Late Eighteenth-century America Research Articles

The Exit Option: Agency and Divorce in Late Eighteenth-Century America

The Exit Option: Agency and Divorce in Late Eighteenth-Century America

Franklin’s Talmud: Hebraic Republicanism in the Constitutional Convention and the Debate Over Ratification, 1787-1788

Hebraic republicanism, a tradition of political thought origi-nating in the sixteenth century, found in rabbinic Judaism a set of sources and ideas that made it possible to argue that constitutional republics, with powers limited by the rule of law, were the only le-gitimate form of government. This article demonstrates that He-braic republicanism had a profound influence on the founding of America, both during the debates over the ratification of the Con-stitution and at the Federal Convention, in particular in the for-mulation of the republican government Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4. This article argues that a full understanding of the Constitution must account for this important but previously unexplored chapter in the history of American constitutional thought. The American writers sound-ing Hebraist themes included many of the most significant figures of the time, among them the framer Roger Sherman, the New York Anti-Federalist leader Melancton Smith, the Anti-Federalist essayist and historian Mercy Otis Warren, and, perhaps most re-markably, Benjamin Franklin, the founders’ elder statesman, who devoted most of the sole essay he contributed to the ratification controversy to a political analysis of biblical passages, basing his ar-gument on Josephus and the Talmud. Franklin’s essay is of particu-lar interest, as his innovative use of Judaic sources demonstrates that political Hebraism —the reliance on rabbinic interpretations for political thought—not only persisted but also continued to de-velop in new ways well into late eighteenth-century America. He-braic political thought gave structure to the risks and opportunities constitution-making presented, offered a powerful set of rhetorical framings that writers and speakers deployed in the ratification struggles in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New York, Maryland, and Virginia, and supplied the central, antimonarchist meaning of the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause. This article argues that we cannot fully comprehend either the American founding or the his-tory of political Hebraism unless we understand the role of Hebra-ic republicanism in the creation of the American Constitution.

Reason and Conviction: Natural Rights, Natural Religion, and the Origins of the Free Exercise Clause

One of the most intense debates in contemporary America involves conflicts between religious liberty and other key values like civil rights. To shed light on such problems, courts and scholars often look to the historical background of the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. But this inquiry turns out to be no less controversial. In recent years, a growing number of scholars has challenged the traditional account that focuses on the roles of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the movement to protect religious liberty in late eighteenth-century America. These scholars emphasize that most of the political energy behind the movement came from Evangelical Christians. On this revisionist account, we should not understand the Free Exercise Clause and corresponding state provisions in terms of the Enlightenment views of Jefferson and Madison, which these scholars characterize as secular, rationalist, and skeptical – if not hostile – toward religion. Instead, those protections were intended to promote religion and especially Christianity. In this Article, I offer a different understanding of the intellectual foundations of the Free Exercise Clause. The most basic view that supported religious liberty was neither secular rationalism nor Christian Evangelicalism but what contemporaries called natural religion. This view held that human beings were capable of using reason to discern the basic principles of religion, including the duties they owed to God and one another. Because religion was founded on reason, individuals had an inalienable natural right to develop their own beliefs and to worship in accord with them. At the same time, that right was limited by the law of nature, which required people to respect the rights of others. In this way, the concept of natural religion established both the foundations and the limits of religious liberty. This view enabled people with different religious and philosophical perspectives to find common ground. It provided the basis for a political coalition between Evangelicals, rationalist Christians, and Enlightenment liberals that secured the adoption of state and federal constitutional guarantees for religious freedom. The Article begins by demonstrating that natural religion and its associated ideas of natural law and natural rights were central to the intellectual world of eighteenth-century Americans. Those ideas played a vital part in many areas of thought, including political and moral philosophy, natural jurisprudence, English law, Christian and Deist theology, and even Newtonian natural science – intellectual strands that came together in the Radical Whig ideology that animated the American Revolution. Next, I explain how those ideas can enhance our understanding of the religious liberty provisions of the first state declarations of rights; the political controversy that culminated in the passage of Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom in Virginia; and the debates surrounding the adoption of the Federal Constitution and the Free Exercise Clause itself. Finally, I explore the founders’ views on the problem of religious exemptions from civil laws, and discuss the implications of this history for our current debates over civil rights and religious liberty – a subject that the Supreme Court recently grappled with in Masterpiece Cakeshop, Ltd. v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission, and that it has agreed to revisit next Term in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia.

