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Chapter 3: “Citizens of the World”: Men, Women, and Country in the Age of Revolution
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61 A man unconnected is at home every where; unless he may be said to be at home no where. —samuel johnson, 1759 “From experience,”declaimed Betsey Galloway with all the world-weariness of youth in a 1779 letter to her mother, “I have formed such an opinion of Mankind that I wish for little society. Where ever I could get the most to live on with you, there I would go whether at Nova Zembla or Otaheite. . . . I shall never feel myself at home without you.” Invoking two places meant to convey the farthest ends of the earth, the arctic island of Nova Zembla and the Tahitian islands recently reached by the British in the Pacific, Betsey, living in London with her exiled Loyalist father, Joseph, sought to reassure her mother, Grace, left behind in America, of the continued strength of their affectionate ties. Facing the grim distance of an unfriendly Atlantic, as well as the economic realities of their situation, Betsey used her letter to convey her own sensible love for her mother, as well as the ways in which “home” depended on people as much as on places. Not having a home of her own, living in London in temporary accommodations, she informed her mother that London could never truly be “home”as long as her mother was not there.Betsey further declared: “I trust in God that our miseries will soon have an end, for my own part I am a citizen of the world and with you could be happy any place.” A self-termed “citizen of the world,”Betsy was happy nowhere and so could be unhappy everywhere. What did it mean for a woman without a country or even a permanent home to declare herself a “citizen of the world”? Such a claim to cosmopolitanism is not exactly what might be expected of a woman who, as a generation of women’s historians have shown, was not even rightly to be “Citizens of the World” Men, Women, and Country in the Age of Revolution sarah m. s. pearsall s Sarah M.S. Pearsall 62 considered a full citizen of any country. On the whole, focusing on the political changes of the Revolution, historians have used print sources and legal decisions to ascertain an individual’s relationship to the state. Historians now know much more about how early republican American newspapers discussed the rights of man and woman, how British periodicals developed understandings of British-ness, and how legal decisions, such as those in the case of Martin v. Massachusetts, both reflected and shaped ideas of citizenship and belonging. Yet too much remains unclear about how ordinary and largely obscure individuals, especially but not exclusively women, understood their own loyalties in an era of considerable change. Women trying to make sense of their place in the world in the aftermath of a life-altering Revolution did not necessarily make use of the categories that historians have often used: patriot, loyalist, even British or American. Instead, they often recast notions of “country” on the basis of “friends.” Attending to this move in the letters of individuals,especially women,allows for a more general comprehension of the dynamics of an Atlantic world and the central virtues of familiarity and sensibility that emerged from it in the course of the eighteenth century. Understanding both personal circumstances and general concepts requires attention both to the individual stories and to the larger context. As many letter writers of the eighteenth century knew, global understandings could best be explained with reference to the personal. Like them, we need to turn our attention from country to friends even to understand the force of national change. Affectionate attachments, especially those nurtured by letters, helped to make sense of worlds turned upside down. The argument of this essay is that many individuals, especially women, did not define themselves in the political categories historians have deployed, but they did seek to nurture familiar and sensible attachments in situations of change. Many in this era, especially but not exclusively women, understood their ties in terms of familiarity and sensibility, and they used these concepts,deriving from an Atlantic world,in order to negotiate attachments in a time of displacement.Both geography (beyond American) and chronology (beyond the era of the American Revolution) require some expansion in order to make sense of such changes. With their country lost to them, the individuals under consideration here focused more strongly on friends and...