Compromises and Connections

The American Revolution was the most important event in American history, as Americans fought a war of independence and created a country based on a republican form of government. Central to the Revolutionary era was how disparate colonies and then states solidified their revolution and established an enduring nation. In Disunion Among Ourselves: The Perilous Politics of the American Revolution, Eli Merritt argues that “[t]he founding of a single United States . . . was hardly the easy marriage of thirteen homogenous, liberty-loving states so often depicted in American history. . . . Instead, the American Union was an unwelcome alliance formed by bitterly conflictual colonies and regions for the maintenance of internal and external security” (3). To prevent disunion, the Revolutionary leaders forged numerous compromises during the Revolutionary era that tied together the thirteen rebellious colonies in what Merritt describes as “a shotgun wedding” (3).Merritt emphasizes that John Adams and other New England delegates in the First and Second Continental Congresses decided to have Virginia, the wealthiest and most populous colony/state, take the lead on many issues to ensure southern support for the Revolutionary cause. This, for example, would lead to George Washington becoming commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and Thomas Jefferson writing the Declaration of Independence. But this would also lead to Virginia’s intransigence on various issues, including western land claims and access to the Mississippi River.When the First Continental Congress met in September 1774 the delegates within weeks agreed on a nonimportation policy in response to Great Britain’s Coercive Acts, but sectional tensions emerged over a proposed export embargo. As the Congress tabled Joseph Galloway’s Plan of Union for creating a constitution to permanently bind the colonies to Great Britain, the export dispute was finally resolved with a compromise to appease southerners, whose profits on export crops, especially tobacco, would benefit by delaying nonexportation for one year.Merritt further depicts the unstable regional dynamics of the American Union by analyzing the vote on declaring independence in the Second Continental Congress. Concerned about intercolonial conflict over various issues and the lack of foreign allies, on July 1, 1776, Pennsylvania voted against independence, Delaware’s delegates evenly divided, and New York abstained from voting. It appeared most of the Middle colonies would not join the emerging American Union. But in an “improvised manner of quiet political maneuvering” (138) the other colonies that formed a supermajority in Congress worked tirelessly during the next twenty-four hours to get Pennsylvania and Delaware to support independence, though New York would again abstain until July 9. “Collective independence,” Merritt asserts, “. . . was coerced by a clear and present danger of disunion and intercolonial bloodshed” (7).Three years later the Continental Congress became dangerously divided over terms for a peace treaty with Great Britain. New England demanded access to the Newfoundland fisheries, which was opposed by delegates from the Southern and Middle states who feared its impact on peace negotiations. At the same time, the New England and Middle states were unwilling to support the Southern states’ demand for the free navigation of the Mississippi River if that prevented the creation of a peace treaty. In the end, Richard Henry Lee of Virginia and Samuel Adams of Massachusetts engineered a quid pro quo compromise where Virginia supported access to the fisheries in return for New England supporting the US right to navigate the Mississippi River. The agreement would hold through the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783 that ended the War of American Independence.Compromise was also necessary during the Revolutionary War for creating a national constitution. Initially proposed in 1776, the Articles of Confederation went through a long process of sectional debate over the power to tax, equal state representation in Congress, and control of western lands. Most importantly, Maryland refused to ratify the Articles of Confederation until 1781 when Virginia gave up its extensive western land claims as British forces invaded the state, and the Old Dominion needed aid from a united republic. “Clearly,” Merritt asserts, “threats of disunion worked . . . when nothing else would” (274).In the years before and after the Treaty of Paris, Merritt shows that delegates in the Articles of Confederation Congress would continue to disagree over numerous sectional issues that threatened disunion, especially the balance of power between the North and the South. The location of the nation’s capital particularly emerged as a contentious issue. “Many delegates,” Merritt argues, “viewed the decision as determinative of the future direction of the nation, whether toward consolidation of power and values in republican New England, the commercial Middle states, or the westward-expanding, aristocratic, slaveholding South” (362). Although a majority in Congress voted for the US capital to be located on the Delaware River near Trenton, New Jersey, Southern states immediately