Gordon S. Wood (ed.), The American Revolution: Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764-1776

Liberty is the greatest blessing that men enjoy, and slavery the heaviest curse that human nature is capable of. – This being so, makes it a matter of the utmost importance to men, which of the two shall be their portion.  Absolute Liberty is, perhaps, incompatible with any kind of government. – The safety resulting from society, and the advantage of just and equal laws, hath caused men to forego some part of their natural liberty, and submit to government.  This appears to be the most rational account of it's beginning; although, it must be confessed, mankind have by no means been agreed about it:  Some have found it's origin in the divine appointment:  Others have thought it took it's rise from power:  Enthusiasts have dreamed that dominion was founded in grace.  Leaving these points to be settled by the descendants of Filmer, Cromwell, and Venner, we will consider the British constitution, as it at present stands, on revolution principles; and, from thence endeavour to find the measure of the magistrate's power, and the people's obedience.

This glorious constitution, the best that ever existed among men, will be confessed by all, to be founded by compact, and established by consent of the people.  By this most beneficent compact, British subjects are to be governed only agreeable to laws to which themselves have some way consented, and are not to be compelled to part with their property, but as it is called for by the authority of such laws:  The former is truly liberty; the latter is really to be possessed of property, and to have something that may be called one's own.

– ("The Rights of Colonies Examined.", Stephen Hopkins, Providence, Rhode Island, 1765, vol. I, p. 125)

The American Revolution, as distinct from the War for American Independence, did not begin with a musket shot in Lexington, Massachusetts in April 1775.  Rather, it began a decade before with a war of ideas fought in newspapers and in pamphlets sold for a shilling.  There, colonial and imperial leaders held forth on issues of liberty, representation, and the limitations and virtues of the British constitution (and Parliamentary power) as it related to the original thirteen North American English colonies.  Both sides, the nascent Patriot and Loyalist/Imperial, often alluded to Greco-Roman orators as being the ultimate source for their arguments on these topics.  In hindsight, what was transpiring just over 250 years ago is rather amazing, as civil discourse became increasingly intertwined with violence (tarring and feathering, burning of officials' houses, the Boston Massacre of 1770, etc.) and yet until the very end the rhetoric never truly (with a few notable exceptions) directly alluded to these violent acts.  It was as though there were two conflicts being acted out simultaneously and yet never truly in concert with each other.

American historian Gordon S. Wood (author of the award-winning The Radicalism of the American Revolution) in this two-volume Library of America set, The American Revolution:  Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764-1776, has chosen 39 pamphlets published during the period between the passage of the Sugar Act and the Declaration of Independence that present the breadth and depth of the arguments made in favor or in opposition to increased American autonomy in the aftermath of the French and Indian War.  He prefaces each pamphlet with a short précis of the pamphlet's general arguments and later actions of the author.  These 1-2 page summaries help non-specialists get the gist of the arguments being presented, as there are times that the authors make so many allusions to classical writers and to legal aspects of the documents that comprise the British constitution that it can be difficult for some readers to grasp what exactly is being argued and why.

Yet a closer examination of these pamphlets and how Wood has juxtaposed them reveal some fascinating undercurrents.  In the preface to the pamphlet quoted above, Wood references Rhode Island's rather unique political system (rotation of the colonial capital among five towns, semiannual voting for assemblymen, a "modern" two party/faction system).  The information there makes Hopkins' observation about how absolute liberty might be incompatible with any form of government seem not just the abstract musing of a quasi-anarchist but rather a wry commentary from someone who is intimately versed in decentralized politics. 

Immediately following Hopkins' pamphlet is Martin Howard Jr.'s "A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax, to his Friend in Rhode-Island, Containing Remarks upon a Pamphlet, Entitled, The Rights of Colonies Examined."  This pamphlet is not just a point-by-point response to "Rights of the Colonies Examined," but it also is one of the earliest and most forceful defenses of the Imperial viewpoint that the colonies by their very foundation by people of English descent have submitted themselves to the strictures of the English constitution:

