CATO's Letters Were Popular Enough in the Colonies to Be Quoted

The Literature of Revolution and the Origins of Ideological Origins

eric slauter

ATO’s Letters were popular enough in the colonies to be quoted in every colonial newspaper from Boston to Savannah, and must Chave had no small share in bringing about that amazing unity of political feeling which we find by 1760 in civilizations so fundamentally opposed as those of Charleston and Boston. Indeed, these periodi- cal papers of Thomas Gordon and John Trenchard, published in The London Journal before 1723, develop a theory of representative government similar in most respects to that which underlies the Decla- ration of Independence.1 Fifty years ago, on the eve of the publication of The Ide- ological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn took out a subscription to a new publication and became a member of a new organization. For $2.00 a year, Professor Bailyn’s mailbox at the Harvard History Department received three issues, each larger than the last, of a typewritten, staple- bound newsletter. Never longer than a pamphlet, the publication alerted readers to the titles of new dissertations and other works in progress and printed bibliographies, short research notes, and book reviews, all on behalf of a group of colonial American literature scholars, who had first come together at the annual Modern Language Association convention in Chicago in late 1965. By 1968 the publication attracted enough con- tributors and subscribers (or members, as they were called, of

1Elizabeth Christine Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750 (PhD thesis Columbia University, 1912).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 58 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY the MLA’s Conference of Scholars of Colonial American Liter- ature) to drop “newsletter” from its title and become the academic journal Early American Literature. What possessed a proper historian to become a member of an MLA group? Bailyn, who majored in English literature in college, may in fact have been the first historian to join this new group of literary scholars. His name appeared (by virtue of the alphabet) near the top of a list of new members in the Spring 1967 issue, the fourth, joining what editor Calvin Is- rael of UCLA’s English Department bragged was “the name of virtually every productive scholar in the area of early Ameri- can literature studies.” The group had fewer than 100 members when Bailyn subscribed. If he was not in fact the very first historian to join ranks with colleagues in literature, he was certainly among the earliest (and, in his mid 40s, the most senior) in a small cohort that also included David D. Hall (then an instructor at Yale) and Linda K. Kerber (then a graduate student at Columbia), historians whose close attention to texts, to imagery alongside ideology, and to the transmission and circu- lation of printed artifacts ultimately helped remake the disci- pline of early American history and has assured them—as it has Bailyn—a wide readership among literary scholars.2 This curious fact begins to suggest some of the peculiar colli- sion of disciplinary forces that helped bring Bailyn’s great book into being and that has helped it find an audience beyond historians from the very beginning. Bailyn’s project emerged not simply against a historiographic background primed to embrace the force of ideas and to turn away from a Progressive interpretation of interest and motive, but at a moment in the development of what J.G.A. Pocock—in a 1965 essay Bailyn read in manuscript—called “that vexed yet favorite topic of the relation of ideas to social realities,” a significant moment in the evolv- ing relations between American intellectual, social, and literary history.3

2Calvin Israel, “A Note from the Editor’s Desk,” Early American Literature Newsletter 2 (1967): 4. The list of “New Members” appears on 29. 3J. G. A. Pocock, “Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser. 22 (1965): 549.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 59 What, after all, would early American historiography look like if Bailyn had simply declined the invitation from his colleague in the Harvard English Department, Howard Mum- ford Jones, to edit a collection of revolutionary pamphlets for a new series of classic books issued as the John Harvard Li- brary?4 While The Ideological Origins of the American Revolu- tion hardly reads like what we know it is, a revised introduction for a collection of reprinted primary texts, the book’s argument nevertheless clearly bears the marks of having been written by someone who had an uncommon level of intimacy with those texts, an editor who had traced all of his authors’ references and followed all of their footnotes. To follow Bailyn himself back to his sources—to do what Bailyn did with his pamphleteers— is to rediscover with surprise his substantial engagement with a largely forgotten body of scholarship on eighteenth-century English and American literature. Ideological Origins has pro- foundly shaped the subsequent study of American literature (and especially the literary history of the book) in the revolutionary period, becoming a crucial spur and foil for literary scholars over the past fifty years, but a celebration of the ac- complishments and legacy of this book would be incomplete without acknowledging some of its author’s debt to the literary scholarship that helped him make sense of what he found in his primary texts. Ideological Origins is itself a legacy of Bai- lyn’s confrontation not only with social scientists but with hu- manists, and embedded in the sources and traditions he drew upon is an important lesson for those who aim to move their fields forward by looking differently at the past. In the opening chapter on “The Literature of Revolution,” the title he used when he combined the first two chapters of the general introduction to Pamphlets of the American Revolu- tion, Bailyn described the revolutionary age as “the most creative period in the history of American political thought,” but it