wanted the motion to be reconsidered. A New England-South coalition subsequently overruled the Middle states by creating a compromise that would have the US Congress divide its time equally between a northern capital on the Delaware River and a southern capital on the Potomac River. The addition of the southern capital, according to the Massachusetts delegates, was essential to “‘preserve the Union’” (366).Also reflecting postwar sectional tensions in Congress was the debate over Vermont becoming the fourteenth state. Although many northern and southern states opposed investing Congress with the power to dismember any state to create an additional state, the southern states also opposed Vermont statehood on grounds that it would favor the commercial states of the North over the interests of the South in Congress. To maintain Congressional harmony, the delegates voted to take no action concerning Vermont.Despite the decisions on Vermont and the national capital, mounting financial and trade problems jeopardized the American Union and would eventually lead to the Constitutional Convention of 1787, which would require several major compromises to preserve the Union. However, Merritt surprisingly fails to carry his analysis of the dangers of disunion in Revolutionary America through the creation and adoption of the Constitution.Merritt acknowledges that other scholars, including Edmund Burnett, Forrest McDonald, Peter Onuf, Cathy Matson, Jack Greene, David Hendrickson, and Jack Rakove, have analyzed the importance of compromises to prevent disunion in the emerging American republic. However, Merritt’s study, extensively using Congressional journals and letters of the delegates, provides a more detailed analysis of many of the conflicts and compromises than any previous work.Whereas Merritt focuses on threats of disunion during the War of American Independence, Andrew Burstein’s multilayered Longing for Connection: Entangled Memories and Emotional Loss in Early America tries “to discover in past applications of language a credible way to bring early America closer, a way for us to appreciate a bit better what it felt like to be alive” (289) from the Revolutionary era to the Civil War. Influenced by several decades of scholarship on the cultural history of emotions, Burstein offers an “emotional history” that attempts “to tease out psychological states from letters, diaries, and similar texts” (9–10). While recognizing that preserved history is only a very small part of what actually happened, Burstein’s emotional history attempts to show how culture during 1775–1865 was partly shaped by “felt connections” and “uncomfortable separations” (10). Covering conditions for public figures, each of six chapters focuses on a particular emotion: martyrdom, apprehension, yearnings, laughter, vainglory, and rationalization. Taken together, Burstein argues that the inclinations can be defined as “longings” (11). And each chapter segues into the next by cross-generational connections until in the final chapter the numerous interconnected people have come full circle from Nathan Hale, the executed spy and Revolutionary martyr, to his grandnephew, Edward Everett Hale, a minister and author of The Man Without a Country.Many opinion makers in antebellum America, Burstein argues, created patriotic paintings, statues, and biographies for sacralizing a very nationalistic creation story in order “to promote good character in a rising generation” (53) and thus advance a sense of moral community. As popular literature, including historical studies, proliferated after 1830 due to power presses, the exploits of America’s heroic leaders, such as romanticized martyrs like Hale, were presented in “puffed-up versions of history that gave greater legitimacy to America’s claim to glory” (211), and Americans refused to see the acquisition of US territory as gained through a violent elimination process that was “little different from the intermittent wars of the Old World” (217). The vainglorious promotion of popular perceptions of American exceptionalism, rugged individualism, and legendary figures was revving up due to the efforts of Jared Sparks, James Paulding, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and other writers. “With [George] Washington leading the way forward and his thuggish, swaggering bastard child, Andrew Jackson, close behind,” Burstein asserts, “the rhetoric of nationalist literature grew apace” (218). While outsiders often saw US citizens as overlooking their nation’s internal conflicts, and even as sectionalism increased in the United States in the late antebellum era, many American writers imagined the nation’s past as united and harmonious. Indeed, Burstein asserts that longing for connection to lessons from an admirable past has existed throughout US history. “Everyone,” he argues, “wishes to know how where we came from relates to who we are” (291), but popular fictions have been major obstacles to understanding our national history by whitewashing former times and creating a mythical past lodged in a dullness of popular thought.Letters were the primary means of connecting over distances in the post-Revolutionary decades. And consolation was found in comforting letters as “[e]veryone at this time witnessed an amount of