Our personal rights, comprehending those of life, liberty and estate, are secured to us by the common law, which is every subject's birthright, whether born in Great-Britain, on the ocean, or in the colonies, and it is in this sense we are said to enjoy all the rights and privileges of Englishmen.  The political rights of the colonies, or the powers of government communicated to them, are more limited, and their nature, quality and extent depend altogether upon the patent or charter which first created and instituted them.  As individuals, the colonists participate of every blessing the English constitution can give them.  As corporations created by the crown, they are confined within the primitive views of their institution.  Whether therefore their indulgence is scanty or liberal, can be no cause of complaint; for when they accepted of their charters, they tacitly submitted to the terms and conditions of them. (I, pp. 150-151)

Howard, as part of a faction that wanted to revoke Rhode Island's charter and have its radically democratic colonial assembly come under direct royal control, came under direct attack during the Stamp Act protests and he later had to flee to England to avoid physical harm.  These threats, including those made to the royal governor of Massachusetts, Thomas Hutchinson, lie as a dark shadow upon the arguments presented during this time.  In the case of Hutchinson, a native of Massachusetts, he became one of the most hated men in North America because of his principled stance in favor of continued union with England, even as more and more colonial leaders and thinkers, especially after 1770, began to advocate autonomy, if not outright independence, as a solution for the problems surrounding representation and taxation.  In his January 1773 speech to the Massachusetts Assembly, Hutchinson outlines his opposition to this increasingly popular viewpoint:

If what I have said shall not be sufficient to satisfy such as object to the Supreme Authority of Parliament over the Plantations, there may something further be added to induce them to an Acknowledgment of it which I think will well deserve their Consideration.  I know of no Line that can be drawn between the supreme Authority of Parliament and the total Independence of the Colonies.  It is impossible there should be two independent Legislatures in one and the same State, for although there may be but one Head, the King, yet the two Legislative Bodies will make two Governments as distinct as the Kingdoms of England and Scotland before the Union.  If we might be suffered to be altogether independent of Great-Britain, could we have any Claim to the Protection of that Government of which we are no longer a Part?  Without this Protection should we not become the Prey of one or the other Powers of Europe, such as should first seize upon us?  Is there any Thing which we have more Reason to dread than Independence?  I hope it will never be our Misfortune to know by Experience the Difference between the Liberties of an English Colonist and those of the Spanish, French or Dutch. (II, p. 10)

As reasoned as Hutchinson's speech may be, he could not fathom truly the depth of desire for separation.  For him and other future Loyalists, Parliament was the protector of freedoms and to reject parliamentary suzerainty was tantamount to abandoning security in a wild goose chase for liberty unmoored from centuries of traditions accreting around the acts and documents that comprised the English constitution.  Therefore, the response made by certain members of the Massachusetts Assembly, including future American leaders John Hancock and John Adams, likely baffled him in their rejection of this view of Parliament being the protector of English and colonial freedoms:

We fully agree with your Excellency, that our own Happiness as well as his Majesty's Service, very much depends upon Peace and Order, and we shall at all Times take such Measures as are consistent with our Constitution and the Rights of the People to promote and maintain them.  That the Government at present is in a very disturbed State is apparent!  But we cannot ascribe it to the People's having adopted unconstitutional Principles, which seems to be the Cause assigned for it by your Excellency.  It appears to us to have been occasioned rather, by the British House of Commons assuming and exercising a Power inconsistent with the Freedom of the Constitution, to give and grant the Property of the Colonists, and appropriate the same without their Consent. (II, p. 24)

This grounding of the main points of contention within this perceived usurpation of constitutional power by Parliament set the framework for later arguments during the people immediately preceding and following the Battles of Lexington and Concord two years later.  Most of the subsequent pamphlets in the second volume follow, in their support or dissent, upon the premises established here.  By 1776, the argument had switched from a direct focus on Parliament's regulatory power in the colonies to a debate on the source from whence liberty and popular representation commenced.  Wood does an excellent job in weaving these strands together to present a powerful argument that the American Revolution did not begin with a shot but instead with a thorough debate, via printed media, on the origins of political powers and human rights.  Although this debate had occurred over a century before during the English Revolution through the use of broadsides (and later, the English Civil War), these ideas found their mature expression during the 1764-1776 gestation period that led to the birth of the Declaration of Independence, one of the most important documents written in world history.  What followed after was messy, with consequences that still affect us today.  The American Revolution:  Writings from the Pamphlet Debate 1764-1776 serves as a excellent look at these written documents that spawned the modern representative republic form of government now seen in much of the world today.

