The present chapter provides a historical overview that focuses on the three distinct periods relevant to the productions of The Age of Reason and Nature, namely the Early Republic, the French Revolution, and Jacksonian Democracy. Rather than an exhaustive account amounting to what might be called a thick description in New Historicist terms, this chapter aims to complement the awareness of the sociopolitical issues and corresponding cultural narratives that impinged upon the production of both tracts and influenced their particular
expressions of matters pertaining to democratic outlines of polities. One interesting if incidental element connecting Paine’s The Age of Reason and Emerson’s Nature is the circumstance that both tracts were produced roughly half a decade after revolutions in France, the former after that of 1789, the latter after that of 1830. Of course, the impact of the French Revolution of 1789 is much more immediate on The Age of Reason since Paine wrote the text living in France in the early 1790s, responding to the policies of the Terror.
The impact of the revolution of 1830 on Emerson is much less immediate, as Emerson resided in the US throughout the composition of Nature and referred in his tract to American landscapes and social question rather than European ones. Emerson’s Nature is hence commonly read as a product of Jacksonian Democracy that echoes the imperatives of individualism and laizes-faire liberalism on its ideological level. This chapter aims to elucidate further and arguably more stringent historical connections between the production contexts of the tracts in question and it does so by focusing chiefly on the concepts and processes that define the described normative system of rhizomatic panopticism. In other words, it is mainly the rhizomatically panoptic features of the said national contexts during the specific historical periods and that form the major interest in this instance. For this reason, the following three sections concentrate on the negotiation of structural features such as centralization and heterogeneity, political representation and the transparence of power, its reciprocity and accountability, as well as sociopolitical hierarchies and the conception of the human body.
The Early Republic
This section retraces the relevant concepts and debates regarding the structural features of a potential, crystallizing polity during the era of the Early Republic. The perceptions and criticisms of the Articles of Confederation as the first instance of an American constitution extending its effect to all of the initial former colonies provides a background for the formulation of the implicit exigencies contemporaries demanded a new, more suitable polity to ideally represent. Yet before regarding the Early Republic in greater detail and focusing in particular on the political structures negotiated and instituted during that time period, one brief differentiation with regard to the underpinnings of American political theory of that era is in order. As elucidated in the previous chapter, mainly sources from Greek and Roman
antiquity as well as from Stuart England and Enlightenment France are credited with having facilitated the development of core structural features of modern-day democracies.
Especially in the context of the United States of America, however, it would be an omission to fail to recognize the impact that Native American political associations, as they were witnessed by the colonists in the mid 18th century, exerted on the formation of the US polity.
In this context, it is the Iroquois Confederation that receives most attention by historians of the US Constitution. Writing in 1996, Samuel B. Payne surveys this increasing specification in historicizing the development of the Articles of Confederation and the subsequent Constitution and states that “[i]n the last few years, the Iroquois influence thesis has shown signs of being accepted as the new orthodoxy in some quarters” (Payne 606).