4Readers of the short review of the first volume of Pamphlets of the American Rev- olution in the journal American Literature in May 1965 learned that Bailyn’s editorial “project is of major importance to all students of Colonial literature” and, even better, that it had its origins in a suggestion from Jones. “Brief Mention,” American Literature 37 (1965): 234.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 60 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY was not for him a period of great literature, and he considered the pamphlets of the American Revolution to be “primarily political, not literary documents.” None of his American-born writers—not Otis, Dickinson, Adams, or Jefferson—rivaled the great pamphleteers of early modern Britain, writers like Mil- ton, Halifax, Locke, Swift, Defoe, Bolingbroke, and Addison. The extraordinary prose style of Common Sense was, like Paine himself, a recent English import. In contrast, the colonial writers were amateurs. When they strove for “artistic effects,” or ventured beyond straight prose, they did not produce “great documents”: “Next to the more artful pamphlets of eighteenth- century England they are pallid, imitative, and crude.” Their plays and dialogues are “wooden and lifeless.” And their poetry, Bailyn admitted, “is almost uniformly painful to read.” Never- theless, Bailyn approached his amateurs with a sympathetic ear and a desire not to dismiss the keywords of their vocabulary (slavery, corruption, conspiracy) as “mere rhetoric and propaganda” or as a simple justification for other motives.5 Bailyn entered the historical profession at a moment when the most avant garde and influential literary scholars were beginning to turn away from history. In an interview with A. Roger Ekirch published in the William and Mary Quarterly in 1994, Bailyn explained that, as an English major at Williams before World War II, he had been drawn primarily toward “the context in which literary works emerged.” What interested him about Laurence Sterne, about whom he was expected to write an honors thesis, “was the way in which [Sterne’s] kind of sen- timental literature was emerging in the late eighteenth century, rather than the details of the texts themselves.” Bailyn had come to Williams in 1940, on eve of the 1941 publication of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism, the book that gave a name to the new formalist movement in literary studies. Ea- ger to attend to issues of form and easily exhausted by older philological methods, New Critics denigrated biographical and

5Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), ix, 12, 16, 18, 21 (quotations henceforth cited parenthetically in the text as “IO”).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 61 historical approaches to understanding literary works. The two English teachers Bailyn most remembered fifty years later were Robert J. Allen, a scholar “interested in the social context of literary work,” and Nelson Bushnell, a professor of English and creative writing who helped his student “a great deal in prose composition and self-criticism in writing.” Both men were in their early 40s when Bailyn met them, but to the New Critics they represented the old guard. Allen (PhD, Harvard, 1929), the author of The Clubs of Augustan London (1933) and an article on Swift’s political tracts, published a catalogue essay on “Life in Eighteenth-Century England” for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston during Bailyn’s second year. Bushnell (PhD, Harvard, 1928) was the author of a book that clearly marked him and his approach: The Historical Background of English Literature (New York, 1930). The title of his 1957 book, William Hamilton of Bangour, Poet and Jacobite, indi- cates Bushnell’s commitment to historical and political context in the face of the formalists’ challenge. Both teachers would have likely pushed their student to balance “the contexts in which literary works emerged” with “the details of the texts themselves.”6 In reading his sources for Ideological Origins, Bailyn did just that. He paid a textual scholar’s attention to word choice, imagery, variants, and even reception and a historian’s attention to the context in which such details found meaning. What had John Adams inadvertently revealed to us when, in drafting articles on the canon and feudal law, he had twice crossed out the word “power” before ultimately choosing “dominion”? Why had so many pamphleteers so often personified power as an en- croaching, trespassing force, a “grasping” and “tenacious” human hand? Why, curiously, had Josiah Quincy almost precisely echoed a phrase from the newspaper version of John Dick- inson’s Farmer’s Letters—“We are therefore—I speak it with grief—I speak it with indignation—we are SLAVES”—that had

