Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic

by Jeremy Engels

Overview

The Declaration of Independence is usually celebrated as a radical document that inspired revolution in the English colonies, in France, and elsewhere. In Enemyship, however, Jeremy Engels views the Declaration as a rhetorical strategy that outlined wildly effective arguments justifying revolution against a colonial authority—and then threatened political stability once independence was finally achieved. 
     Enemyship examines what happened during the latter years of the Revolutionary War and in the immediate post-Revolutionary period, when the rhetorics and energies of revolution began to seem problematic to many wealthy and powerful Americans.
     To mitigate this threat, says Engles, the founders of the United States deployed the rhetorics of what he calls "enemyship," calling upon Americans to unite in opposition to their shared national enemies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780870139802
Publisher:	Michigan State University Press
Publication date:	11/01/2010
Series:	Rhetoric & Public Affairs
Pages:	316
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Jeremy Engels is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University.

Read an Excerpt

ENEMYSHIP

DEMOCRACY AND COUNTER-REVOLUTION IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC

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By Jeremy Engels

Michigan State University Press

Copyright © 2010 Jeremy Engels
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-87013-980-2

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Chapter One

How Enemyship Became Common Sense

It is one of the most famous lines in American history: echoed in movies; recited by schoolchildren. On March 23, 1775, Patrick Henry told his audience at St. John's Church in Richmond, Virginia, to "Give me liberty or give me death." Like many episodes in American mythology, this defining moment might not have happened. The text of Henry's speech did not survive, and Americans, at the very least, learned about Henry's words only in the early nineteenth century. Apocryphal or not, Henry's words color how we remember the Revolutionary War: as an idealistic act of daring will. In turn, Henry's words encapsulate something essential about what it means to be an American—or at least about how Americans like to think of themselves. American history is the history of the unconditional "can-do," of stepping up, of carpe diem, of betting big against long odds and taking down the house. The biggest gamble was the first, a revolution against the mighty British for the highest stakes: liberty or death. The story of the American Revolution as Americans learned it in the nineteenth century, and as we learn it today, is a story of the happy marriage of transcendental ideals with the steely determination to confront tyranny no matter the cost. With pluck and grit, Americans willed themselves to victory, nationhood, and liberty.

The primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson, remembered things somewhat differently. The Revolutionary War was of course about ideals, including life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. But alongside those ideals was a powerful emotion spurring Americans on to battle: fear. In his 1821 Autobiography, Jefferson recalled that the working union forged during the American Revolution was premised not so much on alluring promises of liberty, but instead on the colonies' shared recognition of the dangers posed by Great Britain. "During the war of Independence," he noted, "while the pressure of an external enemy hooped us together, and their enterprises kept us necessarily on the alert, the spirit of the people, excited by danger, was a supplement to the Confederation, and urged them to zealous exertions, whether claimed by that instrument, or not." Things quickly fell apart, however, for "when peace and safety were restored, and every man became engaged in useful and profitable occupation, less attention was paid to the calls of Congress." According to Jefferson, an "external enemy" "hooped" Americans together, and therefore the colonial war effort—and the rudimentary forms of federated colonial government—were possible only because of colonists' shared fears of mutual enemies. For the third president of the United States, Americans became Americans when "excited by danger." Once "peace and safety were restored," Americans stopped being Americans and became New Yorkers and Virginians again.

Putting the shared fears of Americans at center stage allows us to see the Revolutionary War from a slightly different angle: not just as an economic, political, or ideological conflict, but as a rhetorical one in which proponents of revolution struggled to bring their reluctant fellows along with them, and then, once the war had begun, to keep morale high and the guns shooting. In turn, by focusing on this pivotal moment, we can probe rhetorical forms and patterns of persuasion that have long been central to the American experience, in war and peace.

To better understand how Americans were "hooped" together in 1776, in this chapter I offer a detailed rhetorical analysis of Thomas Paine's Common Sense. In the able judgment of Bernard Bailyn, Paine's work was "the most brilliant pamphlet written during the American Revolution, and one of the most brilliant pamphlets ever written in the English language." Paine's genius was found both in style and form. Paine understood that if he did not write in a style accessible to everyday people, then he would not reach them—and thus Common Sense was noteworthy for its rough but shimmering prose. Common Sense was also noteworthy for its rhetorical structure, which, following Paine, I label "enemyship." Paine's enemyship wove together divergent fears and heightened them to a degree that demanded action. In turn, we should study the structure of persuasive tracts like Common Sense because arrangement is central to the practice of rhetoric. Many Americans who read Common Sense copied Paine's language. Some even acted out the more dramatic scenes of the tract. Less noticed is that Americans also copied the structure of Paine's masterpiece, arranging their arguments for various ends as Paine arranged his. This is what enemyship is: rhetorical architecture. Common Sense was a blueprint of sorts for moving people to action. In the coming decades, the structure of Paine's argument was emulated by activists and politicians. Some used enemyship for revolutionary ends, others to tame revolution. As it was deployed and redeployed, adapted and revised, enemyship became instantiated in the public culture of the United States. In the early Republic, to be "excited by danger" became central to what it meant to be an "American."

