, University of Nebraska, Kearney * Denys Van Renen, University of Nebraska, Kearney * Ed Simon, Bentley University * Wyger Velema, University of Amsterdam * Leonard von Morzé, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Part I

Transatlantic Cliques

Circulating the American Revolution

The Atlantic Networks of Christian Jacob Hütter

Leonard von Morzé

On 8 March 1800, an immigrant living in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, advertised a most unusual German-language pamphlet. In translation, the title reads Washington’s Arrival in Elysium: A Sketch in Dialogue Form by an Admirer of the Pallid Hero. The reader would have opened the book to discover a thirty-page dialogue, concluding with a few pages of patriotic songs—all of this “dedicated,” as the extended subtitle indicated, “to all uncorrupted American republicans.”1 Ostensibly a memorial to Washington, the dialogue would, when finally printed and distributed sometime around September 1800, contextualize the American Revolution within a global history from Rome to revolutionary France and trace the young republic’s recent fall into corruption under the Adams administration.2 As though these topics were not ponderous enough for such a short text, the author cast them into a classical genre well known to eighteenth-century readers: a dialogue among the dead. The text, discussed at greater length below, begins with Washington’s waking up in the pagan underworld and follows him as he engages in political discussions with revolutionaries from ancient Rome to Napoleonic France. These discussions offer a rousing history of American liberties, from the first European colonization of the continent to the American Revolution and beyond.

A gesture at the end of the dialogue, however, offers its most significant hint about how the author wished readers in the new century to understand Washington’s revolution. In the closing scene, Hebe, goddess of youth, offers Washington a cup from the waters of the Lethe, which would allow Washington to forget his earthly sorrows. To Hebe’s surprise, Washington makes an unprecedented refusal, as he prefers to “keep the memory of my life!” (28). As a ceremonial gesture, Washington’s act of declining the proffered cup suggests a rejection of the Christian rite of communion. This was an appropriate way to end an uncompromisingly pagan dialogue whose author was interested in the cultural capital signified by classical learning, by knowledge about the Greek cup itself rather than in its potential to be turned into a Christian allegory. Equally significant for the purposes of this essay, the act marks a commitment to remembering the Revolution at a time when many Americans—so the dialogue implied—seemed determined to forget it. By implication, Washington’s revolutionary legacy does not need Hebe’s help to remain eternal. His refusal of the cup of happy forgetfulness suggests to the reader that the specific history of founding a separate American republic could be remembered without negating the possibility of subsequent revolutions.

The printer (and, in the absence of other candidates, the presumed author) of the dialogue was a young man who had not been around for the American Revolution. He had arrived in the country in 1789 and was, at the time of publication, twenty-nine years old.3 Born in Saxe-Gotha in 1771, Christian Jacob Hütter had been taken at a very early age to Zeist in the Netherlands, and then to Pennsylvania at the age of eighteen as part of the Moravian mission. What this background does not explain is how Hütter came to view the American Revolution through the mirror of Rome’s pagan mythology and the history of its republic, and to adopt a republican historical perspective on virtue and corruption. It seems unlikely that he had any schooling in the Anglo-American tradition reconstructed by the historians associated with the “republican synthesis,” in which Roman history played such a central role.4 The context for Hütter’s views on revolutionary political culture was, instead, a shifting set of influences that evolved in response to the unfolding of the French Revolution. In the Washington dialogue, Hütter was evidently moved by the secularization of France, which impressed him and encouraged him to see, retrospectively, the American Revolution as having satisfied the dreams of the pagan republic of ancient Rome, a progression that made the death of the founder of the “fatherland” more tolerable as it offered hope that the principles of the American Revolution had already spread abroad.

Fifteen years later, however, Hütter’s admiration for the French Revolution had considerably diminished, partly thanks to his distrust of Napoleon. At this point in his career, Hütter published a remarkable novel called The Life and Adventures of Moses Nathan Israel that reworked the familial theme of Washington, once again comparing the American republic to a fatherless orphan. Yet the later work is a realist novel with an allegorical dimension rather than a dialogue conducted in a space outside history. In Moses Nathan Israel, the American Revolution embodies the historical spirit of the age, whose global dimensions await discovery (in this case, through a reckoning with the laws and customs of Hanseatic Germany) by the hero and the reader. In the earlier Washington, by contrast, the American Revolution is understood as the expression of natural right rather than the establishment of a positive law. Hütter understood the history of English and German transatlantic migration as the settlers’ affirmation of the right of mobility, and defended the ever-present possibility of continued emigration. The trappings of pagan mythology and the dialogue of the dead provided an imaginative structure for the work, whose political significance was to situate the mobility that led to the American Revolution in a setting outside place and time, in the domain of natural right.

