Early American Republic

The war of 1812 went bad and except for Jackson post peace victory at New Orleans it ended badly too. The war and peace taught many Democratic Republicans unpleasant lessons about the feasibility of Jefferson’s Revolution of 1800. Democratic Republicans were anti National Bank but if the National bank had been rechartered than the Secretary of the Treasury could have borrowed the $18 million he needed to fund the war from the bank since there was no national bank the secretary of the treasury was forced to make deals with John Jacob Astor and Stephen Giraud for personal loans to keep the country going. The Democratic Republicans were also supposed to oppose taxation as an infringement upon the liberty of the virtuous farmer. Well a government that does not tax is a government that cannot afford to fund internal improvement like the upkeep of roads, fund armies or navies. The dismal and haphazard performance of the United States forces underscored the folly of small government. Madison was not the first person to realize these inconsistencies but he was the most important.

With Irene Quenzler Brown.

In 1806 an anxious crowd of thousands descended upon Lenox, Massachusetts, for the public hanging of Ephraim Wheeler, condemned for the rape of his thirteen-year-old daughter, Betsy. Not all witnesses believed justice had triumphed. The death penalty had become controversial; no one had been executed for rape in Massachusetts in more than a quarter century. Wheeler maintained his innocence. Over one hundred local citizens petitioned for his pardon—including, most remarkably, Betsy and her mother.

Impoverished, illiterate, a failed farmer who married into a mixed-race family and clashed routinely with his wife, Wheeler existed on the margins of society. Using the trial report to reconstruct the tragic crime and drawing on Wheeler’s jailhouse autobiography to unravel his troubled family history, Irene Quenzler Brown and Richard D. Brown illuminate a rarely seen slice of early America. They imaginatively and sensitively explore issues of family violence, poverty, gender, race and class, religion, and capital punishment, revealing similarities between death penalty politics in America today and two hundred years ago.

Beautifully crafted, engagingly written, this unforgettable story probes deeply held beliefs about morality and about the nature of justice.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674017603

Conventional understandings of Catholicism, especially the claim that the pope held temporal power over all civil rulers, presented a signal challenge to early American Catholics’ civil and religious liberty. Yet reform-minded Catholics in the North Atlantic world asserted their independence from the temporal powers of external authorities, including the pope. Catholics who participated in the American founding, such as Charles Carroll of Carrollton and John Carroll, drew from an intellectual tradition of conciliarism that was rooted in Catholic thought yet compatible with republicanism. The Carrolls’ public support of the nation’s foundational documents and their development of the American Catholic Church presented to the broader political and religious public a Catholic tradition that advocated not only a republican view of temporal independence but also a juridical, nonhierarchical understanding of church and state. Catholics of this sort were not a foil to American religious and political arrangements; instead, they fit their beliefs within the ideologies of the American founding and thereby answered Protestant charges that Catholics should be legally penalized. These conclusions offer compelling reasons to include the conciliarist tradition within the “multiple traditions approach” of American founding historiography.

Calvin Schermerhorn’s provocative study views the development of modern American capitalism through the window of the nineteenth-century interstate slave trade. This eye-opening history follows money and ships as well as enslaved human beings to demonstrate how slavery was a national business supported by far-flung monetary and credit systems. The author details the anatomy of slave supply chains and the chains of credit and commodities that intersected with them in virtually every corner of the pre–Civil War United States, and explores how an institution that destroyed lives and families contributed greatly to the growth of the expanding republic’s capitalist economy.

Between 1793 and 1822, a series of successive yellow fever outbreaks ravaged the eastern seaboard of the United States. The outbreaks generated not only the biggest public health crisis in that period but also one of the most pressing and contentious disputes in medical theory. Often told as a national story, this article re-examines that controversy by situating it in the context of outbreaks, research, and debates in other parts of the anglophone Atlantic. It argues that American responses to disease were shaped by the young republic’s post-imperial relations to both Great Britain and the West Indies. On a broader level, this study challenges current approaches in the formation of American natural knowledge and identity during this period. It looks beyond both national boundaries and relations to former metropolitan centers, locating some of the above developments in a more ‘‘multi-centered’’ Atlantic world.

