Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors: the Pursuit of Recognition in the Biographical War of the Early Republic

Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors: The Pursuit of Recognition in the Biographical War of the Early Republic

Hannah Spahn

Abstract

“All revolutions,” Alexis de Tocqueville claims in Democracy in America, “enlarge the ambition of men.” This article takes a look at the complex relationship between two major Ameri- can discourses of recognition in the revolutionary and early republican periods, one focusing on ambition as a force potentially undermining the foundations of the commonwealth, the other on the pursuit of esteem as an anthropological universal that contributed to the progress of civilization. In a language partly reminiscent of David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s social mirrors, John Adams’s architectural metaphor of a mirrored ‘boudoir’ captured the ambivalence of recognition in the late American Enlightenment, an ambivalence negotiated primarily in the period’s highly aestheticized approaches to history as a literary genre. The revolutionary generation eventually competed for a sublimated recognition on the battlegrounds of the ‘biographical war’ of the early nineteenth century, in a genre including commissioned biographies, unsent letters, and clandestine memoirs. Trying to achieve the impossible aim of representing their hopes for recognition as self-sacrificing republicans in writing, the aging revolutionaries reached a moral and aesthetic impasse, thus ending up lost, or so this article claims, in their own historical boudoir of mirrors.

“Abby, thou comprehendest not,” John Adams scribbled in the margins of De la legislation by his late French acquaintance, the Abbé de Mably. On other pages of his copy, Adams’s comments on the French critic of private property were hardly more favorable, ranging from “Abby, thou hast it not right” to “Stark mad.” A major fault in Mably’s argument was, as Adams complained in his marginalia, that the “Abby has not Seen the true source of the passions. Ambition springs from the desire of Esteem, and from emulation, not from property.”1 For Adams, human behavior was intrinsically motivated by the aim to be perceived in a favorable light by others—a universal desire for social distinction that he called

1 For a more recent version of the Mably-Adams controversy, see Fraser and Honneth. John Adams’s marginalia into his copy of Mably’s De la legislation, pages 163, 148, 74, and 124 (pho- tography with transcriptions) can be viewed at www.johnadamslibrary.org. Elder brother to Eti- enne Bonnot de Condillac, Gabriel Bonnot de Mably (1709-1785) was a respected writer when Adams met him, but his political tracts reached a wider circulation only after his death, when they were widely quoted during the French Revolution (many developments of which they appeared to have anticipated); see Schleich. For Adams’s reaction to Mably, see Ellis 90-91, which transcribes “emulation” rather than “simulation,” the transcription by the Adams library. While both would make sense in the context of recognition in a neoclassical culture, the more general “emulation” might have been Adams’s more likely choice in this context. As will be discussed below, it is also a key term in Smith’s discussion of recognition in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. 534 Hannah Spahn the spectemur agendo2—rather than by the striving for material goods as an end in itself. As he remarked in the margins of his copy of Rousseau’s Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, the human “love of Esteem” had begun as early as the moment when the “first two men or women […] met” and “felt an Affection for each other.”3 Thus understanding the pursuit of recognition as a foundational activity in the establishment of society, Adams felt that Mably’s argument for a more equal distribution of property missed the point, designed as it was to cure at best the symptoms of social inequality, but not its source. He differed from the abbé, less in his criticism of crass inequalities as such than in his views on the proposed remedy: Abolishing private property rights would not, as Adams saw it, go to the root of the social and political problem posed by destructive human passions such as ‘Ambition.’ Adams’s comments on Mably’s and Rousseau’s writings offer a glimpse into a wide-ranging discussion on the nature of human motivations and a just society in the late Enlightenment. As I will argue in this essay, the modern problem of recognition in a society of relative social equals, which became conspicuous in the democratic culture of Tocqueville’s America, was divided into two different discourses in the early American republic. On the one hand, many Anglo-Ameri- cans considered the striving for esteem, approbation, attention, honor, reputation, or fame (in their terminology) to be a central driving force of human behavior; Adams, for instance, went as far as to regard it as the original incentive for the procreation of the species. On the other hand, however, many contemporaries stressed the dangerous potential of this basic human motivation. In the Stoic and Christian tradition, they often criticized the pursuit of recognition as a habit that, if exaggerated, easily deteriorated into a dangerous vice or a sin.4 It could take the specific form of political ambition, for Adams and likeminded political thinkers a vice capable of destroying the very foundations of the republic. As I want to show, the conflict between these two discourses about recognition—between a produc- tive pursuit of esteem and a potentially destructive ambition—was negotiated in the domain of aesthetics, specifically in the literary historiography of the period.

2 On the role of spectemur agendo in Adams’s conception of politics, see C. Thompson, “John Adams and the Science of Politics” 237-65, especially 242-46. 3 Adams’s critical comments were made into his copy of this translation—Jean Jacques Rousseau, A discourse upon the origin and foundation of inequality among mankind (London, 1761): “Love of Esteem is much earlier than this. The first two men or women who met felt an Affection for each other” (114)—and can be found at www.johnAdamslibrary.org. For Adams, the “desire of Esteem” had originated in the state of nature, thus significantly earlier than for Rousseau (in whose pre-social natural state it did not yet exist). 4 See Taylor 25-73, especially 44-51. Taylor sees Rousseau as the eighteenth-century alternative to the two traditional ways of thinking about esteem and recognition. According to him, Rousseau’s alternative of gaining esteem in a system “characterized by equality, reciprocity, and unity of purpose” in his ideal republic initiated a “new discourse about honor and dignity” in modernity (49). Adams’s ambivalence toward esteem overlaps with Rousseau’s third way in some particulars—as in the controlling force of republican visibility in his historical boudoir of mirrors, which will be discussed below—but due to the fact that, unlike Rousseau, Adams located property and esteem in the natural state, the political solutions he and other American revolutionaries proposed had little in common with the Contrat social. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 535

