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III. The Ruling Class: A Crisis of Identity
- University of Virginia Press
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192 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution the issue of the bill with the virtue and patriotism of the Revolutionary struggle, writing: ‘‘Many of our fathers, many of ourselves, have fought and bled for the Independence of our country. Do not then expose us to sale.’’ Finally, employing the same transcendent justifications of God and Reason used by the Revolutionaries, he asked whether ‘‘God who made the white man and the black, left any record declaring us a di√erent species.’’ Of his own remarks, he noted: ‘‘They are the simple dictates of nature and need no apology.’’≥∑ In a speech to the Ladies’ Antislavery Society of Philadelphia, Forten directly invoked the Declaration of Independence, pointing out that freeing the slaves was equivalent to securing ‘‘a greater respect and obedience to Him who wills the happiness of all mankind, and who endowed them with life, and liberty, as conducive to that happiness.’’ The party wars of the 1780s and 1790s were now bearing cultural and intellectual fruit—a democratized political discourse that included non-elite participants publicly applying the broadened notion of liberty to their own interests and aspirations. III. The Ruling Class: A Crisis of Identity The excess of the passion for liberty, inflamed by the successful issue of the war, produced, in many people, opinions and conditions which could not be removed by reason nor restrained by government. —Benjamin Rush, Medical Inquiries and Observations, 1794 The period between 1786 and 1800 witnessed a growing countero √ensive against ‘‘usurpers’’ to liberty. There were two principal causes of this reaction. One was that the late colonial gentry had always taken for granted that they would remain in power in the post-Revolutionary world, but now were beginning to realize that it was no longer a certainty. The other was an increasing anxiety that the set of values which made up their distinctiveness and coherence as a class was eroding. They had built this distinctiveness around a certain ideal of liberty, in part inherited from Britain and in part a product of the Revolution. It presented them as progressive, enlightened, and benevolent rulers, destined to govern the new republic for usurpers and dupes 193 the foreseeable future. What they did not anticipate was that the constitutional debates of the1780s and the subsequent escalation of political rivalries would raise public awareness of various liberty-related issues to a point where the elite’s ability to control their meanings would come into question. The first and instinctive counterattack was directed at political populism. It was instinctive because there existed among the colonial upper class a long tradition of antipathy to such conduct. Laments were common against steps ‘‘many of the Members of Assemblies take to make themselves popular,’’ a dangerous conduct which ‘‘can activate a mighty and many headed Multitude .’’≥∏ The Revolution did not eliminate this aversion, but swept it under the carpet in order to promote a soaring, universalistic ideology, which initially was not seen as a threat to elite authority. But by the late 1780s many among the political class became alerted to the fact that the popular usage of liberty language had begun to blur the traces of conventional social distinctions originally contained in it. Nathan Dane, a delegate to Congress from Massachusetts, anxiously expressed the hope that this state of things would turn around soon, but his diagnosis was grim: ‘‘The revolution, popular harrangues made to e√ect it, and various circumstances have thrown us into extremes of disorder on the popular side. We have experienced the evils of a Government popular in its principles and too popular, on many occasions at least, in its administration.’’ The original idealism and enthusiasm for the idea of a new nation of upright citizens was now being dampened by a growing disillusionment. It has been suggested that this disillusionment came from the discovery that the ‘‘high hopes’’ of the revolutionaries did not find su≈cient reflection in the virtuous behavior of the people. But a closer look shows that the disappointment was not so much about too little virtue as about too much equality. ‘‘I myself have been an Advocate for a Government free as air; my Opinions have been established upon the belief, that my country men were virtuous, enlightened, and governed by a sense of Right and Wrong,’’ noted Rufus King in1786. He had assumed that ‘‘if our Republican Governments were subverted, it would be by the influence of commer[c]e...