In 1781, James Yates, a farmer in upstate New York, brutally murdered his family while suffering from a “religious delusion.” Fifteen years later, in 1796, The New York Weekly Magazine published an anonymously authored account of this episode, which in turn inspired Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Wieland. Previously unexamined newspaper reports of the original massacre uniformly link Yates’s violence to his religious identity as a Shaker. Shakerism’s emphasis on gender equality and rejection of patriarchal familial structures prefigured, in many ways, the republican ideological investment in women (particularly mothers) as repositories of virtue; thus, Yates’s crime can be understood as an early manifestation of a broader “crisis of masculinity” in the period. The 1796 account makes no mention of Yates’s Shakerism, but nevertheless participates in discourses of gender and nationhood; it memorializes the female victims, containing Yates’s “treasonous” violence against the family with...

Men and women who became friends in the early American republic struggled with societal worries about the purity and chastity of their friendships. More so than other pairs of friends, heterosocial friends had to attend to how their friendships appeared to those around them. One of the most important ways of doing so was positioning a friendship in relation to spouses. In an era when marriage was the central structure for relations between men and women and fears of seduction and ruin were rampant, friends of the opposite sex needed to integrate their friendships within their marriages. This paper examines how men and women did so through the lens of their correspondence. Navigating a society without clear boundaries or rules for conducting a friendship between a man and a woman, individual pairs of friends improvised to create safe friendships in person and in letters. The careful intertwining of marriages and friendships they created demonstrates the way intimate social relationships were embedded in the social fabric of the early American republic.

In the first decade of the twentieth century, a rising generation of British colonial administrators profoundly altered British usage of American history in imperial debates. In the process, they influenced both South African history and wider British imperial thought. Prior usage of the Revolution and Early Republic in such debates focused on the United States as a cautionary tale, warning against future ‘lost colonies’. Aided by the publication of F.S. Oliver’s Alexander Hamilton (1906), administrators in South Africa used Hamilton and George Washington, the Federalist Papers, and the drafting of the Constitution as an Anglo-exceptionalist model of modern self-government. In doing so they applied the lessons of the Early Republic to South Africa, thereby contributing to the formation of the Union of 1910. They then brought their reconception of the United States, and their belief in the need for ‘imperial federation’, back to the metropole. There they fostered growing diplomatic ties with the U.S. while recasting British political history in-light-of the example of American federation. This process of inter-imperial exchange culminated shortly after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles when they publicly presented the Boer Generals Botha and Smuts as Washington and Hamilton reborn in the Round Table journal.

The problem of money in the Stamp Act crisis comes down to basic definitions. What was money? After the Seven Years War, Parliament sought to alter the monetary basis of British North America, in part, by levying taxes and fees in silver colonists insisted they did not have. The Stamp Act of 1765 made silver absolutely necessary. Without silver, the simplest legal instruments of law and commerce became unattainable. The result was absurd: the Stamp Act was a law that made the operation of law impossible. This paradox provides a new explanation for widespread American resistance to the Stamp Act and the origin of debates that led to revolution.

Archaeological test excavations of "Spafford's Grant" in 1977 by the University of Toledo revealed the historic remains and features of a frontier, log farm-house of the Early American Republic destroyed during the War of 1812. The house and farm was owned by Amos Spafford and Family, the second U.S. port collector and inspector of the revenue of Port Miami from 1810 to 1830. The farm was destroyed, along with other family farms, when the British and Indians from Fort Malden, Canada, lead by Captain Peter Latouche Chambers and Shawnee chief Tecumseh, invaded the settlement in August 1812 after the fall of Detroit. Spafford and family returned after the war in 1814 to rebuild their house and farm with other settlers.

The "Common-Place" Politics Issue 2008. Edited, with Edward G. Gray. Originally published in "Common-Place" 9 (Oct. 2008), issue 1, URL -- http://www.common-place-archives.org/vol-09/no-01/. Accompanied by "Myths of the Lost Atlantis: A blog series dedicated to Phil Lampi" (posts by guests and myself on scholarly and popular misconceptions about early American politics), URL -- http://www.common-place.org/pasley/?cat=135. Available here as originally published, in the form of a pdf print-out.