"From Such Beginnings, Much May Be Expected"

"From Such Beginnings, Much May Be Expected" Brandon C. Downing (bio) In The Pioneers: The Heroic Story of the Settlers Who Brought the American Ideal West, David McCullough provides his version of how the West was won. He starts with a group of Revolutionary War veterans from New England led by Rufus Putnam, Manasseh Cutler, and Benjamin Tupper who founded the Ohio Company of Associates to secure land purchases in the Northwest Territory. Like all pioneer stories, their story was not an easy one. This was late eighteenth-century America where the advancing line of Euro-American settlement barely crossed the Appalachian Mountains. Compared to the thriving and well-developed eastern seaboard, the backcountry had "no roads. … no bridges, no towns, churches, schools, stores, or way-side taverns. … not one permanent legal settlement" (7). If the travelers survived the journey to the Ohio Country, then an uncountable number of trees of enormous size had to be cleared, houses had to be built, sustenance had to be obtained, and fields had to be sown and crops harvested. On top of the hard labor, settlers had to be vigilant against possible Indian attack; bears, wolves, and panthers lurking in the woods; and the harshness of the climate. Their success in overcoming these numerous obstacles enabled them to establish the first permanent settlement of the Northwest Territory—Marietta, Ohio—in 1788. McCullough is a good storyteller, and he succeeds in presenting the different personalities of the various settlers and the trials they had to endure to travel, build, and live in "their infant city." He illustrates the hardships endured by so many suffering from "Ohio fever" in their efforts to get from Massachusetts to the frontier. One couple, Ephraim and Leah Cutler, lost two children to illness: their one-year-old son, Hezekiah, and just a few days later their seven-year-old daughter, Mary. Even if one did survive the [End Page 173] journey, the realities of frontier life did not provide much certainty. Many residents suffered tremendously during the winter of the "Starving Year" (1789): measles took the lives of several children and smallpox took even more lives later that season. Not all was bad. McCullough also weaves in individual highlights such as the first wedding of the Northwest Territory between Rowena Tupper and Winthrop Sargent; the great escape of John Mathews from an Indian attack (sans trousers); and the building of Harman and Margaret Blennerhassett's opulent mansion by the notable and selftrained architect, Joseph Barker. Even during bleak times, when the settlers were confined to Campus Martius during the Northwest Indian War, they "enliven[ed] the off-hours within the stockade [with] a variety of games and sporting events—foot races, boxing matches" (117). These personal accounts provide a good description of what frontier life was like in the Ohio valley, and McCullough's ability to portray a vivid scene of so many individuals and families in one narrative is a testament to good, regional history. Despite the title, McCullough's book is not about the American West as one might imagine it. Instead, he primarily focuses on the individuals who founded, developed, and progressed the city of Marietta. This, however, is a good place to start because Marietta represented what the federal government envisioned the West to be—organized. Much of this organization was laid out in the Land Ordinance of 1785. In order to avoid lawsuits over property boundaries, collect taxes to pay for the Revolutionary War, and to satisfy land bounties to veterans, the land purchased by the Ohio Company of Associates would be divided into square townships six miles in length with thirty-six square miles in total. These organized township grids were similar to those found in New England. If the Land Ordinance was the form, then the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 was the function as it established a territorial government and a method for admitting territories into states. The more recognizable provisions of this ordinance included the outlawing of slavery, reserving land for schools, ensuring trial by jury, and guaranteeing religious freedom. It was these articles that McCullough claims to be the "American ideals" the first pioneers of Ohio brought with them to...

David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer, edited by Mark G. Spencer

David Hume: Historical Thinker, Historical Writer, edited by Mark G. Spencer. University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2013. xii, 282 pp. $69.95 US (cloth). This book is a fine collection of essays addressing an under-explored topic, namely relation between Hume philosopher and Hume historian. Mark G. Spencer notes in introduction that apart from scattered remarks on history in Hume's philosophical treatises and essays, and general comments on development of English constitution in his History of England, philosophical content in Hume's historical writings and historical content of his philosophy are not fully apparent. And while Hume's History of England was widely read in his day, his historical work tended to be neglected thereafter relative to his philosophical texts. Although some of claims made by authors in this volume may be questioned, in terms of their various attempts to unify philosophical and historical sides of David Hume, collection as a whole represents a significant contribution to growing scholarship on this important aspect of Hume's thought. The essays employ a diversity of approaches. Roger L. Emerson argues that Hume was potentially interested in writing an ecclesiastical history (as did his successor Gibbon), given often rich accounts of ecclesiastical affairs in The History of England. His hesitance arose from not wanting his peace disturbed by both offended religious authorities and radical Enlightenment philosophes. In contrast, Jennifer A. Herdt is critical of Hume's distinction between natural moral sentiments, and artificial lives as influenced by superstition and enthusiasm. In fact, she argues, a sympathetic understanding of religious belief and practice underpins Hume's writing; Hume's own historiography can be interpreted as endorsing a kind of providentialism (of human progress). The following chapters focus on Hume's History of England. Philip Hick nicely traces development of concepts of from Machiavelli to Bolingbroke. He argues that Hume broke from republican and Whig views on freedom in his analysis of its entanglements with religious fanaticism, and need to balance with authority. Nevertheless Hume's employment of rhetoric of the spirit of liberty helped fuel revolutionary politics of late eighteenth-century America. Mark Towsey turns to eighteenth-century Scottish readership of The History of England. He shows that despite misgivings over Hume's religious skepticism, and complicated and controversial political learnings, work nevertheless enjoyed great success in his homeland. David Allan looks southward to ascertain who Hume's English readers might have been, and how they discussed and obtained copies of his History--again despite or because of its controversial content. In his examination of medieval volumes of History, Jeffrey M. Suderman explores Hume's nuanced reflections on English kings of Middle Ages. For Hume greatest monarchs were those who transcended barbarism of their times, thus reinforcing not only superiority of modem civility but also surprising role of powerful monarchs in making of modem English constitutional liberty. …