Related to the moral and aesthetic problem of vanity, it became central to the revolutionaries’ efforts to achieve virtuous reputations on the historical record. The striving for the precarious balance between esteem and ambition thus came to play a crucial role in one of the earliest American culture wars: the ‘biographical war’5 about the power to define America’s national origins. The first skirmishes of this literary war, about the representation of the American Revolution, began even before its military action had ended. Its cultural battles intensified with the publication of John Marshall’s Life of George Washington and continued to be fought well into the third decade of the nineteenth century.6 In the first two sections of this essay I seek to present, briefly, an enlightened theory of recognition. I discuss its transatlantic origins, its political role in the American Revolution, and the complex ways in which the contemporaries came to terms with the relationship between recognition and aesthetics—that is, between their Janus-faced combination of esteem and ambition, and their aestheticized conception of ‘history’ as a literary genre. The two final sections of the essay explore the literary dimension of recognition in the biographical war. Due to the two conflicting discourses in the transitional culture of the late Enlightenment, the biographical war left in its wake a series of rather odd pieces of writing. It produced the curious phenomenon of letters that were never sent, but were con- scientiously preserved among the papers of the founders—part of their collective attempt, it could be said, at turning the historical representation of their period into something like a gigantic epistolary novel. The biographical war has also left us with a strange collection of founding autobiographies and memoirs. Although most of these texts were written with highly literary expectations on the genre of history by men who desperately sought to instruct posterity, they are mostly remembered today (with the famous exception of Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiog- raphy) as striking literary failures.

Enlightened Recognition

The British-American project of Enlightenment was closely linked to the incentive of gaining the esteem of others. According to foundational texts such as John Locke’s Thoughts Concerning Education—echoed, for instance, in Thomas Jefferson’s educational letters—the wish to be esteemed by one’s fellow men was the main goal of all individual improvement and self-discipline.7 Adam Smith described the hopes for “approbation” and “attention” as the dominant motivation

5 For the term the ‘biographical war,’ see Freeman 62-74, 274-88. 6 The first American biographical war was followed by several others, from the second wave of biographies by the sons of the founders lasting until the 1850s, to the recent phenomenon of “Founders Chic” in the early twenty-first century. For the nineteenth-century concern with biography, see Casper. 7 Cf. Locke 114-325, especially § 56-58 and 152-53. On esteem as “perhaps the most crucial word in the Lockean lexicon,” see Fliegelman 9-29, 13 (quotation). Compare Jefferson to Peter Carr (19 August 1785), to Martha Jefferson (28 March 1787), and to Thomas Jefferson Ran- dolph (24 November 1808). Cf. Jefferson, Papers 8: 405-08 and Family 34, 363. 536 Hannah Spahn for the attainment of wealth. In the context of a transitional society of ranks that was becoming upwardly mobile, he explained: From whence, then, arises that emulation which runs through all the different ranks of men, and what are the advantages which we propose by that great purpose of human life which we call bettering our condition? To be observed, to be attended to, to be taken notice of with sympathy, complacency and approbation, are all the advantages which we can propose to derive from it. It is the vanity, not the ease, or the pleasure, which interests us. The rich man glories in his riches, because he feels that they naturally draw upon him the attention of the world, and that mankind are disposed to go along with him in all those agreeable emotions […]. The poor man, on the contrary, is ashamed of his poverty. He feels that it either places him out of the sight of mankind, or, that if they take any notice of him, they have, however, scarce any fellow-feeling with the misery and distress which he suffers. He is mortified upon both accounts; for though to be overlooked, and to be disapproved of, are things entirely different, yet as obscurity covers us from the daylight of honour and approbation, to feel that we are taken no notice of, necessarily damps the most agreeable hope, and disappoints the most ardent desire, of human nature. (61-62) This passage from The Theory of Moral Sentiments discusses many of the terms that would become relevant for Adams, Jefferson, and other combatants in the biographical war. According to Smith’s concept of human nature, men tried to better their condition, not because of their “interest” in the material aspects of wealth, but because of their “vanity.” They engaged in the “emulation” of their superiors because they hoped to partake in the “agreeable emotions” of social visibility and the resulting “fellow-feeling” of others. The term ‘vanity’ had connotations that were both religious (stressing man’s finite nature) and aesthetic: As Smith emphasized repeatedly, all men were concerned, in particular, about the visual impression they made in the “view of the public,” or “the eyes of mankind” (61). Thus, he described the universal human yearning for recognition in ancient as well as strikingly modern terms. Smith still understood the hope for “approbation” and the “fellow-feeling” of other men in moral terms, as a contrast between “honour” and “glory” on the side of the rich, and “shame” on the side of the poor. His discussion of “attention,” meanwhile, foregrounded aesthetics as “the most ardent desire, of human nature” was frustrated when men were “overlooked,” placed in “obscurity” and “out of the sight of mankind.” For Smith, the hopes for “bettering our condition” were directed at the combination of gaining the (conventional) approbation and the (more modern) attention of society. His pursuit of recognition thus linked the problem of socially accepted moral value to the sensory experience of broad “daylight.” When abstracting from the descriptive emphasis of Smith’s moral philosophy, it could be argued that it was this daylight of more equal recognition that many progressive thinkers of the Enlightenment were hoping to spread. In a complex discussion of the existential significance of recognition that would eventually be condensed in Hegel’s dialectics of Master and Bondsman (the starting point of today’s recognition theories), many eighteenth-century arguments connected the pursuit of approbation and attention with the individual and collective aims of independence, liberty, and progress. To some extent, the American Revolution itself was motivated by the double aim of equal recognition and representation. So Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 537 much can be concluded, for instance, from the very first and last sentences of the Declaration of Independence. By its own account, this document only engaged in the activity of declaring only because this was what “a decent respect to the opinions of mankind” required. The concern with being recognized by the rest of the world literally had the priority, compared to the Declaration’s famous procla- mation of self-evident truths; it was only in the second paragraph that inalienable rights were asserted—after the claim for national recognition had been made in the first paragraph.8 In keeping with this emphasis on international respect at the very beginning the Declaration, its last phrase supported independence by mutual recognition on the domestic level, in the signers’ pledge of their “sacred honor.”9 As the term ‘sacred honor’ illustrates, the revolutionary pursuit of recognition was—like Adam Smith’s transitional combination of approbation and attention— to some degree still a socially exclusive endeavour which retained important ties to a premodern world. According to Montesquieu’s appropriation of ancient political theories, honor was the ruling principle in monarchies, while republics depended on virtue to survive. Although his classical definition of virtue as self- sacrifice for the commonwealth began to be criticized around the middle of the eighteenth century, it still proved influential in revolutionary and early republican America.10 In their attempts to gain the esteem of likeminded men across the At- lantic world, the writings of the revolutionary generation oscillated between the concepts of monarchical honor and a classical republican virtue—and between the achievement of an aristocratic “love of fame,” defined by Alexander Hamilton as “the ruling passion of the noblest minds,”11 and the more modest achievement of a virtuous republican reputation. In the political culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, of course, aristocratic values did not have to come into conflict with republican arguments.12 As Hamilton’s terminology indicates, however, the wish to excel one’s peers in fame and glory tended to be connected to the domain of love and passion. Unlike the achievement of republican virtue, which required a certain amount of self-restraint, the ‘noble’ love of fame almost by definition eluded rational mechanisms of control. In the words of Edmund Burke, the “passion for fame” was linked to greatness—but at the same time to failure, if it got out of hand. Charles Townshend, known for the Townshend Acts which became one of the major irritations leading to the American Revolution, was a prominent example. Burke described him as a man who “had no failings which were not owing to a noble cause; to an ardent, generous, perhaps an im- moderate, passion for fame; a passion which is the instinct of all great souls” (60).

