Seeing Through Language: Narrative, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver's The Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion

Abstract

Seeing Through Language:Narrative, Portraiture, and Character in Peter Oliver's The Origin & Progress of the American Rebellion Edward Larkin (bio) In recent years scholarship on revolutionary and early national American literature has devoted considerable attention to the role of representation. When reading early American novels, such as Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, William Hill Brown's Modern Chivalry, and Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette, in the context of an emerging representative democracy, we have understood them at least in part as commentaries on the dangers of misrepresentation. When we read the early histories of the Revolution, however, our attention has focused elsewhere, on questions of political affiliation, personal relationships, or narrative structure instead of on the questions of representation that have occupied historians almost from the moment the 13 British colonies in North America decided to take up arms against the mother country. American historians of the early national era, such as David Ramsay, Mercy Otis Warren, and John Marshall, did not set out merely to record the events of the Revolution. They well understood their role in developing an understanding of the recent upheaval and shaping the nation's sense of self. To them, writing a history became an opportunity to interpret, a chance to represent and legitimate a particular view of the causes and lessons of the Revolution. That interpretive dimension is a large part of what made the American Revolution unique. It revolved emphatically around texts and the interpretation of them.1 One practical reason for this was the distance between the colonies and the mother country, but another, perhaps more compelling and suggestive, was that this was a time when most people believed in human reason and its ability to solve almost any problem, whether philosophical, scientific, or political. As Gordon Wood has so persuasively demonstrated, the late eighteenth century was also the era of [End Page 427] "conspiracy and the paranoid style." If this was a period when even the most sophisticated thinkers sought to explain important political, social, and economic events by "attributing [them] to the concerted designs of willful individuals" (Wood 411), one of the best means to identify those designs was through the printed explanations, arguments, and justifications offered in the rapidly expanding press.2 The public sphere, in other words, both reflected and expanded a fundamental belief in human reason. With the emergence of such a public came an increase in stature for the written word: texts—as the concrete extension of reason—were endowed with an increasing amount of power as they began to depend less and less on their authors' identity for their authority. The history of the American Revolution, consequently, became a crucial text since it, at least in the minds of the revolutionaries, promised to document the triumph of words and reason in politics. Just as the Encyclopedie in France would catalog all human knowledge, the history of the Revolution would serve as an instructive source on liberty and democracy, the apex of reason in the political world. Hence, the writing of the history of the Revolution was a crucial part of the Enlightenment project in the United States.3 No wonder, then, that so many histories, both for and against the Revolution, were written in the two decades after the British colonies in America declared independence. If the continuing influence of pro-independence history is more or less self-evident, the importance of those histories written by Americans who opposed independence may be more difficult to discern.4 However, they constituted a significant body of written work about the Revolution and bear discussion not only for their political import but for their literary interest as well.5 In the following pages I will argue for the significance of one such history, Peter Oliver's Origin and Progress of the American Rebellion, A Tory View (1781),6 in which the former chief justice of Massachusetts constructs a highly literary and provocative counternarrative of the Revolution that raises questions both about the revolutionary leaders in his home state and about the notion of revolution itself. To Oliver, American revolutionary discourse, rather than expressing high-minded idealism, served the self-interested motives of a crafty and ambitious...