"THE LADIES OF TRENTON: WOMEN'S POLITICAL AND PUBLIC ACTIVISM IN REVOLUTIONARY NJ"

The Ladies of Trenton: Women's Political and Public Activism in Revolutionary NJBy Catherine HudakAbstractUsing the Ladies of Trenton as a case study, this article examines the extent and forms of women's public and political activism in the early national period. An analysis of the Ladies of Trenton's efforts demonstrates the pivotal roles women played in the formation of the vibrant political culture that emerged in late eighteenth century America. These elite NJ women had access to rich worlds of social and educational refinement coupled with strong political connections. The Ladies of Trenton used their literacy skills, knowledge of the patriot cause, and high social standings to captivate the nation as they entered male-dominated spaces of politics and print culture. Among the civic acts organized by the Ladies of Trenton include a fundraising campaign to assist the Continental Army and a public tribute honoring newly-elected President Washington. Contemporaries publicly recognized the significance of their fundraising to the success of the war effort as these NJ women refashioned gender roles for women by assembling to establish a committee, managing financial matters, and delving into military concerns. The Ladies of Trenton's public tribute for Washington included profound symbolism commemorating the battles of Trenton and Princeton as well as being reflective of the new nation. The contributions of the Ladies of Trenton demonstrate the presence of active public roles for women during this critical historical period of nation building in the United States.

Provincial Nationalism: Civic Rivalry in Postrevolutionary American Magazines

This essay uses magazines as an entry point for analyzing the relationship between print and nation formation in the postrevolutionary era. Produced mainly in the country’s leading urban centers, magazines cultivated an outlook I call “provincial nationalism”; that is to say, magazine literati invoked nationalist rhetoric to publicize the virtuous character and intellectual prowess of their respective communities. Focusing on New York’s American Magazine, Philadelphia’s American Museum, and the Boston Magazine, this essay shows how local cultures of information and exchange stymied attempts at creating a viable national magazine. Collectively, these three titles thus demonstrate that networks, community affiliations, and civic rivalry defined the cultural work of magazines in late eighteenth-century America.

“So Truly Afflicting and Distressing to Me His Sorrowing Mother”: Expressions of Maternal Grief in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia

In 1781, Lowry Wister produced an eight-page account of her three-year son’s death from small pox. Lowry Wister’s narrative offers important insights into the emotional landscape of mothering, mourning, and religion in late eighteenth-century America. Religious and cultural prescriptions stressed restraint throughout the mourning process, and in particular admonished women to avoid excessive displays of grief. Lowry Wister’s emotional struggles as a “sorrowing mother” enable us to examine the relationship between individual experiences and prescribed expressions of grief and mourning. While eighteenth-century conventions stressed quiet resignation to God’s will, emerging cultural changes increasingly enabled – indeed, encouraged – women to give public voice to their private emotions. By the nineteenth century, sentimental views of childhood, along with a culture of mourning, inspired parents – especially mothers – to give full expression to intense feelings of loss and sorrow. Lowry Wister’s narrative reveals how women responded to and negotiated various religious, cultural and literary conventions that shaped their understandings of motherhood and mourning. Her narrative illustrates the various ways in which individual women challenged cultural norms and helped usher in new forms of emotional and literary expression. Comparisons of Wister’s narrative to other eighteenth-century women’s writings on grief and mourning further illuminate the interplay between cultural convention and individual expression.

