Being alone in the age of the social contract

William and Mary Quarterly

Volumn 62, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 31-66

  Slauter, Eric ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950215208     PISSN: 00435597     EISSN: 1933-769     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/3491621     Document Type: Review

References (132)

1. "Social Compact, " "To the Printer, " New-Haven Gazetteand the Connecticut Magazine 2, no. 33 (Oct. 4, 1787): 262.
2. For an account of the failure to distinguish between the separatecontracts of society and of government, and the corresponding collapse betweenconstitutions and social contracts, see Thad W. Tate, "The Social Contractin America, 1774-1787: Revolutionary Theory as a Conservative Instrument, "William and Mary Quarterly 3d Ser., 22, no. 3 (July 1965): 375-91.
3. Like most periodicals in Connecticut, the New-Haven Gazette printedalmost exclusively pro-Constitution (or Federalist) commentary. For an accountof the relationship of periodicals like the New-Haven Gazette to the publicsphere, and of the ways in which elites tried to maintain control of publicityin the face of mounting challenges, see Christopher Grasso, A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999).
4. "Social Compact" might have reflected the broader publicopinion the author hoped to shape, but his essay did not convince a majority ofdelegates from New Haven county to vote for ratification at the Connecticut Convention. For the micropolitics of New Haven's vote at the Convention, see Christopher Collier, All Politics Is Local: Family, Friends, and Provincial Interests in the Creation of the Constitution (Hanover, N.H., 2003).
5. "The Hermit's Soliloquy, " New-Haven Gazette and the Connecticut Magazine 3, no. 31 (Aug. 7, 1788): 7.
6. For "fantasies of publicity, " see Michael Warner, The Lettersof the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America(Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 151-76.
7. Of course, the soliloquy might have been read aloud, either in what wethink of as "public" or in "private." For public circulationof newspapers in the taverns of the early Republic, and for the"communal" circulation in private homes, see Thomas C. Leonard, Newsfor All: America's Coming-of-Age with the Press (New York, 1995), 3-32.
8. Benjamin Rush, An Oration, Delivered before the American Philosophical Society ... containing an Enquiry into the Influence of Physical Causes upon the Moral Faculty (Philadelphia, 1786), 24.
9. Rush's prescription resembled the moral of Aesop's fable "Of the Hermit and the Soldier, " a text frequently reprinted in the period, thatdemonstrated "that Many renounce Vices, because They are not able toexercise Them [any] longer" (Fabulae Aesopi selectae; or, Select Fables of Aesop; With an English Translation ..., trans. H. Clarke [Boston, 1787], 85).
10. For shifting concepts of privacy, see Patricia Meyer Spacks, Privacy:Concealing the Eighteenth-Century Self (Chicago, 2003);
11. Thomas Laquer, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York, 2003).
12. Accounts of privacy in early America produced in the context ofwiretapping in the early 1960s look very different from accounts of early American privacy produced in the wake of the Supreme Court's majority opinion in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, or for that matter the majority opinion in Roev. Wade in 1973. See Norman F. Cantor, "Privacy in Colonial America, "A Report Submitted to the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, Special Committee on Science and the Law, 9 January 1964;
13. David H. Flaherty, Privacy in Colonial New England (Charlottesville, Va., 1972).
14. It is worth noting that the Supreme Court's 2003 majority opinion in Lawrence and Garner v. Texas centered on equal protection to the right toprivacy, though the crucial amicus brief filed by historians rarely invoked theterm privacy as part of its narrative of changing historical attitudes toward"sodomy." See Brief of George Chauncey, Nancy F. Cott, John D'Emilio, Estelle B. Freedman, Thomas C. Holt, John Howard, Lynn Hunt, Mark D. Jordan, Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy, and Linda P. Kerber as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioners (2003).
15. Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1980);
16. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England, 1650-1750 (New York, 1982);
17. Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority (Cambridge, 1982);
18. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (New York, 1986);
19. Ruth H. Bloch, "The Gendered Meanings of Virtue in Revolutionary America, " Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 13, no. 1 (Autumn1987): 37-58;
20. Jan Lewis, "The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic, " WMQ 44, no. 4 (October 1987): 689-721;
21. Rosemarie Zagarri, "Morals, Manners, and the Republican Mother, " American Quarterly 44, no. 2 (June 1992): 192-215;
22. and, in the wake of the reception of Habermas, though not alwaysformulated in his terms, see Cornelia Hughes Dayton, Women before the Bar:Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1995);
23. Mary Beth Norton, Founding Mothers and Fathers: Gendered Power and the Forming of American Society (New York, 1996);
24. David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America(Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997);
25. Elizabeth Barnes, States of Sympathy: Seduction and Democracy in the American Novel (New York, 1997);
26. Julia A. Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (Chicago, 1997);
27. Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender, and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, N.J., 1998);
28. Julie Ellison, Cato's Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion(Chicago, 1999);
29. Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore, 2002);
30. Ruth H. Bloch, "Gender and the Public/Private Dichotomy in American Revolutionary Thought, " in Gender and Morality in Anglo-American Culture, 1650-1800 (Berkeley, Calif., 2003);
31. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, The Gender of Freedom: Fictions of Liberalismand the Literary Public Sphere (Stanford, Calif., 2004).
32. Indeed, the focus on the publicness of the public sphere has obscuredbasic questions and foreclosed avenues of research pursued by other nationalhistoriographies. For France, see esp. the essays collected in Roger Chartier, ed., Passions of the Renaissance, trans. Arthur Goldhammer, A History of Private Life 3 (Cambridge, Mass., 1989);
33. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988);
34. Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, trans. Lydia G.Cochrane (Durham, N.C., 1991);
35. Dena Goodman, "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime, " History and Theory 31, no. 1 (February 1992): 1-20;
36. John Brewer, "This, That, and the Other: Public, Social, and Privatein the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, " in Shifting the Boundaries:Transformation of the Languages of Public and Private in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Dario Castiglione and Lesley Sharpe (Exeter, U.K., 1995), 1-21.
37. Critiques of the application of Habermas's historical sociologicalaccount to eighteenth-century America are familiar; indeed, they begin with Habermas's own brief examination of the American Revolution in an essay on"Natural Law and Revolution" written just a year after his book firstappeared in Germany in 1962. See Jürgen Habermas, "Natural Law and Revolution, " in Theory and Practice, trans. John Viertel (Boston, 1973), 82-120;
38. for a reading of this essay that finds Habermas "correct"but "ungenerous" to revolutionary America, see Antonio Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, trans. Maurizia Boscagli(Minneapolis, Minn., 1999), 19.
39. Warner's brilliant Letters of the Republic, a context-sensitiveadjustment of Habermas rather than the application it is sometimes taken to be, offers the most persuasive situation of Habermas's thesis in eighteenth-century America. Early Americanists have voiced their own reasons why the Habermasiannarrative is not a theory that travels well. For crucial restrictions based onengagement with oratory, manuscript circulation, and the reality of materialpractices, see Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993);
40. Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago, 1996);
41. Shields, Civil Tongues;
42. David Wldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997);
43. Grasso, Speaking Aristocracy;
44. Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000);
45. Trish Loughran, "Virtual Nation: Local and National Cultures of Print in the Early United States" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2000);
46. Jeffrey L. Pasley, "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, Va., 2001);
47. John L. Brooke, "To be 'Read by the Whole People': Press, Party, and Public Sphere in the United States, 1790-1840, " Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 110, no. 1 (April 2000): 41-118.
48. The criticism and historiography for eighteenth-century Britain offersone of the best places to begin thinking about transformations of the terms"self" and "society" in the eighteenth century. For self, see Dror Wahrman, The Making of the Modern Self: Identity and Culture in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 2004);
49. for society, see Mary Poovey, "The Liberal Civil Subject and the Social in Eighteenth-Century British Moral Philosophy, " Public Culture 14, no. 1 (Winter 2002): 125-45.
