Industrialization and slavery in The Sugar Masters

            Our conversation this week touched upon a lot of the ideas that have been circulating throughout this semester. One of our major critiques of this book was that it seemed to cover theoretical and ideological ground with which we were already familiar. The notion that slavery and capitalism were not polar opposites is something that we have talked a lot about in our discussions this semester, and there were questions raised as to whether Follett was bringing new insight into this concept, or simply applying it to a different location and context.

        In addressing this question, it was important to keep in mind that our understanding of the interrelation of these two economic systems is significantly more nuanced, courtesy of HIST1970f, than most people who think about American history. For some readers, then, the clear and careful laying out of the argument of new methods of industrialization alongside long-held dynamics of slavery would have come as more of a surprise than it may have for us.

            For us, too, I think this book served an important purpose. For one thing, it is not simply a repetition of concepts we have already come across. The Louisiana sugar plantations were significantly different from both their southern U.S. and their Caribbean contemporaries. These differences suggest a particular notion of the sugar growing class as a category designed with absolute parameters of race. If free workers could not join the ranks of sugar plantation slaves, even when their manpower was greatly needed, this raises the question of whether Louisiana slaves actually constituted a class.

            Our attention to the distinction between slave labor and wage labor was complex and important. We discussed the striking similarities between the two systems, as well as examining the potential outcomes of highlighting those similarities. I think we came to the crux of the issue in noting that slavery is qualitatively different from wage labor, and that describing the two as interchangeable is a hugely problematic and inaccurate task. At the same time, though, taking note of the similarities without demanding that we equate wage labor with slavery gives us a lens with which we can integrate the industrializing and modernizing tendencies of Louisiana sugar plantations alongside their rigid and racially non-negotiable understanding of slavery.

            This discussion’s relation with agency is where it really gets hairy. Follett takes some major risks in describing slaves as complicit in their own enslavement, while at the same time, valorizing slaves’ agency over their acquiescence risks implying that slavery was not actually the cruel and inhuman system that it was. Agency is even more complex when it includes the agency of planter classes. Follett periodically tosses in a sentence that the slaveholders believed their own façade and rhetoric about paternalism. This unqualified psychological assessment throws the argument of slave compliance into perhaps unintentional contrast, and seems to further the implicit blaming of slaves for their own enslavement. 

Living Class: Response to Scraping By

I suppose that it is little surprising that Professor Rockman's book addresses many of the issues that have played out in his seminar this semester, but I think it made it hard in class to focus on any one of the arguments he raises in the book. I also think that it made it difficult for us to discern some of the theoretical positions that Rockman took in Scraping By: since it lays out explicitly many of the themes that have been implicit in our study, it was hard to see what was special about the book.

As such I would like to focus my response on two theoretical statements Rockman articulates in the text, and then critique how they play out in his methodology. I think that one of the most essential passages in the book occurs in the introduction when Rockman writes that

For the workers portrayed in this book, class experience was waiting every February for the harbor to thaw so that low-end jobs might resume. Class consciousness was knowing the proper pose of deference to get hired. Class Struggle was trying to meet the rent and scavenging for firewood to stay warm during winter. (Rockman, 11)

Although this seems like a descriptive statement about life in Baltimore, it is really a theoretical rejection of analysis that elevate class consciousness or class struggle, as these identifiers are traditionally understood, as requisites for the existence of class phenomena. As we discussed in seminar, this theoretical motivation lead Rockman to write a highly material history detailing the ways that individuals were impacted by social order in early American Baltimore.

One might contrast this understanding of class with that of Thompson who, while also focusing on experience, emphases that the emergence of a "class consciousness" that ties members of the social group together. On the surface Rockman's work agrees with Midleton and Smith's piece that we read early this year in the belief that class is a "constitutive element of social relationships emerging from inequalities in material conditions and social and cultural capital that serves as a primary way of signifying relationships of power." (Middleton and Smith, 11) I think that Rockman expands on this understanding when he argues that class is "mutually constitutive" with other social divisions typically invoked by the terms race and gender. On this front, I think that Rockman puts forward a satisfying way to quench the puerile desire, evident in a lot of social theory, to select from "race, class and gender" a primary driver of historical events. I think that Rockman demonstrates that it is impossible to separate the effect of racial divisions, or gender divisions from one another, or from the impact of class divisions in a market society.

