SENTIMENTAL DEMOCRACY PB: Evolution of America's Romantic Self-Image - Brossura

Burstein, Andrew

Brossura

ISBN 10: 0809085364 ISBN 13: 9780809085361

Casa editrice: Hill and Wang, 1982

Riassunto

The provocative interpretation of American political rhetoric

Americans like to use words of sentiment and sympathy, passion and power, to explain their democracy. In a provocative new work, Andrew Burstein examines the metaphorically rich language which Americans developed to express their guiding principle: that the New World would improve upon the Old. In journals, letters, speeches, and books, an impassioned rhetoric of "feeling" set the tone for American patriotism.

Burstein shows how the eighteenth century "culture of sensibility" encouraged optimism about a global society: the new nation would succeed. Americans believed, as much by sublime feeling as by intellectual achievement or political liberty. As they grew more self-confident, this pacific ideal acquired teeth: noble Washington and humane Jefferson yielded to boisterous Jackson, and the language of gentle feeling to the force of Manifest Destiny. Yet Americans never stopped celebrating what they believed was their innate impulse to do good.

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Informazioni sull?autore

Andrew Burstein is the author of The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist. He teaches at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Sentimental Democracy

The Evolution of America's Romantic Self-ImageBy Andrew Burstein

Hill & Wang

Copyright © 2000 Andrew Burstein
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780809085361

Chapter One

SENTIMENT AND SYMPATHY:
BEGINNINGS

Inventing a nation entails giving definition to the character ofthe people, identifying their compatible qualities and common understandings,cultivating a sense of moral community. In the United States,this process is still going on. It has provoked every emotion from themenacing rhetoric of nativists to the humbling acknowledgment of diversity.Almost every such attempt to define the nation's identity canbe linked in some way to an embellishment of the language and eventsof the American Revolution?a romance with the pre-romantic age ofthe eighteenth century.

    The most distinctive emotional force of those years was sentimentand sympathy. When citizens today claim that mastery of the continentwas attained by the enterprising spirit of unselfish, fit pioneers, or whenthey avow the right of all to free speech and assembly, or whenever theU.S. government asserts that maintaining world peace can best be accomplishedby a benevolent use of American power, the spokespersonsfor these ideals have relied on an inherited vocabulary of sentiment andsympathy. In his 1801 Inaugural Address, in words that Americans todaystill relate to, Jefferson termed his country "the world's best hope."Seeing the "rising nation" as a land that was "wide and fruitful," heurged its citizens to "unite with one heart and one mind," to restoreafter a decade of heated politics the sentimental values of "harmonyand affection." For, without these, he insisted, "liberty and even lifeitself are but dreary things."

    From the time of the Revolution, if not before, Americans havetended to project a self-image of charitable concern and active self-restraint.Less persuasively, perhaps, their commitment to ordered libertyhas dictated that righteous self-expression stop short of forfeitingreason through the degenerative effects of self-indulgence, greed, license,or political fanaticism?the unhealthy passions. During the Revolutionarycrisis, loyalists decried rebel Americans' excesses in just sucha vocabulary. The passion they witnessed in the activities of patriotsduring the 1770s appeared to them dangerous and unruly; they describedthe failure to check behavior in terms of "deformation," of aloss of reason and judgment. People recognized and feared their ownbase instincts; they knew they were vulnerable creatures subject totemptation. Freedom could not exist without morality?both sides inthe American Revolution believed that?and both felt certain that theother lacked fortitude and enough moral strength to avoid being victimizedby untrustworthy leaders.

    In part because mid-eighteenth-century Americans were thought(and acknowledged themselves) to be culturally and economically inferiorto Europeans, the preeminent pens and leading voices of 1776focused on what they believed was a widely held sense of moral superiorityover the powerful mother country from whom they were toseparate. Starting by describing their continent in idealized imagery asa promised land conducive to the growth of liberty, they highlightedthe virtue of simplicity possessed by the people of the thirteen colonies,and they promoted a community spirit generated through popular resistanceto an authority as unsentimental as it was unrepresentative.

    Revolutionary America's eloquent polemicists could defend the inseparablecauses of independence and American exceptionalism by theuse of a potent, viscerally felt contrast: they claimed they were a patient,understanding, sensate people, and that the king and Parliament, whohad sought to suppress their decent impulses, were necessarily dull,insensitive, and emotionally misaligned and misdirected. Jefferson'sDeclaration of Independence in particular played up the distinction betweenthe feeling and the unfeeling, between a virtuous people and atyrant who had "waged cruel war against human nature itself." Americanswere resorting to war only after grievously suffering the "last stabto agonizing affection," while King George III had "plundered," "constrained,"and "neglected" honorable subjects who had been simplyseeking their rightful happiness. Because the colonists' British brethrenwere "deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity," Americans hadunited to form a new consanguinity. Thus the nation of a just sensibility,with its "manly spirit" (here meaning one with sturdiness andconviction), had determined to "renounce forever these unfeelingbrethren."

