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Abstract
Our analysis of farmer and tavern-keeper William Manning's 1798 Key of Libberty extends the concept of American republican rhetoric to include both elite and vernacular forms. We find that the key components of Manning's vernacular republicanism are: an aggressive use of the rhetoric of critique; the demand for transparency in public argument; the rejection of elite leadership; and the belief that decisions must be made in the interest of the common good. We compare vernacular to elite republicanism and conclude that the vernacular perspective has endured in American reform rhetoric.
Notes
1. Samuel Eliot Morison and William Manning, “The Key of Libberty,” The William and Mary Quarterly 13, no. 2. (1956): 202–254, see 221.
2. On vernacular rhetoric see: Kent A. Ono and John M. Sloop, Shifting Borders: Rhetoric, Immigration, and California's Proposition 187 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 13; Gerard A. Hauser, Vernacular Voices: The Rhetoric and Publics of the Public Sphere (Columbia, University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities; Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1991), 43. The scholarly literature on civic republicanism as a political language is vast. Some useful works for rhetorical scholars include: James Jasinski, “Rhetoric and Judgment in the Constitutional Ratification Debate of 1787–1788: An Exploration in the Relationship between Theory and Critical Practice,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): 197–218; Zoltan Vajda, “John C. Calhoun's Republicanism Revisited,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 4 (2001): 433–57; Bradford Vivian, “Jefferson's Other,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 284–302; J. G. A. Pocock, “Between Gog and Magog: The Republican Thesis and the Ideologia Americana,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 325–46; J. G. A. Pocock,“Verbalizing a Political Act: Toward a Politics of Speech,” Political Theory 1 (1973): 27–45; J. G. A. Pocock,“Machiavelli, Harrington and English Political Ideologies on the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 22 (1965): 549–83; Stephen Howard Browne, “‘The Circle of Our Felicities’: Thomas Jefferson's First Inaugural Address and the Rhetoric of Nationhood,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 5 (2002): 409–38; M. N. S. Sellers, American Republicanism: Roman Ideology in the United States Constitution (New York: New York University Press, 1994); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul A. Rahe, Republics Ancient and Modern: Classical Republicanism and the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Stephen H. Browne, Jefferson's Call for Nationhood: The First Inaugural Address (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2003); Michael William Pfau, “Time, Tropes, and Textuality: Reading Republicanism in Charles Sumner's ‘Crime Against Kansas,’ ” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 6 (2003): 385–414.
3. Michael P. Kramer, Imagining Language in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), ix.
4. Thomas Gustafson, Representative Words: Politics, Literature, and the American Language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 14.
5. Or in “rhet-trickery” ways according to Wayne Booth. Presentation to Alliance of Rhetoric Societies, Evanston, IL, September 12, 2003.
6. Morison, Key, 204–207; Michael Merrill and Sean Wilentz, “William Manning and the Invention of American Politics,” in The Key of Liberty: The Life and Democratic Writings of William Manning, “A Laborer,” 1747–1814 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 3–86. In this essay we use the Morison edition of the Key, mainly because Merrill and Wilentz's decision to correct Manning's spelling and syntax causes the text to lose much of its charm. The decision also seems odd in light of Merrill and Wilentz' own radical democratic beliefs. Edmund S. Morgan accuses the editors of violating the canons of historical editing: “Pioneers of Paranoia,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994, 12. The fact that Manning's essay was unpublished and lacked an audience in his immediate context may remind rhetorical critics of John Jay Chapman's “Coatesville Address” as discussed by Edwin Black in Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method, 2nd ed. (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), 78–90. Like Manning, Chapman was unable to attract an audience for his anti-lynching speech, but, as Black writes, “The context of the Coatesville Address is not the vacant grocery store in 1912. Rather, the discourse must be understood as joining the dialogue participated in by Jefferson, Tocqueville, Lincoln, Melville, Henry Adams, Samuel Clemens, Santayana, and Faulkner—a dialogue on the moral dimensions of the American experience” (83–84).
