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  • Does the Republic of Letters Have a Body?
  • Betsy Erkkila (bio)
Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early American Republic. Bruce Burgett. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 213 pp.

At its most radical the American Revolution empowered everybody. "[L]et the crown . . . be demolished, and scattered among the people whose right it is," Tom Paine asserted in Common Sense (98). In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the name of the American people: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." It is no coincidence that when Abigail Adams translated the Revolutionary language of rights, liberty, consent, and representation into a plea for the rights of women in marriage, family, and state, John Adams associated her request with the uprising of other bodies-"Children," "Apprentices," "Negroes," "Indians"-who were implicitly excluded from the abstract, disembodied, and universal language of personhood and rights that grounds the originary charter of the American republic. "As to your extraordinary Code of Laws, I cannot but laugh," John wrote in response to Adams's threat "to foment a Rebelion" among women. "We have been told that our Struggle has loosened the bands of Government every where. That Children and Apprentices were disobedient-that schools and Colledges were grown turbulent-that Indians slighted their Guardians and Negroes grew insolent to the Masters. But your Letter was the first Intimation that another Tribe more numerous and powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented." Recognizing the dangerous loosening of traditional bonds of rank and subordination brought by the revolutionary moment, John reasserts [End Page 115] the absolute power of patriarchy: "Depend upon it,We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems" (Adams Family 1: 370, 382). His bantering tone does not disguise his self-contradiction and his edginess. "Whence arises the Right of Men to govern the Women, without their consent?" he wrote only a month later to James Sullivan about proposed revisions in Massachusetts law. "Depend upon it, sir, it is dangerous to open So Fruitfull a Source of Controversy and Altercation. . . . There will be no End to it. New Claims will arise. Women will demand a Vote . . . and every Man,who has not a Farthing, will demand an equal Voice with any other in all Acts of State. It tends to confound and destroy all Distinctions, and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell" (Papers of John Adams 4: 211-12).

John Adams's fear of the uprising of everybody-that there would be "no End" to the "Controversy and Altercation" spawned by the founding language of rights, consent, and representation-is at the sources of revolutionary fantasy. The specter of the unruly body, its needs, desires, hungers, and excess, shadows the scene of revolution in the literature of the founding. For all its emphasis on a republic of reason, virtue, liberty, and law, the writing of the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period is often marked by scenes of bodiliness, corporeality, passion, and blood. In Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (1773), Phillis Wheatley grounds her authority to a speak as a patriot of American "Freedom" in her bodily experience as an enslaved "African." The "shocking spectacle" of a caged Negro, his eyes "picked out" by birds of prey and his body "covered with a multitude of wounds," erodes the orderly form and enlightened republican vision of the farmer's letters in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (178). The second part of Franklin's Autobiography, which was composed the year after the close of what Franklin called "the bloody Contest" with England, is wholly taken up with his "account" of his unsuccessful effort to quell the unruly impulses of the body: "Habit took the Advantage of Inattention. Inclination was sometimes too strong for Reason" (Autobiography 66). While Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia (1787) was written as an early national defense of a republican order grounded in virtue, liberty, and law, several sections of his narrative are focused on the lower body parts of...

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