Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Burstein is the author of The Inner Jefferson: Portrait of a Grieving Optimist. He teaches at the University of Northern Iowa.

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Sentimental Democracy

Hill & Wang

Chapter One

SENTIMENT AND SYMPATHY:
BEGINNINGS

Inventing a nation entails giving definition to the character ofthe people, identifying their compatible qualities and common understandings,cultivating a sense of moral community. In the United States,this process is still going on. It has provoked every emotion from themenacing rhetoric of nativists to the humbling acknowledgment of diversity.Almost every such attempt to define the nation's identity canbe linked in some way to an embellishment of the language and eventsof the American Revolution?a romance with the pre-romantic age ofthe eighteenth century.

    The most distinctive emotional force of those years was sentimentand sympathy. When citizens today claim that mastery of the continentwas attained by the enterprising spirit of unselfish, fit pioneers, or whenthey avow the right of all to free speech and assembly, or whenever theU.S. government asserts that maintaining world peace can best be accomplishedby a benevolent use of American power, the spokespersonsfor these ideals have relied on an inherited vocabulary of sentiment andsympathy. In his 1801 Inaugural Address, in words that Americans todaystill relate to, Jefferson termed his country "the world's best hope."Seeing the "rising nation" as a land that was "wide and fruitful," heurged its citizens to "unite with one heart and one mind," to restoreafter a decade of heated politics the sentimental values of "harmonyand affection." For, without these, he insisted, "liberty and even lifeitself are but dreary things."

    From the time of the Revolution, if not before, Americans havetended to project a self-image of charitable concern and active self-restraint.Less persuasively, perhaps, their commitment to ordered libertyhas dictated that righteous self-expression stop short of forfeitingreason through the degenerative effects of self-indulgence, greed, license,or political fanaticism?the unhealthy passions. During the Revolutionarycrisis, loyalists decried rebel Americans' excesses in just sucha vocabulary. The passion they witnessed in the activities of patriotsduring the 1770s appeared to them dangerous and unruly; they describedthe failure to check behavior in terms of "deformation," of aloss of reason and judgment. People recognized and feared their ownbase instincts; they knew they were vulnerable creatures subject totemptation. Freedom could not exist without morality?both sides inthe American Revolution believed that?and both felt certain that theother lacked fortitude and enough moral strength to avoid being victimizedby untrustworthy leaders.

    In part because mid-eighteenth-century Americans were thought(and acknowledged themselves) to be culturally and economically inferiorto Europeans, the preeminent pens and leading voices of 1776focused on what they believed was a widely held sense of moral superiorityover the powerful mother country from whom they were toseparate. Starting by describing their continent in idealized imagery asa promised land conducive to the growth of liberty, they highlightedthe virtue of simplicity possessed by the people of the thirteen colonies,and they promoted a community spirit generated through popular resistanceto an authority as unsentimental as it was unrepresentative.

    Revolutionary America's eloquent polemicists could defend the inseparablecauses of independence and American exceptionalism by theuse of a potent, viscerally felt contrast: they claimed they were a patient,understanding, sensate people, and that the king and Parliament, whohad sought to suppress their decent impulses, were necessarily dull,insensitive, and emotionally misaligned and misdirected. Jefferson'sDeclaration of Independence in particular played up the distinction betweenthe feeling and the unfeeling, between a virtuous people and atyrant who had "waged cruel war against human nature itself." Americanswere resorting to war only after grievously suffering the "last stabto agonizing affection," while King George III had "plundered," "constrained,"and "neglected" honorable subjects who had been simplyseeking their rightful happiness. Because the colonists' British brethrenwere "deaf to the voice of justice and consanguinity," Americans hadunited to form a new consanguinity. Thus the nation of a just sensibility,with its "manly spirit" (here meaning one with sturdiness andconviction), had determined to "renounce forever these unfeelingbrethren."

    As Jay Fliegelman has effectively argued, the Declaration of Independencewas intended to be read aloud as well as in its printed form.Print culture in 1776 was secure in its authority, yet Jefferson aimed topreserve the special character of the spoken voice in his composition ofa vigorous and passionate, politically persuasive document. When onemember of Parliament denounced the Declaration as a "wretched" instrument"drawn up with the view to captivate the people," John Wilkes,a defender of American rights, rose to laud Jefferson's composition:"The polished periods [sentences], the harmonious happy expressions,with all the grace, ease and elegance of a beautiful diction, which wechiefly admire, captivate the people of America very little; but manly,nervous [vigorous] sense, they relish even in the most awkward anduncouth language. Whatever composition produces the effect you intendin the most forcible manner is, in my opinion, the best." Jeffersonmay not have seen his technique as Wilkes did, but he clearly aimed tomix style and sentiment in a way that affected listeners as well as readers.He was in effect announcing to the world a new oratorical idealthat combined masculine sentiment and a kind of theater. To "captivate,"in the sense almost of ensnaring or bewitching (as the memberof Parliament intended to convey), was not the effect of the Declaration;rather, Americans were responding to language that contained sensorypower, that coursed through the nervous system and, in fact, made"sense."

    Self-serving distinctions between feeling and unfeeling persisted inAmerican political rhetoric in the decades after the Revolution. AFourth of July oration in Portland, Maine, in 1801, for example, remindedcitizens of the meaning of independence: "We were no longeresteemed the rebellious subjects of Great Britain: but as a magnanimouspeople struggling for liberty?for our inherent birth-right ... in oppositionto men and measures instigated by the vilest motives; in oppositionto men totally devoid of principles, of humanity, and of everyspicies [sic] of fellow feeling." In Ohio, the Scioto Gazette that sameyear referred to a Great Britain likely to prevent farmers' flour from reachingthe West Indies as an "unfeeling nation." Of the expected blockade,the newspaper editorialized: "The prospects of the enterprising citizensof the western country [are] blasted in the bud?their only avenue toforeign markets obstructed by an arbitrary and unfeeling nation, whosesubjects are starving for the very article which they have preventedfrom proceeding."

    As the new republic grew, it continued to develop a sense of itsspecial destiny grounded in its unique and unprecedented, emotionallyrich and resilient, morally uplifting national creation story. Scholarswho...