Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World
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Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World
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Overview
Historian Janet Polasky focuses on the eighteenth-century travelers who spread new notions of liberty and equality. It was an age of itinerant revolutionaries, she shows, who ignored borders and found allies with whom to imagine a borderless world. As paths crossed, ideas entangled. The author investigates these ideas and how they were disseminated long before the days of instant communications and social media or even an international postal system. Polasky analyzes the paper records—books, broadsides, journals, newspapers, novels, letters, and more—to follow the far-reaching trails of revolutionary zeal. What emerges clearly from rich historic records is that the dream of liberty among America’s founders was part of a much larger picture. It was a dream embraced throughout the far-flung regions of the Atlantic world.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300213430 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 03/01/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 392 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Revolutions without Borders
The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World
By Janet Polasky
Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Yale UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-21343-0
CHAPTER 1
"The cause of all mankind" in Revolutionary Pamphlets
A traveler returning home to Geneva a few years after the battles of Lexington and Concord was amazed by the veritable "brochure mania" that had seized his small city-state. Within days of an armed skirmish, printing presses had churned out hundreds of pamphlets assaulting the governing councils of Geneva, many of the handbills framed in terms of individual sovereignty secured in Philadelphia. A few years later, first in the United Provinces of the Netherlands in 1787 and then in the Belgian provinces, lawyers, clerics, and the occasional philosopher launched another barrage of brochures denouncing the rule of tyrants and asserting the sovereign rights of independent peoples. The American War for Independence of 1776 was but the first of the cascading Atlantic revolutions.
Pamphlets, not muskets, ignited the revolutions that swept through America and Europe at the end of the eighteenth century. Written in Philadelphia coffeehouses, hawked on the streets of Geneva, and reprinted by Amsterdam booksellers, these documents defined the transgressions of tyrants as they called the people to rebellion. The rhetoric of freedom traveled on folded sheaves, often small enough to hide in a pocket. Transported, read, and debated in North America, Geneva, the United Provinces of the Netherlands, and the Belgian provinces, few were as bold and none were as widely read as Thomas Paine's, but like Common Sense, they roused their readers to revolution.
In 1776, Paine, like the pamphleteers he inspired on both sides of the Atlantic over the next two decades, deployed "language as plain as the alphabet ... to make those that can scarcely read understand." His was a readership largely unaccustomed to the world of politics. In uncompromising prose, Paine made his argument for American independence to farmers and merchants as well as members of Congress, caricaturing British King George as "a worm, who in the midst of his splendor is crumbling into dust." The forty-six pages of Common Sense, written, rewritten, and written again in Paine's rooms above Robert Aitken's bookshop on Front Street in Philadelphia and in noisy coffeehouses nearby, found their way into the hands of readers, some in positions of power, but more not. This network extended not only up and down the East Coast, it crossed the Atlantic. William Carmichael, aspiring to diplomatic service, pocketed Common Sense to give to Charles Dumas, a French immigrant born in the German principality of Ansbach and living in The Hague. From there, Paine's call to revolution resonated among small republics and monarchies from Edinburgh to Warsaw, challenging the reigns of foreign emperors and the privileges of aristocratic orders. "In this century when sovereigns force their subjects to submit to the yoke of despotism," the call for liberty could be read everywhere," a countess, Anne Thérèse Philippine d'Yve, proclaimed in her pamphlet published in Brussels, the capital of the Austrian Netherlands.
For more than a hundred years, pamphlets had proved an ideal medium for disseminating messages of protest. These unbound booklets of printers' sheets, folded and stitched together without a cover, were published cheaply wherever there was a printing press and a cause. In the last decades of the eighteenth century, pamphlets, running the gamut from short poems in rhyming verse to theoretical treatises, some eight pages, others fifty-two, carried ideas across the Atlantic. Their crossings, like the revolutionaries who transported them, extended in both directions. In the 1770s, American pamphleteers quoted liberally from the philosophers of the European Enlightenment—Locke, Rousseau, Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Hume, among others—who had viewed the American wilderness as a blank slate on which to sketch the natural rights of man. American revolutionaries eagerly embraced this European vision of the exceptional promise of their primeval wilderness. A decade later, Genevan, Dutch, and Belgian insurgents, in turn, modeled their calls to arms on those of the victorious American patriots. They cast their struggles for sovereignty in the 1780s in the language of American liberty.