8 For this priority, see Onuf 65-80 and Armitage 64-69. 9 Jefferson’s draft as quoted in the “Autobiography.” Jefferson, Writings 19, 24. 10 On this partial anachronism and the transformation of republican virtue in the American founding period, see Schloss. 11 Publius (Hamilton), “No. 72,” in Madison, Federalist 414. For the achievement of the highest of five stages of fame in Francis Bacon’s classification as a major motivation of the Amer- ican founders, see Adair 3-26; for an elaborate overview of the history of fame, see Braudy 392- 400 (on the American revolution and early republic). 12 Freeman, for instance, goes as far as to interpret the culture of honor as “a source of stability” in the confusion of early republican politics (xv). 538 Hannah Spahn

Although to some extent this was an accepted mentality because it was associated with ‘great’ men, the aristocratic dimension of recognition—a ‘noble’ desire for social distinction, for honor, glory, and fame—could also turn out merely to in- crease the height of the eventual fall. If the American Revolution was seen, within the voluntaristic modes of historical explanation in this period, as the political effect of personal causes like Townshend’s decisions, the eventual achievement of American independence itself appeared to prove that aristocratic aspirations to fame and glory were destined to become nothing but glorious failures. In the inner-American context, the problematic aspects of this “instinct of all great souls” became especially relevant in republican fears of ambition—a term originally denoting the act of personally collecting votes for office in the pursuit of political recognition. As Tocqueville would later remark, revolutions always enlarged “the ambition of men” (II: 334). The founding generation was especially sensitive to this problem; for them, a capitalized and personalized ‘Ambition’ was a dangerous passion both on an individual and a collective level. Individually, it turned men into “slaves” to (public) opinion and thus eliminated their personal liberties. Collectively, ‘Ambition’ was the political motivation that, accompanied by its allies, ‘Venality’ and ‘Avarice,’ threatened to produce dependence, corrup- tion, and eventually the downfall of the republic. Hence, while the American revolutionaries regarded the pursuit of recognition as the source of liberty and progress, they also saw it at the root of despotism and decline. It became crucial for them to find a realistic middle ground between the two potentials of recognition, between the natural search for ‘Esteem’ and the corrupting force of ‘Ambition.’ The enlightened pursuit of recognition focused not only on political, but also on aesthetic representation, as explained in Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Thus, literary productions became a major battleground on which the revolutionary generation fought for esteem and against ambition. Specifically, their concept of a literary historiography promised to fulfil the double function of sustaining republican stability and spreading the ‘daylight’ of attention and approbation. As I will discuss in the following section, revolutionary writers hoped both to educate the public and to postpone their own yearnings for recognition into the future, sublimating their present-centered ambition by awaiting the posthumous fame awarded by posterity.

The Boudoir of Philosophical History

In the American biographical war, the battle for recognition was fought in the domain of ‘history’: a generic term allowing the contemporaries indiscriminately to conceive of historical narratives, including biographical writings and even letter collections, as a didactic literary genre. Subordinated to rhetoric, this anti- Aristotelian ‘philosophical’ history13 was supposed to deal with the two sides of recognition; personalized historical examples were expected to incite republican

13 For recent discussions of philosophical history, see O’Brien 1-20; Pocock 7-25; and of its status in the literary system of the early republic, Scheiding 40-56. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 539 citizens to shun ambition to gain their fellow citizens’ esteem. During the revolutionary war, Thomas Jefferson explained the didactic use of philosophical history in the Bill for the More General Diffusion of Knowledge: [E]xperience hath shewn, that even under the best forms, those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny; and it is believed that the most effectual means of preventing this would be, to illuminate, as far as practicable, the minds of the people at large, and more especially to give them knowledge of those facts, which history exhibiteth, that, possessed thereby of the experience of other ages and countries, they may be enabled to know ambition under all its shapes, and prompt to exert their natural powers to defeat its purposes […]. (Writings 365)14 Based on the enlightened tautology of a universal human nature, Jefferson and his contemporaries were able to equate historical knowledge with the knowledge of “ambition under all its shapes.” Apart from some basic mathematics, it was this knowledge of exaggerated yearnings for recognition in the past that was at the core of his program for public education. Within three years, “the great mass of the people” was supposed to learn essential lessons of republicanism in order to ensure the future stability of the commonwealth (Jefferson, Notes 147). This exemplary historical instruction was not considered to be a great intellectual chal- lenge. According to the theories of philosophical history that were available to the contemporaries of the biographical war, such historical learning was less a matter of reason than of memory, the passions, and the senses. In a mimetic reading process, readers were expected to imitate those examples that were aesthetically the most attractive, largely without the mediation of rational reflection.15 Aim- ing to instruct every citizen rather than merely the educated elite, a republican philosophical history had to present its exemplary narratives of “ambition under all its shapes” by making appeals to the senses that were strong enough to incite an imitative habit formation. Of all the senses, references to the ‘daylight’ sense of sight were especially prominent in philosophical history, as were visual analogies to painting, theater, and (in the tradition of the ancient art of memory) architecture. In his influential Elements of Criticism, Lord Kames emphasized the importance of vision claiming that “even real events, entitled to our belief” had to be presented “as pass- ing in our sight” in order to appear believable. Like other enlightened theorists of history, he thought that the intense visual experience of “pictures of human life” was as relevant in Tacitus as in Homer or Shakespeare. In each case, readers were turned into “spectators” who did not reflect “whether the story be true or feigned.” Philosophical history, in order to be successful in influencing its audience, had to be “artful”—aesthetically conveyed and purposefully composed or

