On Writing the History of Violence

R AC H E L H O P E C L E V E S

We are happily removed far from the scene of confusion and blood. The Reverend Joseph McKeen spoke these words to his Massachusetts congregation at a Fast Day service in April 1793. From the pulpit, and in their parlors, McKeen warned parishioners about the Reign of Terror then engulng democratic France. Mobs and demagogues had overthrown the bulwarks of social order and were committing thousands to the guillotine. McKeen predicted that a generation would die in the horrid scene. The turbulence of bloodshed may have seemed distant to his parishioners, sitting peaceably at home or in the meetinghouse. But McKeen cautioned that factious spirits threatened to involve the United States in the calamities of anarchy and war. He struggled to impress the proximity of violence upon his listeners. Let us not think that we are in no danger, he pleaded.1 We are happily removed far from the scene of confusion and blood. My words cut the blank page. I have in mind another bloody scene, which could have cut my voice, and left silence in its place. Ten years ago,

Rachel Hope Cleves is a doctoral candidate at the University of California, Berkeley. She is working on a dissertation entitled The Problem of Violence in the Early American Republic. She thanks Paula Fass, David Henkin, Alan Taylor, Amanda Littauer, Susan Haskell, Caroline Hinkle, Ellen Berg, Masha Zager, Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Kate Bobrow-Strain and Jonathan Sinnreich for their criticism and encouragement. 1. Joseph McKeen, A Sermon, Preached on the Public Fast in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, April 11, 1793 (Salem, MA, 1793), 1317; William Buell Sprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, or, Commemorative Notices of Distinguished American Clergymen of Various Denominations: From the Early Settlement of the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-Five with Historical Introductions (New York, 1857), 2: 216.
Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Winter 2004) Copyright 2004 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved.

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when I was a student at Simons Rock College in Massachusetts, a classmate used an assault rie to re his way methodically through the campus. In my housing unit the phone rang, the resident advisor warned me and my housemates that someone was shooting a gun. The phone rang again, a friend told us that the shooter was Wayne Losomeone whom I had long feared. Wayne and I had gotten in many classroom arguments, and I personally represented for him the intolerable corruption of our profane and permissive school. I felt my esh calling out to his bullets. I locked the front door and cowered beneath the windows. Wayne wounded a security guard, killed my teacher, killed my friend, wounded three other students, and just barely missed many more, before his gun jammed and the SWAT team came to take him away. It is my memory of violence, of that greedy demon reaching out for me, that has propelled my research into the past and acquainted me with the frightened minister whose words I have appropriated. But it is my historical research into the surprising consequences of the American conservative reaction to the violence of the French Revolution that has led me to write about my personal experience. Political engagement with a subject often provides an entry point for reections on historical meaning; in this essay, I use a series of correspondences between my personal and academic narratives to demonstrate how emotional engagement can be a valuable entry point as well. I will interweave an academic history of writing about violence with a personal history of violence, and draw from each to argue that rhetoric has the power to overreach limited origins and change ethical perceptions. The gothic language that early national conservatives used to condemn French democracy transcended its context and became a powerful ingredient in progressive nineteenthcentury reform movements. When authors and orators warned about the proximity of bloodshed to arouse audiences, they made violence a pressing problem that demanded redress. I have learned from this history that descriptions of violence are not limited by their sensationalism. For ten years I resisted writing about my experience during the shooting, because I feared creating a titillating narrative that would exploit the victims. I have changed my mind, in the hope that using my story to arouse readers to a sense of bloodsheds proximity will persuade this audience to take violence more seriously as a pressing historical problem that demands study.

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Most American citizens embraced the French Revolution during its early phase as a positive reection of their own political progress.2 But as news of the Revolutions disorder and violence began reaching America, a gradual attrition of opinion occurred among conservatives.3 The American conservative turn against the French Revolution began as early as 1790, when John Adams published a series of essays entitled Discourses on Davila in the Federalist newspaper, the Gazette of the United States. Adams worried that the proposed single assembly in France lacked the checks necessary to restrain mens depraved ambitions, and thus would
2. Many authors have described how Americans initially welcomed the French Revolution as an extension of their own ideals; Charles Downer Hazen, Contemporary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD, 1897); Bernard Fay, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America; a Study of Moral and Intellectual Relations between France and the United States at the End of the Eighteenth Century (New York, 1927); Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 17501848 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1927); Esther Ernestine Brown, The French Revolution and the American Man of Letters (Columbia, MO, 1951); Beatrice F. Hyslop, American Press Reports of the French Revolution, 17891794, The NewYork Historical Society Quarterly, XLII (Oct. 1958); Judah Adelson, The Vermont Press and the French Revolution, 17891799 (Ph.D. diss., New York University, 1961); Ann B. Lever, Vox Populi, Vox Dei: New England and the French Revolution, 17871801 (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1971); Patrice L. R. Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Republicanism (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: French Lightning, American Light (New York, 1999). 3. This argument revises the present historiographical consensus that violence had only secondary inuence on the American reaction to the French Revolution. In a frequently cited 1965 article, Gary Nash argues that the New England ministry only rejected the French Revolution in 1795after its most violent stage had drawn to a closewhen the threat of deism and disorder had increased in America; see Gary Nash, The American Clergy and the French Revolution, The William and Mary Quarterly, 22 (July 1965), 392412. Other historians who have underestimated the importance of violence in forming the American reaction against the French Revolution include Brown, French Revolution; David Brion Davis, Revolutions: Reections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations (Cambridge, MA, 1990); Hyslop, American Press Reports; Henry Farnham May, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), 224; Jonathan D. Sassi, A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary New England Clergy (Oxford, 2001), ch. 2. Ruth Bloch argues that the French Revolution only acquired a reputation for violence at the end of the 1790s; Ruth H. Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 17561800 (New York, 1985), 207.