Monarchs and their ministers were as frightened by the discovery of a stack of new pamphlets as by the unearthing of a cache of arms. These small documents with their inflammatory rhetoric could be concealed in a closed hand and readily passed along. In 1787, an informant alerted Austrian spies to the identity of Brussels pamphleteers whose words incited villagers to revolt against their Austrian rulers. Austrian soldiers raided the house of a wine merchant in the center of Brussels, seized stacks of pamphlets, and, on the emperor's orders, set them ablaze in the Grand Place. Before they went up in smoke, these revolutionary pamphlets drew readers, some literate, others not, into debates and discussions that resonated in the streets and cafés far beyond the benches of parliament and the seats of government.
Annotations scribbled in the margins of the revolutionary pamphlets that survive today in libraries and archives reveal a chain of engaged readers on both sides of the Atlantic. This alternative political sphere entangled ideas of liberty ranging from grievances against hereditary despots living far away to visions of a new world of individual sovereignty. The French journalist Camille Desmoulins, later dispatched to the guillotine by his friend the Jacobin Maximilien Robespierre, marveled at the free exchange of revolutionary ideas in the small states at the center of Europe. Opposing ideas battled openly in the Belgian provinces, he wrote, truly "the land of the pamphlet." That would not be as true in revolutionary France, where the concentrated political power and ever-present guillotine inhibited debate.
These pamphlets that readily crossed borders, oceans, and mountains linked the revolutions, small and large, short-lived and enduring. Wherever they alighted, the pamphlets forged constituencies of likeminded though often far-flung revolutionaries. The readers of Common Sense from Philadelphia to The Hague discovered an abstract liberty that called them to a shared revolutionary cause. At the beginning of the revolutionary era, John Adams, happy that he "had been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to live," worried about the effect "so popular a pamphlet [as Common Sense] might have among the people." He understood that it was in this alternative sphere of politics, the international network of individuals traveling outside the national institutions where Adams governed, that pamphlets resonated.
Paine's Common Sense: "We have it in our power to begin the world over again"
In 1775, the outspoken Philadelphia physician, philanthropist, and abolitionist Benjamin Rush envisioned a pamphlet that ventured far "beyond the ordinary short and cold addresses of newspaper publications" in its uncompromising proclamation of American rights and its resounding condemnation of British rule. Rush would have written the argument for American independence himself, but many patients had left his care after the publication of his abolitionist tract a few years earlier. Instead he gave the assignment to an audacious young itinerant and part-time journalist, Thomas Paine, whom he had met at Robert Aitken's bookshop. Thirty-eight years old, Paine had weathered two short-lived marriages, two stints at sea, an apprenticeship in corset making, the bankruptcy of a tobacco goods store, and dismissal from positions as a government tax collector and a teacher.
Paine had come to America from England in search of employment, a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin in hand. He landed in Philadelphia, sick with what was probably typhus. Nevertheless, the English radical exulted: "Those who are conversant with Europe would be tempted to believe that even the air of the Atlantic disagrees with the constitution of foreign vices. There is a happy something in the climate of America which disarms them of all their power of infection and attraction." In his optimism, he echoed any number of European exiles who had already arrived in American harbors and armchair philosophers like the widely read Abbé Guillaume-Thomas Raynal, who could only imagine this virgin land of forests and rocky coasts peopled by self-sufficient farmers and their families.
Writing did not come easily to Paine. Franklin furnished Paine copies of British treatises on liberty to consider. Paine cast aside these polite but often abstruse philosophical arguments. Instead, he chose to write in a clear, straightforward prose for all to read. No long sentences or classical references would get in the way of his argument for American independence. Rush struggled to find a publisher willing to take on the incendiary pamphlet. Philadelphia bookseller Robert Bell finally agreed to print the pamphlet intended for a wide audience in 1776, but only on the following terms: if Common Sense lost money, Paine would pay publication costs himself; if it made a profit, half would go to Bell and the other half to buy mittens for American troops stationed in Canada.
