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Download File Corresponding Republics: Letter Writing and Patriot Organizing in the Atlantic Revolutions, circa 1760-1792 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2011 © 2011 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal All rights reserved ABSTRACT Corresponding Republics: Letter Writing and Patriot Organizing in the Atlantic Revolutions, circa 1760-1792 Nathan Perl-Rosenthal “Corresponding Republics” is a study of how letter writing practices shaped elite political organizing during the early years of the American, Dutch and French Revolutions of the late eighteenth century. The heart of the project is a study of revolutionary leaders’ correspondence and epistolary practices. Letters were the lifeblood of all early modern politics—the means to share information, develop strategies and resolve internecine disputes. This was particularly true of the eighteenth-century Atlantic patriot parties, which all faced the challenge of building cohesive movements in the fragmented political landscape of the old regime. Yet even though most studies of revolutionary politics make heavy use of private correspondence, nobody had yet examined the ways in which patriots’ reliance on private letters and networks shaped the revolutions’ broader political cultures. “Corresponding Republics” argues that the distinctive old regime private correspondence practices of patriots in each region persisted into the revolutionary period. These practices, which were crucial to the elaboration of patriots’ political subjectivity, helped produce different kinds of political networks and contributed to significant divergences among the three revolutions. Though by no means the whole explanation for the three revolutions’ different courses, epistolary practices are an essential and untold part of that story. The main sources for the project are manuscript letters in American and European archives. The first three chapters of the dissertation examine inter-colonial organizing during the first years of the American Revolution. Chapters One and Two offer a revised view of the efforts by Sons of Liberty, as the patriot leaders called themselves, to build a cohesive inter- colonial patriot party from 1765 to 1772. They document patriots’ deep immersion in mercantile correspondence and their persistence in using it after 1765. Yet this style, which raised high barriers to posing questions or engaging in debate, made it difficult for patriot leaders to have tactical discussions and coordinate their activities across the colonies. The Sons instead created a largely symbolic agreement on general principles of resistance. Chapter Three focuses on the developing relationship after 1772 between the patriots’ private networks and public committees of correspondence. It shows how private letter writing helped the Sons organize formal inter- colonial corresponding committees in 1773, which reflected the private networks’ focus on information transmission rather than discussion. Not until the meeting of the First Continental Congress in 1774 did patriot leaders develop an inter-colonial network whose affective depth enabled tactical and ideological debate. And even then, the patriots’ epistolary tools still encouraged them to paper over serious differences about political strategy and ideology in order to maintain the unity of the colonies. The second half of the dissertation uses studies of national organizing in the Dutch and French Revolutions to examine what was distinctive about the Sons of Liberty’s organizing efforts. The underlying problems the patriot movements confronted, I argue, were similar: like their American counterparts, Dutch and French patriots sought to build a cohesive political movement on a national scale through correspondence. In practice, however, the process differed significantly. French Jacobin leaders drew on a pre-revolutionary tradition of scholarly epistolarity, which encouraged discussion and dialogue among participants. These qualities helped them develop epistolary communities far more tightly knit than those of their American counterparts. This proved to be both an asset and a liability. It helped them forge a high degree of ideological and tactical unity within the movement. But it also made it more difficult for them to avoid internal disagreements, contributing to the serious internal dissention in 1792 that foreshadowed the eruption of violence among patriot leaders. The Dutch patriot elites, for their part, created highly hierarchical private and public networks. The division between the two types of networks, heightened by their reliance on courtly epistolary habits, inhibited their efforts to forge alliances with the growing popular militia movement. These divisions were a factor in the Dutch patriots’ failure, in the short term, to successfully achieve their goal of seizing and holding national political power. TABLE OF CONTENTS Table of Contents i List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iii Introduction 1 Part I: The American Revolution, 1765-1776 1: Merchants and patriots: private networks and politics, ca. 1760-1770 24 2: Messengers and misinformation: the epistolary construction of truth, 1770-1773 74 3: Mechanics of protest: committees and private correspondents, 1773-1775 118 Part II: The Dutch Patriot Revolt, 1780-1787 4: The aristocratic style of revolution 164 Part III: The French Revolution, 1785-1792 5: From academicians to patriotes: the Roland epistolary network, 1780-1790 201 6: Entangled networks: the Roland circle among the Jacobins, 1790-1791 237 7: Triumph and tragedy: the making and breaking of Jacobin unity, 1791-1792 277 Coda 313 Bibliography 317 i LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Fig. A: Broadside announcing the formation of the Virginia Committee of Correspondence 163 Fig. B: A letter between elite patriots and a letter from a patriot society 200 Fig. C. A collective letter by the members of the Roland circle. 236 ii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS At the end of the student phase of my scholarly life, it is a pleasure to be able to express my thanks to the teachers, friends, colleagues and family who have helped me reach this point. I am deeply grateful to Eric Foner, exemplary teacher and advisor, for his wise counsel, good humor, and unstinting support over the past years. In 2000, he told me to come back to Columbia for graduate school and then made sure that I did. As a teacher, he introduced me to the study of the early Republic, nineteenth century America and the American radical tradition. I learned most of what I know about how to teach from watching him in the classroom. As a dissertation advisor, he provided an ideal balance of advice, honest criticism and encouragement. At every turn, and with every piece of writing, he was ready with comments that were just what the occasion required. Above all, he let me follow my own path and supported me no matter what unexpected directions it took. It has been a privilege to be the last doctoral student to work with Isser Woloch. I have benefited immensely over the years from his extraordinarily attentive reading and his judicious advice even (or perhaps especially) when we have disagreed. He is truly an homme des lumières: one of those rare individuals who is actually open to persuasion, who considers everything on its merits and draws his own perfectly measured conclusions. Christopher L. Brown, David Bell and Evan Haefeli put me even further in their debt than I already was by agreeing to serve on my committee. I could not have asked for better readers. Their comments—incisive, wide-ranging and sympathetic—improved the project beyond measure and have given me a road map for revisions. I have learned over the past years iii to count on their friendship, support, conscientious advice and their extraordinary mastery of their respective fields. I look forward with great pleasure to working with them further. Courses with a number of teachers in early modern American and European history lay the foundations for this dissertation. In addition to classes with Evan Haefeli, Isser Woloch and Eric Foner, I learned much from James Delbourgo, Joyce Chaplin, Jean-François Dunyach, Jean- Pierre Poussou, Matthew L. Jones and Harold C. Cook. James, as he knows, receives all the credit and none of the blame; Joyce was the model undergraduate advisor and remains a valued friend, mentor and inspiration; Matt’s fingerprints are all over this dissertation and his friendship means a great deal. Though I never studied with them formally, I also benefited from many conversations with Columbia faculty members Elizabeth Blackmar, Caterina Pizzigoni, Pamela Smith, Carl Wennerlind, Herbert Sloan, Samuel Moyn and Alan Brinkley. It has been my great good fortune to have wonderful colleagues and friends at Columbia and elsewhere who have eagerly asked me about my research, listened to my often rambling explanations and offered good advice about my projects and much else. At Columbia, they include the 2005 US history mafia (Nicholas Osborne, Sarah Kirshen, Elizabeth Hinton, Bryan Rosenblithe and Bob Neer), the Dutch patriots (Ariel Rubin, Deborah Hamer, Jeun Cho), and a motley and distinguished assortment of others working on all parts of the globe: Matt Spooner, James Chappel, Tom Meaney, Victoria Geduld, Eileen Ryan, Rachel Van, April Holm and Asheesh Siddique. I have benefited from conversations with friends and colleagues including Benjamin L. Carp, Peter S. Onuf, Pauline Maier, Naomi Wulf, Allan Potofsky,
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