Empire of Liberty: A History of the Early Republic, 1789-1815 (95 page)

A
LWAYS THE GOAL
of every cultural effort during these post-Revolutionary years was to instill the right feelings in the spectators. “Emulation,” seeing virtuous exemplars and becoming desirous of exceeding them, said Jefferson, was the best means of inculcating virtue in the society.
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Anything that might inspire patriotic and republican sentiments, such as viewing Washington’s statue or one of his many portraits, was encouraged, and anything that smacked of European dissipation and luxury, even something as seemingly innocuous as a semi-monthly tea assembly in Boston in the 1780s, was criticized. In 1783 Jeremy Belknap urged Congress to display all the trophies taken from the British during the war, since the sight of them would “fan the flame of liberty and independence.”
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In 1787 the New England founders of Marietta, Ohio, aimed to inspire the new settlers with the right spirit by calling the public squares in the town Capitolium and Quadranou in emulation of the Roman republic. With similar hopes of instilling the proper republican attitudes, Jefferson in the 1780s proposed some extraordinary classical names, including Assenisipia, Pelisipia, and Cherronesus, for the new states of the West.

When compared to the extravagant French effort in the succeeding years under the direction of Jacques-Louis David to put the arts into the service of revolution and republicanism, the American attempts to exploit the fine arts for the sake of their Revolution and their new Republic may seem pale and feeble.
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Yet in the context of America’s undeveloped
provincial situation in the eighteenth century and its relative lack of experience in the arts, the American Revolutionaries’ aims and achievements are truly astonishing.

On the face of it, the creation of a monumental city like Washington, D.C., in the midst of the wilderness is incredible. But it becomes comprehensible in light of America’s neoclassical aspirations, expressed, for example, in poet David Humphreys’s vision of the United States as a rebirth of the ancient Roman republic. “What Rome, once virtuous, saw, this gives us now—/ Heroes and statesmen, awful from the plough.”
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Even little Goose Creek off the Potomac was renamed the Tiber.
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Probably no other American had more effect on America’s public architecture than Jefferson, and no one emphasized the moral and public purposes of the arts more than he. He was “an enthusiast on the subject of the arts,” he said, and of all the arts, architecture was his special “delight.” He believed that nothing showed as much as “this beautiful art,” and he spent his life “putting up and pulling down” buildings. (Indeed, Americans in this period were almost totally interested in architectural exteriors and spent very little time on interior design.)
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From France in the 1780s Jefferson badgered his Virginia colleagues into erecting as the new capitol of the state in Richmond a magnificent copy of the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple at Nîmes from the first century
A.D
. This classical building, he explained, “has pleased, universally, for nearly two thousand years,” and it would be a perfect model for republican America. Indeed, the purpose of erecting such a Roman temple amidst the muddy streets of a backwoods town in Virginia, said Jefferson, was “to improve the taste of my countrymen, to increase their reputation, and to reconcile to them the respect of the world, and procure them its praise.”
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No matter that the Virginians had to interrupt their original plans and tear down some of what they had begun building to make room for Jefferson’s model. No matter too that a Roman temple was hard to heat and was acoustically impossible. Other considerations mattered more. With the erection of this Virginia capitol Jefferson single-handedly influenced the classical style of public buildings in America. And he
helped to place a moral and civic burden on the arts that would prove difficult to sustain in subsequent years.

T
HE CULTURAL RELICS
of these neoclassical dreams are with Americans still: not only in the endless proliferation of Greek and Roman temples but in the names of towns like Athens, Rome, Syracuse, and Troy; in the designation of political institutions like capitols and senates; in political symbols like the goddess Liberty and numerous Latin mottoes; and in poetry and songs like “Hail Columbia.” But the spirit that once inspired these things, the meaning they had for the Revolutionaries, has been lost and was waning even as they were being created. Indeed, much of the culture inherited from the Revolutionary period remains only as an awkward reminder of the brevity of America’s classical age.