CONTENTS

Jim Cullen
"The Wright Stuff"
Stephen Douglas, Frederick Douglass, and the blackened
reputation of Abraham Lincoln

Amy S. Greenberg
"The Politics of Martial Manhood"
Or, why falling off a horse was worse than falling off the
wagon in 1852

Reeve Huston
"What We Talk about When We Talk about Democracy"
Reengaging the American democratic tradition

Richard S. Newman
"Faith in the Ballot"
Black shadow politics in the antebellum North

Jonathan D. Sassi
“Great Questions of National Morality”
Lyman Beecher on religion and politics in America

Ray Raphael
"Instructions"
The people's voice in revolutionary America

BONUS ARTICLE: Christian G. Fritz
"America's Unknown Constitutional World"


Richard R. John
"Why Institutions Matter"
Rewriting the history of the early republic

Sean Patrick Adams
"The Tao of John Quincy Adams"
Or, new institutionalism and the early American republic

Max M. Edling
"When Johnny Comes Marching Home…from the Bank"
War and public finance in America, from the U.S.-Mexican
War to the present.

Gautham Rao
"Sailors’ Health and National Wealth"
Marine hospitals in the early republic

Jeffrey L. Pasley
"Midget on Horseback:
American Indians and the history of the American state"

Caroline F. Sloat
"The Technology of Democracy"
The material history of the U.S. ballot

Patricia Crain
Potent Papers
Secret lives of the nineteenth-century ballot

Lisa Gitelman
"Voting Machines and the Voters They Represent"
Technology and democratic intent

Laura Rigal
"Black Work at the Polling Place"
The color line in The County Election

ASK THE AUTHOR
Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein
New-York Knicks Reconsidered
Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein on Washington Irving,
Aaron Burr, and the lost political and literary world of early
New York City

American Indian resistance to settler colonialism in North America has been examined in many historical works, but none have explored this phenomenon through the lens of anonymous resistance. This is surprising because scholars researching other global regions have applied this idea to studies of resistance in Latin America, Africa, Europe, South Asia, and East Asia. This article investigates how various forms of anonymous resistance by the Indian nations in the region of the western Great Lakes and upper Mississippi Valley often preceded public, violent forms of resistance such as warfare. Anonymous resistance was one of several strategies that Native communities employed to challenge American settler colonialism in this region from 1815 to 1832.

This study examines the historical context, spiritual development, and theological arguments of four Protestant critics of Second Great Awakening revivalism who published critiques from the mid-1830s to the late-1840s: Calvin Colton, John Henry Hopkins, John Williamson Nevin, and Horace Bushnell.  Historians have begun to give increased attention to the role played by critics of revivalism in the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, but inadequate attention has been devoted to critics of revivalism in the Second Great Awakening of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Several competitors vied for the right to define revivalism in the Second Great Awakening.  New Divinity revivalists legitimated their revivals by the construction of an Edwardsean tradition of sober revivalism, but their definition of genuine revival was contested not only by Frontier, New Haven, and New Measures revivalists, but also by critics who questioned the underlying theological assumptions of revivalism.

The counter-revivalists in this study were not merely reactive; they sought to counter revivalism by formulating alternative understandings of Christian theology and spirituality.  High Church Episcopalians Calvin Colton and John Henry Hopkins argued for the superiority of the Episcopal Church; Colton praised his church’s refusal to meddle in political affairs in the manner of revivalistic reformers, and Hopkins appealed to his church’s faithfulness to the pattern established by the “Primitive Church” of the first four centuries against the “novelties” of revivalism.  John Williamson Nevin criticized revivalism’s subjectivism, countering with a churchly piety, grounded on the objective presence of Christ in the sacraments.  Nevin envisioned an alliance between the German Reformed and German Lutheran Churches as a bulwark against Americanized evangelicalism.  Horace Bushnell criticized revivalism for its supernaturalistic dualism; as an alternative, Bushnell offered a Romantic revision of the means of grace, in which parents could shape the Christian character of their children through the power of organic connections.  The counter-revivalists in this study offered counter-narratives set against prevailing revivalistic norms to offer an alternative understanding of American religious culture and to open up new directions for the future of Christian piety and theology.

PhD dissertation, The University of Iowa, 2005

Tales of the supernatural have been entertaining millions of people for decades in
America. One of the first authors writing about the Gothic in America was Washington Irving
(Bendixen 34), and Rip Van Winkle as well as The Legend of Sleepy Hollow are two of his
most popular tales. The Gothic made its way into American Gothic fiction during the First
Gothic Revival in Britain (Ringel 16) and climbed to record sales by 1790 (23). However, it
seems extraordinary that a young nation was obsessed with stories of “ruins and decay.”
(Hedge 91) Furthermore, the Gothic is closely entwined with questions of identity in young
America (Bendixen 31). Irving’s Sketch Book, then, reflects this identity crisis in an early
capitalist society (Antony 112) with free social mobility (Bendixen 32). This work aims to
explore the identity crisis depicted in Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
embedded in of the fantastic and the Gothic. Irving, then, expresses cultural tensions of
otherness and regional conflict by symbolic use of supernatural encounters and creating
uncertainty as to whether these are natural, after all. First, the formal requirements of the
fantastic are examined. Then follows an analysis of the themes in both stories.