14 I have analyzed Jefferson’s philosophical history and its transformation during the partial breakdown of enlightened modes of historical explanation in my Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History. 15 On the mechanistic conception of a mimetic reading process, see Fluck 30-39. Since by definition, the philosophical history of the eighteenth century differed from poetry only in degree, but not in kind, the reading processes of early republican novels and the literary historiography of the period were essentially the same, and similar metaphors (food, poison, seduction etc.) appeared in the context of both genres. 540 Hannah Spahn

“designed.” The effect of historiography thus understood was, as in the case of poetry or drama, that of a “waking dream”—comparable to an illusionistic painting whose artfulness had to be hidden to appear credible to the spectator.16 In a neoclassical culture, the philosophical historian could only achieve his didactic goal of fighting “ambition under all its shapes” (or, according to the paranoid style of the period, “ambition under every disguise it may assume”) by creating the trompe l’œil of a convincing visual appeal in his writings (Jefferson, Notes 148). The illusionistic demands of “ars est celare artem” (“art is to conceal art”) forced him to take up disguises, himself, in order to expose past disguises of ‘Ambition’ persuasively on the canvas of philosophical history.17 In a society that tended to regard the yearning for attention and approbation as an anthropological universal, the fact that this act of disclosure was only possible through new disguises made the figure of the philosophical historian intrinsically suspicious—especially, of course, when he18 was also a classical Thucydidean historian writing about political actions in which he had been personally involved. Therefore, the necessary link between aesthetics and the didactic aim of counter- acting the dangerous political force of ‘Ambition’ became especially problematic in the American biographical war, most of whose protagonists found themselves making history in the double sense of political action and literary representation. In the context of antiquity, John Adams condensed the problem of the quasi-visual appeal of philosophical history, in ways reminiscent of David Hume’s and Adam Smith’s social mirrors,19 in the complex metaphor of a mirrored boudoir: The History of Greece should be to our countrymen what is called in many families on the Continent, a boudoir, an octagonal apartment in a house, with a full-length mirror on every side, and another in the ceiling. The use of it is, when any of the young ladies, or young gentlemen if you will, are at any time a little out of humour, they may retire to a place where, in whatever direction they turn their eyes, they see their own faces and figures multiplied without end. By thus beholding their own beautiful persons, and see- ing, at the same time, the deformity brought upon them by their anger, they may recover their tempers and their charms altogether.20 Adams’s boudoir of mirrors reflected the personal and the illusionistic dimension of philosophical history, anticipating many of the conceptual problems within the

16 Home 33-40. Jefferson paraphrased and recommended this work extensively. Compare Jefferson to Robert Skipwith with a List of Books (3 August 1771) in Jefferson, Papers 1: 76-78. Adams’s copy of Kames can be viewed at www.johnadamslibrary.org. 17 For the ‘canvas’ metaphor for history, see e. g. Jefferson to Madison (31 July 1788); to Count de Moustier (17 May 1788); to Rabaut de St. Etienne (3 June 1789); to C. F. de C. Volney (8 February 1805) in Jefferson, Papers 13: 440-44, 173-176; 15: 166-67; and Writings 1154-58. 18 There were, of course, prominent female historians in the Anglo-American world in this period, with Catherine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren leading the way. Perhaps due to the aesthetic, anti-rational emphasis of the ‘boudoir’ of philosophical history, they were greatly respected also by male audiences. Since women were to a greater extent denied the role of the Thucydidean historian writing about personal experiences of political and military events, however, they did not encounter the problem of ‘Ambition’ in historical narratives in the same way as men. 19 Smith, Theory 129 (referring to Hume’s different mirror in the Treatise of Human Nature). 20 John Adams 4: 469. A more detailed interpretation of this passage in the context of eighteenth-century philosophical history is in my Jefferson, Time, and History 111-13. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 541 founders’ pursuit of recognition during the biographical war. Apart from the typical spatial and atemporal aspects of philosophical history, which do not fall within the scope of this paper, the passage foregrounds the precarious relationship between aesthetics, selfhood, and the concern for a virtuous reputation. Character- istically, Adams’s self-reflective mirror linked historical writing not only to present visual experience in general, but also to the problem of personal vanity in particular. Other eighteenth-century theorists of history had similarly described human vanity as the main motivation for the reading and writing of history and biography. As Bolingbroke had succinctly put it in his Letters on the Study and Use of History: “The love of history seems inseparable from human nature, because it seems inseparable from self-love” (II: 4). For Adams, vanity and self-love still had decidedly negative connotations. As the image of the boudoir illustrates, he associated them, in the first place, with the potentially effeminate life-style of the continental nobility—in terms of gender, confession, and politics—with the very opposite of his ideal republican virtue. Moreover, his allusion to the allegorical tradition of vanitas, a young woman with a mirror, emphasized the conventional argument for humility in the face of the finite character of human nature; in the Stoic-Christian tradition, and in the particular context of Adams’s secularized Calvinist background,21 the most important counterpoint to exaggerated yearnings for recognition. Most strikingly, Adams’s mirrored boudoir stressed the great confusion and epistemological uncertainty of philosophical history, complicating the boundaries between fact and fiction (the real young lady and her mirror image), between different aesthetic values (deformity and the ‘recovery’ of beauty), and between the self, on the one hand, and all other historical agents, on the other. In Adams’s boudoir, the pursuit of recognition was characterized by the fact that the limits of selfhood vis-à-vis the commonwealth could not be clearly defined. If philosophical historians, biographers, and autobiographers applied the theory of Adams’s mirror stage to their work, it was not clear where to draw the line between personal and collective aspirations, between the historical event, its representation, and the audience of the representation, between the writer’s and the reader’s pursuit of recognition. The self-constructions in the biographical war suffered greatly from the uncertain boundaries of a republican virtue that tended to deteriorate into its opposite in an act of aesthetic representation that involved the writer’s and reader’s vanity. Essentially, the productions of the biographical war were destabilized by the dualistic nature of the enlightened pursuit of recognition. If, in Adams’s boudoir, an honest republican hope for ‘Esteem’ looked into the mirror, a destructive ‘Ambition’ always threatened to look back.