6A. Roger Ekirch, “Sometime an Art, Never a Science, Always a Craft: A Con- versation with Bernard Bailyn,” WMQ 51 (1994): 625–58 (citations at 626–27). The conversation was held in 1993.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 62 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY not appeared in the subsequent pamphlet version? What had Thomas Hollis disclosed when, in marking his own copy of an English pamphlet, he had scribbled that for the word “weaken” in the phrase “weaken the foundations of our constitution” we should instead “read: ruined”?7 Ideological Origins is full of such wonderful textual details keyed to the contexts that gave them meaning. The project of editing and introducing the pamphlets forced Bailyn, by necessity, to engage with the work of literary scholars who had preceded, survived, or ignored the Progressives and the New Critics. Farthest back, and first cited, was Moses Coit Tyler’s two-volume Literary History of the American Rev- olution, 1763–1783, published in 1897. Tyler had been an En- glish professor at Michigan from 1867 to 1881 before becoming a professor of American history at Cornell. Howard Mumford Jones, who wrote a new preface in 1949 for Tyler’s work, felt Tyler had practiced “mature cultural history” and likened him to Gibbon. Tyler himself felt his novelty. He consciously set out to develop a “new method” in his study: while the “outward history” of the American Revolution had been written many times, he wished to set forth, “for the first time in a system- aticandafairlycompleteway,...theinwardhistoryofour Revolution—the history of its ideas, its spiritual moods, its motives, its passions, even its sportive caprices and its whims, as these uttered themselves at the time, whether consciously or not, in the various writings of the two parties of Americans who promoted or resisted that great movement.” For Tyler, it was pamphlets—not newspaper essays—that provided “the most abundant and the most important of all existing materials for our Literary History during that period.” And it was pamphlet writers, “mere writers,” who had “nourished the springs of great historic events by creating and shaping and direct- ing public opinion” and who “still illustrate, for us and for all who choose to see, the majestic operation of ideas, the creative

7Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 55, 56n1, 56, 233n1, 87n32.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 63 and decisive play of spiritual forces, in the development of history.”8 Bailyn was hardly an idealist—for he liked philosophy one could validate, as he explained in 1993—but he nevertheless aspired to glimpse what he termed an “‘interior’ view” (IO, vi) of the Revolution. If not quite a Gibbon, Tyler was at the very least a fellow traveler. Bailyn drew next on the work of literary scholars who had continued to try to fill in Tyler’s “inward history” during the Progressive Era. In Elizabeth C. Cook’s 1912 Columbia dis- sertation in English and Comparative Literature, Literary In- fluences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750, submitted as Charles Beard put the finishing touches to his Economic In- terpretation of the Constitution of the United States, Bailyn read the two sentences that I’ve included as an epigraph, where Cook linked the popularity of Cato’s Letters in colonial newspapers to the Declaration of Independence. In his chapter on “Sources and Traditions” Bailyn quoted directly from Cook’s first sentence. In a sense, all of Ideological Origins is itself an elaboration on and substantiation of the second sentence, which was, after all, a throwaway observation outside of the scope of both Cook’s interests and time frame.9 If Bailyn did not find inspiration from Cook’s thesis, he at the very least found confirmation in her careful combing of her newspaper sources about the diffusion and imitation of opposition voices in pre-revolutionary America. To help understand the peculiar constellation of thought he found in the pamphlets, Bailyn turned to more recent work by literary historians who had resisted the New Criticism. Here he drew heavily on—and praised highly—Alan D. McKillop’s study on “The Background of Thomson’s Liberty,” a 123-page

8Howard Mumford Jones’s new foreword first appeared in an edition published by Cornell University Press in 1949 and was reprinted by Frederick Ungar in 1957. Moses Coit Tyler, The Literary History of the American Revolution 1763–1783, 2 vols. (1897; repr. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1957), 1:v, 20, vii; and see Bailyn, Ideological Origins, 3n4. 9Bailyn, Ideological Origins, vi, 36. Elizabeth Christine Cook, Literary Influences in Colonial Newspapers, 1704–1750 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1912), 81–82.

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Fig. 1. A crucial pamphlet for Ideological Origins. Image courtesy of Rice University, Houston, Texas

pamphlet issued by the Rice Institute in Houston in 1951 (figure 1).10 Bailyn described McKillop’s “revealing study,” uncited in the general introduction of 1965 and perhaps unknown to him then, as “the most sensitive effort yet made, as far as the present writer is aware, to distinguish opposition themes from the mainstream tradition of eighteenth-century political thought” (IO, 46–47n33), a compliment designed to place

10Alan D. McKillop, “The Background of Thomson’s Liberty,” The Rice Institute Pamphlet 38 (1951).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 65 McKillop’s name and work (as he had in the foreword) alongside the recent contributions of historians Caroline Robbins and J.G.A. Pocock, neither of whom cited McKillop. In one of the longest notes written specifically for the 1967 book, Bailyn expressed his surprise and admiration that “Thomson’s Liberty (1735–36), a vast, unreadable autobiography of the goddess of that name, detailing the long history of her ancient greatness, her decline in ‘Gothic darkness,’ and her ultimate revival in Hanoverian England, proves, in the excellent analysis by Alan McKillop . . . to be of the greatest importance in the ideological history of the eighteenth century.” “For not only does this ‘sweeping synthesis or elaborate piece of syncretism’ ex- pose the great array of sources that fed the early eighteenth- century ideas of liberty,” Bailyn added, “but it demonstrates the degree of deviation from the normal pattern that opposition thought involved as it traces the shifts that took place in Thomson’s views in the course of writing the poem—from con- fidence in English politics to concern, from support of the ad- ministration to opposition—and that are reflected in it” (IO, 49n37). Jack P. Greene, perhaps the only individual to review both Pamphlets in 1965 (for American Quarterly)andIdeo- logical Origins in 1967 (for the American Historical Review), noted that Bailyn had answered one of the criticisms made of the general introduction of 1965 by “building upon the work of J.G.A. Pocock and several literary scholars, especially Alan D. McKillop” in the revised and expanded book; Greene even quoted Bailyn quoting McKillop.11 That McKillop’s pamphlet, with its attention to the synthesis of opposition thought, is not mentioned alongside Robbins or Pocock as part of the early ge- nealogy of the “republican synthesis” and is certainly unknown to most of Bailyn’s readers now is perhaps a sign of our disciplinary times; but that it was almost certainly unknown to most of Bailyn’s readers in 1967, and perhaps even to Robbins and

