Prosecuting the Revolution

Journal Article The Forty-Third Annual Meeting Get access The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, Volume 21, Issue 5, 1 May 1961, Pages 591–601, https://doi.org/10.1210/jcem-21-5-591 Published: 01 May 1961

Annis Boudinot Stockton, an elite early American poet and patriot, ends a letter to her daughter with a declaration: I am frightened at length of my letter--and more when I look at watch and see hour of night--it is past one oclock, and not a creature upon in house but my self--but you will say, it is my custon [sic] to keep vigils of night. Adieu my love, may heaven bless you and yours and protect you this night, prays your ever affectionate mother A Stockton--(307) According to Carla Mulford, editor of Only for Eye of a Friend: The Poems of Annis Boudinot Stockton, Stockton most likely wrote letter on 22 March 1793 (304). In writing this letter, Stockton mus[es] over her solitary fire at her elegant home in Princeton, New Jersey (304, 305). She must have had ink and pen at her side as well as sheets of paper, prepared for her script. But what was so urgent that Stockton needed to continue her day's labor into early hours of morning? Was it news of sickness or a neighborhood festivity? No, Stockton was writing to her daughter, Julia Stockton Rush, about her opinions of Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of Rights of Woman. What follows is a study of this American reading of an English text. I begin with background about Stockton and her subject, Wollstonecraft's Rights of Woman. Next, I provide an overview of literary and feminist scholarship that underpins my reading. Finally, I analyze letter and argue that it demonstrates limitations of private and public sphere terminology in describing reception of early American women's letters. In contemplating women's rights, letter operates in an expanded sphere of intimacy that Stockton characterizes as the neighbourhood (304). Building upon her term, I propose that a woman author writing within an epistolary neighborhood can directly engage with political and domestic concerns. Blurring line between public and private, and private, an epistolary neighborhood allows a woman author to gain an audience beyond her home and family while also avoiding cultural ridiclue often directed at vocal women. Although other women, especially elite whites such as Mercy Otis Warren and Abigail Adams, also wrote in neighborhoods, Stockton's status as a widow gives us an opportunity to examine her text without specter of a politician husband hovering over our interpretations. Her writing, in short, offers a new lens through which to reconsider her contemporaries. According to Mulford's introduction to Stockton's letters, author was born in 1736 to Catherine Williams and Elias Boudinot, a well-to-do couple who provided her with an education alongside her brother Elais. She was born in Darby, Pennsylvania, but spent most of her youth in Philadelphia where her family's home and father's silversmith shop were next door to Benjamin Franklin's Post Office. After two moves, first within Philadelphia and second to New Brunswick, New Jersey, family finally settled in Princeton, New Jersey, in 1752 or 1753 (12). There, Annis Boudinot met and married successful Richard Stockton and they established their home across from College of New Jersey (15, 17). She romantically named their property Morven, after Fingal's Kingdom in James Macpherson's Ossianic poems. At Morven, couple cultivated an elite status by not only entertaining numerous guests, but also modeling their gardens to mirror those to Alexander Pope at Twickenham (17). As an elite man, Richard was drawn into New Jersey politics and worked on behalf of government until 1774 (19). Though initially taking a moderate stance toward American Revolution, Richard converted to patriotic cause in 1776, signed Declaration of Independence, and became a member of First Continental Congress (20). During occupation of New Jersey, Richard was seized by Tory leaders and taken captive by British who incarcerated him until 1777 (21). …