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provoke factionalism, which might culminate in an episode of violence akin to the infamous St. Bartholomews Day Massacre.4 New England Federalist politicians, and the Calvinist ministers with whom they allied, shared a common fear of depraved humanitys potential for violence. They believed that human rights were not innate, but social; the peoples freedoms had to be created and secured by a strong social order that could control human brutality.5 Prior to the American Revolution, fears about human depravity were contained by the hierarchical politics and society of the colonies, which concentrated power in the hands of an elite. During the war for independence, violence served as a political tool, a necessary means to expel the British. After the Revolution, when the germ of democracy challenged traditional patterns of deference, and the ideal of citizen virtue as a bulwark of social order lost its wartime sheen, violence became a more urgent concern.6 The new republic seemed especially susceptible to violent political disorder in light of the lessons of classical history and contemporary experience. In classical texts, early American political theorists read about the brief lifespan of the ancient republics. Representative governments had foundered when citizens substituted their private interests for
4. John Adams, Discourses on Davila. A Series of Papers, on Political History. Written in the Year 1790, and Then Published in the Gazette of the United States (Boston, MA, 1805). John Quincy Adams and Gouverner Morris, who lived in France from 1789 to 1793, also sounded early warnings about the incipient chaos of the Revolution. 5. For arguments about the social construction of mans rights, see Nathaniel Chipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, VT, 1793); James Kent, Dissertations: Being the Preliminary Part of a Course of Law Lectures (New York, 1795); Noah Webster, An Oration Pronounced before the Citizens of New Haven on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July, 1802 (New Haven, CT, 1802). Two perceptive historical inquiries into Federalist ideology are Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent; Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Ithaca, NY, 1970); James M. Banner, To the Hartford Convention: The Federalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 17891815 (New York, 1970), especially chapter 1. 6. The decline of deference is treated authoritatively in Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1993); Joyce Oldham Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984); James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, CT, 1993); Stanley M. Elkins and Eric L. McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993).

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the public good, splitting nations into contending factions, inviting the rise of demagogues, and leading to eventual civil war. Civil wars were far more dangerous than other wars because they disunited the people, causing extremes of violence, and leading to eventual anarchy.7 Current events supported the lessons of ancient Greece and Rome, when in 1786 Daniel Shays led a tax revolt among western Massachusetts farmers. To conservatives, Shays and his followers appeared to be placing private nancial interests above the needs of the common weal. Their selshness threatened to doom the nation to re, sword and blood.8 The rebellion culminated in a large-scale attack on a federal arsenal and the death of four men in Shayss army.9 The French Revolution raised the tone of conservative concerns about the republics vulnerability to violence, from studied warnings to shrill cries. Conservatives feared that by dismantling the social order, the Jacobins were casting the French people into an uncivilizing process and returning them to savagery and unrestrained butchery. Democracy, by teaching men disobedience and by overturning traditional structures of hierarchy, threatened to initiate a reign of anarchy. These fears were reinforced by the French revolutionary assault on Christianity. Only Christianity, Calvinists and Federalists believed, could redeem man from his depraved nature, and thereby soften his violent passions. Along with political disorder, the rise of indelity persuaded American conservatives that the world was hurtling toward the millennium, when all humanity would be swept into a vortex of bloodshed.10 These fears placed conservatives at odds with American democrats, led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who shared the progressive Enlightenment faith in mans innate capacity to govern himself. They viewed human rights as natural, requiring the protection of government

7. Revolutionary era concerns about classical examples of fragile republics are treated in the standard dening texts on republicanism; Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 17761787 (New York, 1993); Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1992); John R. Howe, Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s, American Quarterly, XIX (Summer 1967), 14765. 8. David Humphreys, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem, 17861787, ed. Luther G. Riggs (Gainesville, FL, 1967). 9. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 40913. 10. Bloch, Visionary Republic.

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but only at a minimal level. Many American democrats were saddened by the reports of French political disorder and violence, but they believed the bloodshed was a regrettable aberrationthe French peoples understandable reaction to centuries of political and ecclesiastical tyranny, as well as to counterrevolutionary subversion. The violence did not reect badly on democracy itself. In the spring of 1793, when news that France had declared itself a republic reached the United States along with initial reports of the bloodshed that would become known as the Reign of Terror, American democrats did not hesitate from gathering to celebrate French events. The Boston parade to commemorate Frances victory at the Battle of Valmy rivaled any American civic feast since the Grand Federal Procession to celebrate the ratication of the Constitution.11 The seeming democratic indifference to French bloodshed planted terried visions in the fertile minds of American conservatives. France is madder than Bedlam, wrote the Massachusetts Federalist Fisher Ames to a political colleague, in October 1792. The civic feasts and democratic ebullience of 1793 convinced Ames and his compatriots that America was following course.12 Democratic societies, seemingly modeled on Jacobin clubs, had sprung up across the United States and issued statements criticizing the government.13 A democratic opposition party
11. See descriptions of the feasts to celebrate French republicanism in John Bach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York, 1883), vol. 2; Simon Peter Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, PA, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and the Rites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA, 1997). 12. Fisher Ames to Thomas Dwight, Oct. 4, 1792, in Fisher Ames, Works of Fisher Ames: With a Selection from His Speeches and Correspondence, ed. John Thornton Kirkland and Seth Ames (Boston, MA, 1854), 121. See Amess letters dated January and February 1793 for his fears of the existence, in America, of a spirit of faction, which must soon come to a crisis; Ames, Works of Fisher Ames, 128. 13. See, for example, James Nicholson, An Address of the Democratic Society, of the City of New-York, to the Republican Citizens of the United States (Newport, RI, 1794). Histories of the societies include Philip Sheldon Foner, The Democratic-Republican Societies, 17901800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitutions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, CT, 1976); Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 17901800 (New York, 1942); Albrecht Koschnik, The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the

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had emerged in the government at the national and state levels. The democratic press slurred leaders of the Federalist Partyeven the venerable Washingtonand attacked clergymen who preached politics.14 ted Gallic democracy, using American democrats paraded, toasted, and fe these occasions to criticize the aristocratic elites at home. Mobs gathered in Philadelphia, the nations capital, to protest President Washingtons refusal to join or support Frances war with Britain.15 Angry whiskey distillers in western Pennsylvania, led by members of the local democratic societies, attacked federal agents who attempted to collect the excise.16 Conservatives fulminated that traitorous democrats wished America to follow its sister republic into the vortex of political violence. Certain American democrats contributed to conservative fears by making public statements condoning the Reign of Terror, or even reveling in its bloodshed.17 Some American democrats believed that the terror was a just means to accomplish a glorious end. In 1794, Benjamin Bachedemocratic organizer, editor of the democratic newspaper the Aurora, and an unqualied enthusiast of the French Republicpublished a translation of a speech made by Maximilien Robespierre that defended terror as a tactic of revolution. The Jacobin leader argued in his Report upon the principles of political morality that the spring of a popular

Limits of the American Public Sphere, Circa 17931795, The William and Mary Quarterly, 58 (July 2001), 61536. 14. The Federalist press published plentiful vituperation of its own; see Donald Henderson Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, NY, 1969); Jeffrey L. Pasley, The Tyranny of Printers: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic, Jeffersonian America (Charlottesville, VA, 2001). 15. McMaster, History of the People, vol. 2. 16. Steven R. Boyd, The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives (Westport, CT, 1985); Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists and the Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 17831802 (New York, 1975). 17. See, for example, the boast made at a July 4, 1794, oration that France had immolated a tyrant at the altar of Liberty, and they will not hesitate at making her fumes to smoke with the sacrilegious blood of those wretched miscreants who violate her mandate and wage war against her votaries; James D. Westcott, An Oration, Commemorative of the Declaration of American Independence: Delivered before the Ciceronian Society, on the Fourth of July, M,Dcc,Xciv; and Published at Their Request (Philadelphia, PA, 1794), 13.