11Jack P. Greene, review of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776, vol. 1, 1750–1765, by Bernard Bailyn, American Quarterly 17 (1965): 592–94; Greene, review of The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, by Bernard Bailyn, Amer- ican Historical Review 73 (1967): 210. The longest “blurb” on the paperback edition of Ideological Origins comes from Greene’s review of Pamphlets in American Quarterly.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 66 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY Pocock at that time, is a sign of the kind of eclectic scholarship Bailyn practiced in order to understand his sources. But for all of the affinities to Tyler’s “inward history,” to Cook’s study of the diffusion of particular texts like Cato’s Let- ters, and to McKillop’s opposition synthesis, the literary scholar who may have left the biggest mark on Ideological Origins was the one Bailyn knew best. In taking the words of his pamphleteers sincerely, Bailyn adopted in part the critical posture of Perry Miller, the literary scholar who had himself transformed early American intellectual history by taking the words of New England Puritans seriously. From the beginning of his career, Miller made space for his work by setting to one side “economic and social factors” and by entertaining the “naïve” belief (as he facetiously put it in the revision of his 1931 Uni- versity of Chicago English PhD thesis) that “the way men think has some influence upon their actions” and was not “justso many rationalizations . . . to disguise the pursuit of more tan- gible ends.”12 Bailyn found Miller and his works “fascinating,” singling him out in the 1993 interview as the colleague after Os- car Handlin whose orientation had shaped his early professional research interests and ideas, while acknowledging that his fas- cination was both with Miller’s approach and what he took to be its problems.13 In reviewing the second volume of The New England Mind in the pages of the New England Quarterly in 1954, Bailyn marveled at Miller’s scope and pointed to his limits. Miller had “managed to analyze in detail the complete literary output of New England during an entire century”: “Poetry and monetary tracts, theological, political, even medical writings all fall within his reach.” This, it turns out, was the easy part, for an “un- usual difficulty” faced Miller, or indeed anyone who attempted to foreground intellectual history when “the type of background history he requires—a detailed, sophisticated history of

12Perry Miller, “The Establishment of Orthodoxy in Massachusetts” (PhD diss., Uni- versity of Chicago, 1931); Perry Miller, Orthodoxy in Massachusetts, 1630–1650 (Cam- bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1933), xi. 13Ekirch, “Conversation with Bernard Bailyn,” 632.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 67 colonial society—does not exist.” Miller had pieced together that background from inadequate secondary accounts and had “extemporized a social history subtler than any yet written.” “The wonder is not that a few weaknesses in social interpretation occur in the book,” Bailyn observed, “but rather that Mr. Miller has been able to extemporize this history of New En- gland society as well as he has.” Bailyn then turned to what he described as “the fundamen- tal problem” of Miller’s new book, raising an issue that clearly irked the senior scholar because it represented the response of an ideal younger reader and signaled the changing fate of intellectual history in the historical profession:

The difficulty stems from the phrase, the New England “mind.” What does it mean? Mr. Miller answers in his Foreword that “‘mind’ means what was said and done publicly.” This definition obliges him to con- sider a huge, unconfined area. He himself notes that “it is evident that from the end of the seventeenth century down at least to the close of the nineteenth, the history of New England’s ‘mind’ was written as much, if not more, by the actions of merchants and men of business as in the publication of theologians and politicians.” Should we not, then, expect an account of “the actions of merchants and men of business”? None is given, for whatever the range of Mr. Miller’s interests, his field of continued research continues to be intellectual history and his chosen sources remain the literary evidences of Puritan thinkers. In the previous volume, dealing with the New England “mind” at the moment of settlement, when the reins of society were firmly held by pious, learned Puritans, this definition caused no trouble. Everything “said and done publicly” in the lifetime of the founders might well be comprehended in the categories of Puritan theology. But if this was true at the time of the founding, it was not true in the succeeding decades. Consequently, Mr. Miller wanders afield as he approaches the end of the selected century. The final portions of the book are relatively formless in comparison with the earlier sections and with the whole previous volume. Digressions into politics, finance, and a variety of social topics break the continuity of thought. Yet—and this is the heart of the problem—the author is right to seek to widen the scope of the subject matter, for, as he realizes, the published sermons and the pamphlets that relate to the reconstitution of Puritan thought bear a diminishing relevance to the issues that absorbed people’s

