This blog features six reviews related to Intellectual History in Virginia, 1770-1824 and after. Beginning with a selection from Fall 2018, each features our “Flashmob Virginia History“. It is a reading list in each area of study with cornerstone scholarship and publications from 2017, 2018, 2019, and 2020 new releases.
– American Enlightenment, where reason brings about a better world but for the excluded;
– Self-Evident Truths, where saying “equal rights” long enough and widely enough unseats the few most propertied and the fewer wealthiest;
– John Adams’ Republic, where the “one” chief executive empowered by the free suffrages of the people, can balance the power of the “few” self-serving rich of inheritance and speculation, for the welfare of the “many” inhabitants and their children;
– Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England, his admiration and its model for the country’s politics, agriculture, society, and “The University” of Virginia;
– American Sanctuary, who and what is a citizen, whether native or in sanctuary, whether in protest mutiny or convicted on the gallows; and
– From Empire to Humanity, how the Atlantic British Empire finds common cause for good deeds after their American Independence rift: anti-drowning, the poor, the imprisoned, the enslaved.
American Enlightenment
Caroline Winterer wrote American Enlightenments: Pursuing Happiness in the Age of Reason in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of the Early Republic by Kirsten Fischer, and in the William and Mary Quarterly by Christopher Grasso. It is available from Yale University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “American Enlightenments” on Amazon here.
Winterer uses the word “enlightenments” without capitalization to stress the variatious approaches among the British North American colonists to understand the natural world around them and humanity’s place in it. Their general attitude was that knowledge based on reason and empirical evidence could contribute to making the world a better place to live. While the 1700s enlightenments of the young republic were not quite as invested in a universal egalitarianism as the modern American mind, the cross pollination between the Old World and the New still brought contradicting conclusions that were unpredictable, tentative, uneven and contested.
Six categories of organized knowledge that we now would call the sciences, religion or the arts were expected to bring explanations and applications for improvement. “Geology” might bring about evidence in the earth to determine its age. “Statistics” could explore the dimensions of rise and fall among both western civilizations and indigenous peoples. “Political economy” was meant to integrate farming methods, free trade commerce and republican governance to bring about greater human happiness on earth.
Yet colonials with an intellectual disposition for the “enlightenments” at hand in the 1700s never came to an agreement on a single concept of community or happiness. They could not agree on who belonged to humanity itself, nor on who might own what portion of its natural rights. In the end, the late enlightenment thinkers never resolved how to treat those they viewed as outside humanity.
More to the point, they differed about whether to expand or restrict the importation of Africans, whose descendants would be forever outside the civil society of their making. Practical politicians struggled with enlightenment sub-propositions about captivity, manumission, or expulsion for the non-citizen, with a view to lessen the intellectual challenge slavery posed for the ideal enlightenment that they so very much believed in.
Buy “American Enlightenments” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Henry F. May in his The Enlightenment in America (1976), Robert A. Ferguson in his The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820 (1997), Jon Butler in his Becoming America: The Revolution before 1776 (2001),
Kirsten Fischer in her Suspect Relations: Sex, Race, and Resistance in Colonial North Carolina (2002), Neil C. Olsen Pursuing Happiness: The Organizational Culture of the Continental Congress (2013), and Christopher Grasso in his Skepticism and American Faith: From the Revolution to the Civil War (2018).
Self-Evident Truths
Richard D. Brown wrote Self-Evident Truths: Contesting Equal Rights from the Revolution to the Civil War in 2017. Reviewed in the Journal of the Civil War Era by Kevin Butterfield, and in the Journal of American History by Michal Jan Rozbicki. It is available from Yale University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Self-Evident Truths” on Amazon here.
At least since 1788, American writers have held a “presumption of equal rights” before the law in U.S. history, when John Jay’s Federalist #2 argued that Americans were “one united people”, and although distinguished among them by various “orders and denominations”, they were united by an attachment to the same principles of government, with the same individual rights, privileges and protections by each of their state governments “everywhere” within the US domain.