The broad and profound influence of classical rhetoric in early America can be observed in both the academic study of that ancient discipline, and in the practical approaches to persuasion adopted by orators and writers in the colonial period, and during the early republic. Classical theoretical treatises on rhetoric enjoyed wide authority both in college curricula and in popular treatments of the art. Classical orators were imitated as models of republican virtue and oratorical style. Indeed, virtually every dimension of the political life of early America bears the imprint of a classical conception of public discourse. This essay marks the various specific aspects of the reception and influence of the classical rhetorical tradition in the learning, speaking and writing of Americans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

La presente tesis se centra en el estudio de las representaciones escriturales y visuales hechas sobre la tapada limeña entre los años 1830 y 1850 en Lima. El corpus a analizar son los diarios de viajes de Flora Tristán y Max Radiguet, así como las pinturas costumbristas de Pancho Fierro y J.M. Rugendas. Mi hipótesis consiste en que el uso del manto por parte de la mujer limeña le permite modalidades de subversión inesperadas para la administración, Iglesia y sociedad patriarcal colonialista, como lo es la libre circulación sin necesidad de ocultamiento por el espacio público, lo cual crea una fisura en cuanto al binomio masculino/público y femenino/privado o doméstico, así como la inscripción de nociones eróticas sobre su figura, de las cuales pudo sacar provecho. Para dicho fin, a través de las herramientas que provee la teoría psicoanalítica, específicamente el fetiche en Sigmund Freud y el sujeto tachado en Jacques Lacan, así como las teorizaciones poscoloniales, como el Orientalismo de Edward Said y las nociones sobre el sublime romántico, la presente tesis plantea el estudio del cuerpo de la tapada, en tanto pudo contar con agencia femenina en una sociedad colonial patriarcal, así como los discursos gráficos que la inscribieron como un cuerpo erótico. En tal sentido, se ofrece una teorización sobre la doble función del manto: permite su circulación en espacios públicos, pero, además, abre los discursos eróticos que la devuelven al histórico lugar de subordinación femenino.

This course asks students to consider the origins and sustaining conditions of nation-states. It focuses on the emergence and early history of nation-states and nationalist consciousness rather than on the more recent twentieth- and twenty-first-century manifestations of nationalism. It also considers nationalism largely in structural rather than ideological terms, that is, as a function of durable patterns in politics, culture and the economy.

Questions addressed include: How did the nation-state come to predominate over other political forms such as empires and city-states? What causes us to identify with a particular nation? Is national identity a prerequisite for a modern sensibility or vice versa? Is a nation endowed with moral or spiritual significance? What is the relationship between nationalism and ethnicity and culture? How important are state institutions to the development of national identities? Where and how do markets and the economy fit into national political structures? And finally, what are the limits to nation-centric conceptions of culture, politics, and history?

Readings include both theoretical works and historical monographs. The course begins with major theoretical studies of the rise of nations and nationalist consciousness. It then moves into a series of case studies that examine specific countries and contexts. The final few weeks are devoted to readings in the early history of the United States. These are designed to test the arguments of previous readings against the American experience, which lacks the ethnic homogeneity and linguistic uniqueness often thought to constitute national distinctions. Is the United States a nation-state and, if so, when did it become one?

Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism tells the history of Early American Jews, focusing on the objects of everyday life used and created by Jews, such as ritual baths, food, gravestones, portraits, furniture, as well as the synagogue. By uncovering these objects and exposing the common culture of the Jewish Atlantic world, the book provides a fresh understanding of a crucial era in Jewish and American history. It offers new insights about the origins of Jewish American messianism, helping readers better understand messianism in contemporary American society. It charts the shared culture of these Jews who lived in the port towns in the Caribbean and on both sides of the Atlantic, and author Laura Arnold Leibman argues that thinking about Judaism as an embodied religion is key to understanding their culture. Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism makes early Jewish American history entertaining, accessible, and interesting to general readers, as well as to academic audiences. A companion website contains thousands of photographs of material culture from throughout the Jewish Atlantic world, as well as study guides for using the images.