21 For a concise discussion of the Puritan heritage in Adams’s thought, see chapter one of Thompson’s John Adams and the Spirit of Liberty, especially 3-6 (summarizing influential neo- Puritan interpretations of his diaries and his conception of human nature, as by Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan) and 6-11 (for an emphasis on Adams’s intellectual rebellion against his Calvinist forebears). 542 Hannah Spahn

Epistolary Self-Effacement

Adams’s posthumous discussion with the Abbé de Mably on the significance of esteem and property, to return to the beginning of this essay, had been pre- ceded by a correspondence and several personal encounters in Paris during the early 1780s. These exchanges highlight the challenges of the beginning biographical war for American writers, revealing the complications in the struggle to find a balance between their desire of esteem and the republican vice of ambition. At a time when Adams was on a diplomatic mission to negotiate the political recognition of American independence by European governments, he became acutely aware of the personal dimension that the search for recognition could have for him. During a long conversation at a dinner party in early 1783 (“more Conver- sation with de Mably than at any Time before”), he was excited to learn that the abbé was planning to write a book about the American Revolution.22 Feeling both a political and a personal interest in promoting a positive image of the revolution in the eyes of Europeans, Adams addressed two letters to Mably in the following days. The first one contained an enumeration of sources that Adams considered to be essential for the study of American politics in general, and the second, a list with his own writings from 1761 to 1779. While the first letter reached its ad- dressee and found its way into Mably’s critical work on American government,23 the second merely survived as a copy among Adams’s papers with the following note: “This Letter was never sent, but the Original was burned by me. It may re- main here, without Imputation of Vanity” (Diary 3:102). Burning instead of sending the original, but carefully editing and preserving the copy for posterity, trying to show off his modesty by an explicit reference to it, today it appears highly questionable whether this strategy was conducive to establishing Adams’s lack of vanity as a character trait. If he was so keen on avoiding “Imputations of Vanity,” why preserve a copy of the letter at all? From a modern perspective, it would certainly seem more effective if he had either destroyed both original and copy, or if he had simply sent off the two letters without further ado. Nevertheless, such conspicuously unsent letters can also be found in other correspondences of the period that were intentionally preserved for future readers. For instance, in a similarly twisted attempt at finding a middle way between the will- ful suppression of his voice and the fear of disappearing entirely from the record, Jefferson invested much rhetorical energy in a long letter to a French magazine editor, detailing how it was not John Dickinson whom Americans had to thank for the Declaration of Independence. However, Jefferson could not even bring himself to mention his own name in this context, and, like Adams, he eventually refrained from sending the letter altogether—while making sure it would be

22 John Adams, Diary 3: 101-02. Mably’s work was published with Adams’s help in 1784 as Observations sur le gouvernement et les loix des Etats-Unis d’Amérique, and translated in the same year as Remarks concerning the Government and the Laws of the United States of America: In Four Letters, Addressed to Mr. Adams (see editorial note 1). 23 Adams to the Abbé de Mably. Adams, Works 5: 492-96. Adams also sent this letter to Marmontel who likewise contemplated writing a book on America. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 543 preserved for a later audience.24 In a similar spirit, Adams and Jefferson’s friend Benjamin Rush even claimed to have destroyed all his revolutionary papers, but not without repeatedly drawing attention to this selfless act in his later correspondence, as in this letter to Adams: I am pleased in reflecting that I destroyed all the documents and anecdotes I had collected for private memoirs of the American Revolution. I discovered in your letter that I have now nothing but the “scenery of the business,” and know but little more than what servants who wait upon table know of the secrets of their masters’ families. I am, however, satisfied that the whole business was a drama and that some persons who acted a conspicuous part in it never composed a single act nor scene nor play.25 Rush’s letter shared with Adams’s and Jefferson’s epistles a strange mixture of embarrassment and pride, arrogance and humility that is no longer self-evident today. All three texts sought to construct historical figures through the double ges- ture of their republican self-effacement—a paradoxical combination of self-denial and self-extension in texts that were deliberately subjected to the moral judgment of posterity. In several respects, Rush’s letter displayed the typical ambivalence of this effort to gain posthumous recognition. He humbled himself almost to the status of a servant ignorant of the master narrative of the American Revolution, all the while exposing the strategic character of this self-humiliation by admitting to being rather proud of himself for his self-denial. Rush professed to refuse himself the possession of secret historical knowledge in the same way that he claimed to deny posterity the knowledge of his actions in the American Revolution. It was in the very act of denial, however, that he constructed the historical image of himself that he wished to impart to future readers: He hoped to be remembered for his “conspicuous” revolutionary actions themselves, not for his subsequent composition of a “drama” of the American Revolution—that is, of a historical work that, for Rush and his contemporaries as well as for postmodern theorists, was first and foremost a personally biased, aesthetically conveyed literary representation.26 What was resonating in Rush’s refusal to dramatize his historical actions and his pretension of preferring historical oblivion to the work of a dramatic historical writer was not so much the eighteenth-century debate on the moral value of theater, or the classical contrast between words and actions. What was of chief concern to Rush and his peers was the problem of ambition in historical writings

