Читать книгу A Republic of Men - Mark E. Kann - Страница 19

The founders told a tale about fathers and farmers who sought to transform a continent of strangers into the fraternity known as civil society.²⁵ They assumed that the organic bonds joining American men to their sons and estates were sufficiently strong to motivate relatives and neighbors to protect their communities. That assumption was borne out by the eight father-son teams that manned the local militia to fight the British at Lexington, and by the complex kinship network of fathers and sons, uncles and nephews, brothers, cousins, and in-laws that mustered at Concord. When America’s parochial protests escalated into a continental revolution, the founders faced the more formidable challenge of forging unity among American men from diverse and distant communities. How could these strangers learn to trust each other? Would they cooperate in war and then contribute to a harmonious peace and shared prosperity?

The founders generally characterized men as social creatures. True, most men were selfish, but they also wanted to be respected by other men. They earned that respect by measuring up to consensual norms of manhood, most dramatically, by defending and extending manly liberty. Accordingly, colonial leaders called on Americans to enlist in the struggle against Great Britain to merit manhood and earn continental respect. Samuel Adams challenged Bostonians: “If you are men, behave like men.” Moses Mather rallied opposition to Britain by imploring Americans “to nobly play the man for our country.” Men who served with honor deserved public acclaim. Thus, Oxenbridge Thatcher complimented Virginia legislators for their resolutions against the Stamp Act by declaring, “Oh, yes. They are men!” Samuel Sherwood congratulated his courageous countrymen by praising “this manly, this heroic, and truly patriotic spirit which is gradually kindling up in every freeman’s breast.” By 1775, more and more American men were heeding the fraternal call to “fight manfully for their country.”²⁶

The founders’ injunctions to “behave like men” and “play the man” and “fight manfully” had contingent meanings. Initially, such phrases suggested that American men should be reluctant to take up arms against their British brethren. James Otis, Jr., advised colonists to protest the Stamp Act but also to recognize Parliament’s authority and exhibit “loyalty, patience, meekness, and forbearance under any hardships,” insofar as these traits were “consistent with the character of men.” John Dickinson counseled Americans to exercise self-restraint in their protests and to remember that the British were still brethren “by religion, liberty, laws, affections, relations, language, and commerce.” He also warned patriots to avert the bloody consequences of separation: “Torn from the body to which we are united, ... we must bleed at every vein.” Worthy men restrained martial ardor to balance claims of liberty against established loyalties. Thomas Jefferson exemplified this disciplined ardor in 1774 when he expressed outrage at British tyranny but continued to plead with the king to reaffirm “fraternal love and harmony.”²⁷

With the onset of armed hostilities in the mid-1770s, patriot leaders began to urge men to war against their treacherous British brethren. George Washington condemned the British for subverting “the laws and constitution of Great Britain itself, in the establishment of which some of the best blood of the kingdom has been spilt.” John Witherspoon expressed disgust that men who were “the same in blood, in language, and in religion should notwithstanding butcher one another with unrelenting rage.” Joseph Warren saw separation as a forgone conclusion and issued a call to arms: “Our all is at stake. . . . An hour lost may deluge your country in blood and entail perpetual slavery upon the few of your posterity who survive the carnage.” Thomas Paine announced that the time for talk was done. His message to the pitiful men who pined for peace rather than arming for war was, “You are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, and lover and ... you have the heart of a coward and the spirit of a sycophant.”²⁸

The founders used consensual norms of manhood to judge men’s conduct during the war. For example, they argued that British peace overtures that promised to restore fraternal harmony at the price of American men’s liberty were deceitful seductions that meritorious men must reject. Paine called Lord Howe’s proposals “cruel and unmanly.” Abigail Adams suggested that Americans who favored peace without independence had “neither the spirit nor the feeling of men.” Meanwhile, Jefferson attacked the British for destroying the trans-Atlantic bonds of brotherhood by committing fratricide and then compounding their treachery by using “Scotch and foreign mercenaries to invade and deluge us in blood.” Washington often mentioned Britain’s use of mercenaries. He refused several proposals to talk peace with the explanation, “I am satisfied that no [peace] commissioners were ever designed except Hessians and other foreigners.” The proper response to Britain’s unmanly conduct, he argued, was for Americans to engage in a “vigorous and manly exertion” consistent with “our character as men.”²⁹ Overall, the founders prided themselves on having vindicated their character as men in dealing with Great Britain. They sought liberty but respected British authority. Their fraternal loyalty to Britain faltered only when fratricide and mercenary activity made unity impossible. Finally, they declared independence, raised a respectable army to defend liberty, and refused peace without honor.