But Brown suggests that when the assertion of “equal rights” was widely adopted, it brought previously unimaginable political challenges, contests and fundamental change. The battleground was often found at trial. There, before judges and juries who determined the de jure alternatives to justice from precedent, it became apparent that the republican theory of society did not match up with the actual facts of the case before them.
The initial discussion begins with the Declaration of Independence, but it then looks into the record of two influential groups: a) the few landed white males voting for their representatives to enact state law, and b) the fewer landed and wealthy gentry voting for state senators to appoint judges. Both social sets of middling farmers and great landowners employed the science of the age to justify social and political stratification for themselves and their legislators.
The landscape of American jurisprudence and American “equal rights” played out in familiar and every day interactions among society and commerce. But any divisions among citizens were never more starkly apparent than when different classes of people stood on trial for their lives. Brown finds that the most insurmountable barrier to equal justice in the early American republic was not race or gender, as important an indicator as they were.
The most serious exception to equal justice under the law was the exaltation and exculpation of those with substantial wealth, whether accumulated or inherited.
Buy “Self-Evident Truths” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Rosemarie Zagarri in her Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (2008), Michal Jan Rozbicki in his Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution (2011), Edmund S. Morgan and Rosemarie Zagarri in their The Birth of the Republic, 1763-89 (2012),
Kevin Butterfield in his The Making of Tocqueville’s America: Law and Association in the Early United States (2015), Jonathan Gienapp in his The Second Creation: Fixing the American Constitution in the Founding Era (2018), Peter Onuf in his Jefferson and the Virginians: Democracy, Constitutions and Empire (2018),
and Lawrence Lessig in his Fidelity and Constraint: How the Supreme Court Has Read the American Constitution (2019).
John Adams’s Republic
Richard Alan Ryerson wrote John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of the Early Republic by Jonathan Den Hartog, and in the Journal of American History by Kathleen Bartoloni-Tuazon. It is available from Johns Hopkins University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “John Adams’s Republic” on Amazon here.
In the “everything new” 1770s American republic, the New Englander farming a modest homestead by a town removed from Boston, may have had cause to be worried about social jealousy and personality partisanship overriding enlightenment ideals.
Founder John Adams was a prolific American political theorist. He began his fame as a provincial writer for colonial rights in the empire of a constitutional monarch. Adams subsequently became “the leading theorist of American republicanism at Independence”. He most feared the local aristocrat’s influence over his neighbors from a lesser social class who voted out loud on the open steps of their courthouse.
To ensure a republican form of government would function in the interest of the people (the “many”), Adams believed that only a strong executive (the “one) based on an authority from free elections, could counter-balance “the few” among self-selected and interconnected commercial interests of local inherited and speculative wealth.
This book elaborates John Adams’ evolving political thought over a long career beginning in the 1760s and extending for the first sixty years of the American republic. Ryerson was the editor in chief of the Adams papers for eighteen years. Here he mines Adams’ public writings, private diary, manuscript autobiography, and private letters from friends and family. [See the TVH review on Jack N. Rakove in A Politician Thinking: the Creative Mind of James Madison (2017).] Buy “John Adams’s Republic” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Gordon Wood in his The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969), Charles N. Edel in his Nation Builder: John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the Republic (2014), Kathleen Baroloni-Tuazon in her Fear of an Elective King: George Washington and the Presidential Title Controversy of 1789 (2014), Luke Mayville in his John Adams and the Fear of American Oligarchy (2016), and
Jonathan Den Hartog in his Patriotism and Piety: Federalist Politics and Religious Struggle in the New American Nation (2015).
Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England
Arthur Scherr wrote Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England: Nationalism versus Sectionalism in the Young Republic in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of the Early Republic by Richard Alan Ryerson. It is available from Harvard University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England” on Amazon here.