Between Markets and Hierarchies: Law and the Constituting of Postcolonial Authority in the ‘Imagined’ American Republic, 1820–1850. From Discourse to Discipline

In the aftermath of the American Revolution, leaders set about reconstituting political authority for a new world of self-rule. This paper explores the challenges they faced as they did so. This process of consolidating democratic transition in postcolonial America has recently assumed special relevance in light of the formative challenges faced by postcommunist societies, the European Union and post-conflict or divided societies experiencing unification and/or democratic transition today. This paper probes the practices and micro-processes through which authoritative postcolonial rule at the local level was established in America and set in motion. My claim is that ideas articulated in common law shaped the vision of postcolonial political authority that developed in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century America. In moving to create a justificatory vision of state action in the new republic, leaders drew on both the imagery of the rule of law and traditional arrangements of hierarchical household and community governance that had historically been elaborated in law. The courts, like political officials, had embraced social ordering as a prime concern.

“Women Love to Have Their Own Way”: Delusion, Volition, and “Freaks” of Sight in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism

Without denying the conservatism of Female Quixotism on such themes as class and nationality, this essay attends to contradictory impulses in the text that work against retrenchment and mark this novel as relatively progressive on matters of gender. Female Quixotism can easily be read as an indictment of sentimental novels and their reputed deleterious effects on female readers or, in a more progressive vein, as a counter to that attack. Tenney addresses not simply the isolation of women who read sentimental fiction but that of all educated women. In this essay, I read Dorcasina as a comic figure who nonetheless registers sober truths about the affective and social options that women faced in late eighteenth-century America. Do the delusions of Tenney's heroine enable intentionality and permit some degree of control over one's story? A lack of such control is precisely what early American seduction novels obsessively and simultaneously mourned and exhorted to the (female) reading public.

"Women Love to Have Their Own Way": Delusion, Volition, and "Freaks" of Sight in Tabitha Tenney's Female Quixotism

Without denying the conservatism of Female Quixotism on such themes as class and nationality, this essay attends to contradictory impulses in the text that work against retrenchment and mark this novel as relatively progressive on matters of gender. Female Quixotism can easily be read as an indictment of sentimental novels and their reputed deleterious effects on female readers or, in a more progressive vein, as a counter to that attack. Tenney addresses not simply the isolation of women who read sentimental fiction but that of all educated women. In this essay, I read Dorcasina as a comic figure who nonetheless registers sober truths about the affective and social options that women faced in late eighteenth-century America. Do the delusions of Tenney's heroine enable intentionality and permit some degree of control over one's story? A lack of such control is precisely what early American seduction novels obsessively and simultaneously mourned and exhorted to the (female) reading public.

“Balloon Madness”: Politics, Public Entertainment, the Transatlantic Science of Flight, and Late Eighteenth-Century America

“Balloon Madness”: Politics, Public Entertainment, the Transatlantic Science of Flight, and Late Eighteenth-Century America

Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia (review)

Reviewed by: Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia Brian Phillips Murphy (bio) Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia. By Andrew M. Schocket. (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007. Pp. xvi, 274. Cloth, $42.00.) In an era when corporate executives jet to Washington on private planes to beg Congress for bailout funds, and when careers can be made by pursuing, defending, or following particular companies, it is essential for historians to remind us of the comparatively humble and vulnerable origins of the corporate form in late eighteenth-century America. Corporations are partnerships that enjoy the legal privilege of a fictional personhood, sometimes exercise the power of eminent domain, and can pass property from one generation of elected directors to the next. They can be efficient, or not; politically influential, or not; well regulated, or not. Corporations are many things, but they are managed by mortals and conjured by charter rather than magic. As early Americanists reincorporate institutions and the state into the historical narrative, Andrew Schocket’s Founding Corporate Power in Early National Philadelphia makes a valuable contribution by placing a specific set of corporations in an integrated economic, geographic, and political context. The author’s chapters are cleverly structured as a series of case studies examining the emergence of incorporated banking in Philadelphia (3), the development of a municipal waterworks in the city (4), and the construction of a canal in the suburban hinterland (5). Schocket’s analysis shines in these latter two chapters, merging his deep primary source research in Philadelphia-area archives with an appreciation for the historiographical legacies of George Rogers Taylor, Carter Goodrich, Louis Hartz, and Charles Sellers.1 Schocket knows his subjects well enough to recognize that historians who partition transportation initiatives, politics, and market relations are missing a bigger picture; these subjects are interdependent, as he masterfully illustrates. Discussing the “complexities of municipal finance” in the period, [End Page 377] Schocket shows how Philadelphia officials funded the nation’s first waterworks by selling bonds and making interest payments through use of a city-established sinking fund—a separate pool of money specifically designated for bondholders’ interest. By assuring buyers that municipal bonds were a safe investment, the city increased its debt capacity to fund infrastructure investments, which ignited broader economic development; bondholders demanded neither “efficiency” nor “even competence,” just interest payments every six months. Thus, as the city grew, its debt grew, and the effect was to concentrate capital and economic opportunity in Philadelphia even as the city lost its edge as the nation’s financial and political capital to New York and Washington, DC, respectively. The Philadelphia Waterworks gave a “corporate community” an “extended reach” that stretched from the city to the suburbs and was further empowered by “internal navigations . . . far beyond metropolitan limits” (137). When recalling the story of the 108-mile Schuylkill Navigation Company canal, nearly completed by 1825 after a long bout of construction funding hiccups, Schocket credits the navigation’s success to anthracite coal mining. Coal shipped on the canal helped create the country’s “first heavy industry” and set off an “economic explosion” in the Schuylkill River Valley (151, 150). The canal was a “nexus” that channeled economic development to the region and empowered incorporated canal promoters to set tolls and usage fees for particular customers or goods (151, 152). Schocket compellingly describes the economic geography of coal and canals, an implicit nod to Sean Patrick Adams’s study of antebellum anthracite, and appreciates the political power wielded by canal directors who regulated the region’s commercial artery.2 Corporations are political, Schocket repeatedly argues, providing a necessary corrective to a historiography of banking and incorporation that in recent decades steered away from Bray Hammond’s sensitivity for partisanship and toward more economic-focused studies such as those of Alfred Chandler and Howard Bodenhorn.3 That said, the weakest points in this book are when Schocket attempts to paint corporate board [End Page 378] members as a “corporate class.” To be sure, the consistency of a few names among directors and shareholders provides ample evidence for the argument that there was indeed an “economic elite” who “profited disproportionately from . . . regional economic integration” in this period...