Joseph de Maistre's commentary on America, though sparse, provides a window into his broader political philosophy.  Rather than attributing New World inferiority to a degeneracy of nature, like his Francophone contemporaries, Maistre explained that America's indigenous peoples suffered from the immorality of an ancient chieftain, the former British colonists from the sin of republicanism. Maistre's understanding of the United States supported his views of recent European history; the fledgling republic was no proof of the durability of republican government. Rather than forming a coherent anti-Americanism, Maistre's ideas about America were supportive of his condemnation of the French Revolution.

The colonists living in the new United States after the American War for Independence were faced with the problem of forming new identities once they could no longer recognize themselves, collectively or individually, as subjects of Great Britain. After the French Revolution American politicians began to weed out the more radical political elements of the newly formed United States, particularly by painting one of the revolution’s biggest defenders, Thomas Paine, as unworthy of the attention he received during the American War for Independence, and fear ran throughout the states that an anarchic revolution like the French Revolution could bring the downfall of the nation. State, local, and regional organizations sprang up to fight Jacobinism, the legendary secret group of murderers and anarchists that fought against the French government.
This distressing situation gave rise to new literature that sought to describe the “real” origins and background of Jacobinism in the War in Heaven and in Eden, and a new movement against Jacobinism was established. Fears about the organization of secret societies did not wane in the decades after the French Revolution, but worsened in the last half of the 1820s when a Freemason, William Morgan, disappeared under mysterious circumstances in connection to an exposé of Masonry he had written. Most Americans assumed that Freemasons had abducted and murdered Morgan in order to keep their oaths and rites secret.
One influential early American who was influenced by this socio-historical context was Joseph Smith, Jr., the founding prophet of Mormonism. Smith interpreted the Eden narrative in light of the movement against secret societies, and literary motifs common to anti-Jacobin literature during the period provided language and interpretive strategies for understanding the Eden narrative that would influence how Smith produced his new scripture. Only a few months after the publication of the Book of Mormon Smith edited the version of Eden found there into the text of the Bible itself and made the biblical narrative conform to the version found in the Book of Mormon through his own revisions and additions.

This paper looks at the British attack on the American privateer "General Armstrong" in September 1814 in Faial Harbor in the Azores.  While the Royal Navy successfully destroyed the brig, it suffered horrific casualties in so doing.  American writers, poets, painters and others seized on this event to create an iconography celebrating privateering as a viable form of naval warfare in the early republic.

This paper situates the competing conceptions of 'republican imperialism' within the ideological conflicts around state formation in the early post-revolutionary period in America. It seeks to demonstrate the novel ways in which American political theorists--notably Jefferson and Hamilton--attempted to transcend a traditional republican dichotomy between republicanism and empire.

In post-Revolutionary Massachusetts, the militia was a well-respected institution. So when the commonwealth expanded into the far-flung District of Maine, Jeffersonians and Federalists battled one another for the plum. As external forces bred internal dissent, the militia fell into disarray just as the country drifted toward another war with England.

The Ottoman provinces of Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and the independent sultanate of Morocco, known as Barbary States, terrorized merchant ships with piracy of cargoes and enslavement of their sailors throughout the early modern period. Barbary privateers, known as corsairs, justified their selective targeting of 'kafir' or 'infidel' merchant ships as waging 'sea jihad'. Agents of empire struggled to reconcile principles of 'just war' in the natural law tradition with the negotiated payment of Barbary tributes for unobstructed passage through the Mediterranean. Resolving this Barbary threat by way of war or tribute involved American interests after 1783. This article examines the ways in which William Eaton, as the United States Consul for Tunis, intervened between Enlightenment and imperial responses to Barbary piracy. Eaton defied Thomas Jefferson's foreign policies by engineering the first American attempt at coup d'´ etat in a foreign government. In doing so, Eaton's strategy of military interventionism offered an alternative to perennial Enlightenment and imperial designs for war and peace in the Islamic world.

This paper argues that the two warnings against internal factions and external alliances in George Washington’s Farewell Address—often considered separate admonitions—are instead a unified rhetorical strategy to imagine a nation. In both his text and context, Washington constructs an “imagined community” specifically though his discourse on patriotism. While Washington’s stark contrasts between “true” and “false” patriotism would only widen the division of current U.S.
politics, Washington’s conception of patriotism ought to be emulated in the modern Presidency in order to advance a transcendent form of patriotism.