Sensibility and the American Revolution

Introduction

Revolutions reinvent societies. As Americans freed themselves from British imperial power and rejected monarchical authority, they directly confronted the question of how to reconstitute society. Simultaneous to the debates over the national Constitution, political leaders, ministers, physicians, and cultural commentators of varying stripes articulated a project of social renovation. They wrote treatises and made speeches and submitted articles to newspapers and to magazines. Their goal was lofty, even perfectionist: the complete social regeneration of the republic. If the people constituted the republic, then society was as important as the political forms that gave the republic its structure, part of how an independent people controlled its own fate.

Changing society involved changing selves. And this was precisely why sensibility was so important to the eighteenth century, and especially to the moment of revolution. Sensibility was human sensitivity of perception and thus comprised the fundamental link of self and society. Man’s sensibility to the world around him was deemed a natural basis for social action, a means of healthy self-formation and social connectedness. Across the eighteenth century, the workings of this foundational human trait were believed to mollify the dislocations of a commercial and less hierarchical world, offering a sympathetic means of cohesion even as authority and obligation shifted. The American Revolution emanated in part from cultural commitments to sensibility that were brought to the forefront by imperial turmoil. For in the long turbulence appeared the opportunity, indeed the seeming necessity, to remake society from the ground up where the sensible self was open to personal change and an agent of social reform. To understand this peculiar determination, which was most fully expressed around the time the federal Constitution was written and debated—what I am calling, for want of a better phrase, the sentimental project—and to explain the extraordinary efflorescence of sensibility during the revolutionary period are the goals of this book.

We are accustomed, of course, to thinking of the American Revolution as a political revolution. Independence from Great Britain and constitutional reform were its main features. Republicanism (or civic humanism) and liberal rights were its best-known ideologies, and a change from monarchy to republic, from dependent colony to independent nation were its loudest goals. Political historians, historians of the top down, write of social effects largely as unintended consequences. Historians of the bottom up, meanwhile, reveal a resistance movement of many, not a few—urban crowds pulling down statues of George III, enslaved blacks petitioning for freedom, women spinning homespun, sailors resisting impressment—but these historians’ terms are more muted than revolution: they describe manifold revolts, internal struggle, subtle transformation, but not a world turned upside down. Suffrage was extended somewhat, and deference and slavery were challenged. White indentured servitude became unimaginable, masters and servants replaced by bosses and employees. But no massive redistribution of property occurred. The state-confiscated loyalist lands, some three million acres in toto, largely went into the hands of the already propertied. Slavery expanded. To the degree the American Revolution was in fact revolutionary, whether looking from the top or the bottom, it appears fundamentally as a revolution about the state and about who held the reins of political power.¹

The men and women who articulated the sentimental project did imagine a certain kind of social revolution: the reconstitution of self and society together. Society was a vital terrain separate from that of the state, they believed, a distinctive arena of beneficent social interaction independent from governmental institutions. As Thomas Paine had put it, society was produced by wants, and government by wickedness. Society promoted happiness; the state restrained vice. If the ratification debates over the Constitution were bad-tempered and factionalized, confirming to the dismay of many the viciousness of issues of state, the sentimental project was their social foil. At its most utopian, this project was highly inclusive, embracing not just the farmers and the master craftsmen who had gained some new measure of political power but also respectable white women and even newly freed blacks. At its most perfectibilist, the society imagined was reckoned on the straight road to heaven. This gung ho utopianism decidedly failed, and sensibility became the object of censure as much as optimism. But the attempt bequeathed to the nineteenth century the moral authority of those who claimed to feel right and the stirring impulse of social utopianism and experiment. Antebellum America would be littered with moral reform movements in the name of the sentiments, quirky campaigns to remake people via diet and exercise, and small but unerringly earnest utopist communities. The pursuit of self-improvement and social harmony continued unabated.²

That late-eighteenth-century revolutionaries were concerned with social regeneration is a story more frequently told by French historians. Regeneration was a program, in the words of one historian, which aimed for nothing less than the creation of a ‘new people.’ French revolutionaries believed that sensibility tied the individual to the public good, distancing him from the corruption and artifice of the old regime. But social renovation and self-transformation were branded with America’s name before the attempt to make l’homme régénéré. Nowhere, except perhaps in that later French Revolution, were the reformist tools of sensibility more visibly used, first ad hoc and then assiduously; nowhere was sensibility as overtly bound up with distinct and politically immediate ends; nowhere were new selves and a new society so urgently re-imagined together; nowhere was sensibility endowed with such dizzying optimism as in the American Revolution. The history of the American Revolution is in part a history of sensibility.³