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 68 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY energies and caught up their imaginations. The terms of Puritan thought became poorer and poorer tools by which New Englanders might grasp reality; they become only slightly less useless for the historian seeking to understand their lives. Faithful to his familiar sources but obliged by his definition of “mind” and by his understanding of the realities of colonial life to broaden the scope of his inquiry as he proceeds, Mr. Miller finds it increasingly difficult to unify and harmonize his voluminous materials.14 This was an extraordinary review of an eminent senior scholar from an untenured historian who had yet to publish his first book. Miller waited seven years to respond in public, and he chose to do so in the 1961 paperback reprint of the 1954 book. Because he took aim at but didn’t name Bailyn, who he referred to as “the most charitable of my critics,” and because the target of Miller’s aim remembered it so well over thirty years later, it is worth quoting the new preface almost in its entirety: I find a particular gratification in the reappearance of this final install- ment because it was such a challenge—as much as I could make it one—to modern scholarship about what constitutes “intellectual history,” and wherein it differs from, or should be set apart from, the “social.” At one point, however, I incautiously remarked that by the close of my century the chronicle of New England’s “mind” was being as much written by the actions of men of business as by theologians. That proved a gaff. I was soon appalled by the eagerness with which academic reviewer after reviewer seized upon this unfortunate passage as a welcome release from the burden of ideas which my treatment had imposed upon them, and by the glee with which they demanded of the book, where was the account of these actions? When they could triumphantly announce that it was conspicuous by its absence, they could comfortably dismiss this sort of history as irrel- evant. They could resume their researches, with a clear conscience, on such topics as ship [sic], trade routes, currency, property, agricul- ture, town government and military tactics. I still maintain, and want this reprinting to insist, that while indeed these kinds of activity require an exercise of a faculty which in ordinary parlance may be called the intelligence, such matters are

14Bernard Bailyn, Review of The New England Mind: From Colony to Province, by Perry Miller, New England Quarterly 27 (1954): 112–18 (citations at 114, 116, 117).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 69 not, and cannot be made, the central theme of a coherent narra- tive. They furnish forth at their worst mere tables of statistics, on the average meaningless inventories, and at their best only a series of monographs. The most charitable of my critics paid me a dubious compliment on my ability “to extemporize” the history of New En- gland society, but he intended this courtesy to be a rebuke to the profession for not having yet built the foundation on which my account ought, by rights, to have been based. He implied that therefore that construct was floating on thin air, like some insubstantial island of Laputa.

My unrepentant—or should I say defiant?—contention is quite the reverse. The terms of Puritan thinking do not progressively become poorer tools than were the concepts of the founders for the recording of social change. On the contrary, they are increasingly the instruments through which the people strove to cope with a bewildering reality. Unless we also approach that buzzing factuality through a comprehension of these ideas, it become even more a tumultuous chaos for us tha[n] it was for those caught in the blizzard. Unless we can do this, the writing of history ceases to be a work of the mind. But to proceed successfully from the intellectual to the social pattern requires of the historian—and the reader of histories—a sensitivity to the nuances of ideas at least as delicate as that of the best intellects of the period.15

It was quite a challenge, one that Bailyn—by then the author of two books and several important articles, and increasingly drawn toward the Revolution—may have internalized. “I didn’t pursue it, but I’ve always thought that that was an inter- esting exchange,” Bailyn told Ekirch in 1993, recalling with ac- curacy specific phrases both from his review and from Miller’s response. “It’s just a few paragraphs,” he noted, “but it’s a defiant, though to me elusive, defense of the autonomy and

15Perry Miller, “Preface to the Beacon Press Edition,” The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1954; repr., Boston: Harvard University Press, 1961), [iii–iv]. The preface is dated February 25, 1961, a month and a half after Bailyn delivered his first sustained argument about the interplay between ideas and social realities during the Revolution, “Political Experience and Enlightenment Ideas in Eighteenth-Century America,” at the Massachusetts Historical Society; the essay was then published as read in the American Historical Review 67 (1962): 339–51. Had Miller heard Bailyn refer to ideas as “instruments” at MHS (as Bailyn does at 351 in the published essay)?

