Читать книгу A Republic of Men - Mark E. Kann - Страница 20

Could American men procreate a national fraternity without fostering fratricide? The founders agreed that American men were disorderly creatures prone to bloody violence; but they disputed the implications of men’s penchant for bloodshed. Jefferson found redeeming value in the bloody violence of Shays’s Rebellion. He wrote Ezra Stiles, “What country can preserve its liberties if its rulers are not warned from time to time that this people persevere in the spirit of resistance?... What signify a few lives lost in a century or two?” But Washington considered Shays’s Rebellion unmitigated evil. He exclaimed, “What, gracious God, is man! that there should be such inconsistency and perfidiousness in his conduct? It is but the other day that we were shedding blood to obtain the constitutions under which we now live . . . and now we are unsheathing the sword to overturn them.”³⁵ These contrasting views were not wholly contradictory. The founders’ grammar used “blood” both as a metaphoric testing ground for manhood in search of fraternity and as a symbol of disorderly manhood in need of fraternal leadership.

Jefferson returned to the relationship between the struggle for liberty and lost lives in 1793, when reflecting on a bloody turn of events in the French Revolution:

In the struggle which was necessary, many guilty persons fell without the forms of trial, and with them some innocent. These I deplore as much as anybody. . . . But I deplore them as I should have done had they fallen in battle. It was necessary to use the arm of the people, a machine not quite so blind as balls and bombs, but blind to a certain degree. A few of their cordial friends met at their hands the fate of enemies. But time and truth will rescue and embalm their memories, while their posterity will be enjoying the very liberty for which they would never have hesitated to offer up their lives. The liberty of the whole earth was depending on the issue of the contest, and was ever such a prize won with so little innocent blood?³⁶

Jefferson took the long view. He saw revolutionary abuses as deplorable but necessary for achieving lasting liberty, implying that men must endure self-sacrifice and bloodshed in fraternal solidarity with future generations. Jefferson’s perspective highlights two major motifs in the founders’ birthing story of America.

First, the founders conceived of blood as a medium for testing men’s membership in society. A man had to invest, risk, give, and take blood to procreate and participate in fraternal society. Crèvecoeur’s American Farmer stated that immigrants who invested their blood in American soil received the title of freemen and the opportunity to “provide for their progeny . . . the most holy, the most powerful, the most earnest wish he can possibly form, as well as the most consolatory prospect when he dies.” The payoff was “a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Washington moved from Crs fraternity of farmersvecoeur’s fraternity of farmers to his own fraternity of soldiers. Following the winter of want at Valley Forge, he paid homage to farmers as men whose labors guaranteed that soldiers’ starvation and suffering would soon end. Meanwhile, “American soldiers will despise repining at such trifling strokes of adversity, trifling indeed when compared to the transcendent prize which will undoubtedly crown their patience and perseverance, glory and freedom, peace and plenty to themselves and the community ... the admiration of the world, the love of their country, and the gratitude of posterity.” Bloodshed and starvation were minor matters to worthy men who willingly paid the price for “being immortalized” as benefactors of posterity.³⁷

Second, the founders suggested that historical necessity challenged Americans to transcend mundane manhood and engage in self-sacrifice to achieve fame. Madison invoked historical necessity to dismiss antifederalist claims that the Constitutional Convention abused its authority: “Which was the more important, which the less important? Which the end, which the means? Let the most scrupulous expositors of delegated powers, let the most inveterate objectors against those exercised by the convention answer these questions. Let them declare whether it was of most importance to the happiness of the people of America that the Articles of Confederation should be disregarded, and an adequate government be provided; or that an adequate government should be omitted, and the Articles of Confederation preserved.” Alexander Hamilton added that necessity sometimes demanded that a representative oppose the will of the people to achieve the public good: “Instances might be cited in which conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the period of their displeasure.”³⁸ Necessity, expediency, exigency, and fortune were opportunities for great men to assert a manly prerogative, regardless of law or adverse public opinion, in the expectation that, eventually, they would be vindicated by the timeless fraternity called posterity.

