CATO's Letters Were Popular Enough in the Colonies to Be Quoted
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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 haveC had no small share in bringing about that amazing unity of po- litical 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 gov- ernment 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 publica- tion 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). The New England Quarterly, vol. XCI, no. 1 (March 2018). C 2018 by The New England Quarterly. All rights reserved. doi:10.1162/TNEQ_a_00660. 57 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 aca- demic 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 his- torian to join ranks with colleagues in literature, he was cer- tainly 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 stu- dent 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 his- torians 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 inter- pretation of interest and motive, but at a moment in the devel- opment 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 col- league 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 revo- lutionary 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 cre- ative 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 writ- ers 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 propa- ganda” 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 be- ginning 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 cen- tury, 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 lit- erary 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.