24 Jefferson to the editor of the Journal de Paris (29 August 1787) in Jefferson, Papers 12: 61-65. 25 Rush to Adams (21 November 1805) in Adams, Spur 43. Adams repeatedly reprimanded Rush for his “rash action.” Rush had told him in a previous letter that he had collected primary sources for the composition of his “Memoirs of the American Revolution,” but had eventually thrown his “documents into the fire.” Adams to Rush (23 August 1805); (4 December 1805); Rush to Adams (14 August 1805); Rush to Adams (18 July 1812) 33; 44; 32; 232. 26 In the wake of the pyrrhonian debates of the seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries, this skeptical attitude towards the genre of historical writing was still widespread in the early republic, in some contexts coupled with decidedly pessimistic expectations regarding the didactic value of historiography. Like many contemporaries, Rush voiced his gradualist understanding of historiography and poetry in his correspondence and contrasted it with his actual historical experience. For example, Rush to Adams (14 August 1805) in Adams, Spur 32. 544 Hannah Spahn that were understood as ‘artful’ literary narratives. These writers tended to regard an all-pervasive pursuit of recognition as the source of historical decline as well as progress, as both subject matter and personal motivation, as a potential evil that was also its own potential remedy. Whether historical narratives revealed ambition or promised esteem, they inevitably mirrored their writer’s and reader’s vanity. Their moral lessons could only be conveyed by appeals to the senses, but these appeals could only be made if the neoclassical writer succeeded in conceal- ing his art sufficiently to create the visual illusion of a ‘daylight’ reality. Because of the duplicitous role of the philosophical historian in creating this illusion, the didactic promise of historical writings was inherently unstable. The more successful the philosophical historian, the more his behavior could be suspected of being morally compromised, and the more likely he appeared to have used his literary mastery also to hide his own secret ambition—most of all, as has been said, when he wrote about historical actions in which he had personally been involved. In the mirrored boudoir of a literary historiography, it was difficult enough for writers convincingly to oppose a cunning ambition and an artless republican virtue. Representing their own virtue in a narrative, however, was a near impossibility because the self-sacrifice supposed to be their subject matter threatened to turn into an illusionistic disguise for ‘Ambition’ in the moment of its representation on the stage of history. Hence, Rush and his revolutionary peers had good reasons to deny any interest in composing the drama of the American Revolution. They jealously realized dramatic success in the writings of their competitors for future recognition—as in Ad- ams’s famous lament about the “great effect” of the “coup de théâtre” achieved by Jefferson’s “penmanship” of the Declaration of Independence27—but they were inclined to claim artlessness for their own writings. In Rush’s case, apart from celebrating his non-dramatic writing, this affected artlessness could take the form of abolishing the barriers between thinking, speaking, and writing by pretending to “think aloud” in his correspondence.28 It could also take the form—one for which he became notorious—of narrating dreams that he supposedly had, as if to give the aesthetic illusion of Lord Kames’s “waking dream” a biographical reality.29 Such modes of self-presentation worked best in the dialogically structured genre of letter writing, which could balance the problems of recognition in the republican mirror stage—the ubiquity of human vanity and the ill-defined border between self and republic—much better than autobiographies and memoirs. In their letters, the founders could present themselves as they wished (as historically eminent figures) without running the danger of exposing the aestheticized ambition that they feared as a major force destroying the commonwealth (and their personal reputations). Ironically, it was by strategies well known from eighteenth-century epistolary novels—foregrounding the documentary source character of the text, and

27 Adams to Rush (30 September 1805) in Adams, Spur 43. 28 Rush to Adams (14 August 1805) in Adams, Spur 33. 29 Adams teased Rush for this habit by beginning to recount his own supposed dreams: see Adams to Rush (29 November 1812) in Adams, Spur 254-55. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 545 preserving unsent letters in the correspondence—that the founding generation hoped to achieve reputations of artless self-denial. Their ostentatious privileging of letter writing over the composition of dramatic historical narratives thus by no means precluded the employment of literary techniques; self-effacement was as much a political virtue securing the stability of the republic as it was an epistolary strategy establishing the writer’s reputation of artless self-denial. The seemingly ignorant role of the servant that so pleased Rush, after all, not only indicated a modest position in the social hierarchy. As the ‘American Boswell’ Rush may have remembered from his reading of the Life of Johnson, a man’s servants could in fact be better informed of his character than his conventional biographer.30 Moreover, the servant was a stylized identity that Rush and many contemporaries assumed almost daily, in letter subscriptions supposed not to hide, but to expose the civilized character of the writer.31

Autobiographical Exertions

One way for the aging American revolutionaries to try to evade the problems of their double-faced concept of recognition, then, was to compose letters conspicuously disclaiming any interest in influencing their future historical reputations, and move on to collect, edit, and preserve these very letters for future readers. In- deed, in cases such as the later-famous Adams-Jefferson letters, it can be argued that it is this carefully executed correspondence, rather than their actual autobiographies, which has most effectively fulfilled the function of conveying conge- nial impressions of their personalities. Nevertheless, autobiographical writing was surprisingly popular among revolutionary statesmen, even when compared to the remainder of the nineteenth century. Of the seven presidential autobiographies written before the First World War, for instance, four were written in the early republic.32 With the exception of George Washington, all of the first presidents, and also men like John Marshall or the supposedly drama-averse Rush, were in fact far from satisfied with their engagement as actors, but also sought to become dra- matists of the revolutionary period. What were their motivations, and how could they hope to neutralize the dangers of vanity and ambition lurking in the process of autobiographical writing? Answers to these questions have to be found in the peculiar conditions of the American biographical war during the first decades of the nineteenth century. After the peaceful transition of power with Jefferson’s election to the presidency, the partisan “suspicions & certainties, rumors & realities, facts & falsehoods, […]

