Longing and Belonging in the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

Longing and Belonging in the Age of Revolutions Kacy Dowd Tillman (bio) Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World barbara b. oberg, ed. University of Virginia Press, 2019 280 pp. Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship carrie hyde Harvard University Press, 2018 308 pp. The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780s–1830s gerald flood leonard and saul cornell Cambridge University Press, 2019 354 pp. Frederick Douglass's answer to the question "What, to the American slave, is the 4th of July?" is that it is "a day that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity. …—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages" (125). For Douglass, a day set aside to celebrate liberty in a slaveholding nation made America a farce. "You may rejoice," he tells his listeners; "I must mourn. To drag a man in fetters into the grand illuminated temple of liberty, and call upon him to join you in joyous anthems, were inhuman mockery and sacrilegious irony" (122). This yearning for equitable inclusion and fully realized citizenship is what Carrie Hyde calls "longing to belong," which is a desire articulated by marginalized people throughout the American Revolution [End Page 835] and early national period and is explored in three astute new monographs: Women in the American Revolution: Gender, Politics, and the Domestic World edited by Barbara B. Oberg; Civic Longing: The Speculative Origins of U.S. Citizenship by Carrie Hyde; and The Partisan Republic: Democracy, Exclusion, and the Fall of the Founders' Constitution, 1780–1830 by Gerald Leonard and Saul Cornell. Before diving into these important works' contributions to the field, some context is in order, as they are invested in extending a scholarly conversation that began in the 1970s and 1980s. This scholarship is likely familiar to most readers; however, in sum: the years leading up to and commemorating the bicentennial anniversary of the war were invested in reevaluating marginalized people's roles in the Revolution. Women were of particular interest. Historians in the 1970s suggested that we expand the notion of revolutionary participation to wives and mothers (both loyalists and patriots) who used domestic and economic means to engage in politics, resistance, and warfare. Later, historians began to examine the political engagement of Black and Native Americans. Scholars in the 1980s and 1990s then revisited the stories of free and enslaved Black loyalists and Native allies who were promised freedom and/or land in exchange for their fealty to the Crown. These studies conducted between the 1970s and 1990s that revisited the American Revolution primarily concentrated on recovery, establishing the role that women, Natives, and people of color played in the war.1 Oberg, Hyde, Leonard, and Cornell expand these studies in three ways. First, they are invested in exploring the notion of "citizenship," which they frame as a rhetorical as well as a legal concept. Second, and related, they track marginalized people's desire for the nation to recognize them as citizens, which Carrie Hyde calls "civic longing." And finally, they explore the social, political, cultural, literary, domestic, and economic outlets that people embraced to insist on their inclusion in the new republic. Derrick R. Spires explains in his book The Practice of Citizenship that for Black people in early America, citizenship is "not a thing determined by who one is but rather by what one does" (3). "Practicing citizenship," he writes, "makes citizens" (4). Hyde, Oberg, Leonard, and Cornell are also interested in the things people do to practice citizenship and the ways in which citizenship was denied them. Women in the American Revolution (Oberg), for example, argues that women utilized their economic, political, [End Page 836] and domestic relationships with marketplaces, statesmen, and children (respectively). Rosemarie Zaggari's introduction suggests we should look beyond "formal legal and political institutions" to determine whether or not the American Revolution helped or hurt women; Zaggari and the collection's contributors argue that...