When the founders declared independence, they initiated a process of procreating a distinctive American fraternity. War catalyzed the process. Wilson Carey McWilliams suggests that men are usually encouraged during a struggle against a common enemy to set aside small differences and “find solidarity” with one another. That was David Ramsay’s explanation for early national unity: “A sense of common danger extinguished selfish passions [and] local attachments were sacrificed on the altar of patriotism.” But fraternities forged in battle are fragile. They depend on the presence of a common enemy or danger rather than on shared values and visions. Jefferson made a similar point during the Revolution. He predicted that from the conclusion of the war onward, American men were likely to forget the struggle for liberty and equality and “forget themselves but in the sole faculty of making money.”³⁰ The founders’ fear that wartime fraternity would falter lent urgency to their efforts to fortify American unity.

The exigencies of revolution and nationhood burst open the issue of membership in American society. What qualified a man to fit in? How early did he have to join the patriot cause? Did he have to serve for the duration? Could loyalists who switched sides be trusted? Were neutrals, the ambivalent, opportunists, and pacifists eligible? Should Catholics be admitted if priests and papists used their “influence in the next world” to turn “the superstitious multitude” against the Revolution? What about clergymen and laymen who were deemed slaves to superstition and avarice? Were they so different from those spiritual souls who participated in “an intercourse of humane, generous kindness and grateful attachment and fidelity which like the vital fluid diffuses cheerful health through the whole political body”?³¹ Did ethnicity affect membership? James Winthrop felt that ethnic homogeneity in New England “preserved their religion and morals [and] that manly virtue which is equally fitted for rendering them respectable in war and industrious in peace,” but mixed blood in Pennsylvania cost that state its “religion and good morals.” Questions also arose about America’s backwoodsmen. Were they Americans or “a mongrel half-breed, half civilized, half savage?” And how did race factor in? “A Constant Customer” was surprised “that a people who profess to be so fond of freedom . . . can see such numbers of their fellow men, made of the same blood, not only in bondage but kept so even by them.” However, a South Carolinian denied that whites and blacks were “of the same blood.” He equated emancipation to miscegenation and proclaimed, “Let every spark of honest pride concur to save us from the infamy of such a mongrel coalition.”³²

The issue of fraternal blood bonds resurfaced in the debate over the Constitution. James Madison invoked “the kindred blood which flows in the veins of American citizens” and “the mingled blood which they have shed” to build continental support for a national government. In contrast, “Cato” stressed the local scope of men’s bonds, arguing that America was made of families and fraternities loosely knit together “to provide for the safety of [their] posterity.” He argued that the Constitution promoted an artificial unity that would see Americans “traveling through seas of blood.” Competing images of fraternity and fratricide resurfaced in the 1790s. Madison proposed the Bill of Rights to invite antifederalists into the national fraternity; but Peres Fobes warned that excessive liberty incited men to practice the licentiousness and factionalism that “create jealousies, infuse suspicions, weaken public confidence, kindle and augment the flames of such contention as may desolate a country and crimson it with blood.”³³ Transforming a land of strangers into a band of blood brothers proved a daunting challenge.

Several factors fostered fraternal unity despite disagreement and diversity. The founders mostly agreed on what it meant to be a worthy man in search of fraternity. Such a man disciplined his passions, impulses, and avarice to win other men’s respect and establish fraternal membership. He continually earned his membership by exhibiting manly virtues such as the courage, integrity, and civility that attracted other men’s trust and friendship. He also recognized manly merit and deferred to meritorious leaders. Noah Webster suggested that the only alternative to men’s self-discipline, fraternal solidarity, and deference to manly leaders was the chaos and violence of Jacobin France. The founders also agreed that the search for national unity was a male endeavor. Men as men shared responsibility for defending liberty, provisioning and protecting families, fitting into fraternal society, and shaping public life. Women could encourage men to fit into fraternal society and compensate for men’s failure to do so, but they could not transcend their political marginality. Jefferson’s attitude was typical. He applauded American women for having “the good sense to value domestic happiness” rather than to “wrinkle their foreheads with politics,” and he condemned Parisian “Amazons” for hunting social pleasures and fomenting political riots rather than minding their nurseries.³⁴

The third rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that worthy men were social creatures who sought to fit into fraternal society. They respected established loyalties and disregarded minor disputes. When necessary, however, they created new fraternities of self-disciplined, meritorious men. In time of war, they invited strangers to demonstrate manly worth by joining the fraternity of battle against enemies who threatened their liberty, property, and posterity. In peacetime, they sought to sustain fraternal bonds and guard them against the corrosive acids of individualism and avarice. Unworthy men came in three varieties: men alleged to have different blood; selfish egotists and social isolates whose only loyalty was to themselves; and misguided mobs, fratricidal factions, and demagogues who menaced the public good. Most founders thought that America’s social stability depended on persuading the bulk of American men to provide fraternal support for worthy leaders who, in turn, would tame the disorderly passions and counteract the democratic distemper of aliens, egotists, isolates, mobs, factions, and demagogues.