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BOOK: Appleby on American Counterrevolution: A Retreat From
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Mon Oct 18 11:47:34 1999
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Subject: BOOK: Appleby on American Counterrevolution: A Retreat From
Liberty
To: HAYEK-L@MAELSTROM.STJOHNS.EDU
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SHEAR@h-net.msu.edu (October, 1999)
Larry E. Tise. _The American Counterrevolution: A Retreat From Liberty,
1783-1800_. Mechanicsburg, Pa.: Stackpole Books, 1999. 672 pp. Index.
$49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8117-0100-X.
Reviewed for H-SHEAR by Joyce Appleby <Appleby@history.ucla.edu>,
Department of History, UCLA
Larry Tise's _The American Counterrevolution_ argues a strong thesis, but
it begins by begging a question that should be confronted at the outset.
The thesis propounded, as the subtitle "A Retreat from Liberty, 1783-1800"
suggests, is that concerns about order overwhelmed enthusiasm for liberty
as "the age of democratic revolutions," to use R.R. Palmer's phrase, came
to an end with the eighteenth century. The question that is begged is
whether such a shift of emphasis should be talked about as an "American
Counterrevolution" in the aftermath of the country's successful War for
Independence.
The very idea of a "counterrevolution" has a number of conceptual
entailments that need to be sorted out if Tise's thesis can be appreciated
and analyzed. We owe the formulation to Crane Brinton, whose _Anatomy of
Revolution_ advanced the French Revolution as a template for revolutions
in general and tested his morphology with reference to both the American
and Russian Revolutions. For Brinton, counterrevolutions were
Thermidorian in character, involving a dramatic change in the structure of
government as well as the replacement of the personnel and symbols
animating the country=92s politics. His example was France's trajectory
as the Reign of Terror yielded to the Directory and the Directory to the
consulate and then to Napoleon's French Empire.
Of course long before Brinton developed his scheme of revolutions, Charles
and Mary Beard had interpreted the revolutionary events in the United
States in a way compatible with the idea of a counter revolution. In
their account, the American Revolution had begun as a typical _ancien
regime_ struggle between elites, those of Great Britain arrayed against
the colonial gentry on the North American continent. But, as with so many
heated disputes, in the Beards' story, the fire got away and spread in the
free air of America, scorching ordinary colonists with the flames of
liberty. Heated, they became political participants themselves, demanding
what their gentry had long withheld from them: the right to participate in
public affairs.
Newly politicized, the colonial outsiders turned the conflict into a
revolution by pushing to the fore the two issues that Beard's associate,
Carl Becker, neatly epitomized as "home rule and who should rule at home?"
The Beards' counter revolution was the Constitutional convention and its
triumphant coda the ratification process which pitted the Federalists
against an outspent, outspoken group of Anti-Federalists. And American
history for them had been driven ever since by the rekindling of freedom's
fire as successive groups of dispossessed, disinherited, and dismissed
made their claim to the libertarian promise of the Revolution. This,
despite the Beards' hard-nosed emphasis on economic motives and interest
group politics.
Tise's counter revolution lacks such an analysis. The acrimony in
Congress over whether or not to honor Benjamin Franklin at the time of his
death in 1790 focuses Tise's curiosity, we are told, about the possibility
of a counter revolution. "What could have caused so many people in
America's seat of power in Franklin's hometown to act as if it would be
wrong to honor the genius of science, philosophy, diplomacy and
statecraft?," he asks. After reviewing possible explanations, Tise
concludes that there was something else "of fundamental importance at
work" -- to wit, Franklin's death had occurred "when the pendulum swing
that had been impelling Americans in the direction of liberty, freedom,
and equality had reached its limit." (pp. 10-11)
Over half of Tise's book deals with the zealotry for liberty unleashed
just when the Beards had whiffed the winds of Thermidor in 1789. To cover
"the sweet summer of liberty," Tise summons to his text a disparate group
of French, British and American radicals who are joined by their advanced
opinions about human progress and the contributions that governmental
reform might contribute to it. Some of the men and women like Thomas
Paine, Thomas Cooper, Mary Wollstonecraft, Gilbert Imlay, Lafayette,
Richard Price, Joseph Priestley and John Daly Burk actually knew each
other and moved from country to country as they formed threads of a
radical network while others are included because of their principled
stands or because their biographies offer an opportunity to inventory the
range of new liberties demanded.
Just how generous Tise's concept of liberty is can be measured by the
attention he bestows upon Sally Franklin, Benjamin Franklin's daughter who
squandered her father's estate. Defying his expressed wishes about gifts
bequeathed to her, Sally earns Tise's admiration as a woman long dominated
by a powerful father finally asserting herself. Women's participation in
the revolutionary era gets a more flattering depiction when he moves on to
the novelist Susanna Rowson, Catherine the Great, and Catharine Macauley,
who bring to his mind the formidable Mercy Otis Warren.