With such high hopes and grandiose expectations the disillusionment among American artists and intellectuals in the years following the Revolution was profound. Culturally, the United States still seemed to be a provincial outpost of the British Empire. Most of the plays that Americans watched in the period were not American but British in origin and were performed by traveling British actors. Of the 160 plays professionally put on in Philadelphia between May 1792 and July 1794 only 2 were written by Americans. Even when native authors attempted something of their own, the English influence was inescapable. The play
Independence
, written in 1805 by the young South Carolina playwright William Ioor, was a perfect example. Despite its patriotic title, the play was based on an English novel, was set in England, and had only English characters. Seventy percent of the books Americans read were pirated English editions. About three-fourths of every issue of one of America’s leading magazines, the
Columbian
, was borrowed from British sources. Most of the songs Americans sang were British songs. The homes and gardens of Americans were copies of English styles, and often in
retarditaire
taste. In 1808 the artist William Birch issued his collection of engravings of
The Country Seats of the United States of America
, modeled on British publications dealing with the country estates of the English landed gentry and nobility, and found many eager buyers.
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So imitative were the arts that some Americans were ready to concede that they were European luxuries after all and thus dangerous to American republicanism. But others, such as Benjamin Henry Latrobe, were desperate to prove that the “arts have not an injurious, but a beneficent effect upon the morals, and even on the liberties of our country.” While Europeans could take the arts for granted, Americans could not. Since, as Latrobe pointed out, “our national prejudices are unfavorable to the fine arts,” the arts had to be repeatedly defended and justified. The peculiarly egalitarian and unstable character of American society, right from the beginning of the Revolutionary movement, had put the arts on the defensive.
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While eighteenth-century Europe had its own intellectual opponents of the arts (Rousseau being the most famous), there the debate over the place of the arts in society had been carried on for a century or more and had never endangered the legitimacy of art. But America’s inexperience with the fine arts and the greater rapidity and intensity of its republican social revolution in comparison with Europe’s forced it to telescope and compress its neoclassical transformation, leading to both the excited over-estimations and the exaggerated apologies, the “hothouse atmosphere of forced growth,” as historian Neil Harris has described it.
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Desiring to make the arts safe for republicanism, Americans placed a heavy moral and social burden upon them—heavier certainly than they bore in Europe—and left both the arts and artists little room for autonomy and originality. “While many other nations are wasting the brilliant efforts of genius in monuments of ingenious folly, to perpetuate their pride, the Americans, according to the true spirit of republicanism,” wrote Jedidiah Morse in his 1791 geographic reader, “are employed almost entirely in works of public and private utility.”
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It was evident that the arts in America had to be morally instructive and socially useful. But most Revolutionaries had assumed that the morality to be inculcated would be elitist and classical, emphasizing sobriety, rationality, and a noble stoicism. In the years following the Revolution, however, the morality of civic humanism became evangelicized and democratized, transformed into a shrill popular didacticism that sometimes ended up resembling little more than prudery. Since art was judged by the moral lessons it taught, ministers like Timothy Dwight drew no
sharp distinction between the sermons they delivered and the poetry they composed—everything had to be edifying.
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The theater especially had a reputation for licentiousness and corruption and consequently had been banned in every colony except Virginia and Maryland. One of the rules of Harvard College during the early 1770s declared that any undergraduate presuming “to be an Actor in, a Spectator at, or any Ways concerned in any Stage Plays, interludes or Theatrical Entertainments” would for the first offense be degraded and “for any repeated offence shall be rusticated or expelled.” In New York City the Sons of Liberty had burned down a theater that had defied the law against theaters. In 1774 the Continental Congress had urged Americans to discourage “every species of extravagance and dissipation,” including “exhibitions of shews, plays, other expensive diversions and entertainments.”
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Throughout the war the Congress had continued to recommend the suppression of play-going; in 1778 it declared that anyone holding an office under the United States would be dismissed if he encouraged or attended the theater. (This at the very moment the commander-in-chief was putting on Addison’s
Cato
for the troops.) No one in 1789 could talk the old patriot Samuel Adams out of his belief that the theater subverted all those “Characteristics of a Republic which we ought carefully to maintain.”
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Everywhere during the 1780s and 1790s—in New York, Philadelphia, Albany, Charleston, Portsmouth, Providence, Boston, and elsewhere—disputes broke out over the establishing of theaters. Of course, in most communities there were well-to-do elites that enjoyed the theater and had no problem with such expressions of luxury as tea parties and theatrical productions. But they had to contend with growing numbers, especially among the middling sorts like William Findley, who feared the influence of the theater and resented those wealthy merchants and luxury-loving professionals who favored it. These middling opponents argued that the theater stimulated debauchery, seduced young men, subverted religion, and spawned brothels. Some argued that it was the theater that had done the most to corrupt England, and thus it helped account for Britain’s tyrannical behavior that brought about the Revolution. Others suggested that the theater contributed to the spread of the deception and dissimulation
that were serious problems in America’s fluid society. “What was the talent of an actor?” asked the Presbyterian minister Samuel Miller, but the “art of counterfeiting himself, of putting on another character than his own, of appearing different than he is.”
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For many it seemed that the future of the new Republic itself had come to rest on preventing the performances of stage plays; “they only flourished when states were on the decline,” declared critics in Pennsylvania in 1785.
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Only with great difficulty were those gentlemanly elites who favored the theater able to have most of the laws against the stage repealed in the decades following the Revolution; and they did so largely by stressing the theater’s moral and civic purposes, sometimes sincerely but perhaps more often because these were the only justifications that could persuade an emerging middling popular culture obsessed with respectability. Washington loved the theater, but he had to defend it solely on the grounds that it would “advance the interest of private and public virtue” and “polish the manners and habits of society.”
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Elbridge Gerry tried to change Samuel Adams’s opinion of the theater by stressing that it was nothing more than a “school for morality.”
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In fact, plays had to be advertised as “moral lectures” or run the risk of being closed down. Shakespeare’s
Othello
was billed as “a Series of Moral Dialogues in Five Parts, depicting the evils of jealousy, and other bad passions.” So too was
Richard III
advertised as “The Fate of Tyranny,”
Hamlet
as “Filial Piety,” and Oliver Goldsmith’s
She Stoops to Conquer
as “Improper Education.” American theater managers cut and edited the imported British plays to the point where, as one critic complained, “the English comedy is reduced to the insipidity of a Presbyterian sermon.”
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Everywhere apologists for the much feared theater were compelled to argue, as William Haliburton of Boston did in 1792, that the theater was the best “engine” for reforming the morals of the society and for suppressing vulgar vices like gambling, drinking, and cockfighting.
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With clergymen
exploiting theatrical disasters, especially the devastating 1812 fire in Richmond that killed seventy-one persons, as evidence of God’s just punishment for the evils of play-going, defenders were always hard-pressed to justify the presence of the stage in their communities. A Charleston, South Carolina, supporter told the people not to worry about the theater: the “morals and manners of this country are too chaste to leave reason to apprehend that any improper plays will be written here for perhaps centuries to come.” When a person left the theater, it was said, he should “have no doubt about what was right and what was wrong, . . . and should testify . . . that he came away a better man than he went.” With such rhetoric flying about, ambitious playwrights could scarcely think of themselves as anything but secular parsons.
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