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government during a revolution should be virtue combined with terror: virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Robespierre pithily summarized his argument in the maxim: Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inexible.18 Baches evident approbation of Robespierres argument, signied by his desire to publicize and disseminate the speech, helped to persuade conservatives that American democrats had violent intentions. Benjamin Russell, who reported Robespierres speech in his Federalist newspaper the Columbian Centinel, was leery enough of the opposition to publish rumors that American democrats had been overheard saying such things as It is time we had a guillotine erected or I wish to see the National Razor in a state of permanent operation.19 In private letters as well, some American democrats persuaded their conservative correspondents that they approved of French terror tactics. During the summer of 1792, William Short, an American diplomat in the Hague, and Gouverner Morris, the Ambassador to France, began writing letters to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson informing him of the Jacobin efforts to use violence to subvert the constitutional government. We may witness some Outrages of the most agitious kind, Morris wrote Jefferson in June, my Heart bleeds when I reect that the nest Opportunity which ever presented itself for establishing the Rights of Mankind throughout the civilized World is perhaps lost and forever.20 By August and September, Morris and Shorts letters to Jefferson offered details of massacres, of the gruesome murder of Madame de Lamballe, and of the ight of the Marquis de Lafayette (once a close friend to Jefferson).21 Short called the Jacobins monsters; soon Morris stopped even referring to the Jacobins by name, calling them simply

18. Maximilien Robespierre, Report Upon the Principles of Political Morality: Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Interior Concerns of the Republic. Made in the Name of the Committee of Public Safety, the 18th Pluviose, Second Year of the Republic (February 6th, 1794) (Philadelphia, PA, 1794). 19. Columbian Centinel, July and Aug. 1794; Mar. 1795. 20. Gouverner Morris to Thomas Jefferson, June 17, 1792; Thomas Jefferson, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, and Julian P. Boyd (30 vols., Princeton, NJ, 1950), 24: 94. 21. See, for example, William Short to Thomas Jefferson, July 31, Aug. 15, Aug. 24, Sept. 18, 1792; Gouverner Morris to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 16, Sept. 10; ibid.

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the violent party.22 In January 1793, Jefferson red back a salvo at his correspondents, rejecting their criticisms of the Jacobins. The Jacobin party, Jefferson wrote, had saved France from despotism, and their violence was entirely justiable. In fact, a holocaust of the human race would be justiable, if in the cause of freedom: Were there but an Adam and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as it now is.23 To counter the Jacobin threat, early national conservatives began publicly attacking French democracy, focusing in graphic detail on the owing blood, corpse-strewn elds, and maimed bodies of its victims. They launched a rhetorical offensive, a torrent of sermons, orations, pamphlets, newspaper copy, magazine essays, and letters, alerting citizens to the potential for bloodshed in the United States. They referred to domestic democrats as Jacobins, and warned about homegrown Robespierres.24 Historians have typically dismissed this linguistic outpouring as disingenuous cover for an elite effort to preserve power from the assault of popular politics. With slightly more sympathy, some historians have described fears of violence as paranoid ravings based in republican ideol-

22. Gouverner Morris to Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 21, 1792, ibid., 24: 792. 23. Thomas Jefferson to William Short, Jan. 3, 1793, ibid., 25: 14. Jeffersons reply to Gouverner Morris, who was his political enemy, is more brief; it defends the violence committed by the Jacobins as righteous. Jefferson did not share Morriss and other conservatives fear of violent disruption of the social order. To Tench Coxe, a former Federalist then changing allegiance to the DemocraticRepublicans, Jefferson scoffed concerning the danger of violence: Let Rawhead and bloody bones come (May 1, 1794; 28: 67). 24. Regarding American Robespierres, see The Massachusetts Magazine, Dec. 1795; Daniel Davis, An Oration Delivered at Portland, July 4th, 1796. In Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Portland, OR, 1796); Ezra Sampson, The Sham Patriot Unmasked, or an Exposition of the Fatally Succesful Arts of Demagogues (Connecticut, 1802). The best-known incident of conservative hysteria concerning the dangers of American Jacobinism is the Illuminati crisis of 17981800, during which leading orthodox ministers including Timothy Dwight, David Tappan, and Jedidiah Morse terried their congregations with tales of a Masonic conspiracy to overthrow religion and social order in the United States; see Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati, vol. LXXXII, no. 1, Columbia University Studies in History, Economic, and Public Law (New York, 1918); Joseph W. Phillips, Jedidiah Morse and New England Congregationalism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983).

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ogy.25 Either way, since conservative fears were never realized, their gothic language has rarely been treated as historically relevant. But descriptive accuracy or intellectual disinterestedness are not the only reasons to study discourse. The fact that violence did serve as a useful tool to arouse and manipulate audiences is more reason, not less, to take it seriously.