Reviewed by: A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution by David Head Michael S. McGurty (bio) A Crisis of Peace: George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution By David Head. New York: Pegasus Books, 2019. 400 pages, 6" x 9". $28.95 cloth, $18.99 ebook. The impetus for the two anonymous letters, written in the Continental Army winter encampment at New Windsor, New York, in March 1783, inciting the Newburgh Conspiracy, continues to confound historians trying to dissect the crisis. The "fellow-soldier, whose interest and affection bind him strongly to you—whose past sufferings have been as great, and whose future fortunes may be as desperate as yours," urged his officer corps colleagues, in those fiery missives distributed in camp, to stop prostrating themselves before the Continental Congress and start to demand that the national legislators find the money for their back pay and subsistence and to fund the officer pension promised earlier in the conflict. Always at the bottom of the priority list of the nation's creditors, the army was determined to realize its due, and its anger might have been exploited by nationalists in their scheme to vest the national government with the power to tax. David Head in his A Crisis of Peace George Washington, the Newburgh Conspiracy, and the Fate of the American Revolution offers a compelling story of the people associated with the incident and the dispassionate response by the commander-in-chief. Written by Major John Armstrong, a twenty-four-year-old aide to Major General Horatio Gates and son of Pennsylvania militia Major General John Armstrong, Head argues that his able pen captured the wrath of a small group of midlevel officers frustrated by the army leadership's weak attempts to petition Congress. While talking tough, the general officers hesitated to take a stronger stance, and these firebrands sought to force them into one. Unwilling to challenge civilian authority, Washington remained aloof, until the actions of the conspiring officers forced him to obliquely advocate for redress of the army's grievances. Head illuminates the characters closely associated with this event and, finding little evidence, dismisses most of the figures' involvement in any conspiracy. Considering the very nature of plots, however, participants are not normally inclined to reveal their participation, especially in ones that failed. If anything, they try to minimize any involvement and discount any accusations about their machinations. Following the money, he details the fiscal irresponsibility behind nearly all of America's problems. The major source of operational funds was the appropriations from the French government. Despite substantially overspending French loans, U.S. representatives in Paris had the gall to still solicit further [End Page 217] financial assistance, knowing that Louis XVI, having already invested so much, would not want to see the young republic founder. Raising substantial revenue in the country was prevented by Congress having no authority to tax. A 5 percent national tax on imports, the Impost, proposed in 1781, was blocked by Rhode Island, and when Virginia repealed its assent, at the end of 1782, it was a dead letter. The states received requisitions annually for their share of the cost of operating the national government, but the responses were disappointing. Every governor and legislature pled poverty. With people at the time, and in any age for that matter, susceptible to conspiracy theories, David Head challenges the assumption made at the time and by subsequent historians that nationalists in the Continental Congress and its administrative bodies were actually pulling the strings. Chief among the believers in the Philadelphia origins of the intrigue, Washington was incredulous that the officers and men of the army "are to be made use of as mere Puppets to establish Continental funds." Superintendent of Finance Robert Morris, his assistant, the transplanted New Yorker Gouverneur Morris, and New York Congressional delegate Alexander Hamilton are generally considered the chief architects of the Newburgh Conspiracy. The Morrises' well-known advocacy for uniting the lobbying power of both the public and private creditors to force the states to either fully remit the annual allocations made on them for the operation of...

The phrase “founding fathers” is central to how Americans talk about politics, and “Words, images, meanings” describes when the phrase was first coined, what it really means, and how artists have depicted the “founding fathers”—those who helped to found the United States as a nation and a political experiment. This group has two subsets. First are the Signers, delegates to the Second Continental Congress, who in July 1776 declared American independence and signed the Declaration of Independence. Second are the Framers, the delegates to the Federal Convention who in 1787 framed the United States Constitution. They include Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton.