I

What, exactly, was sensibility? Its genealogy lay in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. In 1735, lexicographer Benjamin Defoe characterized sensibility as the Quality of being sensible; in his next entry, he defined sensible as that which falls within the compass of the Senses, that may be perceiv’d or felt; also that feels, apt to perceive, apprehensive; also that is of good Sense or Judgment. Twenty years later, Samuel Johnson, who was especially concerned with policing the good and bad of the English tongue, offered two pithier definitions: quickness of sensation and quickness of perception. Only in low conversation, Johnson admonished his readers, did sensible mean reasonable or wise. In 1765, Francis Allen simplified sensibility to quickness of sensation and perception. Eighteenth-century dictionary writers identified a spectrum of proper meaning, from the simple sensations of feeling to the sensory perception from which thought itself derived.⁴

Attentive to such contemporary formulations, this book treats sensibility as a distinctive mode of self. What made sensibility particular was how it eschewed traditional dichotomies of reason and feeling, mind and body by means of sensation and perception. Sensibility was based, not in strict oppositions of head and heart, reason and passion, but rather in a naturally sensitive, briskly responsive, and thoroughly holistic self. Cognition and emotion were understood as necessarily entwined and bound together, reason being conscious, embodied, and deliberative, rather than an abstracted understanding of the correct order of the universe.⁵ The self’s sensitivity—the quickness Johnson and Allen identified and, crucially, its very foundation—was to the surrounding world, its external environment. The sensible self was simultaneously made and expressed in social interaction by sensations of sympathy and fellow feeling, what I term a socially turned self. (Johnson, for one, defined sympathy as mutual sensibility.) By this peculiarly eighteenth-century set of understandings, together perception and sympathy connected the different parts of body and mind and the sensible self to society.

There was, it is worth noting, nothing neutral about this approach to man and his environment. Sensibility was at once normative and prescriptive. It could mean the physiological and psychological quality of sensitivity of which all humanity was made, or it could mean the moral refinement of those in the know. It could refer to a universal basis of human nature or to the effect of deliberate pursuit and cultivation. Malleable, perceptual, made in and of the social world, and open to refinement, these were the hallmarks of the sensible selfhood on which American revolutionaries would so actively draw.⁶

The historical origins of this mode of self lay in the slow early modern European shift away from lineage societies and, in England, in the seventeenth-century political and social chaos of the Civil War and its messy aftermath. From the sixteenth century, the ties of extended family and loyalties that centered on the aristocratic great household shriveled. Rejections of inherited birthright and obedience without question challenged lineage societies characterized by lordship, faithfulness, service, and a code of honor and took their most radical form in the English Revolution of the 1640s. Patriarchal religion and politics—submitting the selfe to all … governours, teachers, spirituall pastours and maisters, obeying the king and his ministers, ordering the selfe lowly and reverenteleye to all … betters, as one catechism had it—was profoundly, concertedly, definitively shaken.⁷ The turbulence of the English Civil War and Revolution and the proclaimed living example of arbitrary government in France generated sharp questions about what kind of society naturally supported liberty and constitutional government, what bonds could hold society together in the absence of inherited obligation, and what was the nature of selves given the new authority of the individual in relation to kings and noblemen. Memory of the seventeenth-century wars of religion provided further incentive for locating man’s identity and solidarity aside from the terrible dividers of doctrine and denomination. These dilemmas underpinned eighteenth-century developments in philosophy, physiology, and imaginative literature, among many arenas, that deeply invested in man’s innate and universal sociability and gave sensibility its intellectual—if not its cultural and social—genealogy.