Washington and the Book Business

As the leading dealer of German-language books in the early republic, Hütter was certainly acquainted with the latest writings from Europe. He seems to have read not just the rancorous party-sponsored newspapers which he also published himself but also German newspapers in the genre of the political review that came to the German states near the end of the eighteenth century.5 But while this genre reflected an evolving relationship between editors in the German-language states and their reading publics, Hütter could not count on a politically engaged German American audience and instead appealed to his readers as consumers interested in purchasing books and periodicals that were valuable as commodities from overseas. At least in the Washington dialogue, his classical framework accordingly reads more as a draft of a marketable educational program than as a coherent ideology for the interpretation of political history. Roman mythology might have, in other words, conferred distinction on readers interested in buying texts other than a family Bible.

Hopeful of reaching these consumers, Hütter had unbounded ambitions for his bookstore and the associated circulating library. Advertising a stock of six thousand titles for sale and claiming that his circulating library boasted one thousand titles, with “many magnificent works missing from the largest libraries in Germany,”6 he is probably responsible for circulating more non-English material between 1798 and 1815 than anyone else on the continent. His confidence, surprising though it may seem today, in the commercial centrality of Lancaster also led to triumphant assertions about its political centrality: “The conditions in Lancaster occupy every politician from the northernmost to the southernmost extremes of the United States,” he claimed in November 1800.7 His subsequent success, despite bankruptcy and repeated relocations, bore this out: until his death in 1849, he would enjoy an extraordinarily varied career as a printer and controversialist in the Delaware Valley. Even more than for other German-language newspapermen (who printed one-third of the titles produced in Pennsylvania in the 1790s), his career remains woefully understudied. This may be because he pursued his business interests by writing and distributing work whose abiding subject was, at least in the early period, political, rather than religious or ethnically particularized, or even limited to the German language, as he began to transition to English-language printing around 1810.

Of the works printed by his own press, the Washington dialogue (1800) and Moses Nathan Israel (1815) are the first and last statements we have from him during the period of the French Revolution. No definitive claim can be made about Hütter’s precise share in writing either text; he seems the most likely candidate for the author of the unsigned Washington dialogue, and he contributed, at the very least, significant edits to Moses Nathan Israel, posthumously published on behalf of the obscure Gotthilf Nicolas Lutyens, who was born in Hamburg and died in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in the year of the novel’s publication. Hütter’s intentions as an author are of less relevance to this essay than his responsibility for importing or printing and then selling works that encouraged readers to interpret the American Revolution in light of ongoing events. The circulation he sought was both economic and political: he wished to attract readers and book purchasers to his Lancaster bookselling operation while at the same time attempting to disseminate a Jeffersonian interpretation of the Revolution. In the ferment around the election of 1800, Hütter saw an opportunity to align his politics with his business interests, as his political identification with the Jeffersonian side supported his proposals to sell thousands of German-language Enlightenment books to American readers. For him, the American Revolution was an unfinished project whose legacy he thought Jefferson and the revolutionaries in France well prepared to continue.

The project of this essay is modest in the sense that I draw attention to an overlooked figure whose business was “global” insofar as it paralleled the Enlightenment book trade itself. Yet Hütter’s biography may also bridge the gap between scholarship on German American literary culture and studies of German literature on the Continent. To date, the transatlantic connections between German and American literary culture circa 1800 have remained as insubstantial as the shades that Hütter’s Washington spotted along the Styx. On the one hand, comparatists have proposed important connections between German and American writers. On the other hand, bibliographers and folklorists have attended to German-language writing of the mid-Atlantic. It is fair enough to say that “belles lettres,” as one representative historian concludes, “hardly existed in the pietistic German-American world.”8 The list of dozens of eighteenth-century works compiled by Robert Elmer Ward qualifies this claim somewhat, but Ward nonetheless also equated the belletristic with the “creative.”9 This equation left political productions such as Hütter’s entirely out of Ward’s bibliography. What ethnic historians ignore, moreover, is the circulation of imported books, consumer items that conferred cultural capital and political identification. Research in the transatlantic history of the book shows that even pietistic German Americans were interested in owning creative if not belletristic works. Transatlantic book distribution gives us a more varied picture than studies of cultural particularity would suggest and offers us new directions for understanding how Germans on ...