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Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 4.1 (2006) 112-146


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Empire Transformed:

Britain in the American Classical Imagination, 1758-1783

Eran Shalev

Haifa University

The distinguished South Carolinian planter and merchant Henry Laurens, imprisoned in the Tower of London during the last years of the War for American Independence on charges of high treason against the British crown, had plenty of time to contemplate the origins and meaning of the enduring imperial contest. While awaiting judgment in the Tower, after he was caught on a boat sailing to Holland to negotiate a loan for his struggling republic, Laurens kept a prison journal into which he spent "many days in penciling large extracts from Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Throughout the journal, the former president of the South Carolina provincial congress compared the British and Roman Empires, and drew "parallels and reflexions from the conduct of Great Britain in the commencement and prosecution of the war against the American Colonies." As Laurens viewed it, the example of the demise of the Roman Empire paralleled "the impolicy and folly" of Britain's conduct, as well as her "injustice and cruelty of proceeding in the War." Laurens, in understanding and representing Britain in terms of the corrupt Roman Empire was by no means expressing an eccentric position, but rather drawing on a historical paradigm that Americans had been circulating for more than two decades.1

The transformation of the historical paradigm that Laurens articulated amounted to an intellectual revolution that took place in North America in the decades following the French and Indian War. Whereas colonists represented [End Page 112]


Click for larger view		 Figure 1
"Henry Laurens, esqr. President of the American Congress, 1778."Mezzotint by V. Green after the portrait by John Singleton Copley. Copley portrayed Laurens in a decidedly aristocratic manner when he executed this work in1782, shortly after Laurens was released from the Tower of London. Collectionsof the Winterthur Museum and Library.
[End Page 113]

Britain as a conquering, glorious, world-dominating Rome in the early 1760s, over the course of the next two decades they proceeded to characterize the metropole by using the image of a different Rome, the Rome of the corrupt tyranny of the most hated Caesars. Recognizing this rapid deterioration in the representations of Britain from heights of glory to depths of tyranny and madness provides a richer understanding of the ways in which the political and psychological separation from Britain became possible, acceptable, and finally inevitable. Furthermore, the ways in which Americans shed their British identity through transforming their classical imagination suggests possible meanings of the classicized representations patriots would produce throughout the War of Independence and beyond. Moreover, the trajectory of the process of "Nerofication," the deteriorating representations of Britain and imperial magistrates in terms of the Roman Empire, questions notions advocated by the so-called republican synthesizers of undisrupted domination of Whig ideas in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century. Indeed, by concentrating on the revolutionary classical discourse we may gain a better understanding of a largely overlooked framework through which civic humanistic ideology could be expressed and articulated. Focusing on the revolutionary use of antiquity, or on classical form rather than on republican content, reveals a remarkable historical hermeneutics and underscores the centrality of the classical discourse to our understanding of the American Revolution and its unlikely creation, the United States of America.

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During the Seven Years' War, the global fighting conducted by France and Britain was not confined to the fields of Mars. As a contemporary French journal concluded, "the future will scarcely believe it, but the war between the English and the French has been as lively on paper as on the high seas." One of the issues of the intellectual mêlées between France and Britain was the dispute over translatio imperii, or who was to be anointed as the new Rome. Early on in the war, after the French victory in Minorca, the Abbe Seran de la Tour published his Comparison of the conduct of the Carthagians...

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