Rethinking Early American Thought

In three recent books, scholars of early America pose the question: "What were they thinking?" Jonathan Beecher Field explores Rhode Island dissidents and their metropolitan readers. Eran Shalev investigates American patriots' use of the classics. Seth Cotlar unearths radical ideas shared by newspaper editors in the 1790s. Together, the books add to our understanding of the transnational nature of thought and argument across centuries of colonial, early republican, and early national history. The books also offer the opportunity to watch three skilled scholars grappling with the problem of how to think about thought.

Cotlar and Shalev are trained as historians, Field as a literary scholar. All take printed texts as their sources, but each makes a different kind of argument about the relationship between those texts and the true object of his study. Shalev seems the most at ease. His goal is "to understand American patriots' uses of the world of classical antiquity as a distinct way in which they thought of and through history" (3). Drawing deftly on the work of Caroline Winterer and accounts of the spread of print culture, Shalev efficiently establishes his case that classical mythology and history, usually in translation and sometimes in visual form, were broadly available both to American elites and to the middling sorts. Shalev then thoroughly explores the mental world these classical sources helped to create. Republican Rome, he argues, "more than any other polity dominated revolutionary Americans' historical reflection" (15). Shalev makes clear that he is not interested in discussing how the uses of antiquity caused or won the Revolutionary War. Rather, he argues that it is necessary to understand "the immense influence of history on late-eighteenth-century Americans" in order to see correctly "the ways in which patriots represented, made sense of, and acted out their political endeavors" (35). Shalev takes for granted that if he explores these ideas persuasively and cogently, his readers will care about them. He is right.

Among the achievements of Shalev's Rome Reborn on Western Shores is to historicize time itself. Accustomed to typological thinking and immersed in classical imagery, American patriots found "the world of the ancient Mediterranean . . . as vivid and recognizable as the world in which they were living" (4). Washington was not simply like Cato, but was a Cato; later, as Americans sought to halt the nation's descent into the mundane, he became a Cincinnatus. George III was a Caesar, Nathaniel Greene a Scipio. "Roman history," Shalev asserts, "was 'the original' through which the annals of the American 'picture' could be read" (102).

The hope or fear of reliving well-known events from the classical period guided actions and shaped the Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary eras. Well known, of course, did not necessarily mean well understood. Another virtue of this book is Shalev's willingness to study thought at work in its natural habitat. Americans' classical knowledge was, for the most part, limited and distorted, but it thrived and functioned within the environment that shaped it. Molded within colonial circumstances and rhetorical frameworks, it was made useful by its very idiosyncrasies, vagueness, and lack of nuance. The southern variant, Shalev persuasively argues, developed in a different environment and so looked rather different from the northern. Whereas in the South, "elite planters . . . expressed common civic-humanistic notions of time as cyclical and corrupting, northerners . . . habitually held to a view of history derived from reformed Christian exegesis, which indicated a tendency toward millennial optimism" (73-74). Northerners adopted an exceptionalist view of American possibility while southerners settled in to watch the nation's inevitable decline. Southerners and northerners lived differently in time, Shalev argues, as in so many other things. In such ways Shalev's book quietly...