The Illusion of Security

For someone who did so much good, Paine's tale is one of tragic neglect. "To trace the curve of Paine's reputation," it has been observed, "is to learn something about hero-worship in reverse." Paine immigrated to America in 1774 and became a leading voice of independence with Common Sense, which was the most important pamphlet published during the American Revolution and is today recognized as one of the most influential publications in American history. Following the Revolutionary War, Paine returned to Europe to agitate for change. His Rights of Man was outlawed in Britain, and hostile reaction to its publication in 1791 forced Paine to flee to Paris, where he served in the National Convention. A change of government found Paine imprisoned on Christmas Eve, 1793. The U.S. minister to France, Gouverneur Morris, let him rot in his cell, where he languished for nearly a year—narrowly escaping the guillotine on at least one occasion—until the new American minister James Monroe secured his release. Paine's support of the French Revolution, his scathing indictment of organized religion in The Age of Reason (1794), and harangues like the Letter to George Washington (1796), which denounced the great American leader as a hypocrite, turned popular opinion in the United States against him. At President Thomas Jefferson's invitation, Paine returned to the United States in 1802, only to be savaged by the Federalist press. Philadelphia's Port Folio labeled Paine "a drunken atheist, and the scavenger of faction," and Boston's Mercury and New-England Palladium denounced him as a "lying, drunken, brutal infidel, who rejoiced in the opportunity of basking and wallowing in the confusion, devastation, bloodshed, rapine, and murder, in which his soul delights." While many Americans saw Paine as a staunch patriot during the Revolutionary War, in his later years he was viewed by these same people as the Antichrist.

Though Americans came to feel distaste for Paine's later politics, the shine of Common Sense has never dulled. This pamphlet resonated with Americans then, and continues to resonate with them now, because it offered an idealistic vision of human equality; because it expressed nothing but searing contempt for all forms of social, political, and economic inequality; and because it legitimated American conceptions of popular sovereignty, democratic government, and the power of common people. Democratic writers in the early Republic made it a habit to sign their editorials "Common Sense." Its trenchant egalitarianism was also why it frightened elites. Paine and other democratic writers found traction by smoothing out society's bumps. As such, his ideas shocked many leaders who believed that revolutionary thought was best kept to elites. John Adams denounced Common Sense as "so democratical, without any restraint or even an Attempt at any Equilibrium or Counterpoise, that it must produce confusion and every Evil Work," and he later dubbed the tumultuous decades of the 1780s and 1790s, in which political elites in the United States and France struggled to suppress democratic energies, "the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Fury, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte, Tom Paine."

Common Sense was one of the earliest and most persuasive cases for popular government in American history. Paine wrote in a style that was accessible to all, and he argued that all men were created equal, that equality was the natural state of humankind, that human labor was innately dignified, and that humans were meant to govern themselves. Having settled in Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love and the home of the most politically conscious working classes in America, Paine observed the proletarian list of revolution first-hand. He was a tireless supporter of the working man and a vocal critic of slavery. In a 1775 essay published under the pseudonym "Justice and Humanity," he questioned the good faith of his fellows, arguing that it was neither just nor consistent to fight a revolution without abolishing slavery. Above all else, Paine praised freedom, autonomy, and self-government.

Paine was a rare rhetorical talent, a master wordsmith of the first degree. The persuasiveness of Common Sense was found not just in its claims, but in how those claims were made. Paine used language to reorient Americans' relationship with the mother country in a way that created the impression that war was inevitable—and it did this with an unrivaled populist eloquence. Most of the arguments in Common Sense were not new. But novelty was not the only mark of genius; the best buildings were often built from ancient materials. In the traditional rhetorical theory of Aristotle, Cicero, and Quintilian, the art of rhetoric consisted of five canons: invention, arrangement (or disposition), elocution, delivery, and memory. Paine's genius was found not in the invention of new arguments, but in their arrangement and stunning presentation. At a moment in which political discourse was formal to the point of being paralyzing, Common Sense employed a blunt democratic argot. To reach a wider audience, Paine eschewed legal metaphors and the lexical bling-bling of inkhorn terms. In their place, he deployed taunts, bawdy jabs, and the type of earthy metaphors common to farmers' almanacs: the cant, in short, most Americans could understand.