30 See Boswell 24-25. On Rush’s admiration for Johnson and the somewhat exaggerated interpretation of his own character sketches as those of an “American Boswell,” see Butterfield 6. 31 For the nuanced use of this formula in the subscriptions of eighteenth-century letters (e. g. “your most obedient and most humble Servant” when addressing superiors, “your humble and affectionate Servant” when writing to equals, and “your Servant” to inferiors), see Bannet 65-66. 32 See Dippel 253-66, and Möser. 546 Hannah Spahn principles & pretensions”33 that had characterized the difficult political climate of the 1790s were transferred to the domain of philosophical history. When eye- witnesses of the American Revolution and the first administrations were dying and historical documents were being lost, the surviving revolutionaries found that their political actions might have been in vain if they failed to make history also by writing it. And as many of them realized, collecting and preserving semi-private correspondences was not enough; letters and letter copies could easily disappear or, worse, fall into the wrong hands and cause scandals by their premature publication (as happened repeatedly in these years). And even if a correspondence was preserved intact until a posthumous publication secured the correspondent’s reputation of selfless virtue (a reputation that was most convincing, as it were, after death), it was to be expected that the popular impact of such a collection would be limited if it was not accompanied by a didactic narrative of philosophical history. So much became clear, in any case, with the huge success of John Marshall’s five- volume The Life of George Washington. Based on the chief justice’s privileged ac- cess to Washington’s papers, this biography managed to unite a partisan narrative of American history with an aura of authenticity. With this combination, The Life became a touchstone in the biographical war, illustrating the necessity not only of preserving sources, but also of composing literary narratives for the construction of posthumous fame. For those who fared badly in Marshall’s interpretation of the American past—predictably, Jefferson and Jeffersonian Republicans—it became crucial to procure Republican antidotes by writing (or commissioning) opposing narratives.34 And even Federalists feared for their reputations when confronted with the enormous dimensions of Washington’s posthumous glory in a book that Adams described, using another of his architectural metaphors, as a “Mausolae- um, 100 feet square at the base, and 200 feet high.”35 As it turned out, Washington had done everything right in the enlightened pursuit of recognition, dying first and having an admirer write a literary Mauso- laeum second. Yet the remaining revolutionaries could not all hope to turn the boudoir of philosophical history into a Mausolaeum with the help of a surviving ally (although some tried hard to emulate this procedure.36) Meanwhile, most of them felt the intense need for personal vindication—in many cases, due to accusa- tions of having privileged their personal ambition over their loyalty to Washing- ton. They accordingly had to accept the solution that was second best and construct their Mausolaeum themselves. As Rush told Adams, in an effort to justify their hopes for future recognition by a candid world: There is, it is true, great difficulty in a man’s speaking or writing of himself so as to avoid giving offense. The King of Prussia in his Posthumous Works says this difficulty is so great that even a public justification for supposed offenses should be avoided, inasmuch as it cannot be made without some self-praise; but this opinion is by no means a correct

33 Jefferson, explanations to “The Anas. 1791-1806” Writings 662. 34 For Jefferson’s attitude to Marshall’s Life of Washington, see Freeman 62-66 and Co- gliano 49-61. 35 Adams to Jefferson (3 July 1813). Cappon (ed.), Adams-Jefferson Letters 349. On Ad- ams’s dissatisfaction with the increasing idolatry of George Washington, see Ellis 66-68. 36 See, for instance, Jefferson to Madison (17 February 1826) in Jefferson, Writings 1515. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 547

one. A reverence for religion and a regard for truth, liberty, family honor, and the interest of society may make it indispensably necessary for a man who has been wronged by the country or the age in which he has lived to appeal to the world at large and to posterity for an acquittal of the follies or crimes with which he has been charged. (Adams, Spur 141) As Rush’s criticism of Frederick II suggests, the pursuit of recognition by “the world at large” through autobiographical texts was by no means a monarchical vice. To the contrary, it could be a proper behavior for good republicans and Christians—a point Rush illustrated further by quoting Cicero and St. Paul in support.37 American philosophical history, as may be recalled from Jefferson’s educational writings quoted above, was supposed to teach the mass of republican citizens to shun “ambition under all its shapes.” It was crucial for republican stability that the citizenry discover ambition under every “disguise it may assume.” Hence, republican statesmen could tell themselves that they could not afford the king’s luxury of disdaining to fight for “public justification.” They had to use their first-hand knowledge of the revolutionary period to expose hidden ambitions (that is, the ambitions of their political enemies) in order to educate the American people for self-government. But how precisely did they expect, as John Marshall put it in the martial language of the biographical war, to “conquer” the difficulty of writing about themselves?38 As the form of their autobiographical writings suggests, the aging revolutionaries tried to solve the problem by composing autobiographies that were both artless and, in a way, selfless. The surviving founders could only hope to come anywhere close to the ideal of Washington’s posthumous reputation if they managed to write narratives that conveyed the impression of a sober outside perspective on their actions—or even, as Jefferson put it, of their actions speaking “for themselves” (Writings 37). They had to write their own biographies rather than autobiographies, texts that created the illusion of having been written by a third person—an effort radicalized in the third-person narratives of Monroe’s and Madison’s autobiographies (and continued, a century later, by John Adams’s great-grandson and self-declared “eighteenth-century boy,” Henry Adams).39 The autobiographical efforts by the combatants of the biographical were, to be sure, quite diverse in the details. They were united, however, in the general failure to achieve what Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography (and some of their own letters) did: create the lively, convincing illusion of an individual self—and