Wendy Lower, Hitler's Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields

In Holocaust studies, one type of perpetrator, fashioned after Adolf Eichmann and others who organized deportations of Jews from Berlin headquarters, is the male bureaucratic killer, or desk murderer.  He commits genocide through giving or passing along written orders; thus his pen or typewriter keys become his weapon.  This type of modern genocidaire assumes that the paper, like its administrator, remains clean and bloodless.  The desk murderer does his official duty.  He convinces himself as he orders the deaths of tens of thousands that he has remained decent, civilized, and even innocent of the crime.  What about the women who staffed those offices, the female assistants whose agile fingers pressed the keys on the typewriters, and whose clean hands distributed the orders to kill? (pp. 98-99)

Nearly seventy years after the last death camps were liberated, the mechanics of the Endlösung still trouble readers and historians alike.  Who was involved or at least complicit in the genocide of Jews and other undesirable ethno-social groups?  To what extent, if any, were these mass killings planned?  Did the Holocaust arise from a Sonderweg, or "special path," that the Germans followed as a response to industrialization and modernity done at a faster pace than those of Western Europe?  Is the Shoah the horrific consequence of the earlier Ostland neo-colonial view of "space and race"?  How does one reconcile the machinery of the gas chambers and desk murderers with images of street violence in the occupied East, as mobs of Germans, Poles, Lithuanians, Belarussians, and Ukrainians beat tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Jews, often to death?

To this litany of questions has recently been added another:  what roles did women play in the Holocaust?  For decades, outside of a few memorable cases such as that of the infamous "Bitch of Buchenwald," Ilse Koch, not much attention has been paid to the roles that women played in carrying out the so-called "Final Solution."  In landmark studies such as Christopher Browning's 1993 book, Ordinary Men:  Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solutionin Poland, the "ground level" focus has almost invariably been on men.  Soldiers, Einsatzgruppen, functionaries, and guards, these were the main perpetrators of the killings at their most intimate, face-to-face, level.  But who did the paperwork processing, the nursing, and other tasks both domestic and industrial alike that were a vital component of the concentration camp social societies?  Who helped tend the vast farms on which several thousand Jews and other concentration camp prisoners were forced to work as slaves to supply food for the German armies?  Yet women have often taken a back seat to men in discussions of the Holocaust.

In her National Book Award-nominated history, Hitler's Furies:  German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields, Wendy Lower begins to explore the matter of those women (mostly) behind the scenes whose actions (or non-actions) aided and abetted genocide.  Utilizing an impressive number of interviews that she conducted with the now-elderly women who were the farmers, the secretaries, and in some cases the murderesses, Lower has pieced together a history that promises to be a significant study.  Yet that word, "promises," is a damning one, as Hitler's Furies fails to become the authoritative or landmark book that it could have become.  It hints at matters, yet does not place them adequately within the framework of current historiographical discussion, leaving the work in that nebulous halfway house between being an oral history of those who were reticent at best to talk of their past lives and a study that places these women and their actions within a larger conceptualization of the Holocaust and its origins and characteristics.

Lower begins her book by introducing several issues that she intends to address.  Among these are institutional power (ranging from direct corporate-style hierarchies to less indirect ones such as the terminology employed in the Third Reich regarding cultures and nations and their degrees of worthiness) and its ability to shape women into the roles desired of them.  Yet, as Lower argues, these women were not passive objects to be set in place but instead were in many cases active agents who themselves engaged in atrocities (and not always then just to please their male companions). This, however, does not mean that the women such as Erna Petri or Liselotte Meier, to name two of the women Lower discusses at length, display a great deal of independence in their actions.  No, their actions, whether they be shooting Jewish fugitives on Petri's manor or Meier's torturing of those rounded up as the German army advanced eastward, are placed within the context of what their male lover/husband did:  Petri following the lead of her abusive husband and Meier that of her officer boyfriend.  While Lower does a good job fleshing out the personalities she discusses, there curiously is a relative lack of discussion of motives beyond the coercive factors of society and ideology.  It is as though Petri, Meier, and the others discussed in the book had lives, dreams, and ambitions of their own, but when it comes to the flashpoint of their roles in the Holocaust, those divergent characteristics fade suddenly into the backdrop of those caught up in the competing whirlwinds of loyalty to male-centric power structures and a sadistic joy in inflicting suffering.  More could have been done to discuss this, but Lower's explanation late in the book felt inadequate in that she relies too heavily on Theodor Adorno's work on authoritarian personality to explain these women's actions.  While certainly there is something to Adorno's view, it does little to account for the complexities of the actions undertaken during this time by both men and women (ranging from outright sedition down through implicit resistance to complicity and then ultimately a surpassing of the authority's desires, as if by doing so, the perpetrator could assert her own stamp on matters); there is much more to the matter.