How can we understand the rhetoric opposing the French Revolution if we do not appreciate the conservative conviction in human depravity? The world appears so different when every person is revealed to possess the terrifying potential for violence. According to Karen Halttunen, it is only since the antebellum era that we have differentiated murderers as moral monsters, utterly unlike ordinary people. Before then execution sermons served to remind listeners of their own innate sinfulness, and the inestimable blessing of redemption. Colonial Americans believed that anybody might succumb to their depraved passions and lash out with violence.26 I grew up in the late twentieth century, fearing vampires and Nazis, not the people who walked in daylight, who crossed the street beside me, whose bodies pressed close in the crowded subway during the morning commute, who rode the elevator, waited on line, sat at the adjacent desk, who mirrored me in all the quotidian acts of daily living. Even the sus25. For status-threat explanations of violent rhetoric see Marshall Smelser, The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, The Review of Politics, XIII (Oct. 1951), 45782; Marshall Smelser, The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion, American Quarterly, 10 (1958), 391419; Smelser, The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy, Plutocracy, and Anglophilia, 17891798, The Review of Politics, XXI (1959), 23958. For the republican explanation, see Howe, Republican Thought. The new cultural history of the early republic has been no more sympathetic to fears of violence than earlier interpretations; see Andrew Bursteins argument that the Federalists transformed sensibility into a negative force: now passion was merely exposing the destructive sentiments of terror and panic instead of feeding sympathy and generosity, in Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of Americas Romantic Self-Image (New York, 1999), 182. 26. Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American Gothic Imagination (Cambridge, MA, 1998).

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tained aggression of my older brother, verbal sadism accompanied at times by physical blows, did not disrupt my essentially trusting conception of human nature. Only the shooting at my college awakened me to a counterworld of human possibilities. Wayne Lo did not kill me, but he made me morbid. I became terribly aware of the proximity of violencesensitive to the thrumming of bloody possibility that rippled the orderly surface of everyday life. In my personal geography before the shooting, the world had divided between dangerous places and safe places. Home was safe. A nighttime street in the wrong neighborhood was dangerous. My college campus, so small that everybody knew everybody, was supposed to be safe. But the shooting cracked the thin veneer of security that overlay the familiar. Walking down the sidewalk, I passed a mother bent over a baby carriage. It seemed to me she could rise up cradling a gun and begin to shoot. The mechanism of self-deception we use to protect ourselves had slipped gears in my brain, now the banal raised alarms. Could even I (that most known and familiar object) have hidden potential for violence? In my dreams I mercilessly beat and bloodied enemies. I began a novel about two young women on a road trip to the Pacic Northwest, armed with guns to shoot the leader of a white supremacist movement. By fashioning ordinary girls into killers I wanted to defy the readers expectations that violence existed outside the bounds of normal life. I bought gun magazines with glossy photos of semiautomatics for research. I wrote a scene in which one of the girls threatened to castrate a truck driver who had manhandled her friend. Then I got very drunk one night and repeated the speech word for word, like a wooden dummy, to a friends boyfriend who was chauvinistic and controlling. I felt the seductive power of wrath. I shouted curses and insults at the men who made rude comments to me in the streets, wishing their public humiliation. I drew a gruesome picture of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, and taped her to my computer for inspiration. I wanted to immerse myself in the culture of violence; to roll my garments in blood, in the words of the prophet Isaiah. I wanted to be the bloody standard after the battle so I could warn people of the horrors of war. Halttunen argues that the gothic genre, with its graphic descriptions of violence, developed as a language to understand murder after the religious conception of depravity had lost its potency. The power to arouse readers with descriptions of violence depended on the new progressive view of humanity, with its sympathy for other peoples pain and

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suffering.27 But my morbid turn reected a crisis in my faith in fellow human beings. It was my new awareness of the terrible/ordinary that made violent language and violent images compelling. I argue for an alternative genealogy for the American gothic. In the early nineteenth century, the linguistic and ethical fascination with human violence arose from a traditional fear of human depravity, which had been greatly intensied by the creation of a republican political structure that posed new challenges to the maintenance of social order.

The sunny mood of optimism that Americans shared after the passage of the Constitution was washed away by the bloody rain of news from France. Soon, the writings of opponents to the French Revolution were deluged in red. American conservatives wallowed in an efux of gore, using disturbing detail to recount the crimes of French democrats. They execrated the Jacobins as masters of blood, ferocious inhuman bloodhounds, sanguinary demons, and violent and barbarous savages.28 They painted France as a eld of blood; a place of war and slaughter, of anarchy and ferocity, where rage could only be satised

27. Karen Halttunen, Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture, American Historical Review, 100 (Apr. 1995), 30334. 28. Charles Crawford, Observations Upon the Revolution in France (Boston, MA, 1793), 42; Thomas Cushing Thacher, A Sermon. Preached at Lynn, November 20th, 1794: Being the Day Appointed for the Annual Thanksgiving (Printed in Boston, MA, 1794); Samuel Deane, An Oration, Delivered in Portland, July 4th, 1793: In Commemoration of the Independence of the United States of America (Portland, ME, 1793), 10; Noah Webster, The Revolution in France, Considered in Respect to Its Progress and Effects (New York, 1794); William Cobbett, Porcupines Works; Containing Various Writings and Selections, Exhibiting a Faithful Picture of the United States of America; of Their Governments, Laws, Politics, and Resources; of the Characters of Their Presidents, Governors, Legislators, Magistrates, and Military Men; and of the Customs, Manners, Morals, Religion, Virtues and Vices of the People: Comprising Also a Complete Series of Historical Documents and Remarks, from the End of the War, in 1783, to the Election of the President, in March, 1801 (London, 1801), I: 167; Nicholson, An Address of the Democratic Society; Enos Hitchcock, An Oration, in Commemoration of the Independence of the United States of America: Delivered in the Baptist Meeting-House in Providence, July 4th, 1793 (Providence, RI, 1793), 15.

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by the guillotine.29 A young Congregationalist minister, the Reverend Elijah Waterman, terried his congregants with imagery of the streets of Paris drenched in blood. Her citizens mad to fury, seeking for some miserable victim which may be sacriced to their rage.30 The Reverend Samuel Kendal dwelled at length upon the thousands of victims who
fell a sacrice to [the Jacobins] relentless fury! . . . Massacres, assassinations, and more general butchery, prevailed, struck the nation with a panic, and presented little else but horror to the affrighted imagination! Indiscriminate slaughter hath sometimes heightened their terror and consternation. The hoary sire, aged matron, inexperienced youth, lisping infant, and virgin innocence, have fallen a prey to the brutal rage of man!31

Benjamin Russells Columbian Centinel included bloody descriptions of the Reign of Terror in every edition throughout the spring of 1795. During the past four years, wrote Russell, France had been immersed in a bath of blood. He insisted on publicizing the crimes committed by the villains, tigers, and bloodsuckers in France, in order to awaken Americans to the dangers posed to them by the Jeffersonians. Russell wrote about the mournful plaint of infants killed at their mothers breasts, and carried on the points of bayonets; he wrote about the shootings, drownings, live burials, the mockery of justice, the deluge of blood.32 Many authors pictured French blood as owing uncontrollably, suggesting that the violence it symbolized, once unleashed, could not be contained, and would engulf any political system. Numerous min-