The danger in Rockman's approach, is that his theoretical position makes it easy to see class divisions at work, and difficult to identify situations when class is not relevant to the history. For Rockman, class emerges in the every day struggle of individuals who, by living different lives in relation to the market for labor power, create experiences segregated by social divisions. But everyone fights daily battles, and those contests will forever be shaped by divisions that will always haunt society. I think that this is defnitly a danger, but it is not clear to me whether the ubiquity of class under Rockman's coneptualizetion is problematic or whether it harms his work.

I suppose that one way of classifying Rockman's approach is as a recapitulation of Marx's famous claim that "the history of all hiterto exsisting society is the history of class struggles." I think that Rockman's affirmation that class is mutually constutive with racial, ethinic and gender divisions is accually analytically similar to Marx's argument that these kinds of disputes are simply class conflicts in disquise.

The second... Have to go to sea for a couple hours, will complete when I return.

Thoughts on the Antislavery Debate

While today’s conversation was rooted in the roots and causes of the antislavery movement I found it to have a lot of broader implications to history more generally.  We spent a lot of time arguing not about which arguments we found to be the most salient, but instead what exactly it was each of the writers was saying, and what differentiated their arguments from one another.  One of my biggest frustrations with the texts we read for class was the different authors’ insistence on emphasizing distinctions between their arguments.  Every time they made a concession to one of their colleagues, the historians insisted on also making a claim about how a term was being misused, or an unfounded assumption was being made, or how the logic of a hypothetical was faulty—ultimately concluding that the author had missed the point altogether.  I think people’s frustration in the nitpicky attacks of the authors was apparent in our conversation and I think our talk brings up questions about how we should think about historiographical dialogues.

             It felt to me as though The Anti-Slavery Debate could go on forever.  Would that be productive?  If we agree that history should not engage in a futile struggle for a non-existent objective reality, should we thus expect our historians to bicker endlessly, competitively broadening the scope of historical understanding with endless possibilities?  Or instead should historians seek to work more cooperatively, not impulsively rejecting every argument that a colleague makes and attempting to collectively come to a better understanding of history?  I do not think that the various arguments were as mutually exclusive as the three historians would have us believe. Could we not blend Davis and Haskall and say that people with class interests behaved in a way that was also informed by a new perception of personal connection to slavery and a widened sense of their ability to do something about it?  I don’t have an answer.  I think that there are problems with the type of competitive writing we just read, but I also think that such competition compels history forward and weeds out poorly constructed interpretations.  The answer perhaps lies somewhere in between.  I think it would be worth talking about the way the job of the individual historian relates to field of history in general, and the work of other practitioners within it. 

            At the end of the discussion Walter Johnson was brought up and I think that these works relate very much to his observation that in our attempts to understand the history of a collection of “rational” individual actors we assume a self-interested liberal subject.  One of the biggest objections that Davis and Ashworth had with Haskall’s argument was that it only explained what made abolition conceivable and actionable, not what actually compelled individuals.  Davis asked us to look at the interests of the abolitionists.  In order to explain why this particular group of people came to find this deeply entrenched institution reprehensible at this particular time we have to look to their individual interests—which means we have to think about how supporting something like abolition could indirectly serve to reinforce and maintain power, status, and material wealth of the supporters.  I think this tendency provides compelling evidence for just what Johnson was talking about.  While I don’t agree with a lot of what Haskall has to say, I did appreciate the fact that his argument did not assume the motivating force of every historical actor.  He argues that the market made it possible for people to think of slavery as something worth protesting and that some individuals thus did.  While I don’t think it is wrong to interrogate groups of people’s interests, I think we should be aware of the fact that “interests” usually implies the self-interested motives of a liberal subject, which can be a very restricted lens to view the world.