Published anonymously, Common Sense fulfilled its author's expectations. Paine, never one to underplay his own achievements, estimated that 120,000 pamphlets were sold between February and May 1776. Some readers speculated that the author, known only as "the Englishman," was Benjamin Rush; others suspected Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, or perhaps John Adams, the author of Novanglus and no friend of the king. The first thousand copies sold out in a week. Without pausing to consult Paine, Bell printed a second edition. After arguing over profits and production costs, Paine engaged a new publisher for a third edition, which he signed and expanded. These six thousand copies sold for a shilling (a little over five dollars in current value), half the cost of the original edition. Before long, sixteen editions had been published in Philadelphia alone. Each copy sold typically had more than one reader, as it passed from hand to hand in households and on the streets. Whether one-fifth of all colonists read it, as many historians have claimed, no other pamphlet was as instrumental in fomenting revolution.
Benjamin Rush proudly observed that Common Sense had "an effect which has rarely been produced by type and paper in any age or country." Delegates lodged in Philadelphia for the Continental Congress sent copies of the pamphlet home to be "lent round" to those still "afraid of the ideas conveyed by the frightful word Independence." By February 1776, Samuel Ward wrote to his brother, "I am told by good judges that two-thirds of this City & Colony are now full in his Sentiments; in the Jerseys & Maryland &c they gain ground daily." From North Carolina, John Penn told the other delegates to the Continental Congress that everyone was talking about "Common Sense and Independence." Travelers carried it from one locale to another throughout the colonies, while other copies arrived by post. Where the pamphlet landed, booksellers set type to reprint it. Paine was particularly pleased that he had reached his intended audience, not just the literary elite with their substantial personal libraries and comfortable reading clubs but "those that can scarcely read." That was what set his pamphlet apart from what had come before.
A resolute republican, Paine set out to persuade Americans to "reject the usurpation" of both king and parliament with his scathing attacks on the powerful and his uncompromising argument for independence. "There is something exceedingly ridiculous in the composition of monarchy," Paine explained, casting the hero of the legendary Battle of Hastings as "a French bastard landing with an armed banditti, and establishing himself king of England against the consent of the natives." The Americans needed no king, he argued; their liberty was their natural right. Press reports that King George had branded the Americans as rebels in his opening address to Parliament gave Paine's characterization credibility.
"'TIS TIME TO PART." It was just "common sense," Paine told the colonists who drilled on their town commons, but still expected to resolve their grievances peacefully with the mother country. Independence, Paine insisted, a full six months before the Declaration of Independence, "is in reality a self-evident proposition." It was not reasonable that the vast American continent should be ruled by a "small island" on the other side of the Atlantic. Paine was calling for more than a break with England. "We have it in our power to begin the world over again," he assured his new compatriots in what he pictured as "Free and Independent States of America." In this radically different republic, the world would find peace, civilization, and commerce.
Loyalists were quick in their retort. James Chalmers of Charlestown, Maryland, answered Paine's devastating critique of the English monarchy with Plain Truth, a forthright defense of the balanced constitution dependent on the crown. Criticizing Paine's "intemperate zeal ... as injurious to liberty," Chalmers called for "a manly discussion of facts." For him as for Edmund Burke, there was no such thing as abstract liberty. Instead, their liberty was anchored in traditional English principles. The readers of Plain Truth looked not to win American independence but instead to secure a British promise to respect individual civil liberties in America as in England.
Readers in England not only followed the discussion of rights in the colonies but jumped into the fray, even when their best interests might have counseled against it. Major John Cartwright published his defense of American natural rights in 1775, American Independence. He resigned his naval commission in 1777, acknowledging that his public support of the American rebels might "possibly be displeasing to Government." In his pamphlet, Cartwright did not envision the actual separation of the colonies from England, but sought reforms that would build the foundation for a "lasting union between our colonies and the mother country." Striving to write in "a plainer and indeed a coarser language ... for the unrefined, though sensible bulk of the people," he proclaimed in terms less bold than Paine: "The Americans, in common with the whole race of man, have indisputably an inherent right to liberty." Renowned Welsh philosopher and Unitarian minister Richard Price went farther, advancing an even more unapologetic justification of the American rebels in his pamphlet Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty (1776). He blamed Parliament for letting loose "the spirit of despotism and avarice" in the colonies in the form of onerous duties. Their liberty threatened, Price explained, "the people fled immediately to arms and repelled the attack." That was only natural.