All philosophers of sensibility drew on John Locke’s sensationist epistemology. Human beings were pliable and shaped by external forces, Locke argued in his 1692 Essay concerning Human Understanding; there were no innate ideas. Material philosopher Claude-Adrien Helvétius forced the point, announcing that all the operations of the mind might be reduced to physical sensibility, the only quality essential to the nature of man. Baron d’Holbach followed suit, opining that mind is a product of … physical sensibility, from it flowing "all the faculties we call intellectual. Philosophers used Lockean ideas to mount a debate about the precise nature of personal identity. Locke’s fuller assertion was that Self is that conscious thinking thing … which is sensible, or conscious of Pleasure and Pain, capable of Happiness and Misery, personal identity being the same as far as … consciousness can be extended backwards to any past Action or Thought. Scottish philosopher David Hume summed up the implication in a brisk polemical formulation: We are nothing but a bundle or collection of different perceptions. Such thinking could be decidedly unwelcome; as minister Isaac Watts put it in imperative tone, identity must not stand upon such a shifting and changeable Principle." But Locke’s dazzling effect was to place the individual’s sensibility to what he or she perceives unmistakably at the heart of formal attempts to define the self.⁸

Especially in Scotland, sensibility was part of new thinking about human psychology and solidarity, a philosophical attempt to discover a system of morals and society by enquiring into the human constitution. That effort turned away from the supremacy of reason toward instincts and sensations as determinants of action and away from the state—the 1707 Act of Union with England had displaced Scottish intellectuals from the seat of political power—to society as an arena of agency. Francis Hutcheson identified a moral sense that acted intuitively and knew good from evil. Men like Hume and Adam Smith elaborated moral philosophy. Sensibility was a basis of morals and a mainspring of action; as Smith put it in his Theory of Moral Sentiments in 1759, it was required for the amiable virtue of humanity. Sympathy was a closely allied term. For Hume in 1739, sympathy was the propensity … to receive by communication [others’] inclinations and sentiments however different or even contrary to our own; for Lord Kames in 1751, it was the great cement of human society. Sympathy made man a social creature. We can form no wish, Hume wrote, which is not a reference to society. Determinedly turning away from the pessimistic thinking of Thomas Hobbes, these philosophers tended to a pragmatic and historically inflected optimism. Absent coercive force, they believed, humans had a natural affinity for each other. The progress of history involved the cultivation of sensibility: uncivilized peoples, or ordinary laborers in the present day, were not fully sensible. Across the Channel, Denis Diderot’s Encyclopédie effused, "Sensibility makes the man of virtue … [and is] the mother of humanity, of generosity; it serves merit, succors the mind, and brings persuasion in its train." The fundamental sociability of man, the natural and active virtues of sensibility and their persuasive charms, these were useful understandings in the face of the dismantling of old hierarchies of deference and order and traditional bonds of obligation. If never fully systematized or precisely defined in relation to the state, society appeared to promise a new world of legitimate government and harmonious cohesion.⁹

These philosophical ideas had a physical parallel in the separate arena of physiology. Sharing a markedly similar vocabulary to moral philosophers, physiologists identified sensibility at its most bodily. Sensibility was—following the popular English doctor George Cheyne in 1733—a quality of the Fibres of the Membranes, Tendons and Nerves communicating Motion or Impression, an Easiness of [the Fibers] being acted upon by external Objects. It was a mark of the existence of nerves in any part of the body—thus Scottish physician Robert Whytt—a feeling with which the organs of the body are more or less endued. The Encyclopédie cast sensibility as the sentient principle, or the feeling of all the parts, the basis and preserver of life, and, Henri Fouquet continued more loftily: the most beautiful and the most singular phenomenon of nature. Théophile de Bordeu explained that sensibility constitutes the life of the nerves, a "species or particular degree of sentiment" being enjoyed by every organical part of the living body [that] hath nerves. In the resulting nervous medicine, the physical body was brought alive and interconnected with sensibility.¹⁰

The key physiological terms were impressions, nerves, and animation. Whereas the circulation of the blood was used as a paradigm for mechanical physiology in the seventeenth century, for parts of the medical community of the eighteenth century the animation of the nervous system—its life force and its sensitivity to impressions from outside the body—was the paradigm for a newly reactive and interactive physiology. Cheyne captured the sense of the sensitivity of the nerves to their environment as an easy reactivity. Edinburgh physicians evolved a model of the body in which sensibility predominated, and sympathy was a special case of sensibility, the nervous connection between different bodily organs that integrated the body’s overall functioning, just as, for the philosophers, sympathy was the means of social integration. Medical men were captivated by the idea of the body as an active and reactive organism, arguing over the best model to replace the older hydraulic view of a body-machine and nonmaterial soul. The stakes were high, for, as the nervous system and its sensibility were understood as a bridge possessing attributes both of body and mind, this physiology tended to monism, to the denial of the traditional duality of body and mind. There were not just physical but psychological implications, potentially blurring the traditional gap between physiology and philosophy.¹¹