Mike's Afterward, or self-indulgent musings

Upon reading the collection of essays in The Antislavery Debate I was reminded that professional, peer-reviewed and mature scholars can be just as proud and pig-headed as any pedantic poster on an web forum or comment page. The passages in which one historian would explain what the other was actually saying, often in direct contradiction of explicit statements made by the historian whose argument was being characterized struck me as just about the most hubristic behavior one could engage in. I realize it is hard to admit when one is wrong, and I believe that I engage in behavior that is not too far away from this sort of glorified pissing contest in class on a fairly regular basis, but I doubt the interests of historical understanding, thoughtful scholarship, or professional respectability and collegiality are served by it.

Nevertheless, a hotly contested argument, even when not approached with the humility and open minds that might have helped the tone and direction of the works in The Antislavery Debate, still forces us to check our assumptions and reinvigorate some things we have begun to take for granted. The debate between Haskell, Davis and Ashworth certainly did this in at least a limited sense and I believe that our discussion in class benefited quite a bit from the spaces for thought their argument opened up.

I feel that much like last week our discussion was again deeply concerned with what the most responsible and appropriate way to engage in the work of the historian is. Haskell, Davis and Ashworth presented us with different styles of historical writing and I think with an example of a rather knotty issue faced by writers of history. Susan's comments about Haskell's failure to engage deeply or in a sustained manner with a historical source base and how she felt that made his theoretical/ideological stance both less convincing and to some degree inadmissible to the realm of serious historical scholarship were thought-provoking. I am an ardent believer that all historians are engaging in theoretical/ideological projects, and that the very process of analysis is always already an exercise in the application of theory/ideology. In my current knee-jerk hostility toward claims of objectively and the idea of non-ideology history I think I was beginning to forget that theory in history, just like in everything else, must stand the test of practice. If the act of crafting a historical narrative is always an act of theoretical/ideological projection, this was reminder that good history is, to me, a self-aware and honest product of a sort of praxis; sources read through a thoughtfully selected theoretical lens, and a theoretical lens constantly responding too and being altered by this encounter with the debris of the past.

Afterwards for Bender's The Antislavery Debate

Contours of Class Afterwards

Our discussion on Monday about class in the early American republic centered around two powerful questions which each carry import not only for historians of class, but for the entire historical profession. Our first question rose primarily from the Osborn article on doctors and alcohol abuse in Philadelphia. His description of the way doctors consciously or subconsciously used diagnoses of alcohol abuse to either legitimate a failed merchant’s fall from wealth, or delegitimize the behavior of the poor led us to ask: who creates class? Can individuals (or small groups) take part in the construction of class realities and identities, or do classes come about as the result of some vast structural development of markets and economic relations? Furthermore, does every individual action carry implications for class? Or can we put some defining boundary around “acts of class”? Though for a while we seemed stuck without an operative definition of class as either an identity or an external mode of analysis, I liked Jonathan’s attempt to see class in a different way – as a motive. His hypothesis is borne out by many of the works we have read thus far this semester. Christopher’s portrayal of slave ship sailors shows how they acted against both the power structures above them and those below. Though perhaps sailors could have identified with their captives and rebelled against the social order, they chose instead to maintain a separate identity from those they enslaved. This class act, as Christopher seems to explain, was an assertion of their own interests in safeguarding their freedom. The constitution of sailors as a class grew not from some shared identity nor from structural forces which determined their economic and social interests, but rather from the motive of freedom.

Our second main question emerged from both the Gienapp and Johnson readings, and returns to the debates we have been having all semester about the place of the historian in constructing history. Gienapp takes Sellers to task for letting the ideologies of his time seep into the writing he does about the past. He argues that seeing class struggle as operative in the Jacksonian period is just patently false. Gienapp’s bias toward sixties radicalism and anti-capitalism must have led him to this erroneous conclusion. But as some in our class suggested, Gienapp’s own classless reading of history is also informed by the late 1990s period of “the end of history” where liberal capitalism seemed to have prevailed and class was supposed to disappear as a method of analysis. But while we could agree that all historians’ work is informed by their ideological positions, their place in society, and the biases of their archive, and that those who still claim objectivity “should be hanged,” we did not in my opinion reach a satisfactory conclusion as to the relationship between the past and the present. The underlying question seems to be fundamental to the study of history: in a post-structuralist framework, can we still say that historians aim to uncover the truth of what actually happened in the past? Or is historical inquiry so colored by the historian’s position in the present that the histories we tell are simply reflections of ourselves, and not of any past reality? This returns us to some of the questions we asked at the beginning of the semester about how class analysis, especially, can persist within an historical discipline which has admitted that the subjectivity of language and documentation limits the extent to which we can make solid conclusions about material reality in the past.