Written for readers on both sides of the Atlantic, Price's pamphlet sold sixty thousand copies in just days. In gratitude, the Continental Congress offered Price citizenship if he and his family would emigrate to America. Price replied that although his ideas readily crossed the Atlantic, he could not travel. He regretted that he was too ill to visit "the future asylum for the friends of liberty." So Thomas Paine and a number of Americans, including Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, came to visit the English champion of American liberty at his home just north of London.
An aristocrat living in the northeastern reaches of the United Provinces of the Netherlands, Joan Derk van der Capellen translated Price's pamphlet into Dutch. Van der Capellen had already published his own pamphlet asserting that if the American colonies rose up to claim their liberty, European revolution would follow. "The flame that burns in America will spread quickly," he wrote, "engulfing all of Europe, littered as the continent is with flammable material." The tyrannical blunders of despotic emperors, kings, and especially the Dutch stadtholders would provide ample fuel for the insurrections. The Europeans had long suffered under their rulers. The Enlightenment ideals that sparked the rebellion in America would inspire them, especially the seasoned revolutionaries in the United Provinces, to claim their natural rights and to set the old order of Europe aflame. Van der Capellen's stirring defense of the American revolutionaries and blistering attack on both the British king and Dutch stadtholder found its way into bookshops throughout the United Provinces.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Revolutions without Borders by Janet Polasky. Copyright © 2015 Yale University. Excerpted by permission of Yale UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations, ix,Dramatis Personae, xi,
Introduction: Revolution without Borders, 1,
ONE. "The cause of all mankind" in Revolutionary Pamphlets, 17,
TWO. Journals Relating "A share in two revolutions", 48,
THREE. The Revolutionary Narratives of Black "citizens of the world", 75,
FOUR. The Press and Clubs: "Politico-mania", 111,
FIVE. Rumors of Freedom in the Caribbean: "We know not where it will end", 138,
SIX. The Revolutionary Household in Fiction: "To govern a family with judgment", 172,
SEVEN. Correspondence between a "Virtuous spouse, Charming friend!", 194,
EIGHT. Decrees "in the Name of the French Republic": Armed Cosmopolitans, 232,
NINE. Revolutionaries between Nations: "Abroad in the world", 264,
Chronology, 277,
Notes on Sources, 283,
Notes, 293,
Acknowledgments, 353,
Index, 359,
Interviews
What was the inspiration for your book?
As an undergraduate studying in London, I discovered a misfiled letter from Thomas Paine in the Public Records Office. That letter introduced me to unlikely alliances among London mechanics, Parisian lawyers, and abolitionists from Philadelphia—eighteenth-century revolutionaries I had never met before. Ever since that first encounter in the archives, I have been discovering Paine’s itinerant friends, most of whom would have agreed with him that “a share in two revolutions was living to some purpose.”
Who are some of those interesting friends?
Thomas Jefferson’s next-door neighbor was one. A Tuscan merchant who enthusiastically adopted the American revolutionary cause as his own, Filippo Mazzei later served as the Polish king’s emissary in revolutionary Paris. Or Anna Falconbridge, whose journal describes the settlement of black loyalists from America in Sierra Leone—to her mind, “a premature, hare-brained, and ill-digested scheme.” And dozens of others who connected with one another in various ways—sometimes aboard ship, sometimes in salons and cafés, and often through notes scrawled in pamphlets, where encounters on the page transformed readers into revolutionaries.
What important insights did you uncover in your research?
The interconnections of today’s global society are inescapable. So why should we imagine that the founding fathers who dreamed of liberty lived in isolation? Revolution loomed as an ever-present possibility over four continents at the end of the eighteenth century, two centuries before the Arab Spring. The rich variety of revolutionary possibility in the past reminds us that revolutions readily traverse national borders, and that they lead in a multitude of different and often unexpected directions.