29. Samuel Williams, The Love of Our Country Represented and Urged: In a Discourse Delivered October 21, 1792, at Rutland, in the State of Vermont (Rutland, VT, 1792), 20; David Tappan, A Sermon, Delivered to the First Congregation in Cambridge, and the Religious Society in Charlestown, April 11, 1793; on the Occasion of the Annual Fast in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston, MA, 1793), 28; Deane, An Oration . . . 1793. 30. Elijah Waterman, An Oration Delivered before the Society of Cincinnati, Hartford, July 4, 1794 (Printed in Hartford, CT, 1794), 16. 31. Samuel Kendal, A Sermon Delivered on the Day of National Thanksgiving, February 19, 1795 (Boston, MA, 1795), 1112. 32. The Columbian Centinel, Jan. 3, 1795; Feb. 28, 1795; Mar. 4, 1795; Mar. 7, 1795.

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isters and orators described France as ooded by torrents of blood.33 Others referred to brooks of human blood or rivers of blood.34 Another phrase repeated in numerous sources that condemn the Terror is garments rolled in blood, a quotation from the Book of Isaiah (9:5). This image comes from a verse describing the horrors of war and calls to mind a battleeld so imbrued in blood that its victims are literally wallowing in gore.35 Critics frequently pictured France, like the battleeld in Isaiah, as a landscape of death. In this symbolic system, violence dominated all other possible understandings of the Revolution; the imagery of holocaust denied any power to the Revolutions promise of a utopian future. In his July 4, 1793, oration, John Quincy Adams blamed France for transforming Europe into a corpse-covered eld; the French had poured the torrent of destruction over the fair harvests of European fertility; which have unbound the pinions of desolation, and sent her forth to scatter pestilence and death among the nations.36 Nothing could grow from

33. Jonathan Freeman, A Sermon Delivered at New-Windsor and Bethlehem, August 30. 1798. Being the Day Appointed by the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, in the United States of America: To Be Observed as a Day of Solemn Humiliation, Fasting and Prayer, in All the Churches under Their Care (New Windsor, NY, 1799); Kendal, A Sermon . . . 1795, 11; William Linn, A Discourse on National Sins Delivered May 9, 1798; Being the Day Recommended by the President of the United States to Be Observed as a Day of General Fast (New York, 1798); David Tappan, Christian Thankfulness Explained and Enforced: A Sermon, Delivered at Charlestown, in the Afternoon of February 19, 1795. The Day of General Thanksgiving through the United States (Boston, MA, 1795), 27. 34. Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans at the Present Crisis: Illustrated in a Discourse, Preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 (New Haven, CT, 1798); David Osgood, The Devil Let Loose, or the Wo Occasioned to the Inhabitants of the Earth by His Wrathful Appearance among Them Illustrated in a Discourse Delivered on the Day of the National Fast, April 25, 1799 (Boston, MA, 1799). 35. See, among many examples, Thacher, A Sermon . . . 1794; Ezra Sampson, A Discourse Delivered February 19, 1795: Being the Day of National Thanksgiving (Boston, MA, 1795); John Andrews, A Sermon, Delivered February 19, 1795: Being a Day of Public Thanksgiving, Throughout the United States of America (Newburyport, MA, 1795), 9. 36. John Quincy Adams, An Oration, Pronounced July 4th, 1793: At the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston, MA, 1793), 1920.

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this wasted countryside. As successive French governments entangled the nation in a series of wars that extended until the close of the Napoleonic era, the imagery of a land blighted by death recurred frequently. In 1799, a Federalist artillery captain, Amos Stoddard, described France as a forest of bayonets; her countryside, instead of owers and the blossoms of vegetation, is covered with the bones of immolated citizens.37 Critics also characterized France as a bloody and grotesque monster. Robert Treat Paines popular song from 1798, Adams and Liberty, described France as a beast whose huge limbs bathe recumbent in blood.38 Many antirevolutionary texts depicted France as a ferocious and bloodthirsty carnivore. A song included in a primarily nonpolitical book of sea chanties, published in 1800, versied France as a bear who wished to crush the United States in his paws. Though gorgd to the full, the bear was not yet sated with blood and still howled for more food.39 William Cobbett called the French bloodthirsty dogs.40 Opponents denounced France as a tiger or a wolf.41 Other critics emphasized the human aspect of revolutionary depravity, calling the French cannibals human ghouls who devoured their own kind. A European book entitled The Cannibals Progress, which chronicled French Republican atrocities committed during the invasion of the German states, attracted an enor37. Amos Stoddard, An Oration, Delivered before the Citizens of Portland, and the Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on the Fourth Day of July, 1799 Being the Anniversary of American Independence (Portland, ME, 1799). See also Timothy Dwight and Barbara Miller Solomon, Travels in New England and New York (4 vols., Cambridge, MA, 1969), 4: 268; John M. Mason, Mercy Remembered in Wrath: A Sermon, the Substance of Which Was Preached on the 19th of February, 1795, Observed Throughout the United States as a Day of Thanksgiving and Prayer (New York, 1795), 15; Samuel Miller, A Sermon, Delivered May 9, 1798 Recommended, by the President of the United States, to Be Observed as a Day of General Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer (New York, 1798), 26. The Ode for Independence, 1793 published in the Massachusetts Magazine, July 1794, described revolutionary France as Deaths vast empire. 38. Robert Treat Paine, The Works in Verse and Prose, of the Late Robert Treat Paine, Jun., Esq (Boston, MA, 1812), 245. 39. The Festival of Mirth, and American Tars Delight: A Fund of the Newest Humorous, Patriotic, Hunting, and Sea Songs. With a Variety of Curious Jests, Bon Mots, Entertaining and Witty Anecdotes, &C, (New York, 1800). 40. Cobbett, Porcupines Works, 1: 167. 41. Mar. 4, 1795, The Columbian Centinel.