Reviewed by: Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment by Wendy Bellion Michelle Sizemore (bio) Iconoclasm in New York: Revolution to Reenactment wendy bellion Penn State University Press, 2019 272 pp. On July 9, 1776, a crowd toppled the equestrian statue of King George III in Lower Manhattan after a public reading of the Declaration of Independence. They beheaded the leaden king, smashed him to bits, and shipped off his remains to be melted into bullets for Washington's army. This much is well-known. Wendy Bellion's new book completes the story, offering a fascinating chronicle of the statue from its creation, installation, and display to its destruction and afterlife. The book's expansive investigation [End Page 955] of the battered statue focuses an account of early British American iconoclasm as a national "creation story" (3). Indeed, a great strength of the study is its dilation from fine details such as choice of the statue's material and its orientation in Bowling Green park to the broader sweep of transatlantic protest. In Bellion's words, "Iconoclasm in New York asks why Americans destroyed the statue of George III in 1776—and why they keep bringing it back." The answers are rewarding. Iconoclasm in New York argues that this legendary mock execution of the king dramatizes a fundamental tension in early American identity formation, for it was an act that at once figuratively severed political ties and secured cultural ties with Great Britain. By enlarging her survey of the event, Bellion builds on histories that view the symbolic regicide exclusively as a sign of American independence. The transatlantic scope and extensive timeframe of the project elucidate the continuities between radical protest in Revolutionary-era New York and British folk and Reformation practices. Further, this research adds to art history's burgeoning study of destruction, of which iconoclasm forms a crucial subset. The book is divided into two parts, each containing two chapters. Part I, "Iconoclasm: The Eighteenth Century," explores American iconoclasm in the eighteenth century within a longer British history and larger Atlantic network of people and objects. Part II, "Afterlife: The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," traces the material remains of the statue and subsequent representations of its demolition. This structure makes manifest "how iconoclasm has continually shaped American identities since the very formation of the United States" (13). To set the stage for a discussion of the king's statue, chapter 1, "Idols in America: Liberty Poles," examines its immediate antecedent: the cycle of creation and destruction of five liberty poles in Manhattan between 1766 and 1776. Converted from pine masts, the liberty poles were powerful symbolic structures paraded from East River shipyards to the Commons (now City Hall Park), along the northern border of the city. The rituals of raising and felling invested the poles with meaning and agency. Both the American patriots who celebrated the poles and the British soldiers who demolished them transformed wooden posts into animate forces, joined in a reiterative process of creation, destruction, and recreation. For this reader, a wonderful highlight of the chapter is the prehistory of the masts, when they were trees in northern New England. Considered "princes of [End Page 956] the American forest" (24), the extraordinarily tall and perfectly straight white pines were valued for their sublime natural beauty and for shipbuilding, especially for masts; in addition, the jurisdiction over cutting white pines had long been under dispute between colonists and royal authority, making the trees one of the most contested resources in the British Empire. As Bellion explains, the liberty pole preserved these economic, political, and natural associations in its charged symbolism. This example is representative of the thorough attention given to every facet of icon-making and-breaking throughout the book. This chapter establishes the book's emphasis on the "thing power" of political icons in eighteenth-century America and beyond. Following the work of Jane Bennett, Bellion conceives of these objects as vital matter and proposes that we approach iconoclasm not simply as the human destruction of things but as a phenomenon in which things act on people and participate in the rituals of destruction. Importantly, these objects signified differently among New York's diverse population...

Poetry Wars: Verse and Politics in the American Revolution and Early Republic

Letters of Members of the Continental Congress, <i>by Edmund C. Burnett</i>; Letters on the American Revolution, 1774-1776, <i>by Margaret W. Willard</i>; Letters from America, 1776-1779. Being Letters of Brunswick, Hessian, and Waldeck Officers with the British Armies during the Revolution, <i>by Ray W. Pettengill</i>; The Journal of Nicholas Cresswell, 1774-1777.

This chapter explores the tumultuous events in the Mohawk Valley during the American Revolution, highlighting the deep divisions and conflicts among colonists, Loyalists, and the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee. It mentions rebels like Henry Timmerman who sought independence from British rule, while figures like Sir John Johnson and Joseph Brant allied with Loyalists, leveraging Native alliances to counteract the rebellion. The Oneidas initially advocated neutrality to avoid the devastation of war but eventually sided with the United States, offering intelligence and military support. The chapter alludes to the Continental Congress that promised to honor the Line of Property and reopen trade, but internal disputes among the Haudenosaunee and pressure from both the British and Americans fractured their unity. Amid escalating violence, General Herkimer's militia faced overwhelming challenges with limited support, as British forces aimed to dominate the waterways and crush the patriot stronghold in New York.

The chapter examines the first year of Benjamin Franklin’s mission to France as a commissioner of the Continental Congress as an early example of US public diplomacy. This first case examines the different ways in which Franklin engaged with the French (and European) public to achieve both immediate and long-term foreign policy goals for the USA. The key findings of this case demonstrate how Franklin and the other appointed US commissioners valued representing the nation to the people of France; the methods used to engage with the people of France and their similarity to public diplomacy today; and the valuable role the engagement played in the American Revolution. The case also discusses some of the issues Franklin had with engagement, as they relate to the key problems identified in Chap. 1.