Though Mike was understandably anxious about finishing the first question before moving onto the second, I think the natural flow of our discussion indicates the extent to which these issues are linked. In fact, Johnson’s article tries in some ways to deal with both together. He shows how writing agency and individual power in shaping identity into the past was an exercise which was important and even revolutionary for the white scholars of the 1960s but which now serves more as therapy than politics (121). One could probably make a similar argument that the historiography which sees class or any mechanism of the past as structural and external to those who lived within it served a certain political purpose for the scholars who wrote in this vein. The identity/structure or agency/determinist debate, then, is just as much about the present as it is about the past. Johnson suggests that as historians we embrace our subjectivity and, while attempting to uncover what actually happened in the past, also admit that we are not necessarily attempting to get closer “the Truth” but rather constructing a truth about the past which serves a purpose in the present. While we don’t have to give up our aspiration to reconstruct what happened in the past, we do have to be transparent and self-critical about why we end up writing particular stories, and perhaps even suggest alternative and contrary stories which could be written in other contexts.

In reading for another class, I recently came across a quote which speaks to this issue. Roger Chartier, in a book called On the Edge of the Cliff: History, Language, and Practices, writes, “Narrow is the way, therefore, for anyone who refuses to reduce history to an untrammeled literary activity open to chance and worthy only of curiosity, yet also refuses to define its scientific character based on the one model of knowledge concerning the physical world” (27). In the last few weeks of the semester, I hope to explore further how we as historians can walk this narrow road, acknowledging both the subjectivity of history, but also its dignity and importance as a discipline that uncovers a past which is real and truthful.

Afterward for Contours of Class in Early Republic:

How the development of capitalism and class distinctions lay the groundwork for Abolitionism

By Kristina Kelleher

In seminar on Monday we discussed the historiography questions raised in this week’s readings extensively. Therefore, I am going to focus my afterward on how the articles read and discussed this week can enhance our understanding of the development of capitalism and class during the early 19th century in American history. (To do this in the space constraints here, I will focus my analysis on the articles by Gienapp and Bushman.) I hope in doing this I will help us begin to think about how these developments lay the groundwork for the rise of abolitionism, our topic of discussion for next week’s seminar.

First, if we look to Gienapp’s article on Seller’s class based history of Jacksonian America, we can see that Gienapp makes a strong argument for how widely “capitalists attitudes were diffused in American society” (page 246) during this time period and were becoming more so. Gienapp argues that part of how the market system was able to triumph so quickly in comparison say to Britain was because there was “Probably no country were capitalist attitudes more firmly entrenched or widely distributed throughout the population before industrialization began than in the United States.” (page 248) As we discussed in class and Gienapp discusses on page 247, “resistance to the market and its values was generally weak” in Jacksonian America.” Gienapp points to much evidence of this widespread acceptance of the capitalist market driven mentalities throughout this period including, on page 247, the wide distribution of clocks. (For more on how capitalist notions of time even took root on Southern slave plantations during this time see Mastered By the Clock, Mark M. Smith) The entrenchment of these capitalist mentalities changed society drastically, particularly in the area of class development.