    As Jay Fliegelman has effectively argued, the Declaration of Independencewas intended to be read aloud as well as in its printed form.Print culture in 1776 was secure in its authority, yet Jefferson aimed topreserve the special character of the spoken voice in his composition ofa vigorous and passionate, politically persuasive document. When onemember of Parliament denounced the Declaration as a "wretched" instrument"drawn up with the view to captivate the people," John Wilkes,a defender of American rights, rose to laud Jefferson's composition:"The polished periods [sentences], the harmonious happy expressions,with all the grace, ease and elegance of a beautiful diction, which wechiefly admire, captivate the people of America very little; but manly,nervous [vigorous] sense, they relish even in the most awkward anduncouth language. Whatever composition produces the effect you intendin the most forcible manner is, in my opinion, the best." Jeffersonmay not have seen his technique as Wilkes did, but he clearly aimed tomix style and sentiment in a way that affected listeners as well as readers.He was in effect announcing to the world a new oratorical idealthat combined masculine sentiment and a kind of theater. To "captivate,"in the sense almost of ensnaring or bewitching (as the memberof Parliament intended to convey), was not the effect of the Declaration;rather, Americans were responding to language that contained sensorypower, that coursed through the nervous system and, in fact, made"sense."

    Self-serving distinctions between feeling and unfeeling persisted inAmerican political rhetoric in the decades after the Revolution. AFourth of July oration in Portland, Maine, in 1801, for example, remindedcitizens of the meaning of independence: "We were no longeresteemed the rebellious subjects of Great Britain: but as a magnanimouspeople struggling for liberty?for our inherent birth-right ... in oppositionto men and measures instigated by the vilest motives; in oppositionto men totally devoid of principles, of humanity, and of everyspicies [sic] of fellow feeling." In Ohio, the Scioto Gazette that sameyear referred to a Great Britain likely to prevent farmers' flour from reachingthe West Indies as an "unfeeling nation." Of the expected blockade,the newspaper editorialized: "The prospects of the enterprising citizensof the western country [are] blasted in the bud?their only avenue toforeign markets obstructed by an arbitrary and unfeeling nation, whosesubjects are starving for the very article which they have preventedfrom proceeding."

    As the new republic grew, it continued to develop a sense of itsspecial destiny grounded in its unique and unprecedented, emotionallyrich and resilient, morally uplifting national creation story. Scholarswho have written about sentiment have primarily related it to the sentimentalliterature of this period, especially to the female consciousness.But sentiment and sympathy?and the culture of sensibility ingeneral?were used to sustain the enterprise of nation building. It wasas important for men as for women to cultivate this sensibility duringand after the Revolution, and it went well beyond familiar characterizationsto comprise an enduring counterpoint to plain masculine assertivenessand national aggressiveness.

    The Enlightenment made an impression on the American foundersnot only in introducing a reverence for science, an appeal to intelligentjudgment, and a tone of criticism but in asserting that harmony andsympathy existed in nature. "The prosperity of reason in the eighteenthcentury," Peter Gay has written, "was less the triumph of rationalismthan of reasonableness." The world of the literate was being emptiedof religious mystery and filled with a philosophic understanding of humanity.In America, from the Stamp Act, which ignited Revolutionaryprotest, through the Jeffersonian-Hamiltonian party battles of the1790s, anxious concern for the preservation of liberty and for the continuedclaim to happiness intensified Americans' fears of aggressiveforces and aggressive behavior. The language of sentiment and sympathy,used by a people who routinely called themselves peace-loving,constituted a defense against inner and outer turmoil.

The concept of sensibilité had arisen in the seventeenth-centuryFrench novel as a combination of amour, amitié, and the capacity to feelpain. When medical research yielded more precise terminology, menwith philosophic minds in eighteenth-century France and Englandcombined their respect for science with social responsibility, as theycame to identify the progress of civilization with decency, generosity,and optimism. The meaning of sensibility expanded accordingly, linkingthe physiology of the nervous system with feminine delicacy andmasculine self-control, with matters of private conscience and publicvirtue. To be endowed with sensibility in its most attractive (and at thesame time most afflicted) form meant to have an enlarged capacity toperform benevolent deeds, to show affection readily, to shed tears andempathize strongly with human suffering. While women were easilyacknowledged to possess such characteristics?tenderness and benevolence,fainting spells and languid spirits being extreme manifestations,positive and negative?men also possessed, to a certain and varyingdegree, a sensible nature.