Thomas Jefferson of Virginia founded a national party with majorities in every region, in the US Senate, in the House of Representatives. “The Virginia Dynasty” spanned not only Jefferson’s two presidential terms, but another eight years for successor James Madison, and yet again for James Monroe’s additional eight in the “Era of Good Feeling”.
Whatever may have been made of Jefferson by later discontents after his death, among historians something must be said for Mr. Jefferson’s political philosophy and outlook that succeeded for twenty-four years, rather than emphasizing a subsequent variation on it that failed in five years.
Scherr’s contribution is to sketch Jefferson in the political arena of the early republic as a nationalist and a friend of New England, beginning with his first visit to Boston in 1784. He admired New England patriotism, and tried to adapt their direct democracy and town-meetings to Virginia in “magisterial districts” for each county.
Jefferson not only preferred New England political organization, and believed its social structure superior to the planter aristocracy. He acknowledged and sought to propagate New England agricultural practice and economy in Virginia and throughout the nation.
Early in his political career, Jefferson sought to apply New England educational innovations as a model in Northwest Territory legislation, and in retirement, the “Hermit of Monticello” recruited Massachusetts-trained scholars for his beloved University of Virginia.
Buy “Thomas Jefferson’s Image of New England” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Peter S. Onuf in his Jefferson’s Empire: the Language of American Nationhood (2000), Richard Alan Ryerson in his John Adams’s Republic: The One, the Few, and the Many (2016), Robert M. S. McDonald in his Confounding Father: Thomas Jefferson’s Image in His Own Time (2016), and Annette Gordon-Reed and Peter Onuf in their “The Most Blessed of the Patriarchs”: Thomas Jefferson and the Empire of the Imagination (2016).
American Sanctuary
A. Roger Ekirch wrote American Sanctuary: Mutiny, Martyrdom, and National Identity in the Age of Revolution in 2018. Reviewed in the William and Mary Quarterly by Hannah Weiss Muller. It is available from Pantheon Books, at Kindle, from Audiobook, and online. Buy “American Sanctuary” on Amazon here.
1797 was a troubled year for British Empire. America had won its “Revolution of Independence” and now its “more perfect Union” cut off most-favored commercial treaties with individual US states. The catastrophic French Revolution was unfolding, and Ireland’s ferocious uprisings were approaching despite widespread jailing of dissidents.
That year offshore Puerto Rico aboard the copper-bottomed frigate HMS Hermione, the bloodiest mutiny in Royal Navy history struck at military authority and the imperial social order. Its captain, Hugh Pigot had been known for his unusually harsh corporal punishment for trivial offenses. The mutineer Jonathan Robbins escaped pursuit to the United States. There he claimed US citizenship in Danbury, Connecticut and protested his unlawful impressment into the British Navy known for its brutal daily life.
Federalist President John Adams blundered by allowing Robbins’ extradition to Britain where he was court marshaled without jury or civil due process, then hung from a ship’s yardarm for all the British fleet at anchor to see.
The Federalist majority in Congress fended off a Democratic-Republican motion to censure, in part because of Robbins’ true identity may have been the notorious Irish rebel Thomas Nash. But the accused refugee met US citizenship requirements; Federalists could not muster a vote of confidence for showing support for the HMS Hermione.
Since 1793 it had been a celebrated predator seizing American vessels and impressing US citizen-sailors, including one day’s spectacular capture of 22 merchant ships and 70 seamen. All told, the British took 10,000 Americans to man their naval blockade of Napoleon’s Europe during this period.
Jonathan Robbins’ hanging set off a political firestorm such that “no one circumstance … affect[ed] the public mind more” in the view of Thomas Jefferson. It led to constitutional crisis and Jefferson’s 1800 Election “Revolution”.
For two centuries the Atlantic afforded individual seamen a venue for mixing, disguise, and border crossings across three continents. National identity was contested among diplomats, politicians and judges. Federalists conceded a citizenship by blood at birth, while Democratic-Republicans sought a reformulation of volitional allegiance, a citizenship of choice by individual right.