Novelists provided the most imaginative and popular accounts of sensibility. It is a measure of the extraordinary reach of Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa that one European physiologist, Albrecht von Haller, discussed it with his Göttingen students over the anatomical table. (Indeed, he was such a fan that he arranged a German translation.) Spearheaded by writers like Richardson and Laurence Sterne in England and Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France, novelists created a bold new realism about selves and social relations, a literary movement competing with other kinds of fiction such as secret histories and scandalous memoirs in offering a convincing, delicious, and personally transforming account of the contemporary world. Two thematic preoccupations stood out: romantic sensibility and love, typically tested by and in contrast to old-fashioned dynastic imperatives, and misfortune, which peopled the novel with sympathetically portrayed victims of ruin, the enslaved, beggars, and the sufferers of a hundred and one social maladies. Novelistic themes and stylistic strategies alike prompted readers’ sentiments—thoughts and opinions rooted in perceptual sensibility—Haller, for one, believing that the most obdurate and insensible tempers were softened by Clarissa’s tale.¹²

Rather than plot, these novels dwelled especially on character types, social encounters, and their congenial assessment, bringing to life the psychological lessons of sensibility along the way. Writing to her friend Anna Howe about Lovelace, for example, Richardson’s Clarissa observed: "I would reject the man with contempt who sought to suppress, or offered to deny, the power of being affected upon proper occasions as either a savage-hearted creature, or as one who was so ignorant of the principal glory of the human nature as to place his pride in barbarous insensibility. Or, in a more satirical vein, Tobias Smollett’s Jery Melford described country squire Matthew Bramble as extravagantly delicate in all his sensations, both of soul and body. I think, Melford surmised, his peevishness arises partly from bodily pain, and partly from a natural excess of mental sensibility; for I suppose, the mind as well as the body, is in some cases endued with a morbid excess of sensation. The pedagogy of the sentimental novel was characteristically saturated in a metaphysical and bodily language of sensation: the dense and knowing diagnosis meted out by Melford of his grumpy companion, Clarissa’s soft-spoken concern for the power of being affected. It dwelled complacently upon the contrast between barbaric savagery and fully sensible humanity, or the subtler gap between being ignorant and admiring of sensibility’s glory," inviting lines of complicity with sentimentally refining readers. This pedagogy was concerned to claim certain social affections from the slur of unreason, in the name of propriety and moral virtue—Clarissa’s sense of the correct occasion for affect—and observing them tested and under duress.¹³

Befitting the preoccupation with selves and social relations, the tone of such novels was invariably intimate, a mood effected by epistolary exchange between friends or the close reporting of conversation. The innovative and often liberal use of the exclamation point indicated sudden and animated reaction, that celebrated quickness: Dear Sensibility! went the sentimental novel’s tongue-in-cheek one-liner provided by Laurence Sterne, source inexhausted of all that’s precious in our joys and costly in our sorrows. The subtitle to William Guthrie’s Friends provided the genre’s late-emerging nomenclature—A Sentimental History—and its labored second subtitle gave novelists’ main argument for the beneficent effect of the social affections: Describing Love as a Virtue, as Well as a Passion. Playfully, earnestly, often via a clever pairing of the two, novelists brought the socially turned self to intimate, imaginative life and implied the remaking of their readers along the way.¹⁴