    Any understanding of sensibility begins, then, with its medical definition.British America's perspective on the psychoperceptual systemin humans, of a mind that received impressions, dated from JohnLocke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). Nerve fibersset off tremors; nervous tension within the body directly affected conscienceand consciousness. Indeed, the words conscience andconsciousness were for the most part interchangeable throughout theeighteenth century and coincided with hearts of compassion, with sympatheticemotions. While the heart combined circulatory power with vital equilibriumand expressions of love, a conscious person was one who commandeda moral sense.

    A revolution in understanding human physiology was underway.Dr. George Cheyne, who treated his friend the popular novelist SamuelRichardson, wrote the paradigmatic line in 1733: "Feeling is nothingbut the Impulse, Motion or Action of Bodies, gently or violently impressingthe Extremities or Sides of the Nerves, of the Skin, or otherparts of the Body, which ... convey Motion to the Sentient Principlein the Brain." Human feeling was understood to be simply the motionof nerve fibers; every response to a moral concern had a physiologicalreferent. Popular writers thus spread, in the words of a modern critic,"the new science of man, directing thought about man from his visibleeyes and expressive face to his unseen nerves and controlling brain,from what he looks like to what he feels to what he knows."

    Because the body was viewed as a mechanism that might be easilyoverwrought, sensible creatures, however respectable, disinterested, creative,or accomplished, might also "fatigue their Heads with intenseThought and Study," according to Bernard Mandeville, an early-eighteenth-centurywriter and physician specializing in nervous disorders.James Madison's hypochondria, or possible "epileptoid hysteria,"was explainable in these terms. New Hampshire senator WilliamPlumer wrote of his Kentucky colleague Buckner Thruston in 1807:

He was educated to the profession of the law?& is a man of science?Is a good Greek & Italian scholar. Is a man of an amiable disposition?his manners are refined?His feelings exquisitely delicate?is subject to hypocendriacal complaints, &, of course, at different times appears very different & unequal. He assured me to day, that was he once attacked with rudeness in a news paper publication he would retire to private life. He is not like his late colleague Brackenridge [John Breckinridge], or his present fellow [Henry] Clay, effective man.

By this time, traits considered feminine, or like the female constitutionpossessing and exhibiting an unusually high degree of sensibility, werethought to indicate an imbalance in males, making them less fit for thedemands of public debate.

    Fibers, connectors of the nervous system, figured prominently insentimental literature. Thomas Jefferson, for one, frequently intensifiedstatements where he wished to combine reason with an appropriatelevel of passion by referring to "every fibre of my frame" as an elementalcomponent of his being; he wished to eradicate "every fibre" ofaristocracy in America and in later years he explained that "every fibre"of his passion for public life had dried up. "Vibrations" and "thrills"also accompanied human activity, words conveying the interpenetrationof emotions and physiology. Around mid-century, the Swiss physiologistand poet Albrecht von Haller clarified the importance of sensibilityas a primary life force with his experimental results distinguishingirritability (unfelt automatic responses) fromsensibility (responses accompanied by feeling).

    Most profoundly, "sympathies" were what conducted feelingsthrough nerves and organs. In his Lectures on the Mind, Dr. BenjaminRush of Philadelphia stated that physiological sympathies were governedby the same laws as emotional sympathy. The pulsation of theheart was a sympathy, as was the "reciprocal" sympathy between thebrain and the stomach. Rush called the senses "the inlets of ideas." Heheld that odors as well influenced morals: living near an active volcanoaroused people to unusual passion, just as one's morning walk througha flower garden brought a natural composure. Arthur May, a candidatefor the degree of doctor of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania,submitted a dissertation on sympathy to the trustees and medical facultyin 1799: "In warm weather appetite fails; because the impressionof heat on the skin invites excitement from the stomach to the surface;and the system cannot bear both impressions of heat and aliment. Appetiteis suspended in the same manner by joy, grief, expectation, etc."May found that impressions or sympathies "vibrate" throughout thebody and "undulate" to the "remotest boundaries." "In a word," heclaimed, "the whole system, mind and body, is one mass of generalsympathy."

