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Chapter 6 Universalism and the Epistolary Divide We know that the men attending the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787 intended the United States Constitution to minimize the possibilities of democracy.1 This was perhaps no surprise, given the abiding influence of mainstream British political culture on American life as well as the fresh trauma of revolution, rebellion, and war. The Founding Fathers designed the Constitution to restrict citizenship, suffrage , rights, and democratic political practice. One effect was to set up the ongoing contests over citizenship and suffrage, in particular, that have marked American history ever since. We know, too, the original terms of franchise exclusion that were gradually overthrown in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: first on the basis of class (universal white male suffrage), then on the basis of race (the Fifteenth Amendment), and finally on the basis of gender (the Nineteenth Amendment).2 This history has often been told as if universal suffrage were somehow built into the original conception of the United States Constitution, but this discounts the intensified restrictions licensed by the Constitution against, say, free blacks in the Early Republic, never mind the many decades of political creativity and struggle required to overthrow all such restrictions.3 It also discounts the failures of universalism marring the course of American history: ongoing and worsening restrictions on citizenship , the refusal to incorporate any economic and social rights into the Constitution, and the thinness of democratic political practice either through or beyond the franchise.4 Of course, the Founding Fathers had in their day learned how to speak and write effectively in the rhetoric of universalism, and they had learned how to imagine such universalism to be both unbounded and bounded at the same time. To label any of this a ‘‘paradox’’ or even a ‘‘contradiction’’ gives undue weight to the portion that was unbounded, rather than the portion that was bounded. The concept of ‘‘the universal’’ was an invention of the European Enlightenment, not of the American Revolution. The very word ‘‘universal ,’’ for instance, began to appear in the titles of British books in the early eighteenth century, whereupon many elements of life were brought under its rubric: language, medicine, morality, history, sci- 236 Chapter 6 ence, mathematics, law, penmanship, economics, geography, spelling, accounting, religion, music, and—in 1770—letter writing.5 In the latter decades of the eighteenth century, prescriptive authors, educators, and their middle-class audiences would all increasingly encourage the youngest of children to participate in the social activity of letter writing . Children were presented in print as the final index of universalism , as if no remaining social boundaries circumscribed either the social practice or the cultural imaginary of letter writing. This would be as true in the middle-class culture of the United States in the 1790s as in Britain in the 1770s. Letter writing was proclaimed to be ‘‘universal ,’’ without social limit—indeed, without the need for any cultural justification or even discussion. Like the notion of political rights asserted in the Declaration of Independence of ‘‘the thirteen united States of America,’’ the intrinsic value of letter writing was deemed to be self-evident, and offered as a measure of society’s enlightenment and modernity. Yet this brand of universalism was to be as incomplete as the political ‘‘rights’’ supposedly guaranteed for the ‘‘People’’ of the United States by the Constitution as well as by the Bill of Rights. That incompleteness can be seen perhaps most dramatically in the cultural imagination of how writing literacy and letter writing fit into the lives and the prospects of enslaved and free blacks. White American antislavery activists of the late eighteenth century could imagine writing literacy only in the hands of some deserving freed blacks, and in that case they could imagine the ability to write as enabling freed blacks only to achieve a minimal participation in society. Giving no thought to, say, principles of social equality or political participation, white antislavery activists aimed mainly to prevent freed blacks from becoming objects of poor relief, and thus tax burdens on middle-class whites. Beholden to a tenacious sense of social hierarchy, white antislavery activists imagined no more than that free blacks might become the functional equivalent of the lowest of lower-sort whites, at least economically. Once an instrument of authority in English culture up to the late seventeenth century, writing literacy and letter writing became a baseline skill for participation in a modern commercial economy and documentary culture. It did...

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