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2001 Seminar Working Paper Abstracts
The following list of abstracts describes the papers presented at the 2001 meeting of the Atlantic History Seminar, "The Atlantic Revolutions, 1760-1825." A copy of the program, where papers may be viewed in the context of the sessions, is also available, and links from each author's name on the program pages will return the reader to the appropriate abstract here.
Douglas M. Bradburn. “ ‘True Americans’ and ‘Hordes of Foreigners’: Immigrants, Federalists, and the Politics of National Citizenship in the United States, 1789-1800”
This paper understands the process of Revolution in the United States by contrasting the divergent visions of American national citizenship pursued by Federalists and Jeffersonian-Republicans in the political and ideological contests of the 1790s. It argues that in the face of the democratizing rhetoric of international revolution, especially the heavy emphasis on the “rights of man,” Federalists reemphasized law and order based upon a strong and homogeneous national citizenry. By the end of the decade, by building on traditions of English nationalism and their belief in the importance of “cultural” difference between national peoples, Federalists pressed both rhetoric and law into an effort to make the United States into a true nation-state and thus secure the national government to the “true American” nation. It was a positive vision of an American national community, but one that could be created only by purging the United States of all foreign contamination, and culminated with the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Naturalization law of 1798. At the same time, however, immigrant groups challenged the Federalists’ notions of national citizenship by merging the idealism of the French and American revolutions with the realities of American representative politics. In doing so, ethnic groups in the urban ports of the republic succeeded in creating a pluralist vision of American citizenship. With the defeat of the Federalists and the subsequent repeal of the offensive acts, Jeffersonian Republicans successfully estab-lished the legitimacy of states’ control over American citizenship and affirmed a tradition of self-aware ethnic political mobilization in American political culture. [WP # 01007]
Stewart Davenport. “Luxury, Theology, Liberty: The Role of Religion in the ‘Great Transition’ Debate”
In the 1820s and 1830s American Protestants confronted a strange new economic world. But if there was much to be excited about in these changing and mostly prosperous times, there was equally much to worry over as well, both from a religious and a political perspective. How was the virtuous life, or the life of faith in the transcendent supposed to fit into a society whose raison d'être was the pursuit of material happiness? In short, where was God in the world of business activity and personal acquisition? In this paper I explore the complex and often conflicted ways in which some early-American Protestants navigated these modern moral challenges. In the end I mean to show that while they held to the Christian notion of neighbor-love and the classical republican preoccupation with virtue, they also stubbornly defended economic modernization and the liberal promises that it supposedly held out for Americans.[WP # 01022]
Jordana Dym. “From Pueblos to Pueblo, Creating the National State: City, State, and Nation in Central America, 1810-1839”
This paper uses the case study of Central America to suggest that, in at least some parts of Spanish America, an important aspect of the political revolution underway in the early nineteenth century was a shift from a classical European political ideology based on municipal sovereignty-that of the pueblos-to a politics of national sovereignty-that of the pueblo. The tensions in the move from municipal to national sovereignty, it is argued, suggest one possible explanation both for the multiple civil wars that broke out in much of Spanish America in the period and for the difficulty of bringing breakaway regions to respect and maintain the colonial districts and capitals whose legitimacy had been undisputed for much of Spain's tenure in the New World. The paper argues that the transition from a political ideology of sovereignty based on city-state pueblos to one based on nation-state pueblo took place in three stages between 1810 and 1839. In the first two stages, Central American leaders welcomed “municipal sovereignty” as a means to accomplish transition to self-government and a republican system while updating strong traditions of Hispanic government; in the third stage, failure of municipal sovereignty led to adoption of a new theory that vested the nation rather than the cities that made it up with sovereignty.[WP # 01003]
Max Edling. “The Problem of American State Formation: Politics of Taxation and the Creation of the Federal Government”
This paper investigates the creation of the federal government by looking at the Federalists’ plans for, and realization of, fiscal reform. A comparative analysis with Britain establishes that in America the political culture, the structure of the economy, and popular influence over important political institutions made taxation by the central government difficult. The Federalists aimed to pursue a politics of taxation adapted to American conditions by reducing government demands on the citizens. In successfully realizing their plans, the Federalists introduced a system of taxation that proved to be long-lived and that had important consequences for the later political development of the United States. [WP # 01013]