As these associations might suggest, Tise's storyline resembles nothing so
much as a billiard ball rolling about the register of the age's lesser and
greater luminaries, lighting up when it hits someone critical to the story
of liberty or the retreat from it. Cameo reconstructions of the lives of
Phyllis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano prepare the ground for consideration
of the African-Americans' revolutionary experience and the beginnings of
the antislavery movement, both leading up to the Haitian Revolution which
closes Part I of _The American Counterrevolution_'s five parts.
Part Two, "World Revolution," begins with the college days of the
impressive Yale class of '78 and the subsequent formation of the Hartford
Wits. Partial to Joel Barlow, as one would expect, Tise follows him to
Paris where he fatefully introduces Gilbert Imlay to Mary Wollstonecraft.
The events of France's Reign of Terror are played out against the tragic
unfolding of their affair while both of them write novels, and Barlow and
Imlay promote American real estate. In Paris Tise also takes up the
thread of insurrectionary activity in the closing years of the tumultuous
1790s on the part of Irish insurgents soliciting French help to rid them
of British rule.
The theme of American women's liberty appears again in a chapter entitled
"Citizenesses in the Land of Liberty" in which Tise reviews the
experiences of some exceptional women, including the jilting of Elizabeth
Graeme by William Franklin which returns the storyline to Benjamin
Franklin about whom Tise knows an amazing amount. Drawing on the
biographies of African-Americans touched by the flame of liberty, Tise
concludes Part Two with an exploration of manumission, colonization and
the ravages of revolution in St. Domingue.
"Annus Mirabilis I, 1793" enables Tise to integrate events in the United
States with those in France, bringing to a close his description of the
waxing of liberty. Much like a literary cenotaph, he concludes the first
half of his study devoted to liberty=92s expansion with a five-page listing
:"Endings of Friends of Liberty in America" (pp. 290-294) to be repeated at
the end of Part V "The Victory of Order" with another listing of "Other
Endings in the Land of Order." (pp. 528-533) With Parts IV and V, Tise
moves into his description, if not actually an argument, for
Counterrevolution beginning with the story of how Edmund Burke became "the
world=92s preeminent friend of order." (p. 308)=20
As Tise's theme would indicate, "Annus Mirabilis I" called forth an "Annus
Mirabilis II, 1798." In America, the sedition trials of the Federalists
and the harassing of George Logan appear as grounds for considering 1798
"America=92s Reign of Terror." Even Yale professors and Hartford=92s wits
have begun looking for safe ports "from the storms of change." (p. 340
Here Tise follows the careers of Josiah Meigs, Timothy Dwight, and Noah
Webster whose sensibilities he links to those of Chateaubriand.
Jefferson becomes the Janus-like figure at the moment of the pendulum
swing. An early and ardent friend of liberty, Jefferson becomes for Tise
a prominent player in America=92s Counterrevolution because his _Notes on
the State of Virginia_ expressed doubts about the capacities of America's
enslaved men and women. Finally we come to "The Victory of Order,"
commencing with the death of Mary Wollstonecraft as she gave birth to Mary
Wollstonecraft Shelley. A signature vignette, Wollstonecraft's death
receives the evocative detail that marks _The American Counterrevolution_
throughout.=20
To conclude that _The American Counterrevolution_ is an idiosyncratic work
is to both compliment and criticize the work. Tise's authorial presence
is omnipresent. His footnotes describe his research as a kind of personal
adventure story in which friends came along at critical moments to supply
him with pertinent books. The structure, as well, makes no concession to
conventional histories. Tise does not argue, analyze or interpret; he
narrates, implying that the events he has chosen to present are the
necessary links in an uncontestable account.
But before we slip into the idea that there was an American
Counterrevolution it seems important to reflect on the absence of
significant violence after 1783 (the Shays, Fries and the Whiskey
Rebellions notwithstanding), and even more remarkable the institutional
stability as Articles of Confederation yielded to the U.S. Constitution
and the Federalist ascendancy to its Jeffersonian opponents. No other
modern revolution found its founders routinely take their turns as chief
executive through the first fifty years of self-government, to be
succeeded by a son and revolutionary war veteran.
Liberty too would bear some scrutiny. A strong case could be made for the
continued expansion of liberty in the United States after 1783. The
problem of course is that the beneficiaries of that liberty -- ordinary
white men -- were often misogynist, racist and willing to be ruthless in
expelling the indigenous native peoples from the land they wanted. Their
greater scope of liberty shrunk or at least compromised that of other
Americans. Order seems an inadequate counterpoise to liberty in these
circumstances.
I would argue that, rather than a Counterrevolution, Americans have
engaged in an Endless Revolution as successive groups have come to
recognize just how powerful were the lines from the Declaration of
Independence that explained the colonists' resort to arms to a candid
world. But of course how they became powerful involves yet another story
about a people grasping for unifying values as they willed themselves into
nationhood.
Copyright (c) 1999 by H-Net, all rights reserved. This work
may be copied for non-profit educational use if proper credit
is given to the author and the list. For other permission,
please contact H-Net@h-net.msu.edu.
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Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
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"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