suffering we can scarcely conceive. Their religion demanded acquiescence. The medicine available to them was mostly ineffective, sudden death was common, and tragic news rarely came as a surprise” (72). To deal with all of the suffering, the language used in letters of consolation “activated . . . the sensory system that governed sympathy” (73–74) and connected the inner sense to the outer world. Burstein also analyzes the emotions associated with prolonged absences from loved ones, especially long and dangerous oceanic travel. To have great sensibility “in a society dominated by physical suffering and loss meant a lot,” and women trained in such a sensibility “excelled at sympathetic understanding” (76). While men were also involved in expressing emotions, Burstein notes that the emotional vocabulary involving sensibility “was apparent in some men in greater abundance than was prescribed, revealing itself in passionate gestures and unpleasant emotional breakdowns. To appeal, a man was taught to exhibit some of the sensibility of a woman, but it had to be less pronounced and better managed if he was to be ‘effective’ . . . in public” (76). To express themselves better as they pursued connections, people drew on language from novels and poetry, especially metaphors, to have “an imaginative rationality” (82) for expressing emotions about their perceptions of the world.But for Americans writing about emotions, such as yearnings, there was a particularly deep dependence on the works of William Shakespeare. “Shakespeare’s pre-Revolutionary appeal,” Burstein declares, “grew exponentially after independence because of an affective power that began to mean more as the years went by” (137). Although post-Revolutionary Americans wanted to advance nationalism in the United States, including an Americanizing of the English language, the use of Shakespeare’s writings was well entrenched. Burstein asserts:The reading of Shakespeare’s works also helped prepare Americans before the Civil War for the humor presented in a wide range of writings. As humor publications regularly sprung up, satirical stories were particularly popular. Burstein especially focuses on James Paulding, William Irving, and Washington Irving, who were the creators of Salmagundi, a periodical that lampooned New York culture and politics. Washington Irving, as author of stories like “Rip Van Winkle” and “Knickerbocker’s History,” had an enormous impact on the literary world of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, Burstein argues that Irving “more than any other early humorist, popularized a magical, timeless America. Not until Mark Twain came along would he have any real competitor in that realm of literary craftmanship” (171). While some commentators believed that satire promoted moral ends by ridiculing follies and vices, other critics attacked the genre as rude and irrelevant. But Burstein sees the satirical humor of writings in antebellum America as significantly different from the visually direct and insulting satire of modern electronic media. “[T]he humor of the past,” Burstein declares, “is disconnected from that of the present” (13).As White Americans attempted to overcome disconnectedness through emotional communications, Black Americans had been disconnected from Africa by the international slave trade and were considered as racially inferior in the United States. The future location of Blacks thus became an emotionally heated issue in American society. The American Colonization Society argued that the transporting of freed slaves to Africa was the most humane and socially pragmatic solution. However, as Burstein emphasizes, “in order to rationalize their doctrine, colonizationists had to overlook an emergent black American identity” (247). Although supported by leaders like James Madison, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and Abraham Lincoln, the American Colonization Society’s plan for shipping ex-slaves to Africa was vociferously opposed by a diverse group of White and free Black abolitionist leaders, including William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass. The American Colonization Society thus gradually lost its momentum as the emphasis was to recognize the right of freed slaves to remain connected to the United States despite its racist conditions. “Ultimately,” Burstein states, “the abolitionists’ language of righteousness and benevolence outdistanced the colonizationists’ language of righteousness and benevolence” (263).Disunion Among Ourselves and Longing for Connection are both about making connections across space and time, with each focusing on public figures rather than the general literate population. For Merritt this connection involved the creation of compromises among regional leaders in Revolutionary America to prevent disunion and save the new republic. For Burstein the connections are much more diverse and more spread out over time and space.One of the values of studying history is that it can demonstrate how earlier generations addressed the issues of their times. In different ways, Merritt and Burstein offer insightful perspectives for understanding the creation of a more connected society that dealt with national and personal issues from the American Revolution to the Civil War.