Common Sense was organized in five parts: a brief introduction set forth the purpose of the work, the first section deconstructed the English constitution, the second section mocked monarchy and kingly rule, the third section narrated a case for American independence, and the fourth section discussed America's readiness to win the war. As Stephen Lucas notes in his masterful investigation of revolutionary rhetoric, Portents of Rebellion, the pamphlet was organized for maximum motivational effect, for it began by stating a problem (English oppression of America), it then offered a solution to that problem (independence), and it closed on an optimistic note, by reassuring Americans that they could win a war against the formidable British forces. As he composed Common Sense in Philadelphia's coffeehouses and taverns, Paine found fuel in the heady idealism of the pre-Revolutionary moment. Common Sense was written before Americans were forced to confront "the times that try men's souls," to use his timeless phrasing from The American Crisis. It was therefore a profoundly hopeful pamphlet. According to Paine, Americans could start over—and as they transcended the narrow limits of monarchy and forgot the horrors of the 1770s, they would rewrite the history books and inspire people all over the world to rise up for their freedom.

Aristotle once argued that it was not hard to praise Athenians among Athenians, a basic rhetorical principle that Paine understood and exploited in Common Sense. In the course of the original pamphlet's forty-six pages, Paine appealed to Americans' feelings of global importance, to their exceptionalism, and to the millennial view of progress, espoused by some Americans, that suggested they would realize a New Canaan, God's kingdom on earth. Paine defined the American Revolution not only as an American revolution but a world revolution, announcing: "The cause of America is in a great measure the cause of all mankind." Positioning America at the heart of a global conflict between freedom and tyranny, Paine imagined his new home as an asylum for the oppressed. "Every spot of the old world is over-run with oppression," he contended, and "Freedom hath been hunted round the globe. Asia, and Africa, have long expelled her.—Europe regards her like a stranger, and England hath given her warning to depart. O! receive the fugitive, and prepare in time an asylum for mankind." America could be such an asylum because it was not bound by the sins of Old World feuding and feudalism; for Paine, Americans were the divinely ordained vessels of worldly freedom and the saviors of the world's oppressed.

According to Paine, "a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," and thus he suggested that the Revolutionary War was intended to get Americans to "see with other eyes," to "hear with other ears," and to "think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used." To the extent that revolution was about a change in perception and vision, it was also about rhetoric, for documents like Common Sense brought about the change in principle, opinion, sentiment, and affection by redefining the relationship between Americans and Britons in a way that promoted independence and justified war. Though Common Sense was a hopeful pamphlet, to understand its motivational appeal we must also recognize that Paine's hopeful message was accompanied by fearful rhetorics that named King George III America's enemy. In fact, the idealism of Common Sense achieved clarity in fear, for Paine warned Americans that their hopes and dreams were threatened by ruffians, magnifying what was good about America through the lens of grotesque difference.

Paine's argument for war was grounded in social-contract theory. His reading of the social contract had a decidedly pro-people, antigovernment cast, more Rousseau than Hobbes. Society, which Paine defined as a group of citizens living and working together on issues of common concern, was beneficial; yet government, which arose to protect the "freedom and security" of people when societies grew too large to be managed without artificial rules and regulations, was restrictive and easily corrupted—as evidenced by the rule of King George III. For Paine, the point of government was protection. "Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government, it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is preferable to all others," he wrote. This statement was central to the argument of Common Sense, for it provided Paine with a hook to justify independence to a skeptical audience. If protection was the end of government, then Americans could judge the British monarchy by the quality of the protection it provided. If the king's umbrella provided cover from the storm, he should be praised. But if the umbrella leaked, or even worse if the king himself was the cause of the tempest, then he should be deposed. Paine defended independence by reframing the way his audience thought about politics. While public debate up to that point had focused predominantly on economic and ideological issues including freedom, equality, self-government, trade, and taxation, Paine transformed it into a conversation about security and safety.

By the time that Common Sense hit the bookshelves in January 1776, Americans were on edge. Boston had been devastated by the British siege, and following the battles of Lexington and Concord, the American press sizzled with tales of dead patriots mercilessly shot down by the king's regulars. In July 1775, the Continental Congress sent an Olive Branch Petition to the king. It was answered with an unforgiving speech on August 23 accusing the colonies of "traitorously preparing, ordering, and levying war against Great Britain," and pledging the king's determination to do everything in his power to put down the rebellion. Then, in an October 26 address before Parliament, the king again denounced the colonists—and his speech reached Philadelphia on January 8, just two days before the publication of Common Sense. In these speeches, the king declared Americans out of his protection, which according to Paine meant that Americans were no longer bound to obey him. And then there were the events in the South.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from ENEMYSHIP by Jeremy Engels Copyright © 2010 by Jeremy Engels. Excerpted by permission of Michigan State University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS....................IX INTRODUCTION: The Second American Revolution....................1
CHAPTER ONE: How Enemyship Became Common Sense....................33
CHAPTER TWO: The Dilemmas of American Nationalism....................67
CHAPTER THREE: The Army of the Constitution....................113
CHAPTER FOUR: The Contract of Blood....................157
CONCLUSION: Hobbes's Gamble and Franklin's Warning....................207
NOTES....................223
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY....................279
INDEX....................299