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  • Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the Revolution
  • C. Dallett Hemphill
Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power and the Coming of the Revolution. By Nicole Eustace (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2008. 624 pp., $45.00).

At 624 pages, Nicole Eustace’s Passion is the Gale may fairly be said to sweep the terrain clean of previous attempts to describe the emotional history of colonial Americans. In the process, she reveals a new landscape for the pivotal events leading to American independence. From the opening lines, one perceives that this will be a path-breaking work. In beautifully clear writing, Eustace carefully sets out to chart the power dynamics she believes are revealed by emotional exchanges. In brief, she describes a shift from an early eighteenth-century Anglo elite understanding that their refined emotional expression entitled them to rule over those devoid either of emotion or ofemotional control, to a revolutionary-era sentiment that emotions were part of human nature and an important basis for universal natural rights. With ambition, she sets out to examine both statements about emotion and the statements made by actual emotional exchanges. To accomplish this, she narrows her focus to a single colony, Pennsylvania.

Eustace begins with the Pennsylvania reception of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, which made an unusually positive brief for the primacy of emotion in human life. She describes the spreading influence of this essay over the middle decades of the eighteenth century, as colonial Americans gradually warmed to its suggestion of the universality and efficacy of human emotion. She then moves through fascinating chapters on the four most commonly discussed emotions in this culture: love, anger, sympathy and grief. In careful examinations of the vocabulary of emotion employed in various forms of discourse and deployed in various actual encounters, she points out patterns that both reinforce and refine our ideas of various relations of power in the colonies. The diversity of the Pennsylvania population allows her to examine the dynamics of emotional exchanges between Native Americans and British colonists, men and women, Quakers and Presbyterians, blacks and whites, parents and children. These chapters on specific emotions are interspersed with and followed by several that examine emotional exchanges in the rhetoric accompanying key events leading to the Revolution: The Seven Years’ War, the Paxton crisis, the Stamp Act resistance, and the Declaration of Independence. Here she is able to show how colonists asserted the vocabularies they had developed in day-to-day relations to make effective emotional statements of their status and to compel desired emotional responses in their adversaries. [End Page 735]

Some chapters are more rewarding than others. Eustace’s chapters on social feeling and the Paxton boys crisis, for example, seem sprawling. While they perform work necessary for later chapters, they might have benefited from further editing. But the reader is amply compensated on arrival at other junctures. In the chapter on love, Eustace offers a fascinating counterpoint between courtship and political relations. Her argument that the colonists used voluntary love to cement power relations provides a needed bridge between the traditional world where identity was mostly social and a new world of individualism. She ends up with a new reading of Locke, who in promoting marriage rather than fatherhood as the model for politics, provided a model wherein new ideas of consent could be mixed with persisting hierarchies (148–149). Her final chapter, wherein Eustace makes multiple contributions to our understanding of the American Revolution through her careful analysis of the changing emotional register of protest, is especially masterful. She adds a new dimension of understanding to the American slavery/American freedom paradox by demonstrating a widespread belief that white patriots were imbued with a “spirit” lacking in those who were inherently “slavish,” and thus justly enslaved (388). Her description of the pan-colonial deployment of grief displays to protest the Stamp Act—a means that was properly submissive and yet very effective in eliciting an appropriately compassionate British response—is also revelatory (410 ff.). Eustace argues convincingly that sympathy played an “elemental” role in uniting colonists in protest, and that the appeal to shared emotions long observed...

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