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 70 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY inclusiveness of intellectual history, brilliant but baffling, and complete with a few sideswipes at the statistical tables he had seen me studying for my book on shipping.” But when inter- viewer asked if, in retrospect, Perry Miller “pretty much got it right” in “his suppositions relating to social history in the colonial era,” Bailyn conceded that, on the whole, he had. Miller had set the terms of the subsequent discussion with a “density of documentation that no one had dreamed of before,” allow- ing his readers to see writings that “had been dismissed as rub- bish” as “part of an entire cultural world that had been lost to history.”16 Sound familiar? If Miller’s 1961 preface remained directly unanswered by Bailyn, Miller’s essay “From the Covenant to the Revival,” published that same year, soon exercised a pull on Bailyn’s historical imagination. Bailyn referred to “Miller’s important essay” (IO, 7n8) on the jeremiad tradition four times in Ide- ological Origins, only one citation less than the number he made to Pocock’s “Machiavelli, Harrington, and English Politi- cal Ideologies in the Eighteenth Century,” an article he read in manuscript while preparing the general introduction for Pam- phlets. (If one adds the uncredited allusion to Miller’s charge against “obtuse secularism” on page viii of the Foreward to Ide- ological Origins, then Miller’s essay tied Pocock’s—but who’s counting?) It is easy at this distance to see why this essay so attracted Bailyn; for here at last was Miller’s attempt (one of his final attempts, before he died in 1963) to focus squarely on the end of the century he traced in the second volume of his great work, to think concretely about the situation in different geographies, and to demonstrate the power of older habits of thinking in the age of the American Revolution. Miller ad- dressed his remarks to the “secular historian,” the kind who would dismiss any reading of the religious appeal of writers during the American Revolution as “a calculated propaganda ma- neuver.” Such “historians, who may or may not be cynical, but who in either case have been corrupted by the twentieth century” perceive in revolutionary appeals to religion “only a clever

16Ekirch, “Conversation with Bernard Bailyn,” 632–33.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 71 device in ‘propaganda,’” a strategy of “rationalist or deistical leaders . . . to bamboozle the lower orders and simple-minded rustics.” “The ministers did not have to ‘sell’ the Revolution to a public sluggish to ‘buy,’” Miller quipped. “They were spelling out what both they and the people sincerely believed.” Here is the case Miller made and Bailyn absorbed: Though by now the Revolution has been voluminously, and one might suppose exhaustively, studied, we still do not realize how effective were generations of Protestant preachers in evoking patriotic utter- ance. No interpretation of the religious utterances as being merely sanctimonious window-dressing will do justice to the facts or to the character of the populace. Circumstances and the nature of the dominant opinion in Europe made it necessary for the official statement to be released in primarily “political” terms—the social compact, in- alienable rights, the right of revolution. But those terms, in and by themselves, would never have supplied the drive to victory, however mightily they weighed with the literate minority. What carried the ranks of militia and citizens was the universal persuasion that they, by administering themselves to a spiritual purge, acquired the energies God had always, in the manner of the Old Testament, been ready to impart to His repentant children. Their first responsibility was not to shoot redcoats but to cleanse themselves; only thereafter to take aim.17 Miller’s 1961 essay seems to have convinced Bailyn, who included “the political and social theories of New England Pu- ritanism,andparticularly...theideasassociatedwithcovenant theology” alongside classical and Enlightenment writings, En- glish common law, and opposition thought in his inventory of the sources and traditions informing revolutionary thinking (see IO, 32n14 and 33n15). “In one sense,” Bailyn acknowl- edged, “this was the most limited and parochial tradition that

17Perry Miller, “From the Covenant to the Revival,” in The Shaping of American Religion: Religion in American Life, ed. James Ward Smith and A. Leland Jamison (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1961), 322–368 (citations at 322, 324, 343, 333). For Bailyn’s references to Miller’s essay, see Ideological Origins, 7n8, 32n14, 33n15, 193n35 (and vii); for references to Pocock’s essay, see 35n16, 36n18, 40n22, 48n35, and 62n7. And see Bernard Bailyn with Jane N. Garrett, eds., Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750–1776 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965), 1:xii.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 72 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY contributed in an important way to the writings of the Revo- lution, for it drew mainly from local sources.” “But in another sense,” he confessed, “it contained the broadest ideas of all, since it offered a context for everyday events nothing less than cosmic in its dimensions” (IO, 32). “It carried on into the eighteenth century and into the minds of the Revolutionaries the idea, originally worked out in the sermons and tracts of the settlement period, that the colonization of British America had been an event designed by the hand of God to satisfy his ultimate aims” (IO, 32). For Bailyn, of course, this tradition was not ultimately as significant or as influential as the strand of opposition thought that he saw braided with it. Neverthe- less, it is difficult to see in Bailyn’s nods to Miller throughout Ideological Origins any of the claim made in the 1954 New England Quarterly review that the “terms of Puritan thought became poorer and poorer tools by which New Englanders might grasp reality”; instead, they now seemed to be precisely what Miller said in his response to Bailyn in his new preface, “the instruments through which the people strove to cope with a bewildering reality.” Bailyn drew on all these works by generations of literary scholars, these accounts of the sources of his sources, but he went beyond them in an important way, ultimately suggesting that it was not just who his American writers read but how they read that made the difference. As he worked through the citations within his texts, he began to distinguish superficial (“See Locke on government”) from substantial appeals to authority (IO, 28n7). He differentiated between a “vivid vocabulary” of the pamphlets derived from classical sources and the “grammar or logic” of their thought, for ancient Roman texts had provided “a universally respected personification but not the source of political and social beliefs” (IO, 26). Americans read sources and events differently. Conditions of life in America, Bailyn claimed, caused Americans to appreciate and deploy the thought of opposition British writers—John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, among others—in ways impossible in En- gland itself, where such ideas “were considered to be extreme” and “dislocating” (IO, 51). This distinction between who and

