The Traumatic Colonel. Ed White

“general welfare” clause and triggered by Hamilton’s “Report on the Subject of Manufactures” (submitted December 1791). Each of these conflicts was accompanied by a substantial body of print argument—not just Hamilton’s theses but a number of essays, pamphlets, and editorials, not to mention internal Cabinet memoranda. Each conflict was narrowly decided in favor of the northern financial classes, and none of these conflicts could, in its own turn, activate the semiotic resources to mobilize mass political action, instead leaving the elites deadlocked. Consequently, these years also witnessed a series of interventions to break this deadlock and translate these conflicts into an iconic repertoire, whereby political disagreements could be reconfigured symbolically.

      Critical here was the rise of a new form of political press. In the summer of 1791, for example, Jefferson and Madison, having led and lost the battle against the bank, began urging Philip Freneau to relocate to Philadelphia to launch a national newspaper capable of answering John Fenno’s Gazette of the United States, founded at Hamilton’s instigation in 1789; Freneau’s paper, the National Gazette, began publishing in late October 1791. From that moment, print played an increasingly important role in ironizing political discourse. There had already been partisan newspapers, to be sure, but now competing discourses were coordinated and synchronized by national papers. Both papers continued to publish essays of political theory—indeed, Hamilton and Madison wrote scores of tracts during these years—but the classic essay of the deliberative public sphere was increasingly complemented by new forms influenced by Revolutionary propaganda. Freneau’s satire “Rules for Changing a Limited Republican Government into an Unlimited Hereditary One” (July 1792) beautifully illustrates this transition. Presented as a series of proposals for subverting the Revolutionary heritage, the essay’s main achievement was the construction of the persona of a devious conspiratorial monarchist. The essay concluded ominously:

      Should it be found impossible, however, to prevent the people from awaking and uniting; should all artificial distinctions give way to the natural division between the lordly minded few and the well-disposed many; should all who have common interest make a common cause and shew an inflexible attachment to republicanism in opposition to a government of monarchy and money, why then * * * * *—⁴⁰

      This abrupt conclusion not only confirms the semiotic priority granted to character over plot but typographically denotates the symbolic space to be filled in the next few years. Whatever the subject matter of public discourse, character would become a regular part of political debate. In 1791, the publication of The Rights of Man prompted a huge body of secondary literature not simply on Paine’s arguments but on Paine himself, giving us the legendary caricature of the rabid, drunk womanizer.⁴¹ A decade later, it was routine for the Federalist newspapers to publish long mocking analyses of the president’s writing style, as if his character and policies could be ascertained by his elaborate and effeminate diction and sentence structure.

      These same years saw a series of pamphlets written as political commentary and presenting an informal characterological theory of political partisanship—this is the moment we typically recognize as the birth of the US party system. From our perspective, the primary cultural work of the party framework was the translation of political disputes into characterological terms, as parties came to be defined not so much by political and theoretical positions or the economic interests of their member groups as by individuals or personality profiles. A good illustration of this emerging analysis can be found in William Laughton Smith’s 1792 pamphlet The Politicks and Views of a Certain Party, Displayed, which began by marveling at the attacks from Freneau’s paper on measures “sanctioned by the Man we all love and revere”—Washington, of course.⁴² The ensuing narrative of votes translated the economic debates of 1790–92 into a tale of this congressman expressing shame and remorse, these congressmen voting in secret in committee, and those who “never openly avowed” their views (11). Hamilton’s particular positions were recast as indices of his historic stature as a minister of state (“his reputation traversed the ocean and in distant climes his Name was mentioned among the great ministers of the age”); criticisms were therefore the result of “Envy” begotten from “Fame” (12). Deliberative disagreements over the duration clause in the banking bill were now described with reference to “solemn threats, sulky looks, big works and great Guns” (17). This political breakdown coincided with “the arrival in this Country of a certain Personage” (3)—Jefferson’s return from France—and this “personage,” later called “the Generalissimo” (with Madison, his “second in command,” known also as “the General”; 22), is the subject of the final third of the essay.⁴³ In these pages, we find one of the first character sketches of this next moment of the Founders:

      Had an inquisitive mind in those days [1790] sought for evidence of his Abilities, as a Statesman, he would have been referred to the confusions in France, the offspring of certain political dogmas fostered by the American Minister, and to certain theoretical principles only fit for Utopia: As a Warrior, to his Exploits at Monticelli; as a Philosopher, to his discovery of the inferiority of Blacks to Whites, because they are more unsavory and secrete more by the kidnies; as a Mathematician, to his whirligig chair. (29)

      Elsewhere Jefferson is cast as “a certain tall and awkward Bird which hides its head behind a Tree and supposes itself unseen tho’ its posteriors are publicly displayed” (32–33), as “this philosophical Patriot, or patriotic Philosopher” (35), and as the devious sponsor of the “Poetaster” (Freneau) given a position as a translator in the State Department (33).

      Contributing to this partisan polarization was the well-known international conflict between the two global powers vying for hegemony. The catalyzing role of the French Revolution provided a lexicon for accelerating and polarizing the semiotic unfolding. In early 1793, the execution of Louis XVI (January) and the declaration of war against Britain (February) set the stage for recurring crises with France through the next two decades. If students of American history even today have a hazy familiarity with a series of proper nouns from this period—Genet, the Jay Treaty, the XYZ Affair—it is because each name denotes a scandal that momentarily clarified and advanced the semiotic polarization, ostensibly around the polar terms of England and France. If events during the Jefferson and Madison administrations revealed the ephemeral nature of this distinction, this did not make it insignificant.

      Finally, we must add that Federalist rule clamped down on popular political outlets. Popular instruction had already been discouraged during the first Congress (August 1789), but the crucial moment came with the formation of the Democratic-Republican Societies (spring 1793), concurrent with the arrival of Genet. These societies’ association first with Jacobinism and then with the so-called Whiskey Rebellion led to their condemnation in Washington’s Message to the Third Congress (November 1794) and a military expedition led by Washington himself, with Hamilton at his side. After the suppression of the insurrection—which itself had a tremendous chilling effect—popular political engagement was increasingly displaced to the press and the party. The frenzy over the XYZ Affair and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 further stifled popular political activities, while increasing the political significance of the national partisan papers. Again, we miss the important structural and cultural transformations of the moment if we see these events as “tap[ping] into a widespread, deep-seated, and preexisting animus towards such ideas”; as Seth Cotlar has argued, the reverse is the case—this moment “led to the rapid crystallization of a xenophobic and explicitly anti-revolutionary vision of American politics.”⁴⁴

      The extensive political conflicts and mobilizations, their complex and esoteric formulations, the international polarization, an electoral system consolidating a two-party complex, the rise of the partisan press and the diminution of vernacular political organization—all of these meant that the 1790s would see the reactivation of the Founders constellation. We should be clear: we are not arguing that the Founders were the inevitable cynical production of propagandists seeking to mobilize supporters. Propagandists were at work and accentuated the partisan inflections, to be sure, but the symbolic imperative and its effectivity betoken a cultural phenomenon beyond political manipulation. As the Arnold-André pairing showed, the symbolic constellation did not need to be confined to the macropolitical sphere, as the iconic portraiture