Gienapp’s article also brings our discussion back to evangelilcialism seen last week in Southern Cross, and in particular, Gienapp argues that the spread of evangelicialism “strengthened capitalist values among workers and farmers.” (pages 245-7) It is even a story of a Methodist minister, Peter Cartwright, on page 246, that Gienapp uses to bring out the development of the idea of “Domestic Respectability” during this time period. Particularly this idea focuses on the time’s movement towards gendering of American labor responsibilities that are tied so closely to the division occurring between the workplace and home (which Bushman discusses.) American women are painted of being particularly guilty of “indulging in this emphasis on fashion and status through consumption and appearance” (page 248) that the capitalist market system brings and that the development of the idea of respectability requires.

The development of the idea of “respectability” and its connection to the Gentility development is further discussed Bushman’s chapter on Culture and Power. The idea of “respectability” became necessary during this time of rapid growth in capitalism and therefore for global trading market economy based on trust and quick assessments of possible business partners. Bushman ties this development to the destruction of traditional communities at the time, when “people were cast adrift, status and identity lost” (page 404) (this search for belonging reminds me of how Hellenistic religions of salvation became popular in the Roman Empire.) And further explains the development of the necessity for a way to judge one’s “respectability” by stating that this is when: “established hierarchies dissolved, and strange faces replaced familiar ones. Strangers had no preconceived idea of each other’s places in the word, especially in the flux of the city. They could only judge by appearances and manners.” (page 404)

Another interesting issue we discussed but did not take as far as we could have in class from Bushman’s article is how this culture of gentility is transmitted and how it interacts with the “American democratic instinct.” In Bushman’s article we see many descriptions of how it is transmitted through culture, particularly written culture such as Griswold, in a top down fashion though less is discussed if there is something to discuss about cultural movement from the down upwards socially. I think it would be worthwhile to consider how Bushman’s and our own thoughts on that topic connect to Johnson’s ideas on Agency and how perhaps giving agency to groups that truly lack power is hurtful because it fails to appropriately respect and communicate the nature of the power dynamics at the time. What’s also often lacking from discussions around the development of this idea of respectability for the upper and middle classes (which Bushman actually does address) is how “by fixing standards of polite conduct for the elite, gentility marked humble people just as distinctly, with their contrasting disheveled clothes, rough houses and coarse manners.” (Page 420) In addition, how the creation of a middle and upper class that could occasionally claim to share some aspects of culture of the gentility ideal also redefine lower social classes. In light of our discussion next week, I think it would be particularly pertinent to look at how this develops alongside the shift during this time where the spectrum of positions of social coercion and “un-freedom” become fewer with clearer distinctions, such as between “free” and “slave” labor.

A Marriage of Convenience: Southern Cross Afterwards

Throughout most of class we found a number of flaws with Heyrman’s argument, but I believe that by the end of class we could look at Evangelism in a way that fits with the our continuing discussion of class. In our group as well as in the larger discussion we bounced around the idea that from the issues brought up in Southern Cross, Evangelism could be similar to how racism was portrayed in Morgan’s book—a tool for keeping the power with the wealthy white slave owner. Even though Evangelism started out as a religion that flew in the face of the white male gentry’s power and life style—anti-slavery, equality of both sex and race, and a modest life style—it eventually became one of its greatest proponents. This change, as with racism, most probably came about because the wealthiest and most powerful people in the south at the time could benefit most from it. Although we have no real proof that white slave owning men sat in a smoke filled room and plotted how to alter Evangelism to benefit them, we can see attempts to fight the people that stood for counter belief to their own; just as we do not have proof that wealthy white men purposely promoted racism to ensure that they could continue to exploit African slave labor. The white gentry may have not even needed to plot how to change Evangelism or promote racism, but just by the fact that they (the most influential group in the society) preferred those shifts caused them to occur. Another similarity between racism and Evangelism is that it does not seem to be the optimal choice for the wealthy white man nor in either case does it seem that they created these tools for the director purpose of keeping their power. Evangelism took time to change and probably would be a poor substitute for some religion that was created to solely idealize the wealthy white man and African slaves were probably not the cheapest to come (factoring in shipping costs alone), yet it both cases these options might have actually been the best since they perpetuated what the wealthy white man wanted as well as garner support from other groups. In that sense it both were a marriage of convenience, at least for the wealthy white male. Interestingly, in both cases there are a number of other agents that are proponents of these “tools.” Weather it was men that wanted to keep masculinity as a positive attribute or poor whites that did not want to be the lowest rung on the social totem pole, it is clear that white males were not acting on their own—and probably could not have. Furthermore it is fascinating that these goggles that were created by racism and Evangelism with which the South seem to perceive the world have lasted for quiet some time.

