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Chapter One. How Enemyship Became Common Sense
- Michigan State University Press
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33 chapter one How Enemyship Became Common Sense I t is one of the most famous lines in American history: echoed in movies ; recited by schoolchildren. On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry told his audience at St. John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, to “Give me liberty or give me death.” Like many episodes in American mythology, this defining moment might not have happened. The text of Henry’s speech did not survive, and Americans, at the very least, learned about Henry’s words only in the early nineteenth century.1 Apocryphal or not, Henry’s words color how we remember the Revolutionary War: as an idealistic act of daring will. In turn, Henry’s words encapsulate something essential about what it means to be an American—or at least about how Americans like to think of themselves. American history is the history of the unconditional “can-do,” of stepping up, of carpe diem, of betting big against long odds and taking down the house. The biggest gamble was the first, a revolution against the mighty British for the highest stakes: liberty or death. The story of the American Revolution as Americans learned it in 34 Chapter One the nineteenth century, and as we learn it today, is a story of the happy marriage of transcendental ideals with the steely determination to confront tyranny no matter the cost. With pluck and grit, Americans willed themselves to victory, nationhood, and liberty. The primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, remembered things somewhat differently. The Revolutionary War was of course about ideals, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But alongside those ideals was a powerful emotion spurring Americans on to battle: fear. In his 1821 Autobiography, Jefferson recalled that the working union forged during the American Revolution was premised not so much on alluring promises of liberty, but instead on the colonies’ shared recognition of the dangers posed by Great Britain . “During the war of Independence,” he noted, “while the pressure of an external enemy hooped us together, and their enterprises kept us necessarily on the alert, the spirit of the people, excited by danger, was a supplement to the Confederation, and urged them to zealous exertions, whether claimed by that instrument, or not.” Things quickly fell apart, however, for “when peace and safety were restored, and every man became engaged in useful and profitable occupation, less attention was paid to the calls of Congress.”2 According to Jefferson, an “external enemy” “hooped” Americans together, and therefore the colonial war effort—and the rudimentary forms of federated colonial government—were possible only because of colonists’ shared fears of mutual enemies. For the third president of the United States, Americans became Americans when “excited by danger.” Once “peace and safety were restored,” Americans stopped being Americans and became New Yorkers and Virginians again. Putting the shared fears of Americans at center stage allows us to see the Revolutionary War from a slightly different angle: not just as an economic , political, or ideological conflict, but as a rhetorical one in which proponents of revolution struggled to bring their reluctant fellows along with them, and then, once the war had begun, to keep morale high and the guns shooting. In turn, by focusing on this pivotal moment, we can probe rhetorical forms and patterns of persuasion that have long been central to the American experience, in war and peace. To better understand how Americans were “hooped” together in 1776, in this chapter I offer a detailed rhetorical analysis of Thomas Paine’s How Enemyship Became Common Sense 35 Common Sense. In the able judgment of Bernard Bailyn, Paine’s work was “the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution , and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language.”3 Paine’s genius was found both in style and form. Paine understood that if he did not write in a style accessible to everyday people, then he would not reach them—and thus Common Sense was noteworthy for its rough but shimmering prose. Common Sense was also noteworthy for its rhetorical structure, which, following Paine, I label “enemyship.” Paine’s enemyship wove together divergent fears and heightened them to a degree that demanded action. In turn, we should study the structure of persuasive tracts like Common Sense because arrangement is central to the practice of rhetoric. Many Americans who read Common Sense copied Paine’s language. Some even acted out the more dramatic scenes of the tract...