"What shall we say to this liberal age?": Catholic-Protestant Controversy in the Early National Capital

“What shall we say to this liberal age?”: Catholic-Protestant Controversy in the Early National Capital Michael S. Carter T his article focuses on a group of previously unexamined texts that appeared in three of Philadelphia’s national newspapers over the span of several months in 1792 when the city was the federal capital. These took the form of an extended discourse about the history and teachings of the Roman Catholic Church and what those implied about the full assimilation of American Catholics into the new nation. Here I explore the way certain late eighteenth-century Protestant attitudes toward Catholicism were manifested in print, examine Catholic responses to them, and argue that during the early Federalist period a change occurred in the nature of public discussions of the status of Catholicism within the new republic. The significance of this shift hinged on an implicit tension in late eighteenth-century America’s understanding of “liberalism”—an idea that has yet to be adequately explored. This essay will also examine how Roman Catholics positioned themselves in the developing milieu of Early National print culture, and will look at the devices and argumentative techniques they used to shape public perceptions of their beliefs and practices. What was the specific nature of anti-Catholic criticism? Who among members of the Catholic community stepped forward to defend the faith against doctrinal and political attacks during this period, and what does this say about the emerging socio-political structure of the Church in America? The First Post-Constitutional Debate About Catholic Citizenship? Ray A. Billington’s classic work on antebellum American anti-Catholicism, The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860, though now over sixty years old, remains among the most consistently cited works on the subject. Billington is one of the few historians of anti-Catholicism in America who has argued, convincingly, that Nativism was not completely submerged by the moderate wave of toleration introduced by Revolutionary-era state constitutions. Rather, it was sustained by a 79 “small but persistent propaganda which lasted through the postrevolutionary period.”1 Billington’s study begins with the year 1800, omitting the Federalist period altogether . He states that in 1793 America witnessed its first public controversy between Catholic and Protestant champions—by a Catholic priest and Protestant minister, whose exchanges took the form of a series of lengthy articles in the Boston Gazette. However, Billington is incorrect on two important details. The date of the controversy he describes is in reality earlier than he dates it: in 1791, not 1793, which places it even closer to the passage of the first amendment to the Constitution, when debates over the place of religion in the civic sphere were much less settled.2 Also, while this 1791 controversy was the first protracted public debate over the place of Catholicism in the new republic, it was between clergymen, who were the conventional exponents of religious debate in eighteenth-century America. Billington, writing that this debate occurred in 1793, also missed what is the most unusual public debate over Catholicism in the Early Republic, and one that has never received scholarly attention . It is all the more illuminating because it was initially answered not by a clergyman , but by a Catholic layman—the thirty-one year old Irish-born printer Mathew Carey (1760-1839).3 This hitherto unexamined controversy, the subject of this article, reveals that toleration for Catholicism was not put to rest, as often believed, through the first amendment guarantee of religious freedom at the federal level. The 1792 controversy examined here, which Mathew Carey himself later that year published anonymously as an octavo pamphlet entitled The Calumnies of Verus; Or, Catholics Vindicated, From certain old Slanders lately revived, appeared originally in three of Philadelphia’s newspapers. These were Andrew Brown’s Federal Gazette, Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, and William Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser.4 This public controversy has never been examined, and the letters, col80 U.S. Catholic Historian 1. Ray A. Billington, The Protestant Crusade: 1800-1860 (New York: MacMillan, 1938), 32. 2. Controversy Between The Reverend John Thayer, Catholic Missionary, of Boston, and The Reverend George Leslie, Pastor of a Church, In Washington, New-Hampshire (Georgetown, 1791). The controversy...

