During and immediately after the American Revolution, US writers described a salubrious national climate that would ensure the prosperity of the nation. Maintaining a good climate involved managing air quality through various forms of so-called improvement. In the 1790s, a series of yellow fever epidemics upended this fantasy and suggested that the US atmosphere might be either fundamentally toxic or incredibly vulnerable to foreign contagion. During this period, maintaining healthy air came to be understood as a national security issue. This discourse offers one point of origin for the contemporary militarization of climate to the benefit of some and at the expense of others. The heightened vulnerability of poor and nonwhite communities to airborne toxins can also be traced to the 1790s, when the government prioritized the health of white bodies at the expense of black people. This chapter traces this arc through Mercy Otis Warren’s anti-British plays, writing by and about Benjamin Franklin, and the novels of Charles Brockden Brown. The chapter closes by connecting this literary history to contemporary scholarship about air pollution.

The defense of inalienable rights and the rhetorical allusions created by Patriot writers in the Revolutionary era ignited protests from slaves, Indians, and women, each systemically excluded from colonial society. Slaves understood the contradictions of revolutionary rhetoric as they wrote extensively in various mediums. Women did the same, with a leading female writer of the time, Mercy Otis Warren, penning plays and poetry that mobilized women to the Patriot cause and pushed them into the public sphere. Likewise, Native American Mingo war leader John Logan foretold much of wartime Indian–American relations in his famous Lament (1774), questioning the inherent lack of American support for Indian freedom and warning against their eventual destruction. These literary tools, however, won few supporters in advancing the rights of these individual groups as each experienced setbacks after the war that ensured the Revolution’s promise would be one long delayed.

John Dickinson (1732–1809) was a Founder of the United States whose jurisprudence was greatly influenced by Quakerism. Although he never joined the Religious Society of Friends, Dickinson adopted the basic tenets of their religion, particularly the belief in the Light of Christ in the conscience, which caused them to consider all people spiritually equal, regardless of gender, race, or socio-economic status. The strong and outspoken Quaker women in Dickinson’s life—his mother, wife, daughters, and a range of other female friends and relatives—influenced him to advocate for women in his legal practice and in his work to found the nation. Among the leading Founders, Dickinson was the only one to press for women’s rights, making him an early feminist.