A Poet, a Planter, and a Nation of Farmers

Abstract

For the past few days in Harpers Ferry we have been inventing and reinventing American nationalism in a marvelous variegation of scholarly papers. We have heard about nationalism and travel, nationalism and antislavery women, nationalism and male identity-and southern artisans, and black nationalists, and even luxury hotels. Although we try to put ironic distance between ourselves and the more egregious forms of nationalism, the papers seem to share the popular fascination with American identity. We cannot resist staring into history and asking who we are as a nation, how did we come to be so wonderful, and why have we failed so miserably. As my own contribution to the convention festivities, I want to offer a few comments on national society in the United States. By national society I mean the construction of social types suitable for life under a republican political regime, the foundation of our national identity. The republican state was created in a stroke at the Revolution, but that was only the beginning of nation formation. Thereafter, American cultural workers had to conceive of a republican society to go with republican government. Writers and intellectuals accomplished this feat of the imagination partly by making sweeping statements about the nation, but more specifically by dressing individual social types in a republican guise. Everyday lives had to be reconceived as exemplifications of republican values. Hence, the famous republican mothers, and the less famous republican children, republican wives, republican merchants, republican artisans and laborers, all were represented in public discourse in their relation to national values. Often the discourse on national social types began in controversy. People fought over these new social identities, because they implied norms of personal behavior, standards for government policy, and degrees of