Old World, New World: America and Europe in the Age of Jefferson

Introduction

1 Throughout his career Thomas Jefferson imagined an impassable boundary between Europe and America, Old World and New.To avoid the “broils of the European nations,”he wrote to Elbridge Gerry in 1797,he wished “there were an ocean of fire between us and the old world.” As the new nation teetered on the brink of war with Britain in 1812, he again hoped to insulate it from European entanglements: “The meridian of the mid-Atlantic should be the line of demarkation between war and peace.” Jefferson understood that the two “worlds” could never be separated, and his imaginary boundaries implicitly acknowledged the weakness and vulnerability of the new United States within the system of European states. Because there was no recognized place for neutrals—no safe harbor for non-belligerents—European wars inevitably threatened American independence .Victory in the Revolution demonstrated the new nation’s dependence on foreign alliances. Jefferson’s isolationist fantasies testify to his “realistic” assessment of America’s insecurity in a war-prone world.There would be no United States without war, but war jeopardized its continuing existence. American independence was the unintended consequence of Patriot agitation for constitutional reform within the British empire. On the eve of the Revolution, American provincial societies were more self-consciously British than they ever had been. Burgeoning transatlantic commercial connections promoted a cultural “Anglicization,” and growing wealth enabled increasing numbers of Americans to return to the metropolis. The deepening political crisis that destroyed the empire was spurred by the frustrated aspirations of provincial elites who exulted in their English rights and British identity. Patriot resistance leaders were understandably reluctant to kill their king and so dissolve “the political bands which have connected them” to their former fellow subjects in Britain. Introduction peter s. onuf s Peter S. Onuf 2 Escaping British despotism meant embracing the European balance of power,gaining recognition and more tangible support from the “other powers of the earth,” which would enable the new nation “to assume . . . the separate & equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature’s God entitle them.” More direct trading connections with Europe would bene fit Europeans as well as Americans.The free trade envisioned by Thomas Paine in Common Sense and by John Adams in the Model Treaty promised a more integrated, prosperous, and progressive trading world, freed from the shackles of British mercantilism. In their cosmopolitan vision the invidious distinctions that defined Old World and New would dissolve as the distance between them diminished. American revolutionaries insisted that the happy “mediocrity” of fortunes and the absence of an aristocratic ruling class provided the most durable foundation for the progress of civilization. Situated on the edge of the empire, Americans could see its defects clearly. Provincial Patriots were driven to resistance by their conviction that the rights of Englishmen remained in full force throughout the empire and rejected the prevailing metropolitan assumption that “rights”necessarily diminished on the imperial periphery. Appropriating and elaborating a republican critique of the British constitution, revolutionaries believed their “political science” would constitute a critical contribution to mankind’s future happiness. The great powers of Europe undeniably had achieved a higher level of civility than the new societies across the Atlantic, but the prevalence of corruption, luxury, and privilege—their radically imperfect constitutions— jeopardized their future progress. Jefferson and his fellow revolutionaries could thus depict the British metropolis as degenerate, recasting provincial defects as virtues and so overcoming,or at least assuaging,their sense of cultural inferiority.Perhaps,as Bishop George Berkeley had famously predicted in 1725,“the Course of Empire”would indeed move “Westward.” John Adams acknowledged the new nation’s continuing cultural deficit in a famous letter to his wife, Abigail: “I must study Politicks and War that my sons may have liberty to study Mathematicks and Philosophy. My sons ought to study Mathematicks and Philosophy, Geography, natural History, Naval Architecture, navigation, Commerce and Agriculture, in order to give their Children a right to study Painting, Poetry, Musick, Architecture, Statuary, Tapestry and Porcelaine.” Many revolutionaries had sacrificed their lives,and others their ambitions,so that subsequent generations might achieve ever-higher levels of civility. Americans would not simply recapitulate the progress of European civilization, however, for Adams’s children and grandchildren would be building on a solid and durable republican Introduction 3 foundation. As civilization reached its highest stage of development in the New...