Of greater interest, yet barely fleshed out, is the idea that neo-colonialist attitudes toward the East and its denizens might explain the actions of Petri and her compatriots:

Petri's testimony is rare.  There are few wartime and postwar records of ordinary German women expounding on their views of Jews and the Holocaust.  More common was a colonist discourse about how stupid, dirty, and lazy "the locals" were, referring to Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews, or veiled references to the dark terrain infested with "Bolsheviks," "criminals," and "partisans," or to the infantilized native who is clever but inferior, and thus dispensable. (p. 156)

This is where I suspect more and more studies of the Holocaust will go, away from focusing strictly on the mechanics of the Final Solution and toward a broader cultural analysis of the times and in particular the World War I era of Ostland and how the Ostland's governmental practices, so reminiscent of late 19th century European neo-colonialism in Africa and Asia, helped shape German attitudes toward Ostland and its natives in a much more insidious fashion than the Nazi ideology on "space" and "race."  Yet despite there being hints of this colonialist attitude in many of the women Lower profiles, she does not give as much credence to this as perhaps she should have.

The sources included in the endnotes is impressive.  Although I haven't kept up with the literature since late 1997, there are a wealth of studies on the issues of women in the Third Reich and roles of women in the Holocaust that appear to be promising reads.  Yet within the body of her study, Lower rarely mentions any of these other historians and their contributions to the field.  Perhaps this is due to Hitler's Furies being marketed more to a general audience than toward an academic one, but ultimately this leads to the sense that Lower's narrative is detached too much from the debates that historians have had on this subject over the past six decades.  While it may be understandable that Lower wants to avoid the old Intentionalist/Functionalist debate regarding the level of intent that the decision-makers had in beginning the Final Solution, the book suffers because there is insufficient grounding of her arguments within the context of larger discussions of the Holocaust's beginning, mechanics, and how its perpetrators justified their actions.  Even the women involved seem at times acting within a narrative vacuum; there is not enough explanation to cover their myriad actions.

Yet despite these serious issues that I have with Hitler's Furies, it is a book that at the very least presents vividly-described actresses and whose discussions at least point the way to possible future paths of exploration within the field.  It is a flawed work, but for non-historian readers curious about the time period, it certainly is a work that will appeal to them.  For many historians of the period, however, Lower's work may be frustrating in the sense that it seems that with just more focus on placing her work within the context of current historiography, her work could have been as important as those of Ian Kershaw and Browning in discussing the mindsets of those involved in the Shoah.  The arguments on complicity and the forms in which it took here will continue to rage on.

Very early thoughts/questions regarding Eric Lott's Love and Theft (1995)

It was at this epoch that Mr. T.D. Rice made his debut in a dramatic sketch entitled "Jim Crow," and from that moment everybody was "doing just so," and continued "doing just so" for months, and even years afterward.  Never was there such an excitement in the musical or dramatic world; nothing was talked of, nothing written of, and nothing dream of, but "Jim Crow."  The most sober citizens began to "wheel about, and turn about, and jump Jim Crow."  It seemed as though the entire population had been bitten by the tarantula; in the parlor, in the kitche, in the shop and in the street, Jim Crow monopolized public attention.  It must have been a species of insanity, though of a gentle and pleasing kind...

– New York Tribune (1855)

Despite their billings as images of reality, these Negroes of fiction are counterfeits.  They are projected aspects of an internal symbolic process through which, like a primitive tribesman dancing himself into the group frenzy necessary for battle, the white American prepares himself emotionally to perform a social role.

– Ralph Ellison

The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous.  But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental.