50. more generally on revaluations of "the social, " see Patrick Joyce, ed., The Social in Question: New Bearings in History and the Social Sciences (London, 2002);
51. Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries (Durham, N.C., 2004). Incalling for more examination of popular culture with political thought, I meansomething different from the very rich historiography in the study of popularpolitical thought that has followed from the work of Alfred F. Young on early American radicalism.
52. [William Hill Brown], The Power of Sympathy; or, The Triumph of Nature Founded in Truth (Boston, 1789).
53. Story mentioned the project of "a poem of about fifteen hundredlines, on the 'Power of Solitude'" in a letter to Thomas Welsh on Oct. 19, 1799, published a first version in 1802, and revised and expanded the poem for asecond edition in 1804. See William W. Story, ed., Life and Letters of Joseph Story ... (Boston, 1851), 1: 83;
54. Joseph Story, The Power of Solitude. A Poem. In Two Parts, 2d ed. (Salem, Mass., 1804).
55. He might have had in mind a contrast to Sarah Wentworth Morton's poem The Virtues of Society ... (Boston, 1799), which he praised in his letter to Welsh.
56. For the importance of sympathy, see Stern, Plight of Feeling;
57. Barnes, States of Sympathy.
58. On the period-wide interest in narratives of the "individualisolated in the pursuit of self-satisfactions that could not easily be publiclyjustified" (4), see Jonathan Lamb, Preserving the Self in the South Seas, 1680-1840 (Chicago, 2001).
59. For French and British interest in the consequences of isolation, and forthe general interest in problems of presociality, see Julia V. Douthwaite, The Wild Girl, Natural Man, and the Monster: Dangerous Experiments in the Age of Enlightenment (Chicago, 2002), esp. 93-133.
60. repr., Exeter, N. H., and Boston, 1795), and by reprinting poeticaccounts of hermits by British writers such as Thomas Parnell's The Hermit(published in Parnell's Poems on Several Occasions [London, 1722];
61. The central episode in Parnell's poem was fictionalized by Voltaire in Zadig (1747), a text translated and printed as Miscellanies by M. De Voltaire:Containing ... Zadig ... (Philadelphia, 1778).
62. New York physician Elihu Hubbard Smith dramatized the poem in Edwin and Angelina; or, The Banditti. An Opera, in Three Acts (New York, 1797).
63. John Pomfret, "The Choice, " in Eighteenth-Century English Literature, ed. Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell, and Marshall Waingrow (San Diego, Calif., 1969) 790-92 [lines 5, 91, 96];
64. Dell Upton, Architecture in the United States (Oxford U.K., 1998), 31.
65. citing Edwin Morris Betts, ed., Thomas Jefferson's Garden Book, 1766-1824, with Relevant Extracts from His other Writings (Philadelphia, 1944), 25-26;
66. [William Livingston], Philosophic Solitude; or, The Choice of a Rural Life: A Poem. By a Young Gentleman Educated at Yale College (Trenton, N.J., 1782), 6, lines 87-92.
67. Philip Freneau, "Retirement, " in The Poems of Philip Freneau.Written Chiefly during the Late War (Philadelphia, 1786), 59;
68. Freneau, "The Hermit of Saba, " in The Miscellaneous Works of Mr. Philip Freneau containing his Essays, and Additional Poems (Philadelphia, 1788), 30-38 (quotation, 34).
69. For the population of Saba in 1775, see Lester J. Cappon, Barbara Bartz Petchenik, and John Hamilton Long, eds., Atlas of Early American History: The Revolutionary Era, 1760-1790 (Princeton, N.J., 1976), 98.