According to that thesis, it is the French and Indian War that brought envoys of the colonies into negotiation with the Iroquois in their search for potential partnerships against the French, and while an alliance could not be established, some colonists started to view the association of the Iroquois as witnessed during the negotiations as an adequate template for the design of a constitution for the colonies (Lutz 59). Features like the intentional “looseness” and the “inherent weakness” of the established bonds between the colonies, facilitating their respective autonomies, are some characteristics said to have been inspired by the Iroquois (ibid. 67; cf. Payne 610, 611). While acknowledging this thesis and the nuance it brings to historicizing the Constitution, Payne is most weary of overstating the actual influence that the Iroquois could have brought to bear on the designs of the associations and legal documents of the colonists; directing his attention also at the more widely acknowledged sources of the Constitution, he offers the conclusion that
[p]robably none of the foreign confederations – in contemporary Europe, ancient Greece, or Indian America – had much influence on the thinking of eighteenth-century Americans. To both Federalists and Antifederalists, by far the most important confederation was the one they were living in: the United States under the Articles of Confederation. (Payne 620)
In the historiography on the periods of the American Revolution and the first phases of the Early Republic, a multiplicity of centers of power before the adoption of the federalist system receives a rather negative evaluation. Edmund S. Morgan notes that, generally, the phase in which the Articles of Confederation were in effect, beginning in 1781 and ending
1789, “used to be considered a dark and doubtful time” by many historians (113). More often than not, the Articles of Confederation, which limited any centralized power and allowed the governments of individual states a fairly high degree of autonomy (Cogliano 103; Horsman 4), are criticized for weakening the becoming political entity of the United States by allowing for such a multiplicity of power centers. In their introductory work to political science, Bond and Smith iterate what seems to be the academic consensus regarding the shortcomings of the Constitution’s forebear: “The overarching weakness in the Articles of Confederation was the lack of centralized power adequate to govern a nation”
(59). Jack Rakove, for example, notes that the perception of the said document as weak was also prevalent soon after its implementation, stating that “[n]o sooner did the Articles go into effect than Congress began considering major amendments” on account of its
“perceived inadequacy” and “imbecility” (Rakove 45).
“Weakness” is also the quality that Francis D. Cogliano readily mentions in his appraisal of the said document, however applying it to the kind of administration that it allowed for; he states that “[t]he Articles of Confederation created a relatively weak federal government” (Cogliano 103). This absence of centralization and the concomitant “weakness”
was exemplified by the fact that the Articles of Confederation curtailed the government’s authority to a highly circumscribed field. Bond and Smith summarize this field as “matters of war and peace that wartime experience indicated should be vested in the nation” (Bond, Smith 45). These matters consisted mainly of levying troops and engaging in diplomacy (ibid.), but excluded the supervision of trade or taxes in whatever form (ibid.). Ben Baack examines “the evolution of the financial powers of the national government” during the late 1770s, precisely when the Articles of Confederation were in effect (Baack 640). This phase also coincided with part of the Revolutionary War and thus rendered issues of raising taxes to fund war-related preparations especially pressing. After the first fights with British troops in April of 1775, Baack explains, Congress called the Continental army into being (640, 641).
It thus “found itself in the rather unsettling position of having assumed national expenditure powers without having any independent source of revenue” (ibid. 641). In that situation, the urgent question was “would the colonial assemblies have granted Congress the power to tax” (ibid.). Referring back to the very cause of the war, Baack tentatively answers this question in the negative: “The experience of 10 years of protest against new British taxes
suggested that they would not” (ibid.). Instead of taxation, Congress had to resort to the printing of currency to cover the costs of war (ibid.).
The fact that the administration under the Articles of Confederation thus had
“inherited a huge debt necessitated by the ongoing war, and a nearly worthless currency”
(Cogliano 104) exacerbated the insubstantial role of the federal government before the ratification and implementation of the Constitution. While the government, consisting, as shall be elucidated further on, of only one chamber, was given the authority of calling on states to disburse a fraction of the taxes raised by them, it was not capable of enforcing the request effectively should states not comply with the request, which frequently happened (Bond, Smith 45). Tracing the continuities between the Articles of Confederation and the Constitution as well as historicizing the genesis of both, Donald S. Lutz explains that when it came to the drafting of the former document, “no argument for bicameralism was heeded.
Most delegates to the Continental Congress were thinking defensively. They were too concerned with preserving state political power to take seriously arguments to make the national government effective, and therefore powerful” (Lutz 64).