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mous readership in the United States.42 According to an excerpt published in the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine in 1798, the French Republican army had gang raped young girls until they died, then raped the corpses. They raped women who had given birth only hours before. The French were cannibals, reeking with human gore, arrayed in all the bloody splendor of rapine and murder.43 Yet the authors of these bloody narratives hoped to do more than terrify their readers; they used accounts of French violence to highlight visions of American peaceableness. Conservatives routinely followed their condemnations of violence in France with celebrations of American nonviolence. Many praised Americas Revolution for its supposed freedom from violent disorder.44 They celebrated America as an asylum from war, contrasting her golden harvests to Frances elds of blood.45 They borrowed the language of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah both to describe the violence Americans should bewarethe garments rolled in blood
42. William Cobbett and Anthony Aufrere, The Cannibals Progress; or the Dreadful Horrors of French Invasion as Displayed by the Republican Ofcers and Soldiers, in Their Perdy, Rapacity, Ferociousness, and Brutality, Exercised Towards the Innocent Inhabitants of Germany (New London, CT, 1798). For more examples of the French depicted as cannibals see Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Spoken at Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, on the Anniversary of American Independence, July 4th, 1798 (Hartford, CT, 1798); John Lowell, An Oration, Pronounced July 4, 1799, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston in Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Boston, MA, 1799), 22; Stoddard, Oration . . . 1799, 17; Francis dIvernois, Authentic History of the Origin and Progress of the Late Revolution in Geneva (Philadelphia, PA, 1794), 17; Cobbett, Porcupines Works, 1: 164, 2: 21. 43. The Philadelphia Monthly Magazine, July 1798. 44. See Gazette of the United States, Jan. 16, 1793; Charles Backus, A Sermon Preached before His Excellency Samuel Huntington . . . Governor . . . Of the State of Connecticut. May 9, 1793 (Hartford, CT, 1793); Thomas Fessenden, A Sermon, Preached in Walpole, on Thursday, February 19, 1795: The Day Appointed by the President of the United States for a Publick Thanksgiving (Walpole, NH, 1795), 7; George Tillinghast, An Oration, Commemorative of the Nineteenth Anniversary of American Independence: Delivered at the Baptist Meeting-House in Providence, on the Fourth Day of July, A.D. 1794 (Providence, RI, 1794), 11. Also Alexander Hamilton, Americanus No. II, for the American Daily Advertiser, Feb. 7, 1794, Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold Cofn Syrett (27 vols., New York, 1961), 16: 18. 45. For an extensive history of American claims to virtue and benevolence, see Burstein, Sentimental Democracy, especially chapter 8.

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(9:5)and the paradise to which they should aspirewhen they would beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks (2:4). The vision of American peacefulness expounded by early national conservatives did not accurately reect the eras political realities or revolutionary history. Rather, conservatives employed imagery of violence in a dialectic with imagery of peace in order to stie democratic dissent and strengthen the Federalist political order. To argue that conservative rhetoric against disorderly violence served a political purpose, however, does not lessen its power. Ideologies function precisely because people do use them to interpret the world. The fear of violence and the projection of a fantasy of American benevolence were sincere in the sense that they were supported by belief. Conservatives meant what they said, and their words had consequences. The new language opposing violence affected conservative attitudes not only toward the practice of politics, but toward their society in general. Social institutions that encouraged violence came to be seen as a threat to the civilizing process on which the new republic depended for stability. Opposition to violence led conservatives to support projects that would ameliorate the condition of humanity. Humanitarian reforms became integral to the political agenda of strengthening the social order.

My morbid sensitivities diminished after a couple of years, and I stopped trying to embody the horror. I quit yelling at people in the streets. But during graduate school, when it came time to focus on a subject, violence seemed the natural choice. The shooting was an unnished part of my personal history. In dreams I found myself back on my college campus, with the sense of having something left to do. I carried the shooting with me through every new stage of life. So I concentrated my coursework and my research on violence in the United States, in the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans, on the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the sociological theories of violence. I avidly read reports that the history of violence was an expanding eld. I wrote violence, I read violence, I taught a course on violence. I remember, sometime not long before the shooting, there was a viewing of Taxi Driver on the big projection screen in the science lecture hall. I went with a couple of friends; my backpack bulged with bottles of beer (not

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permitted on our campus, where almost all the students were under twenty-one). They clinked and clanked as I sidled down an aisle of seats, past Wayne Lo. Paranoia hit me, as it often did in his presence, would he tell campus security and get me in serious trouble? I looked over once or twice during the beginning of the lm, to see if he was watching us, but he seemed transxed by the screen. I could drink my beers securely. Did Wayne get the idea to shoot us that night? Did he see himself in Travis Bickle, a good man isolated in a corrupted world? Wayne didnt go home for the Thanksgiving break immediately before the shooting. He stayed on campus watching Full Metal Jacket over and over again. Its easy to imagine that these movies, intended by their creators to expose the evils of violence and war, seduced Wayne with their powerful narratives of retribution. The night of the shooting, Wayne wore a sweatshirt emblazoned with the name of a hard core band: Sick of it All. Many newspaper articles noted this detail, and more than one opinionator earnestly inquired into the effects of heavy metal music on Americas youth. My xation with violence did not lead me to buy a gun. After a long time, I realized that I needed to do more in my scholarship than recount tales of slaughter. During orals preparation, I fell in love with Norbert Eliass The Civilizing Process, a book that imaginatively inquires how western European cultures gradually limited the violence of individuals over many centuries.46 It inspired me to quit the trampled pursuit of the origins of exceptional rates of violence in the United States and start asking how historical developments have limited violence.47 Inquiries into American violence are often based on assumptions of deviance; we ask why Americans have departed from an unstated norm of peaceful46. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1994; revised ed., Malden, MA, 2000). 47. For examples of histories, as well as works in the social sciences, that seek to explain American violence, see Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat: Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York, 1991); Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York, 1980); Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier (Middletown, CT, 1973); James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and Its Causes (New York, 1996); Fox Buttereld, All Gods Children: The Bosket Family and the American Tradition of Violence (New York, 1995); Frankling E. Zimring, Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America (New York, 1997); Hugh David Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical and Comparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills, CA, 1979).