As a result of the repeated failure of his revolutionary efforts, Sun Yat-sen decided to borrow from the Soviet Union's successful experience. But his advocacy of a total revolution by the whole people was essentially contradictory to the proletarian revolution of Soviet Union. After the Guomindang (KMT) reorganized and began to admit members of the Chinese Communist Party, they gained considerable power within the KMT and were able to influence its political line, which gave rise to an eruption of ideological contradiction. Within the KMT, controversies erupted between the left and the right, and in society conflicts emerged between merchants and workers. By this time Guangdong merchants were already in a state of discontent with the revolutionary government, because they had been subjected to a range of severe harassments stemming from levies imposed by both the government and visiting armies. After its reorganization, the KMT headquarters established peasants' and workers' bureaus, but lacked any corresponding merchants' bureau. Its propaganda and policy were biased toward the peasantry and workers to the neglect of merchants, which caused the latter to suspect the KMT of promoting communism. As far this point is concerned, the conflict between merchant militia and the government was based on both ideological differences and practical fears. As well the left and the right within the KMT and the CCP all engaged actively in the conflict, in a struggle for revolutionary leadership. The right cultivated the power of merchants and promoted party organizational reform, while the left established an additional bureau of merchants in its fight against the right. The establishment of this bureau by the KMT headquarters was on the one hand a measure to pacify merchants in the wake of the conflict with merchant militia, while on the other hand it implied a conflict of revolutionary line. However, although the left established a merchants' bureau, it had no clear plan as to how to define the status of merchants in a revolutionary program based primarily on the peasantry and workers. Not until the second plenary conference of national representatives of the KMT, was a merchants' movement adopted as party policy. But owing to the fundamental contradictions between the two ideologies and revolutionary lines of the KMT and the CCP, the issues surrounding merchants were to constantly reappear without resolution.

This paper argues that revolutionary regimes often persecute intellectuals because these educated individuals are perceived as threats to ideological purity and political control. To demonstrate this thesis, the study compares three historical revolutions: France’s Reign of Terror, China’s Cultural Revolution, and Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge. In each case, intellectuals were scapegoated as enemies of the revolution and blamed for the nation’s problems. Revolutionary leaders fueled anti-elitism by rallying the masses against scholars and professionals. These intellectuals were portrayed as symbols of the old order and privileged classes. The regimes also displayed ideological extremism, enforcing strict conformity and punishing any independent thought as subversive. Overall, despite differing contexts, all three revolutions followed a similar pattern of vilifying and suppressing intellectuals to maintain ideological purity and political control.

SOME historical scholar, devoted by taste and habits to close research, might well examine the records still accessible of our colonial age, to ascertain the laws and usages which prevailed before the American Revolution in each of the thirteen original colonies concerning the elective franchise.1 For this is a subject whose exposition must depend, not upon a priori reasoning, but upon the facts. So far as the charters of that long adolescent period afford any light they make but three things plainly evident: (i) That voting was common in all these colonies under one reservation or another; (2) that in Rhode Island and Connecticut, under those highly liberal charters from Charles II. which served each state for a considerable space of this nineteenth century after royalty had been abolished, and in Massachusetts, too, under her earliest grants, this elective franchise was largely exercised; (3) that, for most of our colonial period at least, in most of the other colonies the voter's right was usually confined to the choice of local town and county officers and of local representatives in that single popular assembly or legislative branch which resembled the House of Commons in the mother country. But when we reach I776, and the era during which these thirteen commonwealths shook off united the British yoke and organized state governments apart, most of the written state constitutions are seen disclosing local predilections attaching to the right of elector. And from that date forward the evolution of the American voter may be fairly traced through a comparative study of these fundamental frameworks. No doubt under the earliest constitutions of such Revolutionary states the franchise was bestowed upon the people in accordance mainly with colonial practice and sentiment. Rhode Island and Connecticut, to be sure, retained colonial charters which left the matter largely to legislative discretion; but the other eleven states established constitutions for themselves. To take the first period of about twelve years which preceded the adoption of our federal constitution (I 776-1788), comparison shows a certain homogeneousness in the policy of admitting freemen to participate by their votes in a representative and republican state government; while at the same time appeared various points of difference. In general the voter was to be a male resident of the state, at least twenty-one years lDr. Cortlandt F. Bishop, in his recent History of Elections in the American Colonies (III. Columbia College Studies, No. I), supplies a scholarly essay on this topic. ( 665 )

This paper employs a broadside not consulted hitherto by scholars of the song “Yankee Doodle” and a more concerted analysis of the song’s carnivalesque references to gender and class to offer new revelations about the origins and role of the famous ditty. “Yankee Doodle” stood at the center of a contested cultural conflict over manhood and class status in the North American British colonies leading up to and during the American Revolution. Although both sides over these years of colonial struggle between American insurgents and the British reveled in the song as they hurled rhetorical shafts at their foes, its references to compromised manhood proved more potent in the hands of Patriot rebels than in the hands of British troops and Loyalists. Emerging by the end of the war as the anthem of the Revolution, “Yankee Doodle” also helped shape the intellectual starting points for the new republic in favor of American commoners, and it undermined more elitist constructions of manhood that had become associated with the effeminate tropes of the fop and the cuckold.