Americans redefined their self-identity to include themselves not only recipients of English Rights; they presumed to offer political haven for refugees fleeing oppressive governments everywhere, “an asylum for mankind” as promised in Tom Paine’s ideal American Independence.
Buy “American Sanctuary” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also Hanna Weiss Muller in her Subjects and Sovereign: Bonds of Belonging in the Eighteenth-Century British Empire (2017), Martha S. Jones in her Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America (2018). Peter Linebaugh, Marcus Rediker, and Clare Anderson in The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (2012, 2020).
From Empire to Humanity
Amanda Moniz wrote From Empire to Humanity: The American Revolution and the Origins of Humanitarianism in 2016. Reviewed in the Journal of the Early Republic by Sarah Crabtree. It is available from Oxford University Press, at Kindle, and online. Buy “From Empire to Humanity” on Amazon here.
This book is a kind of long-term biography of a few influential men from across the British Atlantic Empire, mostly medical doctors who came of age in the mid 1700s. They were known to one another and over the course of the next half-century, they maintained their connections and relationships and causes by adapting their associations.
Their constant bond was a belief in philanthropy as a natural outgrowth of their faith, a benevolent tool of statecraft and human reconciliation. These men of the British Isles, North America and the Caribbean were at first fellow subjects of the same Crown. They cooperated in extending their care beyond their native localities to embrace concerns of all those in the empire, and they enlisted hundreds of donations for charities abroad from the ordinary men and women in their local communities.
These causes included medical and hospital advancements, educational charities, poor relief, prison reform, and antislavery. With American independence, their relationships were expansively reimagined from empire to a cosmopolitanism that overcame their newfound “foreignness”.
While corresponding with one another to continue their collaborations, the men acted locally as so became alternately national or imperial heroes. Americans embraced the British example in an “anti-drowning” campaign that demonstrated their equal status among the benevolent societies of the world.
Commercial networks among the erstwhile compatriots enfranchised them in a new global community of multidirectional goodwill, if not universal moral responsibility for all humanity. However with the coming of the French and Haitian Revolutions, the reformers were given pause as to who might not qualify as recipients of their benevolent efforts.
Nevertheless, Moniz concludes that these activists laid the groundwork for 20th century global undertakings by both national and international organizations.
Buy “From Empire to Humanity” on Amazon here.
Flashmob Virginia History:
See also James J. Horn, editor, The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race and the New Republic (2002), Jeffrey L. Pasley, editor, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (2004), Sarah Crabtree in her Holy Nation: the Transatlantic Quaker Ministry in an Age of Revolution (2015), Marcus Rediker The Fearless Benjamin Lay: The Quaker Dwarf Who Became the First Revolutionary Abolitionist (2017).
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Releases related to Virginia history in other eras from Spring 2018 journals can be found in previous Virginia History Blogs at Colonial Virginia Era – Summer 2018, Colonial Virginia History ii – Summer 2018, Revolution and New Nation – Summer 2018, Madison & Jefferson – Summer 2018, Antebellum Civil War – Summer 2018, Civil War Virginia – Summer 2018, and New South and Modern Virginia, part 1 – Spring 2018. Fall 2018 reviews begin with Late Colonial Virginia – Fall 2018, and continue with this blog on Revolution & New Nation Virginia – Fall 2018.
• The TVH webpage for Revolution and New Nation, 1750-1824 features our top title picks taken from the bibliographies of three surveys of Virginia History’s 400 years: two that are widely used in Virginia college courses, and one to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2019.
Note: visitors must scroll down the page; the Table of Contents is broken.
Sub-sections include Revolution & Constitution Policy, New Nation Policy, Social History in Virginia, Gender in Virginia, Religious Virginia, African American Virginia, and Wars in Virginia – American Revolution and War of 1812.