7. Morison, Key, 204.
8. There were precedents for “dialect” writing, notably the letters written by John Adams under the name “Humphrey Ploughjogger” to the Boston Gazette in January 1767; see Robert J. Taylor, ed., Papers of John Adams, I (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1977), 174–82 (we are indebted to James M. Farrell for this reference). See also the discussion of Jedediah Peck (who also used the nom de plume “Plough-Jogger”) in Alan Taylor, William Cooper's Town: Power and Persuasion on the Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995), 242–43. There is linguistic evidence that Manning was writing in his own dialect rather than “dumbing down” his language for rhetorical purposes. His phonetic spelling is consistent with the dialect spoken in his region of Massachusetts during this period; see two articles by Henry Alexander, “A Sidelight on Eighteenth-Century American English,” Queen's Quarterly 31 (1923): 173–81, and “Early American Pronunciation and Syntax,” American Speech 1, no. 3 (1925): 141–48. Alexander oddly refers to Manning as “a self-educated farmer-politician who in his anti-Jeffersonian fervor leaves his orthography to take care of itself and obviously reflects very faithfully his native New England speech” (“Early American Pronunciation and Syntax,” 143).
9. William David Sloane, “The Media and Public Opinion,” in The Significance of the Media in American History, ed. James D. Startt and William David Sloane (Northport, AL: Vison Press, 1994), 97.
10. Morison, Key, 207.
11. “The Key of Libberty,” The Freeman 7 (May 2, 1923), 173–74; James O'Neal, “An Early Labor Philosopher,” The Call Magazine, June 10, 17, 24, 1923. Harold Laski, the British socialist leader, wrote to Oliver Wendell Holmes on June 16, 1922, that he had just read Morison's edition of the pamphlet by Manning: “I thought it very interesting, and though the retention of the original spelling was a pedantic crime, I must say it confirmed all my admiration for the men of the revolution.” See Holmes–Laski Letters: The Correspondence of Mr. Justice Holmes and Harold J. Laski 1916–1935, Vol. I, ed., Mark DeWolfe Howe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1953), 432–33.
12. Eugene P. Link, Democratic Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942), 49, 91, 96, 159, 175.
13. Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought, 2nd ed. (New York: Harper and Row, 1951), 141–42.
14. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1963), 151–57.
15. Christopher Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 8.
16. Merrill and Wilentz, however, made the strange choice of modernizing Manning's spelling, which seems to make the text lose some of its charm. They also use the 1799 version of the Key, which does not include the more inflammatory comments on President Washington that are in Morison's version.
17. Edmund S. Morgan, “Pioneers of Paranoia,” New York Review of Books, October 6, 1994, 11–13. Another negative review came from the labor historian Marcus Rediker, who claims that Manning was actually part of an “American Thermidor,” since he did not support the Shays' or Whiskey Rebellions. Rediker finds him to be “a man of cosmic vanity, naive provincialism, and contentious self-righteousness, the combination of which very likely made him unbearable to those who knew him”; see Review of The Key of Liberty by Michael Merill and Sean Wilentz, International Labor and Working Class History 47 (Spring 1995): 147–49.
18. The Virginian Anti-Federalists' opposition to the Constitution as ratified made Madison's election to Congress contingent upon his reversing his previous opposition to a national Bill of Rights.
19. Stephen J. Hartnett and Jennifer R. Mercieca, “‘Has Your Courage Rusted?’: National Security and the Contested Rhetorical Norms of Republicanism in Post-Revolutionary America, 1798–1801,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs (forthcoming, 2006).
20. Roger G. Kennedy argues persuasively in Mr. Jefferson's Lost Cause: Land, Farmers, Slavery, and the Louisiana Purchase (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003) that Republicans in general, and Jefferson in particular, may have ostensibly desired such a middling economy, but consistently constructed policy to aid large planters rather than their cherished small farmers.
21. Morison, 211–12.
22. Jennifer R. Mercieca, “‘We, the People,’ the Rhetorics of Republicanism and the American Political Fiction, 1776–1845” (Ph.D diss, University of Illinois, 2003), 27.
23. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1991), 145–46.
24. Garry Wills, Cincinnatus: George Washington and the Enlightenment (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1984), 13; see p. 36 for Parson Weems' more elaborate version of the tale.
25. Morison's footnote to this section reads, “The author here repeats charges against the Society of the Cincinnati which were generally believed by plain folk at that time, but without foundation in fact,” 223.
26. The Massachusetts Soldiery, “Having observed in one of your late magazines,” Worcester Magazine … Containing Politicks, Miscellanies, Poetry, and News, February 8, 1787, 2, 45.
27. Wills, 140.
28. Cited in Wallace Evan Davies, “The Society of the Cincinnati in New England, 1783–1800,” William and Mary Quarterly 5 (January 1948): 11.
29. Davies, 4–9.
30. Wills, 139–48.
31. Morison, 224.
32. Morison, 225.
33. For a recent reworking of the Illuminati conspiracy, see Pat Robertson, The New World Order (Dallas: Word, 1991), 67–68.