Power, Gender, and ΙοÎμντπϕ in the Irish Free State Maryann Gialanella Valiulis In 1932, Eamon de Valera, leader of the Irish Free State, dehvered the eulogy on the death of Margaret Pearse, mother of the famed 1916 revolutionary leaders, Patrick and William. In it, he described the dominant Irish male pohtical behef of the period concerning the ideal Irish woman and began his eulogy by noting: But for the fame of her sons the noble woman at whose grave we are gathered would, perhaps, never have been heard of outside the narrow circle of her personal friends. Her modesty would have kept her out of the pubhc eye. Yet it was from her that... [her sons] learnt that ardent love for Ireland and for Gaelic culture and tradition that became the passion of their hves. It was from her that they inherited the strength of soul that made them resolute and unshrinking in the career they foresaw would end in death.1 De Valera then went on to say that Margaret Pearse must have known long in advance of her son Patrick's desire for martyrdom and must have: suffered in advance the sorrow of his death. When the time of parting came she too was prepared. This loving and tender woman resisted the promptings of her mother's heart; she did not seek to hold her sons back. She bade them go... she bore bravely the sorrow of their death. As she once said, she knew that her boys had done right and that she too had done right in giving them for their country.2 After the death of her sons, Margaret Pearse, de Valera commented approvingly, saw her role as being "to hold what they upheld." She fulfiUed this role, he claimed, not with bitterness and complaint but rather with courage, charity, and cheerfulness.3 Here was the ideal Irish woman. She was first and foremost a mother who inculcated in her chüdren, her sons in particular, a love of country, of Gaelic culture and fradition, of freedom for Ireland. This was the Irish version of Republican Motherhood which surfaced after both the American Revolution and the French Revolution: women's role was to produce and educate sons in the nationalist fradition to be good and virtuous citizens of the new state.4 But de Valera goes beyond this image, delineating the particular self-sacrificing attributes that make up the Irish Republican Mother, like Mary who understood that her son Jesus must die, so too did Margaret Pearse understand that her sons must die, putting the good of the nation above her own motherly desires. Indeed, de Valera © 1995 Journal of Women-s History, Vol 6 No. 4/Vol 7 No. ι (Winter/Spring) 118 Journal of Women's History Winter/Spring paints the picture of the Irish Pieta, the noble suffering mother holding the dead son—in this case two dead sons.5 De Valera's ideal woman was also passive. She has no work of her own to do but rather fulfUls the wishes of her sons or husband or brothers.6 She performs her role in pubhc, not with an agenda of her own but rather as a living vessel through which the dead may speak. AU of this bespeaks an air of self-effacement, of meekness, of indirectness. What it lacks is passion, vitality, independence, and assertiveness . What it does not incorporate is a pubhc identity for women. De Valera's aUusion to the Virgin Mary was important and revealing. In constructing the ideal Irish woman, politicians received the enthusiastic support of the Cathohc Church. Ecclesiastical leaders legitimated and sanctioned both the limited vision of women's role in the state as weU as the restrictive legislation which politicians proffered. The prelates agreed that women should be denied access to the pubhc arena. This idealized picture also represented a consensus among pohtical leaders which reached across the nationalist divide separating the two major pohtical parties, Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna FaU.7 For example , in 1925 the Cosgrave government restricted women's access to the upper levels of the civü service. In 1935 the de Valera government enacted legislation which gave it the power...

Mercy Otis Warren, wife of General James Warren and sister of James Otis, was one of the most vocal supporters of the patriot cause during the American Revolution. Called “a definite stimulator of the Revolutionary leaders” (Christ 7), she wrote extensively: poems, sketches, letters, and plays, and was praised by John Adams as a “political pen which has no equal that I know of in this country” (Quinn 34). Of her plays, The Adulateur (1773), The Defeat (1773), The Group (1775), The Blockheads (1776), and The Motley Assembly (1779), she claimed only one, The Group, and that long after publication; all of her work was published anonymously. This anonymity poses no real problem for authorship for most of the plays, for there is reasonably strong documentary or internal evidence indicating that she wrote The Adulateur, The Defeat, and The Motley Assembly, as well as The Group, and there is general agreement that she wrote these plays.