    In the eighteenth century, most Europeans and Americans weretaught from birth how to curb their emotions, though they remainedanxious about appearances. "Outward expression of the passions is asort of universal language," wrote a contributor to The Universal Asylum,and Columbian Magazine, seeking insight into Americans' character.Passions were "commotions of the body as well as of the mind," whicha sensitive, sophisticated observer could interpret. Countenance andconstitution were the subjects of the "conjectural science" of physiognomy.One could search for fraud, deceit, or moral weakness. In a morepositive light, the perfectly innocent, unsuspecting heroine in SusannaRowson's sentimental Charlotte Temple (1791) was described by herphysiognomy: "The goodness of her heart is depicted in her ingenuouscountenance." According to The New-Hampshire Magazine, the externalmanifestation of inner virtue was visible even to those with a lessextraordinary perception: honor and love of truth wore the face of "vivacity"in a true gentleman. The young Bostonian author of The Powerof Sympathy (1789), William Hill Brown, gushed in his prose: "But comethou spirit of celestial language, that canst communicate by one affectionatelook?one tender glance?more divine information to the soulof sensibility, than can be contained in myriads of volumes!" Repeatedreferences to Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, firstpublished in America in 1794, attest to the popularity of this method ofreading character. Lavater tauntingly illustrated his findings, which associatedthe shape of foreheads, eyes and eyelids, noses, lips, and chinswith various temperaments. "Each part of an organized body is an imageof the whole," the physiognomist claimed.

    The taxonomy of facial expressions and their corresponding revelationsof character formed a literature that could be easily translatedinto political culture. The republican ideal of plain speaking, honestdeportment, and apparent lack of concealment was contrasted with theseductiveness of heartless contrivance. Sociability highlighted sensibility.It was an important part of politics, at once art and strategy. Itinvolved subtle self-promotion, at the same time avoiding a crass regardfor notice or the appearance of glory seeking. But it was not easy toeffect. As Jay Fliegelman has commented, "the triple injunctions toplease yet persuade, to control oneself but stimulate passions in others,to reveal oneself and yet efface oneself, combined to create an exhaustingchallenge."

    At once sentient and rational, human beings needed to maintain aproper balance between these two facets of their behavioral system inorder to achieve happiness. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759),Adam Smith produced what was perhaps the most thorough work codifyingthe culture of sensibility into which eighteenth-century Americansand Britons alike came of age. Smith described the sensations ofsentiment and passion as "affection of the heart from which any actionproceeds," and he characterized virtue and propriety, the experiencesof grief and joy, taste and judgment, concord and discord, opinions andmoral standards. "A man of sensibility," he wrote, "may sometimes feelgreat uneasiness lest he should have yielded too much even to what maybe called an honourable passion." The man of virtuous sentiment, cultivatinga sense of duty, overcame the impulse of self-love through reason,principle, and conscience?by reflecting on the precariousness ofexistence and discovering "the man within." He came to recognize that"we are but one of the multitude." Smith called such a feeling "moderatedsensibility."

    The injunction to follow nature's dictates animated themid-eighteenth-century Scottish philosophic school to which Smith belonged.Not inconsequentially, Edinburgh and Glasgow were centersof medical as well as moral discourse. The American Enlightenmentplainly profited from the writings of these Scots (including ThomasReid, Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Hume's cousin, LordKames), for the Revolutionary literati appreciated their pragmatic andintuitive qualities, and their argument that benevolence and public virtuedemanded an engagement of the heart. Silent, pondering reason,they insisted, could not act as a moral restraint. America's language ofsentiment drew upon the moral scheme of the Scottish Enlightenment,a system which may be said to have contributed structure to the cultureof sensibility.

    The so-called father of sentimental ethics was the third Earl ofShaftesbury (1671-1713), a student of John Locke who conceived harmonyand sympathy in cosmic terms and cherished the notion that aninnate moral sense was present in all human beings. Shaftesbury believedthat society was made strong and cohesive through the cultivationof intimate connections, the "natural, generous affections." While self-interestwas said to govern the world, he wrote, "Passion, Humour, Caprice,Zeal, Faction, and a thousand other Springs, which are counter toSelf-Interest, have as considerable a part in the Movements of thisMachine." Even as the metaphor of the cold, metal mechanism came intoliterary fashion?the balanced springs and wheels of a clock to representthe well-tuned human body?it required the "enlarg'd Affections" ofthe heart to perfect circulation. In his 1726 "Plan of Conduct," thetwenty-year-old Benjamin Franklin found himself sensibly "excited" tothis idea of moral virtue. Appreciating natural impulses and the valueof emotional intimacy, he and his successors in America's enterprise toconstitute a humane government responded to Shaftesbury's sentimentand to that nicely expressed in Alexander Pope's 1733 Essay on Man:

In lazy Apathy let Stoics boast
Their Virtue fixed; 'tis fixed as in a frost,
Contracted all, retiring to the Breast;
But strength in mind is Exercise, not Rest:
The rising tempest puts in act the soul,
Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.
On life's vast ocean diversely we sail,
Reason the card, but Passion is the gale.

Human abilities were best employed when the passions were recognized,not artificially stifled. The yearnings of the heart must give forceto real progress in public affairs.

(Continues?)

Continues...

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Hill and Wang
• Data di pubblicazione: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0809085364
• ISBN 13: 9780809085361
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 432
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile