“No Undue Prejudice”: Samuel Colt and the Politics of Uniformity

© Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue canadienne d’études américaines 32, no. 1, 2002 “No Undue Prejudice:” Samuel Colt and the Politics of Uniformity James Massender To have civilization, it is necessary that a people should be numerous and closely placed; that they should be fixed in their habitations, and safe from violent external and internal disturbance; that a considerable number of them should be exempt from the necessity of drudging for immediate subsistence. Feeling themselves at ease about the first necessities of their nature, including self-preservation, and daily subjected to that intellectual excitement which society produces, men begin to manifest what is called civilization; but never in rude and shelterless circumstances, or when widely scattered. – Robert Chambers, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation The philosophy of six thousand years has not searched the chambers and magazines of the soul. – Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The Over-Soul” […] the speech of Mr. Hobbs could not fail to impress upon their minds the fact that it was more difficult to engineer men than to engineer matter. – from a discussion of John Anderson’s paper “On the Application of Machinery in the War Department,” Journal of the Society of Arts, 28 January, 1857 *** One of the most pressing difficulties with which I must contend in the process of shaping the following argument about what I am calling the “Machinery of Individualism ” – and its deployment of an imperative that bears upon the practices of both history and science – is that of a tendency toward idealization. That is, it is easy to generalize, to portray in heroic terms, those “renegade” factions or unruly groupings that have resisted metabolization by a dominant order. Indeed, this very structure is replicated in the authorized version of early American history, in Canadian Review of American Studies 32 (2002) 18 which the first colonists set out for the New World in order to escape the tyrannies of the Old. For my purposes, it is important to consider more carefully the risks that attend the invocation of the conventional opposition between individual and community, especially as this opposition is so often invoked in defence of an ideology of individual liberty. The horns of this dilemma can be considered in terms of inclusion and exclusion. Certainly, it is difficult to recognize difference at the same time as one extends the possibility of inclusiveness: for example, the potentially seductive notion of a “universal human community” based upon the ordering principle of reason , while seeming radically inclusive, becomes on a practical level a mechanism of exclusion, whereby individuals or even classes of individuals are at times denied human status according to a judgement of their capacity for rational thought. Describing the use Spanish colonists made of Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery as a justification for the subjugation of aboriginal populations, Anthony Pagden cites Aristotle’s contention, in Nicomachean Ethics, that the slave can at least imitate the behaviour of a man, “for although he may not be able to perform rational acts unaided, he is susceptible to reasoned admonition” (Pagden 43).1 Further, Pagden locates the Greek sense of identity in their access to logos through the Greek language and in their participation in civil societies that reflected their reasoning powers, stressing that the Greeks judged anyone who lived outside the oikumene, “the Greek family of man,” to be outsiders who could not possibly be “truly human”(16). A comparison between the oikumene and Christian congregatio fidelium (brotherhood in Christ) suggests that there was a necessary openness about the Christian community – though it was still “convinced of its uniqueness” – that stands out against the exclusionary nature of the Greek, and which allowed for the admission of non-Christians after a ritual of transformation: The Christian myth of a single progenitor of all mankind, and the Christian belief in the perfection of God’s design for the natural world, made a belief in the unity of the genus homo sapiens as essential for anthropology and theology as it had been for Greek biology. The myth of the second coming, which played so large a role in the ideology of the Franciscan missionaries to America and later to China, was an obvious concomitant...