The same principle applied with regard to military matters, as only the states had the authority to draft soldiers (Bond, Smith 45). Further illustrating the central government’s lack of power was the provision that modifications to the Articles of Confederation could only have been put into effect had all states agreed on them unanimously (Bond, Smith 45;
Fritz 138). As Bond and Smith summarize, “[l]acking the authority to make the states meet their obligations, and bereft of the power to tax or conscript individuals, the national government lacked the means to fulfill the basic governmental responsibilities entrusted to it” (Bond, Smith 45). Thus, it is this lack of a provision of what Carr et al. refer to as “actual administrative machinery of government at the national level” (35) in the Articles of Confederation that allow most historians to conclude that this first constitution was
“seriously defective as an adequate constitutional basis for a system of national government in the United States” (ibid.)
Both, the contemporary American distrust towards multiplicity and decentralization as well as historians’ negative evaluation thereof can be read as connected to the prevalent conviction in contemporary political theory that a society, if it set out to function well, needed to avoid faction and conflict. Many public figures of the Early Republic shared this very persuasion and insisted that the best functioning social and political culture was one
that relied heavily on the predominance of concord over conflict. As Thomas Clark points out regarding Benjamin Rush, the noted Early Republic politician and physician, his “model of a political order was the classical Republican principle that a society required harmony, i. e.
that all its individual parts conform to each other” (Clark 65). This rather abstract notion elevated to an ideal of political principle stood in marked contrast to the actual structures of the communities which were marked by heterogeneity from the inception of colonization. It has to be kept in mind that, for example “[t]he colonies were each a collection of towns or counties rather than a single, undifferentiated entity” (Lutz 57), and that this structure persevered to some extent into the Early Republic as “the colonies, and later the states, tended to be built from the bottom up as a federation of local governments” (ibid. 58).
Heterogeneity also marked the perception of the colonies in their socio-economic features and political interests when compared to each other. As Jack P. Greene points out,
“[d]ifferences and animosities among the colonies appeared to be so deep that they became an important element in the calculations of both metropolitan officials and American resistance leaders during the controversies that preceded the Revolution” (Greene 19), making their unification into a homogenous political entity an unlikely contingency (ibid.).
Among the colonial politicians and representatives, there was a stark unbelief “that any effective or lasting union among such heterogeneous components could ever turn out well”
(ibid. 20). This situation of heterogeneity was further resonant with what Greene refers to as an “almost total absence of any sense of American national consciousness,” which was prevalent well into the revolutionary period (22). The imperative towards unity and the complete negation of faction relevant in the political discourse of the Early Republic seem thus like a forceful rejection of the recent past so strongly marked by the very characteristics now perceived as a threat to consolidation and conformity.
According to Daniel J. Elazar, however, it might have been the refusal to identify with larger political entities that actually prompted the colonists to consent to unifying into one state, instead of maintaining the independence of every one of the individual states. As he puts it,
[n]o doubt, one of the reasons why it was possible to convince a majority of Americans voting by states to abandon confederation for federation was because, even in the Revolutionary era, the states were not able to command a level of
identification stronger than that of individual self-interest and the growing common perception that Americans were Americans, first and foremost (Elazar 3).
While Elazaer’s last statement might seem to contradict Greene’s conclusion regarding the lack of a unified national identity during the Revolutionary period, it also reads like a fairly commonplace formula that adds a celebratory tone to an otherwise very sober observation.
This observation entails that the voting residents of the states were motivated first and foremost by their “individual self-interest.”
This facet, however, did not only impact individuals, but was representative of states’
behaviors during the Revolutionary War under the Articles of Confederation, as well. Keith Dougherty’s empirical analysis of the state’s contributions to the government under the Articles of Confederation seems to support the assumption that particular needs and interests usually superseded the concern for the welfare of the whole. Dougherty comes to the following conclusion:
During the American Revolution, when patriotism was allegedly at its peak, state politicians appear to have been more responsive to their immediate interests and local threats than to the needs of the Union. In other words, there is more evidence that the states contributed to attain the private benefits of joint products, such as defeating nearby enemies or trading with local armies, than the common needs of the Union. (65, 66)
Dougherty thus attributes greater accuracy to the Federalists’ evaluation of the reasons why states failed to support the government with the quantities of either money or soldiers necessary. According to this faction, as Dougherty reports, the respective states “had an incentive to free ride” (52), while Anti-Federalists usually correlated insufficient support with the state’s insufficient means to render the support required by the government (ibid.).