If long-term challenges to traditional forms of authority and cohesion set the main stage for the genealogy of sensibility, there was also an immediate material context: the expansion of commerce and capital. Economic developments set in motion a century or two earlier accelerated and matured in the early eighteenth century as never before, giving birth to consumer society in the short space of a few generations.¹⁵ That heady material change left its trace alike in physiologists’ concerns for the nervous effects of luxuries, in novelists’ commodification of virtue, and in a nascent discipline of political economy, neatly wedded to moral philosophy, that described liberal economic actors, identifying their interests in cooperation with others. Luxury and Laziness, fretted doctor George Cheyne, spoil’d and perverted the nerves, producing a host of new diseases. Sterne’s Sentimental Journey was shunted along by scenes of commercial exchange as well as by sentimental exclamation: the transfer of money or sentimentalized objects, such as snuffboxes, between Yorick and those he encountered. Sentimental novels were stuffed full of stuff, chock-full of cash and other forms of capital. Borrowing, almsgiving, and virtuous acts of charity that returned sensibility’s investment with warm thanks were the very substance of the genre. The social relations of the novel were sympathetic economic relations, too. Meanwhile, the sympathy enshrined in Adam Smith’s theory of moral sentiments was made to fit with the self-interest promoted in his economic analysis. Individuals will not exceed what is beneficial to others, as well as to themselves, the logic ran, for such excess will ultimately hurt them and cut them off from social cooperation. An unfettered economic individual who might tend to selfishness was in fact enmeshed in social restraint and collaboration; the self’s impulses were socially productive.¹⁶

With the benefit of hindsight, sensibility appears as double-hinged, somewhere between the medium and the reaction to this rapid and large-scale economic change. Commerce demanded the oiling of new social relations aside from hierarchies of birth. As a refined but accessible mode of self, sensibility—like polite manners—provided the lubricant, helping to effect useful moeurs for a commercial age, supple if unctuous instruments among the commercial classes for building trust, facilitating exchange, and getting past snobby forms of social exclusiveness. Sensibility was also groping reaction to the anonymity of the market and to the depersonalizing and cruel effects of finance capital. The expansion of market relations triggered efforts to overcome social distance, and depersonalization and the spectacle of inequality made for anxious sentimental criticism. Certainly British contemporaries liked to believe that one of the positive effects of so much economic change was a heightened sensitivity to social and moral problems, an expansion of the operation of sympathy on an ever larger mercantile and imperial stage.¹⁷

The North American colonial world made a mark upon the genealogy of sensibility. Although Samuel Richardson was fond of threatening to banish his heroines to the plantations, no novels were written there. But the British colonies were a testing ground for understandings of how post–divine right, post–Civil War society might cohere, for the potential of bonds of sympathy and for questions about the universality of human nature. Richardson’s brief threats aside, the sentimental novel took enslaved and colonized populations, alongside the seduced and the poor, among its suffering subjects; the captivity narrative that shaped the novel form was a product of British settlement in North America as much as of British expansion in the Mediterranean and Asia. Scottish philosophers of society thought like armchair anthropologists, looking to the New World for concrete examples and a place to think about historical change, human diversity, and truths about man’s nature. The high-minded missionaries of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, meanwhile, focused their sentimental gaze on the American natives themselves, evidence of that contemporary confidence that theirs was a more sympathetic world. Before the imperial crisis, and inseparable from its place within the British Empire, colonial North America was embedded in sensibility’s early-eighteenth-century genealogy. Only in the second half of the century, around and with that crisis, however, did sensibility take on a central place in American history.¹⁸

II

The agenda of this book is in the second half of the eighteenth century and the social impulses of the American Revolution. Why did certain Americans reach for sensibility to reform individuals and society? What were the preconditions to the sentimental project articulated at the same time as discussions of the Constitution: the expectations about how society operates, the appeal and everyday workings of sensible selfhood, the experience of this way of inhabiting the world? What made the fond expectation of social revolution seem remotely feasible?

Sensibility in the American Revolution only makes sense if approached through a thick history of this mode of self and way of apprehending the world. To tell the intimate and peopled history that understanding self, sensibility, and revolution requires, then, this account focuses on Philadelphia, Quaker city turned imperial entrepôt turned capital of the new nation. Late colonial Philadelphia was a key site for the efflorescence of sensibility because it was the most cosmopolitan city in North America, with a flourishing print culture, a major port in transatlantic trade with burgeoning commercial classes, and a Quaker civic ethos involving a long-standing commitment to religious tolerance and social harmony. In the third quarter of the eighteenth century, the city experienced, through imperial wars and economic dislocation, growing economic inequality, social friction, and political divisiveness that challenged the ideals of cohesion under which it was founded. Subsequently, Philadelphia was a political center of the Revolution and the new nation: site of the continental, confederate, and federal governments and of the convention that drafted the federal Constitution. As the most cosmopolitan city of the colonies and then the new republic, Philadelphia had perhaps singular cultural influence, a hotbed of currents that converged there from the Atlantic world and unusually important to the history of American sensibility.

