Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (review)

In this provocative study, Eustace boldly advances a “history of eighteenth-century American emotion”(3). Although the results occasionally do not fulfill the initial promise, she earns high marks for demonstrating not only that the social grammar of feelings and passions is a fruitful field of study but also that insights into the contested meaning of common emotions contributed to the coming of the American Revolution. Eustace argues that ordinary people developed subtle rhetorical strategies in which appeals to emotions—such as love, anger, grief and sympathy—allowed them to manipulate, even to resist, those who held real power. She has taken on a huge topic, and to make it manageable, she decided to focus principally on the emotional landscape of colonial Pennsylvania.

Eustace has no time for the Enlightenment with its universalizing claims for reason. She insists that by concentrating almost exclusively on abstract philosophical concepts—discussions of classical republicanism and the liberalism of John Locke, for example—historians have short-changed the role of emotion in how people claimed and contested social status. In support of her position, she provides strikingly original readings of a wide range of documents. Eustace moves confidently from poetry to letters, from formal government reports to newspaper articles. Whatever the source, she exposes subtle linguistic strategies. As she explains, people in Pennsylvania “expended considerable effort deciding how to describe their own emotions and those of others according to the social ranks and relations they wished to establish”(14).

Everyone in Pennsylvania seemed to know the conventions governing these emotional exchanges. Not surprisingly, members of the colonial elite insisted that ordinary colonists should control expressions of anger and behave like proper gentlemen. Those living on the frontier adopted a different perspective, asserting either that rage signaled genuine masculinity or demanding that the leaders of society voice real sympathy for their suffering. Rulers softened direct commands through a rhetoric of love and sympathy.

So innovative and ambitious an approach inevitably raises questions. Eustace’s analyses of the evidence often seems strained, turning on readings so subtle that one wonders from time to time whether the people that she is studying could possibly have understood how their own rhetorical strategies served to subvert shared cultural conventions. Take, for example, her claim that the Paxton Boys—Scotch-Irish settlers who had just murdered Native American prisoners in cold blood—“appreciated the subtle social signals encoded in the vocabulary of anger” (342). Sometimes the people in this book seem to have been players engaged in a complex game, in which the players who knew the rules made moves and countermoves, trumped the emotional claims of opponents, and exposed rhetorical contradictions. One cannot help but wonder whether their emotional contests involved more substantive elements. Greater attention to the real theological differences separating the various Protestant sects in Pennsylvania—especially those of evangelical persuasion who celebrated religious enthusiasm—would have added an important dimension to our comprehension of the rules of emotional expression.

Finally, since Pennsylvania, like the rest of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, was undergoing a radical commercial transformation—de Vries’ “industrious revolution”—we might have expected Eustace to devote attention to such troublesome passions as greed, covetousness, and envy.¹ Channeling selfish emotions for the common good was not specifically a Pennsylvanian problem or an American problem; it was the major challenge confronting the age.