Júnia Ferreira Furtado. “Mirror of the World: Libertines, Heretics, and Rebels in Baroque Minas Gerais, Brazil: The Conspiracy of 1789 and the Naturalist José Vieira Couto”
This work aims to analyze the penetration and diffusion of seditious ideas in Minas during the eighteenth century, particularly during the Inconfidência Mineira. It takes as its point of departure the notion that the popularization of Enlightenment and Masonic ideas in the region, which preceded and ran parallel to the diffusion of revolutionary ideas, was linked to an irreligious and libertine substratum. It also analyzes the role of Brazilian naturalist José Vieira Couto in the movement. Various testimonies in the Solemnities state that he was present at several meetings during which the rebels discussed their plans. Although he was present at the rebel’s final meeting, he was never listed as a rebel, most likely because he was consistently able to convince powerful forces in the Court to come to his support. [WP # 01002]
Malick W. Ghachem. “The Coming of the Haitian Revolution, 1789-1791”
One of the crucial turning points on the path to the Haitian Revolution was the decision of the Saint-Domingue planters to seek representation in the Estates General of France in 1789. The subsequent two years witnessed a clash between the centripetal, unifying, monistic impulses of the French Revolution and the colony’s impulse to protect its so-called “interior regime” and “domestic property” (euphemisms for slavery and the disenfranchisement of free blacks) from interference by the metropole. Successive decrees passed by the National Assembly cut in contradictory directions, at one moment favoring the legislative assimilation of Saint-Domingue to France, at another moment favoring the principle of colonial autonomy. These decrees set off a civil war between the various racial factions in Saint-Domingue, and in August of 1791 that civil war met up with a slave revolt in the colony’s northern plains. [WP # 01005]
Matthew Rainbow Hale. “The American Reign of Terror: French Revolutionary Warfare and the Shaping of American Nationality in the United States, 1798-1801”
How did residents of the early United States create a distinctive American nationality? What factors influenced Americans’ views of their nation? Through an investigation of newspapers, this essay suggests that the French Revolutionary Wars played a decisive role in the maturation of an American nationality. In particular, it argues that the waning of the Franco-American war crisis of 1798 facilitated Anglophobes’ characterization of their opponents as proponents of a Reign of Terror like that of Revolutionary France. By thus reworking their ideas about the relationships among American, British, and French nationalities, anti-British individuals contributed to the emergence of a distinctive American nationality, as well as to a Jeffersonian popular political coalition that seemed to embody their burgeoning formulation of American-ness. [WP # 01009]
Rachel Hammersley. “French Revolutionary Republicanism and the Republican Tradition”
The influence of seventeenth-century English republican ideas in eighteenth-century Britain and America has been explored in some depth. By contrast, very little attention has been paid to the use of those same ideas in revolutionary France. This paper suggests that this neglect is due not to the fact that revolutionary French republicanism owed nothing to the English ideas, but rather to the nature of the relevant historiographical traditions. At least one group of French revolutionaries was deeply interested in English republicanism. As the paper demonstrates, leading members of the radical Cordelier Club drew on the works of Marchamont Nedham and James Harrington to promote their own conception of a classical, democratic, republic. [WP # 01001]
Monica Henry. “The American Public Debates on Recognition of the Spanish-American Republics, 1810-1822”
Despite the policy of neutrality adopted by the American government vis-à-vis the struggle between Spain and her colonies, the public in America became increasingly interested in the revolutions taking place in Spanish America. American propagandists and Spanish Americans living in the United States set out to convince the public that helping and recognizing the new southern republics would be in the interest of both North and South America. Yet not everybody agreed. Thus the arguments against recognition measured the more or less negative impact of recognition on the United States. Advocacy and propaganda on the one side, opposition and self-interest on the other made this debate a complex one. [WP # 01011]
Evelyn Powell Jennings. “In the Eye of the Storm: The Spanish Colonial State and African Enslavement in Havana, 1763-1790”
This paper examines the Spanish colonial state’s use of enslaved laborers in defense works in Havana, Cuba after the British occupation in 1762. It is argued that in spite of the absence of political revolution in Cuba between 1760 and 1825, the revolutionary upheavals in the Atlantic region effected profound transformations. To defend the island and to ensure the loyalty of Cuba in the revolutionary age the Spanish state was compelled to increase both public and private dependence on enslaved labor, encourage the expansion of sugar production, and make concessions to Creole economic and political interests. The paper concludes that the case of Spanish colonialism in Cuba is a fruitful site for comparative studies of empire in spite of Spain decline as a major colonial power. [WP # 01015]
Marixa Lasso. “A Republican Myth of Racial Harmony: Gran Colombia, 1810-1831”