Magazines, Presentation Networks, and the Cultivation of Authorship in Post-Revolutionary America

Magazines, Presentation Networks, and the Cultivation of Authorship in Post-Revolutionary America Robb K. Haberman (bio) In the New York Magazine for August 1792, Richard Bingham Davis's "Elegiac Ode" appeared in the "American Muse," the periodical's poetry section.1 Although the occasion marked the work's debut in print, it was not the first time that Davis, a twenty-one year old New York City woodcarver and gilder, had submitted the piece for examination.2 A few weeks prior to publication, Davis introduced a draft, "Verses to Imagination," at a meeting of the Calliopean Society, his local literary circle. Following Davis's oratorical exercise, the assembled company both praised the merit of his performance and offered suggestions for improvement. In addition, a review committee provided written commentary before approving the work for periodical publication (Figure 1).3 Successful entry into the New York Magazine, however, did not mark the culmination of changes to either the poem's title or print status. Fifteen years after its periodical appearance, the "Elegiac Ode" reemerged as "To Imagination" in an 1807 collection of Davis' poetry. Sadly, the transition from magazine to book resulted from an earlier misfortune. During the autumn of 1799, Davis was struck down by the yellow fever epidemic then ravaging the city. His untimely demise prompted his colleagues in the Calliopean Society to collect and publish his verse as a commemorative act.4 As a work republished after a substantial interval and in a different venue, the "Elegiac Ode" exemplifies a phenomenon common to the era's periodical literature. Along with hundreds or possibly thousands of other contemporaneous compositions, Davis's poem appeared in numerous formats. This essay focuses on the multiple renderings of works to explore how magazine contributions cultivated authorial reputation in late eighteenth-century America. Citing conditions of low subscriptions, distribution difficulties, and faulty payments, most scholars thus far have viewed magazines from a [End Page 141] perspective of cultural isolation. I do the opposite, however, by conceptualizing magazines as part of what I call a presentation network to show that magazine pieces, far from being ephemeral, appeared and circulated in numerous venues, including literary societies, civic groups, anthologies, newspapers, and theaters. Magazines were thus fundamental to the development of literary culture in the post Revolutionary era.5 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Detail from the Calliopean Society Minutes, July 10, 1792, Proceedings of Calliopean Society of New York, vol. 2. Reproduced by permission from the New-York Historical Society. To map out how presentation networks influenced authorial development, I present two case studies of aspiring literati from the early national era. In addition to examining Richard B. Davis at greater length, I look at Benjamin Bridge, a struggling lawyer from Worcester, Massachusetts. While Davis and Bridge hardly exhaust the range of possibilities for establishing presentation networks, their activities lay bare the relationship between literary presentations and authorial personae and the ways in which writing informed and reflected the character and condition of daily life. Moreover, as young unmarried men residing in the Northeast and belonging to the "middling sorts," Davis and Bridge provide an entry point for investigating the social group that formed a core community of magazine contributors. [End Page 142] Although an important outlet for establishing authorship, magazines functioned differently for Davis and Bridge. For Davis, magazines buttressed and extended an authorial reputation already grounded in his connections with New York's literary institutions. In contrast, Bridge had no such prior institutional connections, and so magazines themselves constituted the hopeful foundation for whatever literary reputation Bridge might achieve. Exploring how writers like Davis and Bridge developed a literary presence through multiple presentations opens new possibilities for interpreting the social and cultural functions of print, orality, and manuscript in the late eighteenth century. Thus far, the scholarship on this topic has paid insufficient attention to the ways that presentation networks influenced how individuals and groups accessed different communications modes. It has also neglected to account fully for the myriad interactions and intersections that occurred among media formats. Consequently, the scholarship on communications tends to assign a given set of collective values, assumptions, and practices to a literary work based on...