Many founders believed that most American men had the potential to be farmers and fighters who invested, risked, and shed blood to secure liberty and earn membership in society. It was this potential that Jefferson honored in his remarks on Shays’s Rebellion and the French Revolution. However, most founders feared that the male majority was not qualified to recognize necessity, address it, or meet its challenges. Consider George Washington’s reaction to the 1783 “Newburgh Addresses,” by which his officers threatened a military takeover if they did not receive their due compensation. Washington warned the officers not to assert a dangerous prerogative that would “open the flood gates to civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”³⁹ If the “gentlemen” of Washington’s officer corps could participate in an anarchic plot, it was even more likely that common citizens and soldiers could be seduced by demagogues into factional bloodshed. Washington’s sharp reaction to Shays’s Rebellion expressed his fear that disorderly men might destroy American liberty and fraternity.

John Adams hoped that most men were “too economical of their blood” to join mobs or follow demagogues; he hoped that most men would become habituated to deferring to the “better sort” of men. However, recognizing the better sort and distinguishing worthy leaders was a controversial matter. Approaching the presidential election of 1800, for example, Alexander Hamilton condemned candidate Jefferson as a dangerous demagogue. Hamilton argued that the possibility of “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics” assuming “the helm of the state” constituted a crisis that made it necessary for leaders not to be “overscrupulous” about “a strict adherence to ordinary rules” to prevent Jefferson’s election. He implied that a few exceptional men were needed to wield nation-saving prerogative. Jefferson won the election only to demonstrate that he, too, was not overscrupulous about adhering to ordinary rules. When he was president, Gary Schmitt observes, Jefferson advanced a “doctrine of extra-constitutional executive prerogative” in the name of domestic order and national security.⁴⁰

Why would ordinary American men who were skeptical of authority become loyal followers of powerful national leaders? One reason was that men and leaders were bound together by the living memory of the revolutionary fraternity of battle. Annual Fourth of July sermons and orations reminded men of their noble struggle, and fraternal groups such as the Society of Cincinnati and the Freemasons provided settings for veterans to sustain their military ties. Another reason was that men and leaders were united by consensual norms of manhood. They agreed that men ought to strive for independence, head families, and fit into fraternal society. Moreover, they believed that individuals who excelled at manly virtues, such as self-sacrifice in the service of independence and the public good, deserved to be recognized, admired, and elevated to national leadership status. That was why William Emerson praised Washington as “a man among men” as well as “a hero among heroes [and] a statesman among statesmen.”⁴¹

Still, the founders felt that unity between men and leaders was always fragile. Individuals risked their manly independence whenever they conformed to group norms or deferred to authority. The founders tried to minimize the risk by portraying leaders as manly men, citizens’ choice, hesitant public servants, and benign governors. Hopefully, most men would trust officeholders who exhibited manly merit and acted the part of affectionate father figures. Another problem was that women potentially subverted men’s attachment to fraternal society and leadership. Wives might keep husbands from militia musters that were excuses for drinking and gambling. Or women might urge men to stay at home to support and protect them rather than do their civic duty as soldiers by marching off to war. One reason the founders felt justified in perpetuating patriarchal power was to defeat women’s efforts to resolve conflicts between domesticity and fraternity in favor of parochial family interests regardless of the public good.⁴²

A fourth rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that worthy men fit into a civic fraternity led by meritorious men. Worthy men were independent farmers and citizen soldiers who suffered pain, risked blood, and underwent self-sacrifice to earn membership in fraternal society. They were also modest men who recognized the need for leadership to address the crises of modernity, deferred to manly leaders, and sometimes consented to leadership prerogative in the service of posterity. Unworthy men were selfish men who demanded the liberty to indulge their passions, viewed others as instruments to fulfill their personal goals, and supported demagogues who pandered to public opinion, fostered factionalism, and sought power to do infamous deeds. Like men isolated in intergenerational time and continental space, those outside the flow of fraternal society and leadership threatened ruin to the republic of men.