In this Philadelphia story—a close social, cultural, and political history together—the Revolution emanates partly from sentimental concerns. Investment in sensibility was not simply an aftereffect, a latter-day means of transcending the mopping up and smoothing over of unpleasant political disagreements with an effort of total social regeneration. The optimistic patriot investment certainly peaked in the later 1780s. The emphasis on sensibility as an especially social revolutionary project was made most forcibly in that decade, in and around the years that Americans were framing and debating the Constitution. But sensibility was also part of the cultural connections of cosmopolitan empire and the contests of imperial crisis. Neither a hegemonic phenomenon that explains all of revolution, nor a full-fledged and somewhat overlooked political ideology with a canon of treatises and manifestos, as a mode of self that was shared and comprehensible sensibility was at once an engine of social change and a resource for revolutionaries hoping to create new subjects for a new republic.

A series of themes shapes this account. The first is the important and durable relevance of Atlantic influences, intended and unintended. Transatlantic immigrants to North America played lead roles in sensibility’s story across the revolutionary period: men such as the Scottish immigrant turned political radical Robert Bell, for example, who determinedly sold sentimental reading and Thomas Paine’s radical populist Common Sense, or the radical English immigrant turned conservative populist William Cobbett, exiled from Britain, who in the 1790s came to mock sensibility and address politics purely to men of reason. The transatlantic circulation of sensibility allowed colonists to see themselves as part of British culture, and also apart from it, working to ends both of coalescence and of differentiation. From the 1760s, the popularization of sensibility through transatlantic print culture, modes of reading, medical treatises, and vibrant social practices, especially propelled by migratory bookmen and physicians, made sensibility a familiar and fundamental mode of apprehending self in social relations and of envisioning new ones. Despite the best wishes of those American revolutionaries seeking to make an overtly new and distinctive society that transcended history and the Old World, developments remained at the utter behest of broader Atlantic connections and change. Events in the wider world, most notably the French Revolution unfolding from 1789, impinged without cease. The story of sensibility in America was marked by the Atlantic ripple effect of French Caribbean revolt and the social and cultural effects of the yellow fever carried on ships of transatlantic commerce as well as by the exceptionalist-minded effort to found a sensible and independent nation.

The point can perhaps be best described as cis-Atlantic. Like the other seaboard cities, eighteenth-century Philadelphia was always situated in relation to a wider Atlantic world.¹⁹ The sentimental project articulated in the later 1780s emerged from local particularity, revolutionary imperatives, and a wider web of Atlantic crossings, connections, and events. Read in isolation, the story of sensibility in the American Revolution can be made to tell a nationalist tale of an independent country born in right sentiment. Apprehended in an Atlantic frame, however, and especially with histories radiating from provincial Scotland, from radical and reactionary London, and from centers of the French empire, sensibility in the American Revolution is a story of transnational contingency and struggle, not nationalist teleology. If always locally inflected, sensibility was no particular respecter of national boundaries, especially when denizens shared a language. It was at once an element of the cultural integration of the white Atlantic world—along with close commercial links, international banking, the profits of the slave trade, institutions of scientific and literary Enlightenment, and the decline of religious conflict—and a means of internal differentiation and colonial independence.

A second theme is class. The sentimental project was the vision of members of the middling and the accommodating patriotic elite. Sensibility was the cutting edge of a rising middling sort that emerged from transatlantic forces of commerce, cosmopolitanism, and shifting modes of authority, and in the crucible of whiteness. The urban middling were those below the elite who did not work with their hands—shopkeepers, schoolmistresses, small-scale importers, lawyers with small practices, for example—as well as artisans in the higher trades, the respectable if modest guardians of apprentices and journeymen. Sensibility was an active means of constituting this middling class, furnishing both its male and female members with aspirational and assimilationist impulses toward elements of the elite as well as faith in their own moral superiority over the savage or the insensible.

