Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution by Sarah L. Swedberg

Abstract

Reviewed by: Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution by Sarah L. Swedberg Lawrence B. Goodheart Sarah L. Swedberg. Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2021. vi + 270 pp. Ill. $110.00 (978-1-4985-7386-3). Carl Becker, one of the Progressive historians, observed a century ago that once the question of home rule was decided, there arose the critical issue of who would rule at home. Both contests were momentous and fraught with tension, as Sarah L. Swedberg in Liberty and Insanity in the Age of the American Revolution makes clear. She brings a novel perspective to a well-worn topic: “Eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Americans agreed that mental illness existed in both the body and the body politics. Insanity infected individuals making it impossible for them to engage in the social and political experiment of the new United States in a rational way” (p. 238). She retells the story in the context of mental aberration from the emergence of colonial protest after 1763 through the contentious two terms of George Washington’s administration ending in 1797. The assumption from the medical literature was that revolutionary turmoil irrationally unhinged people and institutions. Not only the American Revolution, but also the French and Haitian Revolutions added to the sense of a world turned upside down. Through assiduous research, the author cites abundant examples of the rhetoric of insanity, loosely defined as irrationality, madness, delusion, and lunacy. Medical diagnosis of societal ills is cited, such as that of Doctors Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, and the influential Johann Spurzheim. The clinical consensus was that expanded political participation contributed to cerebral malfunction. More often “madness” was employed during tumultuous times as a cultural trope to denigrate an opponent or opposition as a whole. “For men in political power, the end goal of the use of this language [of insanity] was,” the author writes, “the metaphorical equivalent of putting his opponent in the madhouse” (p. 24). The argument is buttressed with numerous examples drawn from primary sources. During the heated contention over the direct tax of the Stamp Act (1765), William Pitt in the British Parliament, expressed his disenchantment with imperial policy and support for colonial protest with loaded language. The Americans “have been driven to madness by injustice.” He asked sarcastically of the supporters of Prime Minister George Grenville, “Will you punish them for the madness you have occasioned?” (p. 60). As rebellion escalated in April 1775, George Cressener in England expressed his outrage at the rabble rousers. “I look on the Bostonians as Men in high fever,” he wrote a friend, “bleeding will bring them to their senses” (p. 108). His meaning was a clever double entendre, for he referred both to the heroic medical practice for calming high strung patients and endorsement of martial means to suppress the protesters. As the American Revolution reached finality in 1783, poet Phillis Wheatley reflected that the insurrectionaries could “now sheath the Sword that bade the Brave attone/With guiltless Blood for Madness not their own” (p. 161). In a letter to Thomas Jefferson on January 29, 1787, patrician Abigail Adams famously characterized the protest of disposed western Massachusetts farmers, including many war veterans, as the “mad cry of the mob.” Beneath the rhetoric of madness during Shays’ Rebellion, clear class and sectional [End Page 596] antagonism existed between creditors in Boston and debtors in the hinterlands during the economic doldrums of the mid-1780s. There was also a confounding racial dynamic in which black freemason Prince Hall proposed that the white elite use African American soldiers to crush rebellious white plebeians. I might add to the author’s description that Hall’s expedient offer, which the Governor James Bowdoin naturally ignored, is a revealing example of black leadership’s expediency. Hall saw an imperative to curry favor with the white establishment in order to protect the precarious security of African Americans. Racial priority obviated class solidarity, an enduring theme in U.S. history. In addition, Swedberg importantly points to the clinical aberration of revolutionary James Otis, Federalist judge John Pickering, and President Donald Trump. There has, moreover...