"Periodical Vistitations": Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism in Chalres Brockden Brown's Arthur Mervyn

“Periodical Visitations”Yellow Fever as Yellow Journalism in Charles Brockden Brown’s Arthur Mervyn Louis Kirk McAuley The evils of pestilence by which this city has lately been afflicted will probably form an æra in its history. The schemes of reformation and improvement to which they will give birth, or, if no effort of human wisdom can avail to avert the periodical visitations of this calamity, the change in manners and population which they will produce, will be, in the highest degree, memorable.1 According to historians of American journalism, such as Jeffre Pasley and Carol Sue Humphrey, during the 1790s, which was a period of intense political debate, it became standard practice for American politicians to subsidize and manipulate newspapers.2 As Humphrey puts it, "for almost everyone concerned, the primary purpose of the press in the 1790s was not to be nonpartisan and present 'the news,' but to support a political cause and strongly advocate one side of an issue while attacking the other side."3 The [End Page 307] Federalists fiercely relied on newspapermen to brand the Republicans as traitors for their support of the French Revolution and opposition to various governmental policies. William Cobbett, editor of Porcupine's Gazette, led the attack against Thomas Jefferson, describing him as the "head of the frenchified faction in this country."4 Meanwhile, Jefferson solicited contributions and provided financial assistance to keep various Republican newspapers afloat, such as the Philadelphia Aurora, and, most importantly, he hired scandalmonger James T. Callender, who "fled Scotland in 1793 to avoid prosecution," to attack John Adams's character during the presidential election of 1800.5 Though the Federalists had already designed the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 to guard against "dangerous" foreign bodies and censor any "false, scandalous and malicious writing ... against the government of the United States" (that is, Republican media), Callender and other radical pamphleteers, journalists, and newspapermen, such as William Duane, editor of the Aurora, continued to publish criticism of the Adams administration. In effect, Callender's depiction of Adams in The Prospect before Us (1800) as possessing monarchical aspirations played a major role in Jefferson's winning the election. With Philadelphia serving as central command post for this intersection of publishing and partisan politics, it hardly seems coincidental that Charles Brockden Brown, in his preface to Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800), refers to the yellow fever that plagued the city in 1793 as a "periodical visitation" (231). What with publication totals for novels and newspapers exploding in the 1790s (figures 1 and 2),6 and with the Federalists creating legislation to silence an increasingly "licentious" Republican media, it seems highly plausible that Brown intended the phrase—"periodical visitation"—as a pun, equating print culture with contagion. I shall argue that Brown apprehended with horror the virus-like, invisible agency of print, or the "impersonal [End Page 308] writing" that, according to Michael Warner, provided the foundation for a "republican paradigm of public virtue."7 I will read Arthur Mervyn—Brown's "journal of the plague year"—as engaging in metaphorical terms Jefferson's backing and manipulation of the press to standardize, or "fix" as Elizabeth Eisenstein would say, his republican ideals.8 That Arthur must painstakingly disentangle his immediate self (essential character) from various "phantoms passing under his name" (mediated selves) speaks to the scandalmonger's cultural authority in late eighteenth-century America. And that he must do so in writing, through textual performance, speaks rather more generically to Americans' increasing investment of authority in mediated forms of public debate (newspaper politics). Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Philadelphia imprints by genre, 1781–1800 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Numbers of newspapers in circulation per city Brown's novel is neatly divided into two seemingly disjunctive volumes, the first dealing almost entirely with the yellow fever [End Page 309] epidemic and various instabilities of print culture (plagiarism, counterfeit, and forgery) and the second dealing with contrasting stabilities of body language (facial expression, gesture, and voice). The disjunction between the two volumes is at first somewhat troubling and suggests a failure on Brown's part to produce a coherent narrative.9 Critics are wont...

