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67 chapter two The Dilemmas of American Nationalism V ictory in the Revolutionary War was greeted with jubilation and a big sigh of relief. But Americans who lived through the war won something they had not bargained for, for victory required cooperation across far-flung communities and between people who had little in common besides their foes. The colonists who tangled with the British received more than military training. As they shared fears and prosecuted a war, they got the experience of working together toward a common cause: in short, the experience of being a people. The rhetoric fueling revolution helped colonists imagine a national community that blurred the lines between here and there, my backyard and yours, Massachusetts and Virginia, New York and Georgia. “You know (for some of you are men of abilities and reading) or ought to know” Noah Webster observed, “a principle of fear, in times of war, operates more powerfully in binding together the States which have a common interest, than all the parchment contracts on earth.”1 After years of trying to forge a more unified 68 Chapter Two national community in the 1760s and 1770s, Americans came together in 1776 to confront a common enemy. This national community, however, was unstable—and while victory meant independence, the cessation of hostilities with Britain also resulted in a sociological step backward as Americans returned home to their families, their kinship in arms expired. During the war, citizens cooperated to survive. Once independence was won and peace restored, however, the American community fractured as citizens once again put local interests before national concerns. The immediate postwar years were characterized by weakness, division, and a public debate over who was really in charge. The Revolutionary War drew lines between Americans and Englishmen. This relatively broad and ambiguous concept of an “American” worked during the war. When it was time to build a government and determine who would rule, however, the gentry believed that it was necessary to draw a second, internal distinction between the people and those who would govern them. While they happily shared the costs of battle with the lower classes and democratic masses, educated elites demanded deference from common folks and did not plan on sharing the reins of government with them once the war was won.2 The transition from revolution to independence was a rocky one, for while elites demanded deference, the Revolutionary War nursed in the masses a feeling of political entitlement, an insistence on popular sovereignty, and a profound belief in political and material equality. With a motley crew of sailors, slaves, free blacks, artisans, merchants, farmers, and elites shooting, hollering, and dying together to achieve independence , the Revolutionary War exhibited strong democratic tendencies.3 As one of the Revolutionary War’s first historians, Mercy Otis Warren, observed in her 1805 History of the Rise, Progress, and Termination of the American Revolution, the Revolutionary War represented “one of the most extraordinary eras in the history of man” because it resulted in an “experiment of levelling all ranks, and destroying all subordination.”4 The Revolutionary War was indeed a democratic “experiment,” for the popular politics, widespread cooperation, and potent rhetorics of revolutionary documents, including Common Sense and the Declaration of Independence , made it possible to ponder more democratic governments. Though Thomas Paine did not use the word “democracy,” in Common The Dilemmas of American Nationalism 69 Sense he expressed faith in the ability of common folks to make a meaningful contribution to public affairs, and he imagined a postwar America that was a more democratic place in which citizens assumed the reins of government . As Common Sense threw down the gauntlet against monarchy, it also praised popular government. Obliterating the hereditary distinctions of monarchy was the goal of the Revolutionary War; to ensure that monarchy would never rear its ugly head in America again, Paine called on his readers to metaphorically smash the king’s crown and distribute the pieces among themselves, “whose right it is.”5 Paine conceptualized the American Revolution as a symbolic act of decapitation in the name of democracy, and all across the colonies, Americans enacted his words. By July 1776, colonists had come to see the destruction of their father, the king, as inevitable—meaning that the Revolutionary War exhibited characteristics of both an oedipal conflict and a coming-of-age rite.6 In the aftermath of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the symbolic patricide committed in Common Sense was matched by physical acts...

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