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

Chapter 3: “Judge the Future by the Past ”

73 3 “Judge the Future by the Past” The Varieties of Historical Consciousness in Revolutionary America At the founDation of the classical discourse of the American Revolution lay a set of assumptions about history and its meaning. So effective was that language that by elaborating on their relation to, and the relevance of, the classics to revolutionary America, American patriots rendered the classical discourse as a distinct mode of historical thought. To better understand this innovative language, this chapter examines various ways through which patriots made use of the classical world and thus reflected and gave expression to revolutionary historical consciousness. Competing sets of assumptions about the nature of history and America’s place within it emerged through the classical discourse during the crucible of Revolution, especially in 1774–76, years of decision in which notions of America as a discrete political entity began to cohere.Within this discourse, two competing paradigms reflected radically different understandings of the past, its relation to the present as well as disparate expectations from America’s national future—that is, they consisted of two distinct historical consciousnesses. Remarkably, those two attitudes toward time and history follow a geographic division: While southerners, mostly elite planters, contemplating ancient history expressed common civic-humanistic notions of time as cyclical and corrupting, northerners discoursing the classics habitually held to a view of history derived from reformed Christian rome reborn on Western shores 74 exegesis, which indicated a tendency toward millennial optimism.1 The middle colonies-turned-states demonstrated in accordance to their trademark religious and ethnic diversity an intellectual middle ground that accommodated and manifested both schools of thought. Southerners and, occasionally, Americans from the middle coloniesturned -states related to the ancients by believing that they shared a common fate with the republics of antiquity; they understood their revolution, for better or worse, as the latest link in a succession of republics that had unfolded through time and followed similar historical patterns. As such, they were obliged to face the question of decline of political entities.While this view of time originating in the south conformed to contemporary continental republican thinking about the cyclicality of history, northerners , mostly New Englanders, displayed a novel attitude toward time by applying reformed Protestant modes of historical interpretation to classical narratives. Within this forward-looking framework, northern patriots expected to surpass their ancient predecessors and succeed where their republican ancestors had failed. Ultimately, these two distinct visions inspired a revolution in which southerners could not deny that America was working within a historical framework and northerners believed that America was destined to escape time and history. Examined together, they seem to have shaped not a single “revolutionary consciousness”but two distinct conceptions of time, of history, and perhaps even of “revolution.” Recognizing this double historical consciousness may modify our understanding of the timing of the development of an American national culture, of distinct northern and southern worldviews. Indeed, the dichotomy of the distinct American cultural regions that we know as the North and the South may have yet unexplored origins in the revolutionary experience, long before the crucible of the antebellum decades and the Civil War, as scholars have commonly assumed. Finally, recognizing the startling differences in revolutionary attitudes toward time will provide a deeper understanding of the variety of historical dispositions that animated revolutionaries in their drive to create an America republic. The belief in recurring cycles in cosmic and human affairs has far-reaching trajectories in Western thought and can be traced from pre-Socratic thinkers to influential twentieth-century writers.2 Cyclical paradigms, in 75 “Judge the Future by the Past” which time moved through a repetitive cycle of successive periods, often implied an imperative decline of social conditions as well as a decrease in human physical, intellectual, and spiritual qualities.3 Typically the cycle would start in a harmonious golden age, followed by decline and destruction , only to be completed at the point of renewal at the gates of another blissful age. This cyclical view of history is commonly associated with the classical world’s attitude toward, and understanding of, time, in contrast to a predominantly linear and successive experience driving toward the eschaton, prescribed by Judeo-Christian temporal sensibilities.4 Cultured southern patriots repeatedly articulated notions of Roman decline as they were contemplating the question of national independence during 1774–76.5 Historical patterns of rise and decline were entrenched in republican thought from the...