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ness. Perhaps we have so thoroughly assimilated the rhetoric of America as asylum that we cannot view our historical traditions of murder and brutality as anything except a terrible falling off from a higher standard. But the shooting caused me to stop believing in a normal, nonviolent, social equilibrium. This loss of faith has not made me cynical and hopeless. Rather, it has caused me to believe that nonviolence must be constructed, and thus compelled my interest into the mechanics of that process. My research locates the origins of a new ideology opposing violence in the early American republic. I am not recovering these beliefs in the hopes of reviving them. The beliefs I discuss belong to a specic historical moment in time and space and are not directly applicable to the present. My aspirations are mimetic. I hope that by describing an older nonviolent ideology I will become a voice of nonviolence in the present. I fear that by writing about the shooting I am exploiting the deaths of my friend and my teacher. I fear that the retelling of my story will inure me to its pain, and I will betray the memories of the dead by no longer feeling their loss. I fear that a desire to dramatize the events will cause me somehow to exaggerate or prejudice the story to accentuate my own part, and again, that I will have betrayed the dead. I fear that I have nothing instructive to say about the shooting and so any discussion of the events must be sensationalistic. These are reasonable fears. But my research has given me hope that writing about the shooting may also have good consequences. Language has the power to exceed its authors limits. A new way of writing about violence, its origins enmeshed in an antidemocratic political offensive, proved a powerful means to promote freedom. I am searching for a way of writing that will allow my own narratives to overspread their boundaries and promote positive change. David Brion Davis wrote that for those of us who still think of history as a kind of moral philosophy teaching by examples, it is precisely the multiple character of truththe varied angles of vision that are also the subject of imaginative literaturethat one must seek to capture.48 Here are two visions of the dead to whom I dedicate this essay: Nacunan, I see you in our seminar room, feverishly discoursing on

48. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 154. Cited in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (Baton Rouge, LA, 1985), 40.

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Foucault, stalking up and down alongside the table, wrapping and unwrapping the scarf you wore around your neck. Ive dreamed of your ofce, a urry of papers fallen to the oor, a student struggling to put them into order. Galen, in my memories you are so solid, so corporal, thick hair, big features, skilled hands, soft eyes, dressed in patched clothes. I remember sitting on you once and accidentally burning you with my cigarette ash, Im sorry. You loved my joke that I was ten feet talllike a tree, half my height was roots. Your memory is rooted in me till the big storm strikes me down.

In 1831, John Quincy Adams wrote to Alexis de Tocqueville: the crimes of the French Revolution have made a strong impression upon us; there has been a reaction of feeling, and this impulse still makes itself felt.49 The endurance of the imagery of French bloodshed is attributable to the profusion and novelty of the language that described it. From 1790 to 1815, America was saturated in texts denouncing the French Revolution.50 These narratives got into every farm house wrote one conservative commentator in 1799, and they wont go out, till the stories of the Indian tomhawk and war dances around their prisoners do.51 Many of these narratives included detailed descriptions of torture and brutality and used explicit language that would have shocked readers only ve years before. The violence of the French Revolution so disrupted American sensibilities that it required the development of a new language, an American gothic mode of writing, to capacitate its enormities.52 John Cotton Smith argued in a July 4, 1798, oration that new

49. Quoted in Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America, from the Revolution to the Civil War, 1st ed. (New York, 1965), 4. 50. Ibid. 51. Chauncey Goodrich to Oliver Wolcott, July 1799 in George Gibbs and Oliver Wolcott, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams, Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury (2 vols., New York, 1846), 2. 52. Literary scholars place the origins of the gothic style in Europe. Charles Brockden Brown is commonly credited for having rst adapted the gothic genre for an American audience in his 1798 novel Wieland; Charles Brockden Brown and Caleb Crain, Wieland, or, the Transformation: An American Tale and Other

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words, new sounds, must be invented, if they are ever to comprehend, in any measure, the unparalleled atrocities which have marked the progress of the French Revolution. The events of the French Revolution were written in lines of blood; its histories would have to be so as well.53 Yet a dangerous irony threatened to subvert the rhetorical offensive against Jacobin violence. The endless recitations of French crimes, which were intended to persuade Americans of the need for self-restraint and obedience to the social order, could have the reverse effect. The bloody imagery might seduce readers into a fascination with violence. In 1800, a poet for the Columbian Centinel warned that the new gothic style could create a hunger for narratives of bloodshed: A single death in times of yore/ Was subject for a nations tears;/ Whole nations weltering in their gore/ Will scarcely satiate modern ears.54 If they did not make readers bloodthirsty, narratives of violence had the equally undesirable potential to desensitize readers. The Balance and Columbian Repository argued that the reading of murderous battles never yet made man, woman, or child either wiser or better: it only serves to harden the mind by inuring it to scenes of blood. Nonetheless, the newspapers conservative editors
Stories, 2002 Modern Library ed., The Modern Library Classics (New York, 2002). Brown, who as editor of The Monthly Magazine and American Review, reported on the Reign of Terror, allegorized the dangers of French democracy in Wieland. 53. John Cotton Smith, An Oration, Pronounced at Sharon, on the Anniversary of American Independence, 4th of July, 1798 (Litcheld, CT, 1798), 5. John Ward Fenno, son of the arch-conservative editor of the Gazette of the United States, delivered a similar verdict on the course of federal-style republics throughout time: their history was written by the hand of violence in characters of blood; John Ward Fenno, Desultory Reections on the Political Aspects of Public Affairs in the United States of America (New York, 1800), 29. 54. The Columbian Centinel, Aug. 16, 1800. Karen Halttunen, who dates the emergence of the gothic genre a generation later, describes this paradox as the pornography of pain. The same increasing sensitivity to the pain of others that nineteenth-century reformers relied upon to persuade their readers to the causes of abolition and temperance, also made readers more likely to be thrilled by descriptions of whippings and beatings; Halttunen, Humanitarianism. David Reynolds discusses the subversive sensationalism of gothic reform literature during the second third of the nineteenth century in David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge, MA, 1988).

