Being American in Europe, 1750–1860

2. “The blows my republican principles receive are forcible,” 1783–1820

Having achieved independence, Americans had to redefine their relationship to Europe, and especially to Great Britain. Many people were uneasy about a connection of any sort. The young republic’s geopolitical situation was tenuous. An enormous but sparsely settled territory, the United States confronted a number of dilemmas: rivals to the north, west, south, and on the seas; Native American nations within its borders; a weak government and a weaker sense of national cohesion ; and skepticism, if not outright hostility, toward their republican experiment among the kingdoms of Europe. It seemed as if establishing some distance from the Old World might be a prudent course. That proved to be impracticable, however. The challenges of 1783, trying as they were, soon got far worse. Most Americans had greeted news of the French Revolution with hope. The principles of self-government had penetrated despotic Europe. But as the Revolution devolved into Terror, war, and empire, public opinion grew angry and divided. The United States found it impossible to remain neutral in a world of clashing empires. Like no time in American history before or since, Europe intruded itself into domestic affairs regardless of what Americans may have wanted.1 Cultural controversies also rendered Americans unable to distance themselves from Europe. The United States was a nation that lacked a strong national identity.2 As we have seen, colonial Americans tried desperately to show that, living on the far side of the Atlantic, they were nevertheless fully British. Although postrevolutionary Americans agreed that their political relationship with Great Britain was finished with, the terms of their cultural independence were unclear. Nationalists believed that independence would be incomplete without some degree of national distinctiveness. But the extent to which the republic should sever its cultural and historical connections with Britain was hotly debated, particularly after the rise of the Jeffersonian opposition in the c h a p t e r t w o “The blows my republican principles receive are forcible” 1783–1820 46 Being American in Europe, 1750–1860 1790s. Purists repudiated any cultural debt to Europe and urged Americans to fashion their own culture shorn of the Old World’s influence. Massachusettsborn Elkanah Watson, sent on a diplomatic mission to France in 1779, imagined that if a wall were to divide Europe from the United States, “the one, sinking into the dotage and imbecility of decay, would be deprived of the renovating in- fluence of its young offspring, whilst the other would be protected from the contaminating effects of the matured corruptions of the old world.”3 Metaphors of contagion permeated Americans’ discourse on their relationship with Europe in this period. Inevitably these debates addressed the appropriateness of Americans’ travel to the Old World. After all, if Americans might be infected by European fashions, music, and literature while in the safety of their homes, how much more dangerous was direct exposure? Caution was in order. John Adams warned Elkanah Watson to “cultivate the manners of your own country, not those of Europe” during his time abroad. Adams did not mean for Watson and other travelers to quarantine themselves, as it were, from Europeans , but merely to follow “a manly simplicity” in their dress and behavior appropriate to republicans. For Adams, the danger was not merely that Europe might corrupt provincial Americans, but that a lack of self-consciousness might lead them to succumb to European dissipation and thereby damage “the character of their country at home and abroad.” Both the new nation’s virtue and its reputation were at stake as its citizens ventured overseas.4 Clearly, for all their brave talk of cultural independence, Americans still craved a connection to Europe and deferred to its cultural authority. Travelers led Americans to define an identity vis-à-vis Europe that staked out a distinctive nationalism while situating the republic within the Atlantic community. Travelers forced Americans to confront and accept their transnational position, as Thomas Jefferson came to know all too well. As minister to France from 1785 to 1789, he fielded inquiries from prospective travelers and extended hospitality to those visiting Paris. To the former, Jefferson stressed the disadvantages of going abroad. He told one correspondent that going to Europe cost a traveler in “his knowledge, in his morals, in his health, in his habits, and in his happiness .” Americans were better advised to travel through the United States, where they could get to know their country—and each other—better. But his...