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Thermidor in America: The Aftermath of Independence in the South

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Michael Zuckerman
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Extract

In the first flush of independence, while most Americans celebrated their success at arms against the English, Benjamin Rush remained more guarded. “The American war is over,” he reminded his countrymen, “but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”

Rush's assertion was an arresting one at the time, and in an attenuated way its insight persists in the work that currently affords us our paradigmatic account of the Revolutionary movement. For Bernard Bailyn extends it to argue, in a succession of brilliant studies, that the ideas set loose in the struggle for independence had a logical momentum all their own. He has traced what he calls the “transforming radicalism of the American Revolution” to fruitions far beyond the conflict with England, and he affirms the fundamentality for all American history of the continuing “contagion of liberty” that originated in Revolutionary rhetoric.

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 8 , October 1983 , pp. 349 - 368
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1983

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References

NOTES

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16. MacLeod, , pp. 100–101Google Scholar; Jordan, , p. 326.Google Scholar

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19. Ibid., pp. 21–22, 15; Matthews, Albert, “Notes on the Proposed Abolition of Slavery in Virginia in 1785,” Colonial Society of Massachusetts, Publications, 6 (1904), 374.Google Scholar

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35. Ibid., pp. 400–401.

36. Ibid., p. 400.

37. Buel, Richard, “Democracy and the American Revolution: A Frame of Reference,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 21 (1964), 167CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Bailyn; Wood, , Creation of the RepublicGoogle Scholar; and Robbins, Caroline, The Eighteenth Century Commonwealthman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

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39. Rogin, Michael, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), p. 35.Google Scholar

40. Bertelson, David, The Lazy South (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 151.Google Scholar The same movement was in evidence again and again in the 1790s under the Federalists in power in Washington: in Alexander Hamilton's fiscal measures, with their willful intent to establish a center of power independent of popular control; in the opposition to the Democratic Societies and the crushing of the Whisky Rebellion; in the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Provisional Army Act of 1798; and more. See, for example, Buel, Richard, Securing the Revolution: Ideology in American Politics, 1789–1815 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell Univ. Press, 1972), pp. 24, 98–99, 98–99, 128–30, 176, 180.Google Scholar

41. Buel, , Securing the Revolution, pp. 128–30Google Scholar; Rogin, , p. 35Google Scholar; Buel, , Securing the Revolution, p. 5.Google Scholar Federalists buttressed their arguments by inviting Southerners to consider “what would happen if the slaves clubbed together”; see Buel, , Securing the Revolution, p. 129.Google Scholar

42. Maier, Pauline, “Popular Uprisings and Civil Authority in Eighteenth-Century America,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 27 (1970), 3–35CrossRefGoogle Scholar; the quotation from Jefferson is on p. 31.

43. Maier, , pp. 33–34.Google Scholar

44. Buel, , “Democracy and the Revolution,” pp. 172–73, 175.Google Scholar

45. Ibid., p. 175.

46. MacLeod, , pp. 153–54Google Scholar; McColley, , pp. 111–12.Google Scholar Even Jefferson, who spoke so eloquently of the desirability of bloody and recurrent revolution to water the tree of liberty, drew the line at racial revolution and at the blacks of St. Domingue exporting their revolution to the rest of the Western Hemisphere. See MacLeod, , p. 154Google Scholar, and McColley, , pp. 112–13.Google Scholar

47. On the “virtual unanimity” of Northern ministerial support for the French Revolution through 1794, see Nash, Gary, “The American Clergy and the French Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd series, 22 (1965), 392–412.CrossRefGoogle Scholar On the forging in 1798 of the fatal alliance of Northern religion and anti-French Federalism, see Buel, , Securing the Revolution, p. 138.Google Scholar On the Southern legislatures, see Abernethy, Thomas, The South in the New Nation, 1789–1810 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1961), pp. 118–20.Google Scholar

48. Abernethy, , pp. 127–28.Google Scholar

49. Ibid.; MacLeod, , pp. 92–93.Google Scholar

50. Abernethy, , pp. 127–28Google Scholar: MacLeod, , pp. 92–93Google Scholar; Thompson, , 1: 127Google Scholar; Buel, , Securing the Revolution, pp. 98–99.Google Scholar

51. MacLeod, , pp. 92–93.Google Scholar

52. Quoted in Dunne, Philip, ed., Mr. Dooley Remembers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), p. 306.Google Scholar