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joined their colleagues in publishing detailed accounts of the bloodshed that had terrorized France. The editors judged gothic accounts of the French Revolution commensurate with its stated intention that the paper would not teach people how to kill, but it will teach how to save life.55 Perhaps the editors recognized that the power of language to overreach its intended purposes not only created the danger of sensationalism, it could also redeem graphic descriptions of violence by arousing readers and shifting ethical perceptions. The positive intention of American conservatives, to foster a reaction against violence by attacking the Reign of Terror, had the negative potential to cause prurient excitement. But conversely, their negative intention, to limit American democracy, was overreached by the articulation of a new humanitarian ethic. The conservatives who so assiduously catalogued the misdeeds of the Jacobins created a mode of writing, a morality of form in the words of Roland Barthes, that transferred to more progressive causes.56 Most importantly, the opponents of democracy developed a new gothic critique of slavery that focused on the institutions violence. In the 1790s, conservative reactionaries began to criticize the brutality of slavery in terms remarkably similar to their attacks on the French Revolution. The language of antiviolence, inspired by fears of democracy, fed into a new antislavery rhetoric that focused less on abstract claims to the Rights of Man, or Christian salvation, and more on the bloody brutality of the institution to its victims. The new gothic antislavery dwelled in morbid detail on the abuse suffered by slaves, the owing blood and the purple tortring wounds.57 To the self-styled friends of order, the violence of nonstate
55. The Balance and Columbian Repository, Feb. 2, 1802. 56. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette and Colin Smith Lavers (New York, 1997), 15. 57. Reections on the Slavery of the Negroes, a poem published in The Rural Magazine, June 1796. For more examples see Amynto, Reections on the Inconsistency of Man, Particularly Exemplied in the Practice of Slavery in the United States (New York, 1796); Alexander McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustiable: A Discourse (New York, 1802); Humanitas, Reections on Slavery with Recent Evidences of Its Inhumanity (1803). The three anonymous texts titled Reections all bear interesting similarities. They argue for immediate abolition and black racial equality, and two include positive allusions to the Haitian revolution. They also share commonalities with a series of antislavery essays published in The Balance and Columbian Repository during 1802, including similarly phrased

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partieswhether executed in the course of a revolution or in the institution of slaveryposed a threat to the community because it could not be contained. Violence owed like the blood that was its symbol, a deluge that threatened to engulf any nation that released its potential. Winthrop Jordan, who has also noted this shift in antislavery literature, describes it as atrocity-mongering, a failure of nerve, and a retreat from rational engagement with the ethical problem posed by Negro slavery.58 Alternatively, the genesis of gothic antislavery can be viewed as an innovative response to the lessening potency of revolutionary antislavery rhetoric.59 The anonymous author of Reections on the Inconsistency of Man, Particularly Exemplied in the Practice of Slavery in the United States (1796) directly connected his antislavery position to his horror at the Jacobin violence in France, and his fear of the potential for violence in America. Reections condemned southern slaveholders as brutal tyrants who threatened to bring a Reign of Terror over America. In those states where slavery is yet raging in all its horrors, a furious democracy copied from the Jacobin principles of France appears to be the wish of most of the southern gentry. The author linked American slaveholders to French democrats in terms of their common violence and cruelties. The association between slaveholders and Jacobins was strengthened by

statements regarding the hypocrisy of American complaints about Algerine piracy, and quotations from the poetry of Cowper. 58. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 15501812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), 36771. The appearance of a new gothic and sentimental vein in antislavery literature during the late eighteenth century has also been previously noted by Lorenzo Dow Turner, Anti-Slavery Sentiment in American Literature Prior to 1865 (Washington, DC, 1929). Other authors who have discussed the gothic vein of antislavery literature tend to position it later, in the middle third of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Halttunen, Humanitarianism; Reynolds, American Renaissance; Elizabeth B. Clark, The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America, Journal of American History, 82 (1995), 46393; Richard H. Brodhead, Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum American, Representations, 21 (Winter 1988), 6796. 59. Kimberly Smith describes the use of sentimentality and sympathy in slave narratives as a valuable corrective to the over-rationalized discourse of politics that emerged in the late-eighteenth century; Kimberly K. Smith, The Dominion of Voice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence, KS, 1999), ch. 6.

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the southern leadership of the American democratic opposition. The Jacobins had committed horrid enormities and deluged the Earth in blood. Likewise, American slaveholders brutalized their chattel with unrelenting ferocity: tis no uncommon sight to see children, with whips and cudgels, striking and mauling poor old decrepid Negroes. Page after page of the enraged text compared the barbarism of slavery to the violence of Jacobinism. The rationalization, made by slave owners, that their chattel would starve on their own was akin to the Jacobins refusal to supply King Louis XVI with a razor for shaving, when they intended to guillotine him. Both scenes presented horrors, in both lands the voice of brothers blood crieth unto me from the ground.60 Conservative attacks on slavery operated within the context of domestic political battles; slavery was a tarring brush to discredit political opponents. Federalists used gothic descriptions of slavery to connect American democrats to French Jacobins, claiming that both parties were comprised of sanguinary tyrants and demagogues, who cared only about their own interests and used violence to achieve their ends. Theodore Dwight, a Federalist lawyer-editor-politician and brother of the Calvinist minister Timothy Dwight, delivered a 1794 oration to a Connecticut abolition society, indicting slavery for its brutalizing consequences on the character of masters. Ownership of human beings transformed people into tyrants, causing even women and children to indulge themselves in paroxysms of rage and . . . seize the instruments of torture. If slavery were not abolished, Dwight warned, Southern slaveholders might cause America to suffer the same fate as France, where a violent and bloodthirsty junto . . . forced the infatuated republic to assassination and ruin.61 Antislavery served as an important political weapon in the arsenal of early republican opponents to democracy. Yet acknowledging the utility of the gothic critique of slavery only serves to reveal its power to inuence peoples minds. While the application of gothic language to the problem of slavery may have had antidemocratic inspirations, we cannot assume that its conservative origins effectively limited the rhetorics re60. Amynto, Reections on the Inconsistency. 61. Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Spoken before the Connecticut Society, for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage: Convened in Hartford, on the 8th Day of May, A.D. 1794 (Hartford, CT, 1794).

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ception. David Waldstreicher has made the functionalist argument that Federalist critiques were only a limited contribution to antislavery because they were not meant to end slavery; they were meant to discredit southern Jeffersonians and their allies.62 To the contrary, the conservative gothic critique provided a language for radical abolitionism and invigorated the abolitionist effort to change American popular sentiment. Early national conservatives may have been limited by their antidemocratic sentiments and their concern for political union from pursuing attacks on slavery to the point of forcing abolition on the southern states. But the gothic critique gradually changed the ethical perception of millions of Americans, leading to the creation of a powerful constituency who would, in the future, support forced change. The inability of authors and orators to limit the impact of the language they use gives a reason to study the consequences of rhetoric, even when its origins may appear disingenuous. Fears of violence often bear this stamp because they are, by nature, rhetorically useful. Tales of bloodshed and pain serve to attract audiences, like a porch light does moths. But for my sources, and I hope for myself, the dangers of incineration are offset by illumination.

62. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 17761820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 252.