Reforming men and women: gender in the antebellum city

Reforming Men and Women: Gender in the Antebellum City. By Bruce Dorsey. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 299. Cloth, $39.95.) Reforming Men and Women is, first of all, a study of reform movements in Philadelphia from roughly 1790 to 1850. If Bruce Dorsey had limited himself to documenting the origins and development of Philadelphia reform his book would have been worth noting since it is, remarkably enough, the first full-length monograph to address this topic. But Reforming Men and Women is much more than an intellectual or social history of Philadelphia reform. This is a careful, complex, and extremely important book. What Dorsey has attempted here, and essentially accomplished, is nothing less than a history of gender in antebellum urban America through the lens of reform. It is also the most thorough and convincing account of the development of male gender ideology in the early republic yet published. The publication of Reforming Men and Women marks an important advance in the historiography of American gender history. There has been no shortage of well-executed and influential accounts of women's reform in the antebellum era, as well as solid studies on each of the individual reform movements Dorsey discusses here: temperance, abolitionism and colonization, nativism, and poverty reform. But studies of manhood in antebellum America have been in short supply, and have focused almost exclusively on the experiences of individual segments of the male population: men, middle-class men, firemen, bare-knuckle boxers, members of secret societies. Dorsey's contribution is to trace carefully the impact of changing ideals of manhood and womanhood African Americans as well as white Americans, to show how the experiences of one group influenced the others, and to reveal how gender shaped the responses to perceived problems in urban America. In some sense it seems obvious that changing ideas of manhood shaped ideas of womanhood, and vice versa; but Dorsey is the first person to detail the mechanics of that change-to show, example, that it was an uncertainty about manliness and the new goals of humanitarianism in late eighteenthcentury America, rather than an ideology of republican motherhood, that presented the opportunity for women's activism in a masculine arena of voluntary associations (21). Dorsey's holistic approach leads him to a number of conclusions as dramatic and exciting as this one. With the exception of the opening chapter, which addresses early ideologies of gender and reform in America, this book proceeds topically rather than chronologically. Each chapter focuses on a problem Americans rather than on reformers or reform movements themselves. In a chapter on slavery, example, Dorsey de-centers the work of white abolitionists and focuses instead on the ways in which colonization efforts were shaped by ideas of true manhood both by and black and white men. A chapter on immigration gives the gender ideologies of Irish men equal time with those of nativists without falling into the trap of classifying Irish ideals of manhood as working class and nativist ideals as middle class. The arguments here are complex, subtle, and ultimately convincing. A short summary cannot do them justice. …

"Tending" and "Intending" a Nation: Conflicting Visions of American National Identity

Sheldon Wolin's categories of "tending" and "intending" expand the debate over the character of the American revolution and founding to include a central though often overlooked fact of late eighteenth-century America: the implications of the country's very fragile, very modern sense of itself as a nation. Both Federalists and Anti-Federalists articulated coherent conceptions of politics, bringing different elements of various liberal, republican and democratic paradigms together in defense of, respectively, "intendment" and "tendment" nationalities. Viewing their debates in light of this analysis not only demonstrates the complicated heritage of both the traditional liberal and republican positions, but also shows how these positions are inextricably connected with our own modern self-understanding. Wolin suggests that intending all but eliminated its rivals; it may be more accurate to say it absorbed them, merging different paradigms into a somewhat inconsistent, romantic, and very modern national identity.

Selected writings of Judith Sargent Murray

As a novelist, essayist, dramatist, and poet, Judith Sargent Murray candidly and often humorously asserted her opinions about the social and political conditions of women in late eighteenth-century America. As a committed feminist, she urged American women to enter a new era in female history, yet published her own writings under a man's name in the hopes of more widely disseminating her ideas. This volume includes selections from The Gleaner, her major work, and other publications.

Female Householding in Late Eighteenth-Century America and the Problem of Poverty

Families in early modern England were more than twice as likely to be headed by a woman as were white households in late eighteenth-century America. On average, in a preindustrial English community, women headed between one-sixth and one-fifth of all households. In the United States in 1790, by contrast, less than one-thirteenth had female household heads or householders.1 The incidence of female householding provides an important window on preindustrial American society. Its magnitude and ramiScations deserve analysis and discussion for at least four reasons. First, householder was a significant status, particularly because households were very important units of social and economic life in the preindustrial era. Householders served as the directors of the predominant institution of economic production. While not a primary category in thinking about the family, householding nevertheless was a consequence of other statuses that mattered more centrally, at least for men. Since newlywed couples established households, becoming a head (and wives were considered co-heads, especially with respect to matters that were internal to the household) conveyed independence from the control of parents. Indeed, the contrast between autonomy and dependence was at the heart of legal definitions and other perceptions of social roles in early modern Anglo-America. The category of female household heads thus is crucial for assessing one critical arena of social autonomy for women.2 Second, like their current counterparts, women who were particularly likely to head households in preindustrial England and America also were disproportionately prone to be impoverished. Consequently they were subjects for support from and intervention by agents beyond the household: informal aid from kin, charity from private individuals or voluntary groups, and poor relief from public authorities. As the wages and assets of these female household heads were lower than those enjoyed by male family heads, on average they were closer to poverty. Additionally, as women householders frequently had responsibility for the support of minor children, they shared their meager incomes with others, increasing the numbers facing poverty. A heterogeneous group, women who headed households had some stability of residence and thus status in the community. Some were even widows of means, who had the inherited resources and practical skills to support themselves and their families comfortably. But for many women familially unattached to the households of husbands or fathers, private troubles became, in many instances, public problems. The study of the incidence of female-headed households proS vides an indirect entry into the analysis of one large segment of the population of the poor of preindustrial society, a portion that was relatively larger in England than in America.