70. See Richardson, A History of Early American Magazines (New York, 1931), 201 n. 193.
71. James Otis, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved(Boston, 1764), 10-11;
72. J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge, 1999).
73. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, ed. Isaac Kramnick (New York, 1982), 66. Suchsentiments were fairly conventional in Philadelphia. As one minister put it in1775: "By nature surrounded with innumerable wants, which his own singleunassisted hand could by no means supply, exposed to innumerable dangers, whichhis utmost strength and sharpest foresight could not possibly ward off, it mustsurely have been this WISDOM OF THE FATHER, that first taught man, by SOCIALCOMPACT, to secure to himself the possession of those necessaries and comforts, which are so dear and valuable to his natural life"
74. (Jacob Duché, The Duty of Standing Fast in our Spiritual and Temporal Liberties, A Sermon, preached in Christ-Church, July 7th, 1775. Beforethe First Battalion of the city and liberties of Philadelphia [Philadelphia, 1775], 11-12).
75. James Wilson, "Lecture 7: Of Man, As a Member of Society, " in The Works of James Wilson, ed. Robert Green McCloskey (Cambridge, Mass., 1967), 1: 227, 235.
76. On Benjamin Rush and solitary confinement, see Michael Meranze, Laboratories of Virtue: Punishment, Revolution, and Authority in Philadelphia, 1760-1835 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1996), 168-69.
77. Pennsylvania Convention, Declaration of Rights, 1776, in Declaring Rights: A Brief History with Documents, ed. Jack N. Rakove (Boston, 1998), 85;
78. James Wilson, Considerations on the Nature and Extent of the Legislative Authority of the British Parliament (1774), in McCloskey, Works, 2: 723;
79. see, for example, [Robert Voorhis], Life and Adventures of Robert, the Hermit of Massachusetts, Who Has Lived 14 Years in a Cave, Secluded from Human Society (Providence, R.I., 1829).
80. Alexander Hamilton, The Farmer Refuted; or, A more impartial andcomprehensive View of the Dispute between Great-Britain and the Colonies ...(New York, 1775), in The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold C. Syrett and Jacob E. Cooke (New York, 1961-87), 1: 122.
81. Otis wrote: "Few people have extended their enquiries after thefoundation of any of their rights, beyond a charter from the crown. There areothers who think when they have got back to old Magna Charta, that they are atthe beginning of all things. They imagine themselves on the borders of Chaos(and so indeed in some respects they are) and see creation rising out of theunformed mass, or from nothing. Hence, say they, spring all the rights of menand of citizens" (Otis, Rights of the British Colonies, 31);
82. Thomas Paine, Rights of Man, Common Sense, and other Political Writings, ed. Mark Philp (Oxford, U.K., 1995), 95;
83. Joseph Brant, American Museum 6 (September 1789): 226-27,
84. reprinted under the title "Indian vs. White Civilization" in Colin G. Calloway, ed., The World Turned Upside Down: Indian Voices from Early America (Boston, 1994), 179-80;
85. [Sir Thomas More], The Common-Wealth of Utopia. Containing a learned andpleasant Discourse of the best state of a Publick Weal, as it is found in thenew Island called Utopia (Philadelphia, 1753), 93-94 [bk. 2, chap. 7].
86. "Equality - A Political Romance" first appeared on Saturdays in The Temple of Reason (Philadelphia, May 15-July 3, 1802), and was republishedin 1837. The Lithconians, the narrator noted, had "no less than teninfallible constitutions, all declared to be founded on the rights of man, inthe short period of forty years" (n.p.).
87. Since the people learned to express their wills peacefully, it was laterdetermined that a formal constitution was superfluous. See [John Lithgow], Equality; A History of Lithconia (Philadelphia, 1947), 17.
88. For a discussion of a similar tension between transparency anddidacticism among French politicians in the 1790s, see Lynn Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, Calif., 1984), 72-73;
89. James Madison, "Vices of the Political System of the United States, " April 1787, Papers of James Madison, ed. Robert A. Rutland et al.(Chicago, 1962-91), 9: 353.
90. John Trumbull, Autobiography, Reminiscences and Letters of John Trumbull, from 1756 to 1841 (New York, 1841), 89.
91. [Anthony Ashley Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury], Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times ([London], 1711), 1: 158, 162, 170, 175(quotations, 2: 319).
