The Interests of the Passions

This is an enormously important book that uses eighteenth-century Pennsylvania as a case study of emotional politics in colonial and revolutionary America. Unlike many studies of affect, feeling, and sentiment in the human past, Passion is the Gale not only seeks to compliment prevailing themes of political, social, or economic history but also to place emotion and "spirit" at the core of those understandings. Among the best reasons to do so, Eustace points out, is that eighteenth-century Americans would have recognized this approach as their own. Drawing from a treasure trove of printed, archival, and visual sources, she shows that colonial Pennsylvanians were deeply invested in the governance and portrayal of emotion and passion, indeed that they saw themselves within the fine distinctions of honorable resentment and unthinking rage, dutiful mourning and petulant sorrow, authentic love and passing affection. "The signals of dominance and deference encoded in the regulation of emotional expression," she writes, "were extremely subtle but nonetheless real and recognizable to eighteenth-century actors" (p. 78). By explaining how clergymen, widows, statesmen, slaves, Indians, and revolutionaries betrayed their feelings and why their emotions mattered to the nation's genesis, Eustace offers something truly original and profoundly relevant.

In essence, this is an intellectual and cultural history of the broadest variety—not a study of professional thinkers and formalized creeds but of the interplay between available ideas and various audiences. During the course of nine chapters, some focused on seminal events and others devoted to signature passions, Eustace offers keen readings of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, and Tom Paine's Common Sense. She also peers into the personal correspondence of Philadelphia couples, the choreographed diplomacy between whites and Indians, and the brutal commerce between slave-owners and their human chattels. She manages to cover this wide range of texts and actors by embracing the organic interdependence of the personal and political and by applying new technologies of finding and decoding historical sources. The cumulative result is a fresh understanding of "the reordering of Anglo-American life" during the Revolution (p. 15).

Eustace bases her study in a strategy of "collapsing distinctions between the personal and the political" (p. 6). This approach, she argues, not only throws light on her elusive quarry but also approximates an eighteenth-century cosmology in which modern categories of power and behavior held little meaning. The personal was assumed to be political in that world, which was poised along the well-studied frontier between communitarian and individualistic mentalités. This does not mean that Eustace would have us conflate emotional encounters within households with those unfolding between nations or empires. Rather, she invites us to explore the political and diplomatic implications that emotional displays and exchanges carried in eighteenth-century milieus.¹

The book opens with a study of Alexander Pope's Essay on Man, which was published in 1733 and available in Philadelphia by 1735. Long overshadowed in many historiographies by Bernard de Mandeville's more cynical Fable of the Bees, Pope's book-length poem clearly resonated in the colonial metropolis. It also offended the conventional wisdom of Christianity and moral philosophy by announcing that the passions were universal, irrepressible, and not all that bad. Reason may be the chart of the human soul, Pope noted, but "Passion is the gale." Moral philosophers could debate the excellence or depravity of Man, he averred, but the truth was simpler: "Man's as perfect as he ought." In letters and commonplace books from the 1740s and 1750s, Eustace finds repeated and direct references to these and other lines of the poem. At length, they began to appear without attribution, so that phrases approving human passions and excusing human nature became ambient voices. But if more and more Pennsylvanians were ready to approve passion's gale and shrug with Pope that "whatever is is right," they also assumed...