Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution

III. Delegitimizing Pedigreed Advantage

98 culture and liberty in the age of the american revolution important attribute. It supplied coherence in an incoherent world, and tempered the wildly di√ering and contradictory experiences of people caught in the turmoil of war by o√ering them a sensible and composed vision of reality. The impact of such language was enhanced by the speaking elite’s rhetorical credibility, which often allowed them to define the meaning of reality for the people. We instinctively tend to focus on the contradictions between language and reality (in this case, between the rhetoric of equality and the practice of inequality), but language may carry meaning even without referring to anything objectively existing—if enough people acknowledge it as a true representation of some thing. Fictionality need not reduce the power of language to shape social space.≤∂ For instance, there was a widespread belief in early modern England that all social ranks were virtually represented in Parliament, and that all possessed liberty, even though in real life liberty was distributed unequally among unequal ranks. Similarly, Americans of various classes could share a belief that equality and liberty reigned in the new republic. Linguistic fictions made the world more consistent for them by symbolically reconciling freedom and unfreedom. The imagined nature of such claims did not diminish this conciliatory power. On the contrary, they were so appealing because objectively existing contradictions could not be reconciled. It was this attraction that contributed significantly to the rapid absorption of such rhetoric into American culture, and to making equal liberty one of its givens. III. Delegitimizing Pedigreed Advantage It has been my hobby-horse to see rising in America an empire of liberty, and a prospect of two or three millions of freemen, without one noble or one king among them. —John Adams, The True Interests of America, 1776 In order to delegitimize the main enemy—the metropolitan ruling class—American Revolutionary authors created a dark image of hereditary nobility in England. They characterized its members as a parasitic, immoral group, wallowing in luxury and debauchery, who betrayed the nation’s an- the revolution 99 cient ideals of liberty and defended an ‘‘aristocratical tyranny.’’ The popularity among all social classes of this vision, of a ‘‘corrupt aristocracy which at present rules the British councils,’’ exceeded its creators’ expectations. For ordinary working people it was a validation of their worth vis-à-vis the powerful and the well-born. For the American political class, the enthusiasm to diminish metropolitan nobility o√ered the joy of payback for having been looked down upon as second-rate Englishmen. This indignity had a long history. Patriot elites were used to having power, and, in this sense, defended the status quo, but what they never attained was recognition as a valid upper class—even when they acquired genteel polish and taste—because, by metropolitan criteria, they were mostly of humble social origins. During his stay in London, the Virginian Carter Braxton irately noted in his diary: ‘‘The people of England generally behold, or rather a√ect to behold, the American with contempt. . . . In my mind, a man of virtue and propriety of conduct, has as fair a claim to attention, and much fairer too, than he on whom fortune has showered titles or riches.’’ After 1764 the tone of English comments on developments in America became even more contemptuous, and laden with epithets suggesting low birth. References such as ‘‘Mr. John Hancock (now president of the Congress, but formerly a most notorious Smuggler)’’ were commonplace. Satirists called upon the British to stand up to ‘‘Hancock with his rabble . . . the wrath of Congress, or its lords the mob,’’ and to the ‘‘the new-born statesmen’’ who, like rats, emerged from ‘‘garrets’’ and ‘‘cellars .’’ The Revolution provided a tremendous opportunity for the Americans to end this humiliating treatment by portraying themselves as genuinely virtuous and by branding English aristocrats as artificial. The otherwise inaccessible criterion of noble ancestry was now cast o√—publicly and with jubilation. The people of America would have a true elite of quality, ‘‘in whose Wisdom and Virtue They could confide.’’≤∑ A typical interpretation of this assault on British aristocracy has been that the Patriots rejected the old hierarchic order in order to create a more modern and egalitarian one. Since there was no nobility of birth in America to speak of, the argument goes, rebellious colonists had neither use for nor appreciation of the privileged classes, especially when such a class system was intrinsically...