Religous Movements and Class: Southern Cross Afterwards

After hearing today’s discussion around class in pertaining to Christine Heyrman’s book, Southern Cross, it seems that our conclusion rested on the idea that Heyrman did not explicitly use class to discuss her arguments about the rise of Evangelicalism in the south. Matt also raised a good point in that Evangelicalism could be seen as a venue for people to participate in for spiritual renewing. But what still remains unanswered is the importance of Evangelicalism to southern cultural history outside of the combining of different classes of southerners. Does Heyrman want us to believe that Evangelicalism is important in the context of an intermediary between clergy, laymen, and planters or is it possible that this portion of Christianity is symbolic of southern culture at a more specific level? Another question is if Evangelicalism is a social force in shaped by southern culture and used as a means for planters to avoid issues of class with other whites across class lines, can any religion be seen as a social force of agency or is it in just this particular situation? This question could resolve further inquires on historical study of religion in terms of its pertinence with social structures. In another sense, while in terms of the majority of southern society, Evangelicalism does not seem to influence it with exception to situations of violent resistance to a general acceptance of the religion on an elitist understanding but it impacted slaves, and women separately from white males, property holding or not.

Maybe it would be more fruitful to consider their perspectives and isolating their experiences into a separate class experience that were in some sense changed due to the challenging concepts such as spiritual equality, tolerance of women speaking in church, and debates on women preachers to separate churches for blacks and whites. For example, “the whiff of sheer insolence- and, as time passed, the stench of racial betrayal-hung over church practices that obliged white men to compete for spiritual recognition with blacks” (217). This passage attests to the opposition the Southern white had against blacks in the church but even though this passage speaks to the spiritual competition between blacks and whites, it underlies a new society being constructed for a lower to non existing class of people that had not been there before. When one considers these outsiders, society changed due to the religion and the conflicting southern culture impacting it.

To add to this idea, maybe a better way of understanding Heyrman’s position in her book, Southern Cross, is considering Gregory Dowd’s work, A Spiritual Resistance. He along with Heyrman approaches ideas of religion in terms of Native American resistance to Christianity in a similar vein to Heyrman. Dowd goes into more detail about the views of Native American theology; from there he outlines the growing resistance, assimilation of Native American groups to Anglo-Americans as well as the Anglo-Americans reactions and manipulations of the Native Americans economically and religiously. For example, “Neolin, the renowned Delaware Prophet, encouraged his followers to give up all the Sins & Vices which the Indians have learned from the White People. On the other hand, he was apparently fond of the French but did go further than most [Indians] and planned to end, eventually, the use of all European-made trade goods”(20). Of course, Dowd does not a direct correlation with Heyrman’s thesis of Evangelicalism because Evangelicalism and Nativism were not both resistance movements but did offer to its communities a separate way of worship. Another difference between the two was that Nativism died out while Evangelicalism survived but both draw upon economic resources used to fuel both ideas.

To surmise, Dowd provides a framework to Heyrman in that he covers a spiritual movement that faces resistance using experiences of whites, Indians, and slaves as well as individual battles while Heyrman uses letters, diaries, and accounts of hysteria and visions which in some ways echoes Dowd. Dowd presents a case in which a religious movement dies because of competing interests and a failure to accommodate to the dominate culture at the time. I suggest viewing other works by cultural historians dealing with religion could penetrate more issues around class in terms of religion and culture impact on class distinctions and tensions.

Southern Cross, Afterwards

Our engaging and energetic conversation this week posed many questions, and may have even answered a few of them! By breaking up into small groups at the beginning of class, we identified some of the Big Questions we wanted to discuss, and shaped the opening statements collectively. The definition of evangelicalism started off our conversation. Although a seemingly specific question, we soon found that the difference between the theological and missionary definitions of evangelical Christianity ran parallel to the distinction between dogmatic and cultural histories of the religion. We addressed Heyrman's implicit definition of evangelicalism, and differed as to whether her use of anthropology as a lens of analysis was or was not appropriate for this topic.