92. For availability in America, see Janice G. Schimmelman, "A Checklistof European Treatises on Art and Essays on Aesthetics Available in Americathrough 1815, " Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 93 (April1983): 154-61, 172.
93. Hamilton, Farmer Refuted, 1: 86-87; [Charles Inglis], The True Interest Of America Impartially Stated, In Certain Strictures On A Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense. By an American, 2d ed. (Philadelphia 1776), vi;
94. [Mercy Otis Warren], The Group (Boston, 1775), 7.
95. For a discussion of the prevalence of the rhetoric of an "Appeal to Heaven, " see T. H. Breen, The Lockean Moment: The Language of Rights on the Eve of the American Revolution, An Inaugural Lecture Delivered before the University of Oxford on 15 May 2001 (Oxford, U.K., 2001).
96. James Smither, The Patriotic American Farmer. J - n D - k - ns - n Esqr.Barrister at Law ([Philadelphia], 1768), engraving, 27.0 × 19.0 cm. The Federal Convention became the subject for at least one woodcut beforeratification and emerged as a stock image in textbook histories of the United States in the early nineteenth century.
97. See [John Norman?], [The Grand Convention], woodcut, Weatherwise's Federal Almanack, For the Year of our Lord 1788 ... (Boston, [1787]), coverpage;
98. Both are reprinted in Richard B. Bernstein and Kym S. Rice, Are We to Bea Nation?: The Making of the Constitution (Cambridge, Mass., 1987), 154-55.
99. [David Ramsay], "Civis: To the Citizens of South Carolina, "Columbian Herald (Charleston), Feb. 4, 1788,
100. in Merrill Jensen et al., eds., Documentary History of the Ratificationof the Constitution (Madison, Wis., 1976-)
101. Commentaries on the Constitution: Public and Private, 16: 22;
102. "An Old Whig, " (Philadelphia) Independent Gazetteer, Oct. 27, 1787, in DHRC, Commentaries on the Constitution: Public and Private, 13: 500
103. "Vox Populi, " (Boston) Massachusetts Gazette, Nov. 13, 1787, in DHRC, Constitutional Documents and Records, 1776-1787, 4: 222.
104. Michael Kammen, Spheres of Liberty: Changing Perceptions of Liberty in American Culture (Madison, Wis., 1986)
105. Elise Marienstras, "Liberty, " in The Blackwell Encyclopediaof the American Revolution, ed. Jack P. Greene and J. R. Pole (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 609-15, are typical in their exclusive emphasis on femalerepresentations of liberty.
106. For representations of erect penises, see Antoine de Baecque, The Body Politic: Corporeal Metaphor in Revolutionary France, 1770-1800, trans. Charlotte Mandell (Stanford, Calif., 1997)
107. Lynn Hunt, "Pornography and the French Revolution, " in The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500-1800, ed.Hunt (New York, 1993), 301-39;
108. Joel Barlow, "Genealogy of the Tree of Liberty, " Notebook [ca.1796-97?], Barlow Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University, b MS Am 1448(vol. 13).
109. See also Neil Hertz, "Medusa's Head: Male Hysteria under Political Pressure, " Representations no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 54 n. 36.
110. Peter Prejudice, "The New Breeches, " (Philadelphia) Federal Gazette, Apr. 15, 1788, in DHRC, Commentaries on the Constitution: Public and Private, 17: 128.
111. The satire was reprinted fourteen times, in ten separate states, in thenext two months; for euphemisms, see, for example, "The ANATOMY of Man's Body, as governed by the Twelve CONSTELLATIONS, " in Andrew Beers, The Columbian Almanack and Ephemeris ... For the Year of Our Lord 1788 ... thetwelfth of American Independence ... (New York, [1787]), [2].
