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  • C. Dallett Hemphill (bio)
Sarah Knott . Sensibility and the American Revolution. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. xiii + 338 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $24.95 (paper).

Sarah Knott's book takes on a key task of the American Revolution, the need to imagine new social relations to accompany the new frame of republican government. To accomplish this, she explores the print and manuscript discussions of the kind of self thought necessary to a self-governing society. This was the "sensible" self in the late-eighteenth-century sense of the word: that is, the person sensitive to the needs of others as much as to his or her own needs. Knott's central contribution lies in uncovering an important contemporary alternative to the selfish liberal self posited by John Locke et al. or the virtuous self of the classical republican school, both of which have dominated our ideas of the self understood by the nation's founders.

Knott thus addresses a question that all historians must tackle in this period: how was society to hold together and not dissolve into chaos once the order provided by a patriarchal hierarchy of orders was dismantled? Knott describes one of the era's answers in sensibility and the ameliorated social relations it was thought to make possible. Her book is a guided tour to the "genealogy" of sensibility, not only in the dislocating political revolution but also in the atomizing competition inherent in the growth of commerce and the rapid birth of consumer society happening at the same time (p. 12). She shows the print discourse where sensibility was explained and rehearsed, ranging from medical books and lectures to sentimental novels to newspaper debates extending from the mundane to the Federalist papers. Along the way, she gives voice to a varied group of "sentimentalists," those sympathetic to the project and to each other. These men and women shared a "way of understanding and being in the world" that was valuable at this particular moment; sensibility was, for them, part of an attempt at social revolution (p. 20). Although she argues that "the sentimental project" ebbed after a high tide in the era of Constitution-making, she notes that the various reform movements of the [End Page 425] antebellum era were indebted to its optimism about the power of sensitive folks to remake society for the better.

Throughout, Knott treats a variety of themes that are useful in connecting her work to the larger literature—and understanding—of the period. The book is clearly about an "Atlantic world" wherein British ideas and immigrants and a North American setting merged with consequences for culture on both sides of the ocean. Knott usefully keeps hers "a story of transnational contingency and struggle, not nationalist teleology." At the same time, she notes how sensibility, clearly "an element of the cultural integration of the white Atlantic world," was also a means of "internal differentiation and colonial independence"(p. 17). A key form of internal differentiation was class, and Knott's account of sensibility as the imaginary of a rising middle class adds to scholars' growing appreciation of this class dimension of Revolutionary-era society by pointing out that sensibility gave a new "sentimental edge to older assertions of middling merit"(p. 50). Knott ties her story to the histories of the military struggle and the creation of the new government, by showing how belief in the power of sensibility served officers who were striving for cohesion in the new army and founders who sought to lay groundwork for the same in the new republic. She also insists throughout, however, on the tensions and contradictions of sensibility and the stubborn questions of inclusion or exclusion represented by pressures from women and blacks. The resulting fragility helps explain how French excesses and British criticisms ultimately brought this chapter of the history of sensibility—that of the faith in its regenerating power in the new American society—to an end in the 1790s.

These recurring themes are played out in the book's sensible (in the twenty-first-century sense of the word) three...

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