We struggled to understand the actors and architects of the changes Heyrman describes. There were a number of nuances and incarnations to this conversation. Heyrman writes with a tone of "before" and "after", and some of us felt that the moment of change itself was unfortunately lacking from her descriptions. We also discussed the question of clergy and their potential overlap with gentry and the ruling elite. How much, and at what times, could clergy be equated with the dominant class? The crux of this question, which permeated most of class, was that of causation between changes in the evangelical churches and the Southern social order. Was it one of mutual influence? Did it change over time? Was the church selling out to demands of the social order? Was the social order changed by the church?

We identified some important gaps in Heyrman's text where more careful and explicit explanation and framing might have helped us evaluate these questions. By and large, though, I think they are questions that are inherently raised by a book such as this, which foregrounds race, gender and age, and uses class as a consistent undercurrent implicitly running through the whole piece. Because this book does not foreground class, it is more of a challenge for us to find it and examine it. Some of our questions seem to suggest that Heyrman's technique was not always successful. In other ways, though, she seems to view class as an important and deeply engrained part of the society of the Early American South, one that perhaps cannot be parsed from the big picture.

At the end of class, we had a brief chance to compare the implications of Heyrman and other writers we have read for this class. I was particularly interested in the connection with Bouton, and whether their books, although very different in material focus, are in fact of a piece. Both begin with the broad-reaching and radical thinking of the pre-revolution years, adn trace these ideals' gradual (and often insidious) erosion toward the mean. Because our readings are often quite disparate from each other, I think it was important to look at how they might connect with one another, and I hope we continue to make a point to keep those conversations active.

We are also experimenting with new ways to organize class, and this week felt very rewarding in that respect. In the future, I would propose that we meet in small groups initially, each group give a 2 or 3 minute opening statement, and then make a clear agenda resulting from those points. Our small groups at the beginning of class yesterday clearly prepared us for our active discussion, but I felt that the order of our points was not entirely logical. For example, it might have made sense to save the conversation about what was not in Heyrman until after we had had a chance to more carefully discuss what she did do, and why. Perhaps if opening statements become more of a group effort, the task of organizing our initial points under two or three main topic headings for the agenda could be the task of the opening people?

Happy St Patrick's Day.

Morality vs Values in Bouton's Analysis

Ordinary Folk. The Common Folk. “The People.” Ordinary Americans. The Middle Sort. The Lower Sort. The Farmers. The Ordinary People. As was mentioned in class, Bouton makes a concerted effort in use ordinary language in Taming Democracy. But whether he is trying to model his diction on every day usage from the time, using words he found in the documents of the epoch, and especially if he is making the claim that he is in tune with the struggle of early Americas, Bouton makes an explicit political choice when he uses these pseudo-historical identifiers.

Like many historians, Bouton uses the language of the era whenever possible. But the terms that he borrows do not reflect pluralism. Rather, what Bouton copies from the ordinary American discourse defines in his text a working set of ideals. And rather than demonstrating the egalitarianism that he wishes to convey, Bouton actually embraces terms generated by the very historical and economic conditions that he attempts to condemn. What is more, Bouton's adoption of terms like “the little man,” “lower sort,” “the middle sort,” and also “the big man,” “the gentry,” “the federalist” Bouton reinforces a perception that these social positions are normal in society.

Stephen is right that Bouton's choice to use these kinds of terms reflects a sort of moral honesty in the analysis. However, Shephen goes on to discuss Bouton's moral language as "value laden terms” which make the analysis pure. Stephen is close to an important point. Because history is a limited endeavor that is never scientific, its practitioners often find it fruitful to flesh their own value judgments to the surface. If assumptions are explicit rather than implicit, their influence is better understood. Yet Stephen is wrong to characterize morals as mere value judgments.

