Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic

Chapter 5: Cato Americanus

151 5 Cato Americanus Classical Pseudonyms and the Ratification of the Federal Constitution On SePtember 27, 1787, Cato spoke: “You have already, in Common with the rest of your countrymen, the citizens of other states, given to the world astonishing evidence of your greatness—you have fought under peculiar circumstances, and was successful against a powerful nation.” He admonished, “Beware of those who wish to influence your passions . . . in principles of politics, as well as in religious faith, every man has to think for himself.”1 Caesar furiously replied within three days: “If that demagogue had talents to throw light on the subject of Legislation, why did he not offer them when the Convention was in session? . . . [T]here is no virtue nor patriotism in such conduct. . . . [I] urge you to behave like sensible freemen.”2 Cato sharply retorted on October 11, “For what did you open the veins of your citizens and expend their treasure? . . . [T]his Caesar mocks your dignity.”3 A mere week later, Brutus joined the dispute. “A free republic cannot succeed over a country of such immense extent” he claimed. “The Grecian republics were of small extent; so also was that of the Romans.”4 Cato? Caesar? Brutus? Did they not die centuries before the last decades of the eighteenth century? They did, yet their voices clamored in the debates over the ratification of the federal Constitution throughout 1787– 88.The widespread use of classical names as textual alter egos for lesser and rome reborn on Western shores 152 greater American writers in changing historical circumstances stand at the center of this chapter. In earlier chapters, we saw that revolutionaries conceived their endeavors with a remarkable classical intensity that produced a variety of sensibilities through which they came to terms with time and history. In this chapter, we will see how, during the process of ratifying the new Constitution, participants in the political discourse plundered classical history to support their arguments and partisan points of view. The long and contentious months of ratification witnessed not only an extensive and calculated exploitation of the ancient example, but also the zenith of a particular genre: the classical pseudonym. Numerous essays, mainly in newspapers printed and reprinted up and down the Atlantic coast, were signed with classical names, preaching for and against the adoption of the proposed Constitution. The following pages examine the texts of writers who assumed classical masks on an unprecedented scale as they pitched themselves into political battle and analyze the changes and continuities the classical language endured in the wake of the Critical Period. We thus continue tracing the different modes through which lateeighteenth -century Americans conceived of, and represented, historical time through the histories of Greece and Rome. We shall come to see how the intense use of classical pseudonyms in numerous squibs, fillers, commentaries, and pamphlets published throughout 1787–88 articulated yet another nuanced temporal mode in which history was understood in the exact moment of the forging of the American federacy as a stage for embodiment and reenactment. Here we will recognize an additional venue through which citizens of the young United States represented the classical polities—first and foremost Rome—and America as occurrences that were part of a single historical momentum.The classical pseudonyms used in the debate over the ratification of the federal Constitution demonstrate how time and history were conceived and represented as stages for modern performances of scenes that took place in a long-gone classical past. The actors in those scenes were, once more, Americans clad in borrowed, if literary, togas. Although pseudonyms and their subset,classical pseudonyms,were a common rhetorical strategy in the early modern Anglophone world, the semiotic profundity of the literary act of posing as ancients in the American 153 Cato Americanus context has received surprisingly little scholarly attention.5 Scholars have tended to mention classical pen names briefly,usually when referring to the pamphlets and essays selected as texts to be analyzed.6 Much less attention has been paid to the reasons for, and consequences of, adopting classical pseudonyms.The following inquiry into the meanings of the pseudonyms used during ratification will provide a thicker description of the complex and obscure phenomenon of moderns’ conversing through the totems of the past. This description will demonstrate the complex relationship of rhetoric and history—and, hence, the rhetoric of history—extensively elaborated during the process of ratification. Focusing on classical...