Thus, he closes with a statement that might also well apply to Elazar’s observations:
“Ironically, the force that bound the Union may have been the same self-interest that the Anti-Federalists believed would corrode democracy” (Dougherty 66). While this differentiation has great explanatory power for the occurrences prefacing the formation of the Union and ratification of the US Constitution, one must be aware of the potentials that
the emphasis on the eventual beneficence of private interest can exude when it comes to the invigoration of discourses of liberalism. Nonetheless, this nuance implies that rather than as a unification affirming unity and harmony, the conjunction of states into a federation was the result of the interplay of a variety and multiplicity of particularized goals.
The relationship towards increasing centralization and structural homogeneity was thus not unambiguously positive, as the considerable interest in ensuring the accountability of elected officials and government institutions show. Here, the concerns of the historians and commentators evaluating the Articles of Confederation as well as the state constitutions and the concerns of the legislators and constituents during the Revolutionary period and during the Early Republic seem to diverge immensely. As just discussed, the former group tends to identify, and to some extent lament, the lacking centralization of power as the weakening element of the Constitution’s precursor, while the latter group seems to have found merit in this trait and its potential to prevent the abuse of power by too powerful a central government. Speaking of the respective constitutions drafted by the individual states before the implementation of the Constitution of the United States in 1789, Bond and Smith come to the conclusion that “[t]he central concern reflected in these constitutions was a distrust of centralized power” (Bond, Smith 46). In the same context, Greene refers the reader to the struggle against Britain and states that “[t]hese painful lessons gave rise to a profound mistrust of central power that was readily transferable from the British government to an American national government” (Greene 20). Greene also points to the influence of Montesquieu on the colonists’ perception of different polities; they heeded and shared his partiality to models of “loose confederation” over “consolidated republics” (20).
Thus, decentralization of power lay at the core of the first constitutions of the former colonies.
Likewise, Cogliano underlines the potentially positive aspect of the perceived weakness of the Articles of Confederation mentioned before, maintaining that “[t]o the extent the power was decentralized under the articles, they can be seen as a victory for those who favored a democratic republican model” (Cogliano 103). Endeavors to elicit major transformations in the document to fundamentally change the safeguarding of decentralization therein granted Cogliano attributes to “elitist republicans” (103), whose efforts finally emanated into “the creation of a stronger federal constitution and the triumph of an elitist republican model for the government of the United States” (ibid. 104).
The attitude toward the separation of powers, by the time in question already a mainstay of political theory as the previous chapter explains, was equally impacted by the concern for guaranteeing accountability and excluding the possibility of undue concentrations of power in one element of the polity. The clearly defined elements of a legislature in the form of the two houses, a judiciary in the form of the Supreme Court, and the executive in the form the presidency are commonly held to represent the American Constitution’s main strength when comparing it to the previously operating Articles of Confederation. The Articles of Confederation designed the government’s legislature to rely on only one chamber and did not define a clearly established and separated executive or judiciary (Bond, Smith 45). Edmund S. Morgan locates the reasons for relying on one chamber in the lack of a “titled aristocracy,” a lack which according to some politicians obviated the need to include an “upper house” into the constitutional design (92).
Comparing the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution, Lutz points out that
[a]side from the narrower grant of power to the national Congress, and a unicameral legislature where each state had one vote, the Articles differed from the United States Constitution mainly in having a Committee of the States instead of a single executive – the Committee being comprised of one delegate from each state – and a court that was directly a creature of the Congress. (Lutz 67)
He goes on to state that the similarities between the Articles of Confederation and the
He goes on to state that the similarities between the Articles of Confederation and the