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 73 how is why the book is not, strictly speaking, an account of the intellectual origins (much less of the literary origins) of the American Revolution but rather of what he called its “ideological” origins (IO, vi)—a word only just slightly younger than the American Revolution itself and one Bailyn used infrequently in both the 1965 general introduction and the 1967 book. Indeed, it is intriguing to watch Bailyn’s own conceptual- izations of what he meant by “ideological” come into clearer focus in his revisions between 1965 and 1967. For instance, in the foreword to Pamphlets Bailyn had written that “study of the pamphlets confirmed my rather old-fashioned view that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological- constitutional struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of society.”18 In the foreword to Ideological Origins, he wrote instead “that the American Revolution was above all else an ideological, constitutional, political struggle and not primarily a controversy between social groups undertaken to force changes in the organization of society or the economy”(IO, vi, emphasis mine). The switch in punctuation from the dash between “ideological” and “constitutional” to the comma may be relatively slight, the addition of “political” may be less so, but in no case does ideology stand on its own; and in the revision “economy” must be added to “society” to provide a sufficient contrast to allow readers to grasp what he means. Such distinctions in terminology are chiefly analytical—but whatarewetomakeofaseeminglymoresignificantrevisionin Bailyn’s definition of the American Revolution itself from 1965 to 1967? In the opening chapter on “Literary Qualities” of the general introduction to Pamphlets, Bailyn observed that “the American Revolution, which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was to a remarkable extent an affair of the mind” and that its “dominant goals were not the overthrow of the existing order but the establishment in principle of existing matters of fact, and its means were the

18Bailyn, Pamphlets, viii, emphasis mine.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 74 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY communication of understanding.”19 To a remarkable extent an affair of the mind? In 1965 and 1966 a number of reviewers of Pamphlets highlighted this phrase and sentence as a convenient way to summarize Bailyn’s argument. Gordon S. Wood echoed it in his article on “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution” in early 1966, pointing to contemporaries who had described their revolution as (in Wood’s phrase) “peculiarly an affair of the mind.”20 Indeed, the phrase seemed to encapsu- latetheveryideaof“TheAmericanRevolutionConsideredas an Intellectual Movement,” the title of Edmund S. Morgan’s 1963 essay.21 And it sounded suspiciously close to the kind of fault he had once found in Perry Miller’s use of the word “mind.” (“What does it mean?”) Perhaps for all of those rea- sons, Bailyn deleted the phrase when he revised the passage for Ideological Origins, where it now appeared in the chapter on “The Literature of Revolution”: “For the primary goal of the American Revolution,” he now claimed, “which transformed American life and introduced a new era in human history, was not the overthrow or even the alteration of the existing social order but the preservation of political liberty threatened by the apparent corruption of the constitution, and the establishment in principle of the existing conditions of liberty” (IO, 19). The significant takeaway from this revision is that “ideological” should not be reduced to “idealist,” a misreading that has at times haunted and at other times helped sustain Bailyn’s interpretation since the 1960s.22 The new title he selected in

19Bailyn, Pamphlets, 17. 20Gordon S. Wood, “Rhetoric and Reality in the American Revolution,” WMQ 23 (1966): 5. 21Edmund S. Morgan, “The American Revolution Considered as an Intellectual Movement,” in Paths of American Thought, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Mor- ton White (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1963), 11–33. 22Despite the deletion, many continued to describe Bailyn’s revolution as “an affair of the mind.” As literary scholar Daniel Shea noted in an entry on “The Ameri- can Revolution as a Literary Event” in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, “the political pamphlets and newspaper essays of the period try to persuade the modern reader that the Revolution was an intellectual event, ‘an affair of the mind’ in Bernard Bailyn’s phrase, rather than an experience that aroused the emotions, engaged the imagination, and, for tens of thousands of people, tormented the body.” Daniel B. Shea, “The American Revolution as a Literary Event,” in Columbia Literary History