Value judgments are methodologically necessary because they are a consequence of how we see the world. This relates to my point when I quoted Marx's passage on the Camera Obscura. Bouton engages historical materialism when he looks for the material and economic interests that drove the political and social movements of the time. Granted, Marx need not be followed in his entirety in order to make use of his material framework of history. But one of Marx’s most important contributions is the idea that social analysis becomes empirical precisely by admitting that value judgments are materially constructed and unavoidable in analysis. The famous version of this argument is Althusser on Marx and science. My point is that morality, as applied in Taming Democracy goes beyond the value judgments that are necessary to a sound reading of history: recognizing values is no reason to adopt moral analysis. Interestingly, a careful reading of strict Marxism finds a striking absence of moral condemnation (for those of you following at home this is especially true after what Althusser terms the epistemological break between Marx's early work and his later work). Some thinkers argue that a strict Marxism does not allow for the use of terms like "just" and "unjust," or a belief in human rights. (Althusser, Can a Marxist Believe in Human Rights?)

This is important because Bouton's "moral honesty" is not analytically sound. I agree with Stephen that Bouton is unforgiving with his morals. But his strong moral stance drives him to embrace shaky distinctions between rich and poor, farmer and gentleman, and even thick and thin. (see Morris figure!)

Bouton is right to use language from the era to show how actors on both sides defined their collective selves along whatever lines that were economically advantageous. This is the strength of his work. Further, doing this is a good way to link Taming Democracy with other works we have studied so far this semester. For example, Bouton's claims about class in Pennsylvania are compatible with Morgan's argument about the economic construction of race in Virginia because the linguistic dynamics that Bouton explores during the revolution seem quite similar to what Morgan studies in the early colonial period.

But in making a moral statement about the elite actors behind the American Revolution, Bouton makes his point less convincing and leaves important elements out his story. There is a difference between showing how the historical characters spoke (defining categories of historical practice), and using the same language as a basis for categorical analysis (adopting categories of practice as categories of analysis). The terms that Bouton uses in the book embrace binaries: rich versus poor, farmer versus gentry, federalist versus anticonstitutionalist and other similar statements. From our point of view as social historians, we are used to thinking about the "gentry" as morally reprobate. Yet Bouton takes it further when he adopts a term like "federalist," which is ordinarily morally neutral, as a moral indictment.

On one hand, this kind of approach sets Bouton apart from the typical historian of American history, who tends to maintain the prevailing value system of American political discourse. I applaud Bouton for the freedom of thought that allows him to break with the typical way of speaking and thinking. And yet, on the other hand, Bouton also goes further than a rejection of typical values; he imbues his work with moral judgment. And I think that there is an analytic plight unavoidable in the use of moral terms: if the subject is either good or evil it cannot be fully understood. This linguistic suppression is also a common tool and in contemporary American Politics. Does not a binary characterization of so-called “moral” issues often serve as the ultimate distraction from important political decisions?

Similarly, Bouton's adherence to a binary distinction between farmer and gentry actually obscures subtle pluralistic and multidimensional interactions. Bouton misses the relationships between his "ordinary" farmer folk and poor city residents they sometimes fought, between poor white farmers and blacks they enslaved, and between "Ordinary Americans" and Native Americans they displaced. According to Morgan, it was precisely this kind of a trick, imposed by the ruling class in early colonial Virginia, that lead to the development of racial slavery in America. Then, elites constructed a binary between Black and White to make the disparity between rich and poor harder to perceive.

On first read, Morgan's views on the construction of race struck many of you as morally insensitive. But I think that it was only by setting down the moral framework that he correctly identifies the real trend. On the other hand, Bouton makes explicit moral judgments that can be emotionally satisfying. And yet these moral statements obscure some important aspects of the story.

I agree in full with Bouton's rejection of the ideals behind the American Revolution. Personally I would extend it to American ideals in general. But I also think that Bouton's "moral honesty" relies on his own set of ideals and I think it damages his credibility. The irony is that Bouton succeeds in showing how the morals of the era were economically constructed tools yet he does not free his own text from moral analysis.