In the imperial crisis, the urban middling asserted itself both politically and culturally for the first time. The alliances of the middling sort shifted from the lower sort to the elite over the course of the Revolutionary War, signaling a bifurcated process of identity and allegiance. For the middling class necessarily faced both ways. Its members historically both dominate and are subordinated; they are exploited and exploiting. To assert themselves, they forge complex alliances to elites and, less often and less easily, to those below them. Even as middling men asserted themselves with the lower sort in the popular movement of resistance, they forged a common middling sentimental identity with the elite. The Revolution saw the fullest expression of that cultural identification in the Constitutional moment and with the optimistic articulation of a sentimental project. Yet this middling and elite cultural coalition did not hold. When members of the middling next formed a cross-class political alliance, with the lower sort in the Democratic Republican societies of the mid-1790s, they left the reformation of society aside in favor of an almost exclusive focus on white male political participation. The social had gained a distinctly conservative hue. Across the revolutionary period, the fate of sensibility was inseparable from class dynamics centered on a middling sort’s seeking affiliation both above and below.

Sensibility operated beyond the realm of soft power, and a third theme concerns the military and the state. From the moment in 1775 when George Washington took command of local troops in the name of the Continental Congress and thirteen mainland British colonies, a motley collection of colonial regiments had to be turned into the Continental army, the embodiment of patriotic union. The leading officers of that army drew on shared sensibility to effect military cohesion as rebellion turned into revolution. In articulations out-of-doors and in the pages of the press, the Continentals imagined themselves as a community of sensibility and sympathy and served as a prototype for the patriot cause and nation formation. Patriots struggled with the inhumanity of wartime violence and saw themselves defending female virtue in distress. Come war’s end in 1783, old soldiers moved into civilian politics and perpetuated the comradely values that distinguished them.

Equally important, society and state preserved no tidy separation. It is hardly surprising that patriots turned to society to make and to secure revolution: early modern states had highly limited powers, and revolutionaries shared an antistatism born of their experience within the British Empire. But they also turned to sensibility to understand state formation. Constitutionalism—with its premise of the replacement of an organic body politic and the ability to construct a new government better suited to man’s nature—required it. The ratification process that constitutionalism involved drew not only on classical precepts, the states’ experience of sovereignty, and the political ideologies we know so well but also on contested ideas about the universal workings of self, knitting sensibility into the very formation of the American federal state.

The Revolution rejected the monarchical oppression of colonial subjects and aimed to empower the sensible self and to reconstitute American society. The happiness, virtue, and stability of the republic were understood to depend upon these processes. But this inclusive and optimistic, even utopian, sentimental vision was also rent with ambiguity and tension. The careful synthesis of reason and feeling on which sensibility depended was fragile. The operation of sympathy was unpredictable, its objects and fault lines ambiguous and contested. The full social inclusion of women and blacks was fraught, their sensibility easily deemed inadequate or irrational. The integration of feeling and reason, and the entwining of society and republican political ambitions, unraveled in the 1790s. Under the weight of French revolutionary developments—the killing of a king, the Terror—a transatlantic war of words made a casualty of sensibility’s value, its very meaning. The discussion of French revolutionary principles was fierce, sensibilité révolutionnaire condemned for its excesses. If nowhere, except in France, was sensibility such an object of sustained inquiry and advocacy as in the young United States, nowhere, except in Britain, did it become so explicitly an object of criticism and scorn, testimony together to its solidity as a cultural force, its unmistakable politicization across the Atlantic world, and its inadequacies as a basis of individual and social reform. The sense of betrayal at once highlights the central premise of this book, that sensibility was a constituent element of revolution, and the falling short of the American goal of a sympathetic society to secure life, liberty, and happiness’s pursuit.

The men and women who formulated the sentimental project in and around the Constitutional moment expressed a commitment to sensibility at its most deliberative and thoughtful, its most determined and purposive. They were concerned with individual self-formation, the active creation of social bonds, instrumental action, and institution building. For their concerted discussion to occur required a series of preconditions or processes. First, it depended upon an energetic pair of transatlantic conduits: bookmen and physicians. The robust dynamism of provincial print and medical culture, and the consequent implication of sentimental and nervous commitments in imperial crisis, is the concern of Part I.

Second, the sentimental project built on a set of practices of self among members of the long revolutionary generation, such as sympathetic friendship, that made sensibility locally familiar and recognizable and revolutionizing American society seem possible. These practices of self were the underlying assumptions and habits that enabled and shaped the explicit articulations of public discussion, the very stuff of ordinary existence that could not be dug beneath. Third, the project depended upon how the independence movement took voice from sensibility and made this way of approaching the world politically matter. A valence of patriotism was the prerequisite to sensibility’s postwar utility in making a new society. Part II concerns this pair of American developments and the resulting sentimental project of the Constitutional moment. Part III treats the backlash, both virulent and superficial, American and transatlantic, that followed in the century’s final decade as the national republican experiment unfolded.