112. For seventeenth-century Puritan political thought, see Perry Miller, "The Puritan State and Puritan Society, " in Errand into the Wilderness(1956; repr., New York, 1964), 142;
113. Thomas Paine, Common Sense, in The Complete Writings of Thomas Paine, ed.Philip S. Foner (New York, 1945), 1: 4;
114. [Benjamin Thurston], An Address to the Public, Containing Some Remarks onthe Present Political State of the American Republicks, etc. By Amicus Reipublicae (Exeter, N.H., 1786), 8;
115. [James Madison], The Federalist No. 51, in The Federalist, ed. Jacob E.Cooke (Middletown, Conn., 1961), 349.
116. The "if men were angels" theme can be seen throughout theperiod. For an account of government as the master term of eighteenth-centurypolitics, see Michel Foucault's 1978 lecture on "Governmentality, " in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago, 1991). 87-104;
117. Noah Webster, A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language (Hartford, Conn., 1806), s.vv. "Libertinism" and "Licentousness."
118. Cooke, Federalist, 469, 238.
119. See also "Diary of Gouverneur Morris, " in The Life of Gouverneur Morris ..., ed. Jared Sparks (Boston, 1832), 1: 311 [1789].
120. Rutland et al., Papers of James Madison, 9: 356, 10: 213.
121. The frontier offered, among other things, a chance to ruminate on thenatural sociability of humankind. As the "American Farmer, "Crèvecoeur asked in 1782 in a chapter of his Letters titled"Distresses of a Frontier Man, " "what is man when no longerconnected with society, or when he finds himself surrounded by a convulsed and ahalf-dissolved one? He cannot live in solitude; he must belong to somecommunity bound by some ties, however imperfect" (J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America, ed. Albert E. Stone [New York, 1986], 201).
122. In the greatly enlarged 1787 French edition of the text (rarely examinedtoday), Crèvecoeur recounted the origin and establishment of an imaginarycommunity located in northwestern New York state, and it was no accident thatthis community made up of English, French, German, Irish, and Scottish settlerswas called "Socialburg." See Lettres d'un cultivateur Américain... depuis l'Année 1770, jusqu' en 1786 (Paris, 1787), 3: 56-96;
123. for the Gallic-American context of this edition, see Robert Darnton, George Washington's False Teeth: An Unconventional Guide to the Eighteenth Century (New York, 2003).
124. For squatters and the Land Ordinance, see Peter S. Onuf, Statehood and Union: A History of the Northwest Ordinance (Bloomington, Ind., 1987), 21-43.
125. The Picture Exhibition (Albany, N.Y., 1790), broadside. The image derivesfrom a woodcut illustration of the Old Hermit printed in Springfield, Mass., in1786.
126. Excitement and anxiety about being alone might very well have been aneffect or the culture of youth in the early Republic. For discussion of thecultural implications of the youthful demographic, see Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims;
127. Daniel A. Cohen, "Arthur Mervyn and His Elders: The Ambivalence of Youth in the Early Republic, " WMQ 43, no. 3 (July 1986): 362-80;
128. Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America, 2d ed. (New York, 2004).
129. The relationship between the "rights of men" and hermits wasmade more explicitly by British radical Thomas Spence. Gregory Claeys hasobserved that Spence claimed historical priority over Thomas Paine for thephrase "rights of man, " insisting he had used it first in 1780, "when, inspired by the independence of a hermit living in a cave by thesea, he inscribed on the cave wall, 'Ye Landlords vile, who man's peace marr /Come levy rents here if you can / Your stewards and lawyers I defy; / And livewith all the RIGHTS OF MAN'" (Gregory Claeys, Thomas Paine: Social and Political Thought [Boston, 1989], 107 n. 10).
130. thank Alfred F. Young for bringing Spence's poem to my attention. Fornarratives of people making, see Rogers M. Smith, Stories of Peoplehood: The Politics and Morals of Political Membership (Cambridge, 2003);
131. (New York) Daily Advertiser, Sept. 2, 1789.
132. Later editions placed the hermit "in the deserts between Fort Pit[t]and Salem." See Remarkable Prophecy, 9th ed. ([United States?], 1796).