A Republic of Men. Mark E. KannЧитать онлайн книгу.
the end, which the means? Let the most scrupulous expositors of delegated powers, let the most inveterate objectors against those exercised by the convention answer these questions. Let them declare whether it was of most importance to the happiness of the people of America that the Articles of Confederation should be disregarded, and an adequate government be provided; or that an adequate government should be omitted, and the Articles of Confederation preserved.” Alexander Hamilton added that necessity sometimes demanded that a representative oppose the will of the people to achieve the public good: “Instances might be cited in which conduct of this kind has saved the people from very fatal consequences of their own mistakes and has procured lasting monuments of their gratitude to the men who had courage and magnanimity enough to serve them at the period of their displeasure.”38 Necessity, expediency, exigency, and fortune were opportunities for great men to assert a manly prerogative, regardless of law or adverse public opinion, in the expectation that, eventually, they would be vindicated by the timeless fraternity called posterity.
Many founders believed that most American men had the potential to be farmers and fighters who invested, risked, and shed blood to secure liberty and earn membership in society. It was this potential that Jefferson honored in his remarks on Shays’s Rebellion and the French Revolution. However, most founders feared that the male majority was not qualified to recognize necessity, address it, or meet its challenges. Consider George Washington’s reaction to the 1783 “Newburgh Addresses,” by which his officers threatened a military takeover if they did not receive their due compensation. Washington warned the officers not to assert a dangerous prerogative that would “open the flood gates to civil discord and deluge our rising empire in blood.”39 If the “gentlemen” of Washington’s officer corps could participate in an anarchic plot, it was even more likely that common citizens and soldiers could be seduced by demagogues into factional bloodshed. Washington’s sharp reaction to Shays’s Rebellion expressed his fear that disorderly men might destroy American liberty and fraternity.
John Adams hoped that most men were “too economical of their blood” to join mobs or follow demagogues; he hoped that most men would become habituated to deferring to the “better sort” of men. However, recognizing the better sort and distinguishing worthy leaders was a controversial matter. Approaching the presidential election of 1800, for example, Alexander Hamilton condemned candidate Jefferson as a dangerous demagogue. Hamilton argued that the possibility of “an atheist in religion and a fanatic in politics” assuming “the helm of the state” constituted a crisis that made it necessary for leaders not to be “overscrupulous” about “a strict adherence to ordinary rules” to prevent Jefferson’s election. He implied that a few exceptional men were needed to wield nation-saving prerogative. Jefferson won the election only to demonstrate that he, too, was not overscrupulous about adhering to ordinary rules. When he was president, Gary Schmitt observes, Jefferson advanced a “doctrine of extra-constitutional executive prerogative” in the name of domestic order and national security.40
Why would ordinary American men who were skeptical of authority become loyal followers of powerful national leaders? One reason was that men and leaders were bound together by the living memory of the revolutionary fraternity of battle. Annual Fourth of July sermons and orations reminded men of their noble struggle, and fraternal groups such as the Society of Cincinnati and the Freemasons provided settings for veterans to sustain their military ties. Another reason was that men and leaders were united by consensual norms of manhood. They agreed that men ought to strive for independence, head families, and fit into fraternal society. Moreover, they believed that individuals who excelled at manly virtues, such as self-sacrifice in the service of independence and the public good, deserved to be recognized, admired, and elevated to national leadership status. That was why William Emerson praised Washington as “a man among men” as well as “a hero among heroes [and] a statesman among statesmen.”41
Still, the founders felt that unity between men and leaders was always fragile. Individuals risked their manly independence whenever they conformed to group norms or deferred to authority. The founders tried to minimize the risk by portraying leaders as manly men, citizens’ choice, hesitant public servants, and benign governors. Hopefully, most men would trust officeholders who exhibited manly merit and acted the part of affectionate father figures. Another problem was that women potentially subverted men’s attachment to fraternal society and leadership. Wives might keep husbands from militia musters that were excuses for drinking and gambling. Or women might urge men to stay at home to support and protect them rather than do their civic duty as soldiers by marching off to war. One reason the founders felt justified in perpetuating patriarchal power was to defeat women’s efforts to resolve conflicts between domesticity and fraternity in favor of parochial family interests regardless of the public good.42
A fourth rule in the founders’ grammar of manhood was that worthy men fit into a civic fraternity led by meritorious men. Worthy men were independent farmers and citizen soldiers who suffered pain, risked blood, and underwent self-sacrifice to earn membership in fraternal society. They were also modest men who recognized the need for leadership to address the crises of modernity, deferred to manly leaders, and sometimes consented to leadership prerogative in the service of posterity. Unworthy men were selfish men who demanded the liberty to indulge their passions, viewed others as instruments to fulfill their personal goals, and supported demagogues who pandered to public opinion, fostered factionalism, and sought power to do infamous deeds. Like men isolated in intergenerational time and continental space, those outside the flow of fraternal society and leadership threatened ruin to the republic of men.
Manhood and the Republic
The final chapter in the founders’ autobiographical story was the one that Abraham Lincoln resurrected in his Gettysburg Address. That was the episode in which our fathers “brought forth,” “conceived,” and “consecrated” a “new nation.” The founders saw themselves as more than virtuous men restoring republican rights or rational men negotiating a social contract; they also portrayed themselves as fertile men who procreated an organic republic. One pre-revolutionary expression of their belief in political animation was John Tucker’s 1771 portrait of an ideal American polity:
The political state would be like a body in full health. The constitutional laws, preserved inviolate, would like strong bones and sinews support and steady the regular frame. Supreme and subordinate rulers duly performing their proper functions would be like the greater and lesser arteries, keeping up their proper tone and vibrations; and justice, fidelity, and every social virtue would, like the vital fluid, run without obstruction and reach, refresh, and invigorate the most minute and distant parts. While the multitude of subjects, yielding in their various places and relations a ready and cheerful obedience would, like the numerous yet connected veins, convey back again the recurrent blood to the great fountain of it and the whole frame be vigorous, easy, and happy.43
The founders depicted themselves as life-givers who, by 1776, had committed themselves to giving birth to a new republic. However, the creation of political life presumed the possibility of political death. American dreams of political fatherhood were premised on Britain’s political degeneration, and the founders knew that their republic was vulnerable to the same fate. Though some founders imagined linear progress, most agreed, “It is with states as it is with men, they have their infancy, their manhood, and their decline.”44
Many founders spoke as if they were giving birth to a living, breathing, pulsating republic. During what Samuel Miller commemorated as “our country’s natal hour,” John Adams anticipated parturition in June 1776 by announcing that the “throes” of Congress soon “will usher in the birth of a fine boy.” Mercy Otis Warren saw a bright future for “an infant nation at once arisen to the vigor of manhood,” but others feared for the Republic’s health. In 1782, a Bostonian worried, “How humiliating would it be to have our independence, just brought to birth, fail for want of strength to be delivered.” A year later, Washington likened the states to “young heirs come a little prematurely perhaps to a large inheritance.” But Warren remained optimistic. She was joyful that the “young republic . . . had rapidly passed through the grades of youth and puberty and was fast arriving to the age of