Читать книгу A Republic of Men - Mark E. Kann - Страница 21

The final chapter in the founders’ autobiographical story was the one that Abraham Lincoln resurrected in his Gettysburg Address. That was the episode in which our fathers “brought forth,” “conceived,” and “consecrated” a “new nation.” The founders saw themselves as more than virtuous men restoring republican rights or rational men negotiating a social contract; they also portrayed themselves as fertile men who procreated an organic republic. One pre-revolutionary expression of their belief in political animation was John Tucker’s 1771 portrait of an ideal American polity:

The political state would be like a body in full health. The constitutional laws, preserved inviolate, would like strong bones and sinews support and steady the regular frame. Supreme and subordinate rulers duly performing their proper functions would be like the greater and lesser arteries, keeping up their proper tone and vibrations; and justice, fidelity, and every social virtue would, like the vital fluid, run without obstruction and reach, refresh, and invigorate the most minute and distant parts. While the multitude of subjects, yielding in their various places and relations a ready and cheerful obedience would, like the numerous yet connected veins, convey back again the recurrent blood to the great fountain of it and the whole frame be vigorous, easy, and happy.⁴³

The founders depicted themselves as life-givers who, by 1776, had committed themselves to giving birth to a new republic. However, the creation of political life presumed the possibility of political death. American dreams of political fatherhood were premised on Britain’s political degeneration, and the founders knew that their republic was vulnerable to the same fate. Though some founders imagined linear progress, most agreed, “It is with states as it is with men, they have their infancy, their manhood, and their decline.”⁴⁴

Many founders spoke as if they were giving birth to a living, breathing, pulsating republic. During what Samuel Miller commemorated as “our country’s natal hour,” John Adams anticipated parturition in June 1776 by announcing that the “throes” of Congress soon “will usher in the birth of a fine boy.” Mercy Otis Warren saw a bright future for “an infant nation at once arisen to the vigor of manhood,” but others feared for the Republic’s health. In 1782, a Bostonian worried, “How humiliating would it be to have our independence, just brought to birth, fail for want of strength to be delivered.” A year later, Washington likened the states to “young heirs come a little prematurely perhaps to a large inheritance.” But Warren remained optimistic. She was joyful that the “young republic . . . had rapidly passed through the grades of youth and puberty and was fast arriving to the age of maturity.” By 1788, “An Old State Soldier” was arguing that the best way to ensure the continuing health and development of “that tender infant, Independence” was to support ratification of the U.S. Constitution.⁴⁵

The imagery of an infant nation seeking the maturity of manhood pervaded the ratification debates. Jeremiah Hill likened the “glory of this young empire” guided by a new Constitution to a “fair, healthy, promising boy rising to maturity.” Simeon Baldwin summed up federalist optimism by recalling the “effusions of genius [that] distinguished the infancy of this nation.” He awaited with delight “what we may expect when she [sic] shall ripen into manhood!” Mercy Otis Warren, for her part, turned federalist imagery on its head when contrasting the “manly exertions” of revolutionary patriots and the “manly feelings” of antifederalists to the childish federalists who resembled “a restless, vigorous youth, prematurely emancipated from the authority of a parent, but without the experience necessary to direct him with dignity and discretion.”⁴⁶

Movement toward national manhood was debated for another decade. In 1790s, Judith Sargent Murray observed “the budding life” of an “infant constitution” invigorated by “luminous rays of manly hope,” but warned that factionalism was “murdering in the cradle so promising an offspring” and bringing forth in its place “hell-born anarchy.” Bishop James Madison praised the United States for its “progress from infancy to manhood” but Peres Fobes recalled, “We saw a nation born in a day [and] felt the pangs and pleasures of the parturition of a new empire” only to have it infected by male licentiousness. Jonathan Maxey added that America’s democratic politics had become “a capricious offspring of a moment, perpetually exposed to destruction from the varying whim of popular frenzy or the daring strides of licentious ambition.” In the early nineteenth century, Noah Webster compared the unstable new republic to young men who have “more courage than foresight and more enthusiasm than correct judgment.” Fisher Ames complained that the U.S. Constitution was conceived “with all the bloom of youth and splendor of innocence . . . gifted with immortality,” only to fall prey to “licentiousness, that inbred malady of democracies that deforms their infancy with gray hairs and decrepitude.”⁴⁷

Many founders saw themselves as participants in what Hannah Arendt calls “natality,” the action of founding and sustaining political bodies in anticipation of an influx of new generations. Their self-portraits depicted men of exceptional merit who procreated a new nation, protected its infancy from democratic excess, nurtured it to mature manhood, shielded it from death, and, by way of exemplary thinking, innovative constitutions, and a federal republic, improved the future for all posterity. To borrow Nancy Hartsock’s language, they regarded themselves as “pregnant in soul.” They certainly ranked themselves among history’s great nation builders and felt they deserved the respect shown by men who called them “fathers of their country.” In effect, the founders expropriated the idea of natality from women. They did not give much weight to female reproductive powers. Judith Sargent Murray understood that women’s public standing would not result from their biological powers but instead invested hope in their cultural productivity. Women needed to emulate “manly fires” of wisdom, develop the “fertile brain of the female,” and exhibit their “creative faculty” to achieve a public presence. Nevertheless, the founders did not include creative women in politics as founding mothers, republican citizens, or national leaders. Often, they even failed to consider women as noteworthy subjects or significant spectators.⁴⁸

The final rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that exceptional or heroic men contributed to the birth and nurturance of a republic. They were the fathers of the country and the future. They invested their fame in the fate of the public and posterity, rather than solely in their own families and estates. Unworthy men were sterile men or destructive men. They felt no connection between themselves and future generations; they were innocent of dreams of distinction; or they were licentious men who imperiled national birth, retarded political maturation, and endangered the newborn republic. The most worthy men sought a fame borne of procreating a glorious future, whereas the most unworthy males acquired infamy by sapping other men’s political potency.