– C.L.R. James

After a decade of first being made aware of it and after having procrastinated in buying it, I finally got around to purchasing a copy of Eric Lott's Love and Theft:  Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class last week after a discussion within an earlier blog post about cultural borrowings and appropriations.  Love and Theft will not be a book that I will rush to finish within a day; despite its relatively short 314 pages (nearly a third of which are endnotes, citations, and indices), this appears to be a weighty tome.

Here are some questions/guesses that I have based on having just finished the Introduction (if I am in the mood, I may write a review essay on it similar to what I had to write nearly two decades when I was a cultural history major):

Approach:  Will it be more like the microhistories of Ginzburg or Ladurie?

Will it be a structuralist examination of mentalités or will there be some exploration of power relations similar to what Foucault was evolving toward?

"The minstrel show was less the incarnation of an age-old racism than an emergent social semantic figure highly responsive to the emotional demands and troubled fantasies of its audiences." (p. 6) – How will this be explored in the main body of the book?

Binary narratives – how will Lott debunk them, as he seems to indicate that he will?

How does the late antebellum (1846-1854) backdrop for "Jim Crow" and other such nascent minstrel shows influence not just the medium of communication but the narrative itself?

Does the concept of "American Studies" co-exist in this historical era with regionalism?  Can there be said to exist then an "American" concept of minstrel shows as opposed to a series of regional conceptualizations?

In which ways did antebellum African American cultures influence white perspectives and in which ways could these shows be seen as a (distorted) reflection of cultural assimilation?

It will be interesting to see how (or if) Love and Theft addresses these questions (and others) raised within its introduction.  I am very curious about this work, as I want to see what methodological and epistemological approaches Lott takes and how well he executes his theories regarding the complex narrative of "love and theft" that surrounds not just the antebellum minstrel shows, but the generations of black-white cultural relations that followed.  Should make for an entertaining read, although I suspect most who read this blog wouldn't quite use the adjective "entertaining" to describe an academic history...

What do you know of the American Civil War?

Last year marked the 150th anniversary of the beginning of the American Civil War, but 1862 was the year in which several of the larger-scale battles were fought in my native state of Tennessee.  I am thinking of traveling to visit a few of the battlesites this year (Ft. Henry and Ft. Donelson, whose battles were fought in February 1862, and Shiloh, whose 150th anniversary is on April 6) and blogging about my impressions.  I'm also hoping to read during the next month or two the first two volumes of a planned four-volume set by the Library of America that utilizes primary sources for roughly a year per volume of that conflict.

But as a historian (albeit one who studied German cultural/religious history of the early 20th century as opposed to US History), I am curious to know what readers, Americans and non-Americans alike, know about this conflict and what they associate with it.  So if you want to share, please do so in the comments, as I do value other perspectives.

A slice of history: My grandfather's 1939 school journal

My grandfather's drawing of what seems to be WWI-era Germany.  Also note the penultimate note:  "Hitler is a common dictator."

My mother went through my deceased grandmother's belongings yesterday, as she is one of the two executors of her estate.  Among the several books she found my grandfather's school notes, apparently from 1939, when he would have been either a sophomore or junior (he was born in March 1923 and these clippings seem to be from just before the German occupation of the rest of Czechoslovakia, so 16 years later).  In them, there were a few notes on Germany, past and present (and other European and Asian nations), as well as newspaper clippings from the same time period.

Interesting to see how close things were to war between Germany and the Soviet Union during the spring/summer of 1939 after the annexation of Czechoslovakia.

For those that are fascinated by contemporary sources, here are the clippings that were found inside the journal.  Note the problems Rumania/Romania was having due to claims from Hungary and others (an issue decided by the ceding of land to Hungary through German mediation), as well as the facts of the day and the Polish refusal regarding Danzig.

More clippings from mid-1939.  Interesting in hindsight, no?

Just thought this might be a neat slice of history for those who are interested in it, especially when it comes to families preserving these clippings over two generations.

In honor of International Women's Day...

Here is a collage that my students have been working on for the past week in honor of Women's History Month.  Some of the choices (most are US-specific) might be more obvious than others.  To be added is a printout that will be scattered across the board that will say:

Women are...

Actresses
Leaders
Business Owners
Teachers
Inventors
Mothers
Writers
Heroines
Singers

Changing the world.