34. Davies seems to think that fears about the Society's monarchism were justified, 22n, 89. So does Robert Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 20. On conspiracy reasoning in the 18th century, see Gordon S. Wood, “Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style: Causality and Deceit in the Eighteenth Century,” William and Mary Quarterly 39 (1982): 401–41.
35. Morison, 230. Readers who grew up in rural America will understand Manning's joke here, but, given the continued drift of the Republic away from its agrarian roots, it may be helpful to point out that a mule is the sterile (and remarkably stubborn) offspring of a horse and a donkey.
36. Cited in Broadus Mitchell, Alexander Hamilton: A Concise Biography (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1999), 179.
37. Drew McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996); Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York: Penguin Books, 2004).
38. Journal of the House of Representatives of the United States, 1789–1793, Friday, January 8, 1790, 136.
39. For a very readable recent defense of Hamilton's proposals, see John Steel Gordon, Hamilton's Blessing: The Extraordinary Life and Times of Our National Debt (New York: Penguin, 1998), 11–41.
40. Morison, 244.
41. William Maclay, The Diary of William Maclay and Other Notes on Senate Debates, March 4, 1789–March 3, 1791, ed. Kenneth R. Bowling and Helen E. Veit (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 377.
42. Maclay, 377.
43. National Gazette, September 29, 1792. Cited in “The Diaries of George Washington, Vol VI Jan. 1790–Dec. 1799,” ed. Donald Jackson and Dorothy Twohig (Chanolltesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979), 171n, 8.
44. Whisky, “Whisky versus Government” The American Museum, or, Universal Magazine, April, 1792. 171–176.
45. Morison, 241. Manning was incorrect—the excise tax was enforced throughout the country.
46. Reportedly graffiti could be found in Boston that read, “Damn John Jay! Damn everyone who won't damn John Jay!! Damn everyone that won't put lights in his windows and sit up all night damning John Jay!!!” See discussion of the Jay Treaty at Digital History, http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/documents/documents_p2.cfm?doc = 335.
47. William Cobbett, “Papers Relative to the Treaty with Great Britain,” Porcupine's Political Censor, April 1796, 117.
48. Morison, 237.
49. Morison, 238.
50. James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), 71.
51. Russell L. Hanson, The Democratic Imagination Conversations with our Past (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 22–53.
52. Morison, 221–23.
53. Morison, 238. On the “adultrious Hambleton's” affair with Maria Reynolds, see Forest McDonald, Alexander Hamilton (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979), 227–30.
54. Morison, 245–46.
55. Morison, 247–51.
56. Morison, 251.
57. Alan Taylor, 23.
58. Alan Taylor, 287.
59. Alan Taylor, 361.
60. On populism as a distinctive American political and rhetorical style, see Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History (New York: Basic Books, 1995). Kazin locates the populist impulse in Thomas Jefferson's “producerist” view of democracy, a view clearly shared by Manning and, later, Andrew Jackson. The tension between producerist and elitist strands in American republican ideology and language needs further study.
61. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution. But this is not to say that orality is insignificant in the Key. It is important to note Manning's background as a tavern-keeper. As David W. Conroy argues in his fascinating study, In Public Houses, “Manning's style reflects the kind of tavern-oratory more men had come to expect from their leaders. He admired but also distrusted the eloquence traditionally striven for in political expression.” David W. Conroy, Jr., In Public Houses: Drink and the Revolution of Authority in Colonial Massachusetts (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 313.
62. Robert Hariman, Political Style: The Artistry of Power (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 96.
63. Hariman, 112.
64. Stephen Howard Browne, “The Circle of Our Felicities,”409; Jefferson's Call for Nationhood. See also Jennifer R. Mercieca, Review of Jefferson's Call for Nationhood by Stephen H. Browne, Quarterly Journal of Speech 91 (November 2004), 519–521.
65. Mario Savio, “An End to History,” December 2, 1964, Free Speech Movement Online Archive, http:www.fsm-a.org/stacks/endhistorysavio.html. This speech was recorded during the December 2 sit-in at Sproul Hall. After first considering revising the speech before allowing it to be circulated, Savio gave his permission for it to be published in its original form in Humanity, An Arena of Critique and Commitment 2 (December 1964), 2. It is also reprinted in “Takin' it to the streets”: A Sixties Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 111–15; in The Berkeley Student Revolt, ed. Lipset and Wolin, 216–19, and elsewhere.