37 Ibid., at 140: “you mention Cicero as a precedent for a man’s doing justice to his services to his country. You might have added the conduct of St. Paul for the same purpose.” 38 “The events of my life are too unimportant, and have too little interest for any person not of my immediate family, to render them worth communicating or preserving. I felt therefore some difficulty in commencing their detail, since the mere act of detailing, exhibits the appear- ance of attaching consequence to them; - a difficulty which was not overcome till the receipt of your favour of the 14th inst. If I conquer it now, it is because the request is made by a partial and highly valued friend” (Marshall, Autobiographical 3). Like Rush and the king of Prussia, Marshall apparently took the “difficulty” of writing about himself very seriously as he had used the term three times in just two sentences, before he replaced the last “difficulty” by the first “it” of the last phrase (see editorial note on page 3). 39 See Adair 191-209, Henry Adams 41, and Monroe. 548 Hannah Spahn the development of that self—in the text. Due also to their mainly defensive character, they tended to fall short in achieving Franklin’s goal of telling an exemplary success story. American statesmen writing in the early nineteenth century usually refrained from presenting their high political offices as the outcome of a successful (self-)education.40 If the four presidential autobiographies, for instance, mentioned the presidency at all, they did so fleetingly at best, as if to disprove in advance any allegation of a personal ambition to surpass Washington. This suggests an additional reason for the apparent modernity of Franklin’s autobiography: A generation older than the biographical warriors, he had not lived to see the intensely competitive political climate of the 1790s that still resonated in the autobiographical responses to Marshall’s Life of Washington during the 1810s and 1820s. Franklin’s combination of persona and narrator could become so successful, both within the narrative and as a literary model, also because he did not have to deal with republican inhibitions that were aggravated by the spotless reputation of Washington’s posthumous character in the early nineteenth century. In this period, by contrast, even writers with acknowledged literary capabili- ties, such as Jefferson or Washington’s successful biographer Marshall, encoun- tered serious difficulties when telling their own stories. Jefferson’sAutobiography may therefore serve to illustrate, very briefly, characteristic problems of the productions of the biographical war. Its conventional claim of having been written for his family, to begin with, was mostly an unimaginative but much needed ex- cuse for engaging in the precarious project of autobiographical writing. Perhaps due to the relative modernity of Jefferson’s conception of virtue, at least, the text spares its readers the discussions of vanity with which especially Adams’s Auto- biography has become associated.41 Yet the predominance of wooden parataxis and abrupt transitions, which differs strikingly from the more elegant phrasing in many of Jefferson’s other writings, suggests a considerable uneasiness with the topic. On the whole, the narrative appears oddly unconstructed—also because, as mentioned above, it tends to declare itself redundant due to the expectation that, ideally, virtuous actions “will forever speak for themselves” (Writings 37). This essentially redundant narrative often refers to outside collections of letters and state documents and away from itself. Instead of dramatizing crucial incidents and creating suspense of their outcome, it moves clumsily back and forth in time.42 Like the autobiographies of many of his peers, Jefferson’s text thus centers not on character development, but on static portraits of his contemporaries.43 In the timeless space of the boudoir of philosophical history, these classical character sketches were supposed to pass exemplary judgments on a citizen’s worthiness of public esteem. Teaching moral lessons by presenting readers with mirror images of their own vices and virtues, these characters typically took the place of an author who was prevented from speaking directly about himself. Thus, the autobiographical

40 For the role of political offices in Franklin’s construction of his life, see Franklin 159-68. 41 Adams’s vindictive memoir opens with a defensive paragraph on “Vanity” (in combination with “disgust”) in John Adams, Autobiography 3: 253. 42 For an exception, see the description of an event outside the American context, Jeffer- son’s dinner with French Patriot party leaders. Ibid., at 95-96. 43 See, for example, section VII in Rush 138-58. Lost in a Boudoir of Mirrors 549 writings by Jefferson and other founders sought to gain posthumous recognition by the authority of universal moral standards and outside source material, rather than the ‘drama’ of an individual life evolving in time. To a certain extent, therefore, what strike us today as literary shortcomings in these autobiographical writings may have been the result of intentional efforts to neutralize the dangers of vanity and ambition in the writing process, and to deemphasize the problematic status of these texts as neoclassical works of art. Like the cracks in an artificial eighteenth-century ruin, the obvious flaws in the literary boudoirs and Mausolaea of the biographical war may, in part, have been expressly ‘designed’ to create the illusion of the work’s artless source character, distracting attention from any activity of dramatic composition. As the revolutionary generation was well aware, however, the didactic effect of philosophical history depended heavily on the polished surface of its literary accomplishment. In his eulogy of Washington, Marshall could more easily have it both ways and combine stylistic polish with the aura of historical authenticity granted by his ac- cess to Washington’s papers. Yet when the combatants in the biographical war wrote about themselves, they had to fear two different dangers: Either they would be accused of hiding their vanity and ambition behind artful masks, or the literary weaknesses of their texts would impede any impact on a future audience. Their autobiographical writings sought to evade, but turned out merely to mirror this dilemma—illustrating, eventually, that both fears had been equally justified.

Conclusion

Thus, the founders ended up lost in their historical boudoir of mirrors. With their transitional concepts of recognition, they wanted to achieve too many con- tradictory goals at once: court esteem and shun ambition, maintain an elitist honor and display a more egalitarian virtue, gain Adam Smith’s moral approbation and benefit from the aesthetic appeal of his attention, affirm their historical agency in a revolutionary drama which they were afraid to compose. Their convoluted search for recognition generated two interesting paradoxes: Despite their highly literary expectations on the genre of ‘history,’ their own historical-autobiographical writings mostly became literary and popular failures. And although they were so desperately intent on avoiding impressions of vanity and ambition, they wrote autobiographies that today convey nothing so much as a deep yearning for being recognized for their individual as well as collective merits as founders of the republic. By the time Tocqueville analyzed American culture, the epistolary and autobiographical exertions of the founding generation belonged to the past. Like John Quincy Adams’s silk underwear, the founders’ boudoir strategies of honorable self-denial had gone out of fashion, becoming associated with aristocratic standards that were acceptable only in the context of women’s gentility.44 A hundred years after the publication of Marshall’s Life of Washington, Henry Adams could

44 For this argument, see Bushman 440-46. On the autobiographies of the first post-revolutionary generation of Americans born between 1776 and 1800, see Appleby. 550 Hannah Spahn re-enter the boudoir of enlightened life-writing with his own philosophy of clothes. Like his great-grandfather, Adams found points to criticize in Rousseau, but they did not directly concern Rousseau’s neglect of esteem in the natural state. Instead, Adams charged Rousseau with initiating, through the provocation of his Confes- sions, a reactive discourse of self-effacement in modernity, claiming that “largely thanks to” Rousseau, the “Ego has steadily tended to efface itself” (Education 7-8). The self-effacement he ironically observed in 1907, however, was no longer the self-effacement of 1807. For the post-revolutionary generations, the striving for recognition changed in two important respects: Firstly, the last vestiges of the relatively elitist conception of a selfless republican virtue disappeared (or were, arguably, transferred from the public to a separate private realm). And secondly, aesthetics became emancipated from their moral function, allowing writers to pur- sue literary fame unburdened by the suspicion of creating mere ‘disguises’ for their ambitions. These developments were at the root of what Tocqueville described, not perhaps as an absolutely greater, but as a socially more wide-spread and culturally more diverse, striving for recognition in Jacksonian democracy (334-41).

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