Cheating with Sound: Imagining Civic Culture in Federalist America

NICHOLAS ROMBES Cheating with Sound: Imagining Civic Culture in Federalist America In 1799 Jonathan MAXCY, a preacher and President of Union College in New York and the University of South Carolina, delivered an address that spoke to anxieties of the French Revolution and that offered an implicit defense of the 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. "Those metaphysic knights in the science of civil policy," said Maxcy, "who have attempted the subversion of our government, have done no small mischiefby the perpetual use ofcertain words and phrases, which, though they conveyed no definite meaning, yet were calculated like the incantations of magic, to blind, seduce and mislead the wary" (Hyneman 1047). As part ofMaxcy's larger warning against the French spirit of dissent emerging in American political culture, the sentence reveals Federalist frustration with the ways in which words were used to "seduce and mislead" the citizenry. But even more than this, the passage, by suggesting that subversives use "words and phrases" that convey "no definite meaning," shifts the focus away from the content of political radicalism to the rhetorical practices of political radicals. This strategy reveals how many Federalists writing during the era ofJefferson's ascension to power saw the political and cultural shifts that eventually spelled their doom in terms of changing language practices to which the Federalists failed to adapt. Worries about whether an "authentic," representative language system was truly possible were frequent in documents from the early republic , especially during an era when anxieties about "representation" Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 4, Winter 1998 Copyright © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004-1610 Nicholas Rombes manifested themselves in so many ways. Writing in The Federalist No. 37, James Madison makes explicit a tension between political discourse and "meaning" that runs throughout the entire document. Addressing the difficulties ofever finding words clear enough to express the principles to be embodied in the Constitution, Madison notes: The use of words is to express ideas. Perspicuity, therefore, requires not only that the ideas should be distinctly formed, but that they should be expressed by words distinctly and exclusively appropriate to them. But no language is so copious as to supply words and phrases for every complex idea, or so correct as not to include many equivocally denoting different ideas. Hence it must happen that however accurately objects may be discriminated in themselves . . . the definition of them may be rendered inaccurate by the inaccuracy of the terms in which it is delivered. (Rossiter 229) Madison's passage succinctly reveals the struggle in eighteenth-century America to discover what Jay Fliegelman has recently described as a "natural" language, one that "would permit universal recognition and understanding" (2). More significantly, however, it raises questions about the nature and agency of words that while only theoretically tested in The Federalist would, in the next decade, be tested in the cultural and political upheavals surrounding the Whiskey Rebellion and the Alien and Sedition Acts. By the mid 1790s, public discourse would no longer be lamenting the inability of words to express ideas "distinctively "; rather, it would be coping with the consequences of "distinct" language used to undermine (according to some) republican principles. It was a decade when some of the "people" that authorized the Constitution began to speak, leading to often furious debates about who, precisely , the "people" were and whether their voices ought to be heard.1 Specifically, several key events during the 1 790s brought into sharp relief the nature and role of language as anti-republican, anti-virtuous, subversive, and uncontained, leading to sustained and often bitter disputes about the relationship between language and cultural authority, debates that continue to shape the way we think about the idea of "America" to this day. If, as J. G. A. Pocock has suggested, "at the heart of Federalist thought arose something akin to the paradoxes of Rous- imagining Civic Culture seau—all government was the people's, and yet the people never directly governed" (524), then the debates in the 1790s—debates so intense that, according to some historians, they inched the republic close to civil war—over the role of language in public culture is not only about language, but also the...