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 75 1967, compared to the sweeping one he had given the general introduction in 1965 (“The Transforming Radicalism of the American Revolution”), signaled both the ambitions of his study and some acknowledgment of its scope. Is Ideological Origins chiefly a book about ideas? It certainly seemed so to its author on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary. In crafting a preface for an enlarged edition of Ideological Origins in 1992, Bailyn invoked the word “ideas” frequently—indeed, eleven times in just four pages, a heavier concentration than in any similar stretch in the original 1967 text. In 1992, he celebrated a “dominant cluster of ideas, beliefs, and attitudes,” a “blend of ideas and beliefs,” and a “powerful set of ideas, ideals, and political sensibilities.” He marveled at the “force and cohesiveness of the original ideas and beliefs” American revolutionaries had inherited as well as the “flexibility of their ideas.” Above all, he emphasized “the protean possibilities of the original ideas” in the face of new circumstances after 1776 (IO, xxiii–xxvi). Given the emphasis on ideas twenty-five years ago it is perhaps even more striking than that in creating his new “Preface to the Fiftieth Anniversary Edition” of 2017 the author chose to use the word just once in thirteen pages in order to express his hope that the book “still conveys an understanding of the ideas, beliefs, fears, and aspirations that inspired the rebellion against Britain and ultimately the founding of the American nation” (IO, xxi). In place of “ideas” readers of the new preface will find the author focusing instead on a set of keywords thathark back to his early training in literary studies: on “words” and

of the United States, ed. Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 147. For early mentions of Bailyn’s phrase “to a remarkable extent an affair of the mind,” see Richard Buel Jr., review of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750– 1776, vol. 1, 1750–1765, by Bernard Bailyn, Canadian Historical Review 47 (1966): 168; Michael G. Kammen, review of Pamphlets of the American Revolution, 1750– 1776, vol. 1, 1750–1765, by Bernard Bailyn, Virginia Magazine of History and Biog- raphy 73 (1965): 360–62; and Charles W. Akers, review of Lamp of Experience: Whig History and the Intellectual Origins of the American Revolution, by H. Trevor Col- bourn, Journal of American History 53 (1966): 108–109. For later invocations of the deleted phrase, see Francis Jennings, Empire of Fortune: Crowns, Colonies, and Tribes in the Seven Years War in America (New York: Norton, 1988), xvii–xix; and Shea, “Lit- erary Event,” 147.

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 76 THE NEW ENGLAND QUARTERLY “meanings,” on “writings” and “readings,” on “authors” and “expressions,” on “quotations and paraphrases,” on “metaphors, similes, and analogies,” on “vocabulary” and “grammar,” on “personification” and “prose,” on “inner voices” and “vision,” on “misunderstanding” and “the limits of imagination” (IO, v–xxi). Readers will also discover Bailyn reflecting on his own style of historical exposition, a series of “quasi-conversational or confrontational collages” of quotations and paraphrases drawn from different writers and designed to dramatize what were in reality the limited and discrete expressions of individuals (IO, viii). They will find him still wrestling, now more than sixty years after his review of the second volume of Perry Miller’s New England Mind in the pages of this journal, with the proper way to return drama to past debates without “assuming some kind of collective mind at work” (IO, viii). At fifty, Ideological Origins remains an inescapable citation, whether superficial or substantive. Since publication, Bailyn’s book has been a crucial and continuing model, spur, and foil for early American literary scholars.23 That legacy is an important one. It has also been an unsurprisingly continuous one, if only because of the professional faith of literary scholars in the power of words. But rather than see the book as the inau- guration of a new interpretation of the American Revolution, the oldest still-vital citation in a rich historiography it helped bring forth, we can honor it by describing it in the terms

23A partial list of books includes Kenneth Silverman, A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Thomas Crowell, 1976); Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in Ameri- can Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 1986); Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer- sity Press, 1990); Sandra Gustafson, Eloquence is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007); Eric Slauter, The State as a Work of Art: The Cul- tural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); William B. Warner, Protocols of Liberty: Communication Innovation and the American Revolu- tion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); and Russ Castronovo, Propaganda 1776: Secrets, Leaks, and Revolutionary Communications in Early America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/tneq_a_00660 by guest on 25 September 2021 THE LITERATURE OF REVOLUTION 77 Bailyn himself used—an “old-fashioned” view, a contribution that drew strength in part from a now largely unknown body of literary scholarship and that found early adopters in an emerging community of scholars beyond history departments. To see Ideological Origins as itself a legacy is to honor the book by subjecting it to the kind of analysis its author himself practiced so brilliantly there.

Eric Slauter is associate professor of English and Director of the Karia Scherer Center for the Study of American Culture at the University of Chicago.

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