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III. Claims of Liberty Claim Their Authors
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152 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution III. Claims of Liberty Claim Their Authors Ye men of sense and virtue—Ye advocates for American Liberty, rouse up and espouse the cause of Humanity and general Liberty. Bear a testimony against the vice which degrades human nature, and dissolves that universal tie of benevolence which should connect all the children of men together in one great Family.—The plant of liberty is of so tender a Nature, that it cannot thrive long in the neighborhood of slavery. —Benjamin Rush, An Address to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements in America upon Slave-Keeping, 1773 We are often tempted to view the lofty statements about virtue and freedom made by Revolutionary leaders with the knowledge of hindsight—as cases of self-fashioning or political propaganda that should be separated from social realities. We would be wrong to make such a separation. Although their liberty talk was certainly not a mirror reflection of the factual state of things, there did exist one peculiar sphere where facts and behavior came to reflect the talk. It was in the area of cultural feedback, where certain symbolic claims made by the speaking class appropriated the speakers, compelling them to act in ways that reflected these claims. For instance, they may have invented ‘‘the people’’ as an abstract entity, but once this notion successfully impressed itself upon the collective mind, they found themselves under no small pressure to demonstrate that the virtues which they claimed entitled them to rule in the name of the people were indeed authentic. They had identified with these virtues as a class long before the Revolution, but now this identity became part of the new political ideology. Attributes such as honor, disinterestedness, and public virtue were no longer just indicators of refinement mostly confined to gentry circles, but became traits that the much larger stage of public opinion expected them to demonstrate. We are all familiar with Washington’s uncommon care not to say or do anything that might blemish his virtuous image among the people. Claims to such upright qualities thus bound the claimers, often obliging them to live up to their selfascribed qualities in practice, both before the audience of their peers and before a broader public. The familiar question of why their actions were at the sway of symbolic power 153 odds with their words has been ubiquitous, but it is also worth asking to what extent these principles claimed the leaders themselves, a√ecting their behavior and decisions. This influence of cultural identity on politics has not always been well understood. For some scholars, the Revolutionaries’ claims of ‘‘virtue’’ were not only historically meaningless but even ‘‘too disgusting for detailed discussion ,’’ because they came from the mouths of slaveholders, speculators, and power-seekers. Authors influenced by the political economy of class have tended to see such claims as mere rationalizations, secondary to the real interests of power and therefore without possible significance as a force toward any progressive end. There are two problems with this approach. The first is that America was not a Panglossian paradise and as we examine early modern liberty we can and should study only the real (often not pretty) world, not the one wished for. The second is that power-seekers rarely sought pure power as such; rather, they desired that which power bestowed—a unique identity and a privileged position in society. Virtue made sense for those who claimed it because it made sense of who they were. What should interest us is the fact that once they became identifiable on the public stage through such attributes, they also became dependent on a continued attachment to these characteristics, and on cultivating and defending them as their distinctive features. The cult of disinterestedness may serve as an example. Once developed as a peculiar quality of the new, republican political class, it became much more than a rhetorical device. In many instances it compellingly obliged them to play the part, or risk ostracism and disgrace for not living up to the consecrated norms. Attributes appropriated their owners. For instance, Thomas Paine, who otherwise questioned many premises of the old social order, thought it immensely important that all his political activities were seen as impartial, and he took pains to let the world know that he was not merely serving his personal agenda. ‘‘If, in the course of more than seven...