This book seeks, then, to explain something quite precise: why particular people appealed to sensibility at a particular time and for a particular set of purposes, why sensibility came intensely to seem both self-evident and important at the Constitutional moment. The most visible of these purposes was postwar regeneration of a very middling kind, a purpose best understood as social revolution. Why and how this came about entails alternative intentions, contrasting social practices, ad hoc political uses, and conditions that did not prevail. It is cut about by class conflict and individual experience. In this account, sensibility emerges, not as a rather ephemeral, amorphous, and fictional language—the way much historical analysis has often seen it—but as a way of understanding and being in the world that held value at a certain historical moment for very specific reasons. The American Revolution emerges as in part an attempt at social revolution, and sensibility as among its constituent practices. It thus appears both more like the French Revolution and more distinct. French revolutionaries attempted to use the state to remake society. American revolutionaries sought, with greater suspicion of the state, to use society to remake itself.

One postrevolutionary French observer, Alexis de Tocqueville, has left a long shadow on interpretations of the American founding: the narrative of rising individualism. This ideology has long been the commonsensical means of comprehending selfhood, indeed of comprehending American culture more generally, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to the present day. By this way of thinking, the possession of an individual, autonomous self spread ahead of, and rather alike, possession of the political franchise. That is, it was desirable. It was empowering. In the words of one intellectual historian charting the making of the American self, as a promise of human empowerment, this highly individualized self-construction … once available only to the elite extended to African Americans and to women as Enlightenment shifted into Romanticism. Full-fledged individualism is the foundational cultural doctrine of the United States, the fond platitude of contemporary commentary.²⁰

The independent and determinedly autonomous character also stalks historical accounts of republicanism and liberalism in the ideological origins of the American Revolution and the creation of the American republic. These political creeds conjured two rather distinctive types: the republican subject, controlling passion with reason and earning political agency for the common good, and the liberal subject, yearning, in full pursuit of personal happiness, rational self-interest, and private gain. Whether self-abnegating in republican mode or self-centered in liberal fashion, both types prized autonomy. They were surely well suited to be actors in an anticolonial war and the making of an independent nation. The drive to full sovereignty, and the pursuit of reason, would seem to be the sine qua non of American revolutionaries.²¹

One of the main questions asked here is what can be known about self and revolution on refraining from frameworks such as the rise of individualism or pure ideologies of republicanism or liberalism. Multiple modes of self can operate simultaneously within a culture, especially in periods of revolutionary upheaval or transformation. And sensibility celebrated—made for—neither complete personal independence nor high individuality. (It was not individualism in florid, emotive disguise. Nor was it merely fledgling romanticism.) The impulse of sensibility was to being a legible if superior type, a generic member of a middling and elite—and American—community. The sharing of sympathy drew on what people had in common; it emphasized the social interdependency and mutual malleability of individuals, even as it distinguished the superiority of those who refined themselves and rendered the rest their condescended objects. American social union had to entail, it was believed, new bonds of interdependence. For good and ill, sensible selfhood—socially constituted, socially turned—shaped the American founding.

The decisive extent of archrationalist and autonomous creeds might have been twice overdrawn. Sensibility pervaded much of middling and elite American life at revolution. It was commonsensical, appealing, familiar, patriotic, and a mainstay of political argument. But, second, sensibility was often a contrarian pose: it responded to, even needed, a cold, hostile, indifferent world. This is what sentimental novelists captured so nicely in their tales of virtue in distress. Revolutionaries used the stance to good effect during the War of Independence—posed against the cold, hostile, indifferent British or unperceiving loyalists—even if patriots had in fact long shared sensibility with metropolitan Britons, and their newfound enemies were entirely capable of throwing back the insult. For an intent and formative postwar moment, that pose of opposition melted into a thoroughly middling and elite sentimental utopianism. But the world of cool reason, atomistic independence, and rugged autonomy so dominant in American history was in part the world as imagined by sentimentalists. Albeit from dismayed and self-regarding distance, it was partly their invention.

Notes

1. The best-known examples among political historians are Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, Mass., 2000); Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York,