During the Spanish American Wars of Independence, a new language of patriotism, liberty, brotherhood, and republican unity recast colonial racial relations. This new republican rhetoric buttressed a concept of nationhood that tightly linked national identity with racial harmony and equality-what contemporary scholars call “the myth of racial democracy.” This paper argues that the combination of blacks’ crucial participation in the patriot army, elite racial fears, and the powerful nationalist ideology that characterized the revolutionary wars may explain why the new Spanish American nations responded to racial conflicts with a nationalist myth of racial harmony and equality. This paper examines the intellectual and ideological side of this process. Focusing on Colombia, it analyses the selective reading of nationalism, republican virtue, and history that permitted the state to construct an authoritative discourse of racial harmony that set the limits to the ways in which both Afro-Colombians and the Creole elite could express racial tensions. [WP # 01010]
Matthew Mason. “The Battle of the Slave-holding Libertarians: The United States, Great Britain, and Slavery in the Early Nineteenth Century”
The issue of slavery permeated Anglo-American politics and diplomacy toward the end of the Age of Revolution. Especially after their roughly simultaneous abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, both countries used slavery to tout their superior commitment to liberty. The War of 1812 helped to further politicize the issue; Britain’s policy of freeing American slaves became a major point of contention, and its practice of impressment dogged the postwar diplomacy surrounding cooperation against the slave trade. Leading Britons used their wartime policy, Americans’ resistance to cooperation on abolition, and American slavery itself to attack republican institutions and to enhance their stance as liberators on the Atlantic stage. But the transatlantic debate over slavery also exacerbated America’s divisions over slavery. Some nationalists closed ranks to defend America on its most vulnerable point. But American abolitionists echoed antislavery Britons’ attacks on the United States, northeastern sectionalists sought to pin all shame for slavery on the South, and some Southerners moved hesitantly toward a principled defense of slavery to parry the blows from across the Atlantic. Both countries’ divisions, together with the ambiguities and contradictions in their respective official stances given West Indian and Southern slavery, lent enormous complexity to the Anglo-American debate over slavery in the early nineteenth century. [WP # 01021]
R. Darrell Meadows. “Social Networks and Transatlantic Migration: Saint-Domingue Refugees during the French and Haitian Revolutions”
This paper presents results from a large letter-cluster sample of records on French public assistance to colonial refugees resident in Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, indicating the major paths of forced migration among Saint-Domingue refugees during the years 1788-1802. In relation to the existing literature, the results presented here indicate the suitability of this source for the study of transatlantic forced migration among this important segment of France's overseas and resident “plantocracy.” Global data on the demographic and occupational distributions among the refugees also suggests the important role played by females in this migration, while closer examination of several representative cases further illustrates the roles and experiences of individual men and women and their use of personal networks in this migration. Discussion of sources, the data sample and the use of historical social network anlysis is also included. [WP # 01019]
Seth J. Meisel. “Soldiers and Citizens in Early Nineteenth-Century Córdoba, Argentina”
This essay traces the development of popular republicanism in the Río de la Plata viceroyalty from the Enlightenment-inspired reforms of the late colonial period to the political culture that emerged in Argentina’s struggle for Independence. Considering the conflicting ideas of citizenship and authority within the wider context of the place of war and nation-building in the Atlantic world, it examines the political pedagogy employed by the new Argentine regimes to garner legitimacy as well as its interpretation by popular groups who learned to use the new political symbols, arguments and practices to assert novel claims for political participation. [WP # 01006]
Hakiem Nankoe. “Counter-Revolution and Controlled Transition to ‘Emancipation’ in Surinam, 1760-1830s”
The onset of the Atlantic Revolution during the eighteenth century coincided with an era of economic downturn in the world economy. The crisis of the Bourse of Amsterdam in 1773 and the epidemic of rebellion conspired to end the Dutch colony as an attractive area for investment. While the slaves “died like flies,” the vigorous expansion of production in Saint Domingue resulted in France’s domination of the sugar and coffee market. Both Surinam and Saint Domingue were haunted by social upheavals during the second half of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, the social revolution took place in Saint Domingue, while Surinam embarked upon the path of restoration. The absence of an alliance between the white planters, mulattoes, Maroons, and slaves has been seen as an important factor in producing a revolution in Saint Domingue. In the Dutch plantation society of Surinam, the establishment of precisely such an alliance between the colonial bloc and the colored petite bourgeoisie, segments of slaves, as well as Maroons was a factor of great significance in reconsolidating the slave order in Surinam. By embarking upon an ultimately successful process of pacification, the cooptation of segments of the enslaved, the ‘bourgeoification’ of Mulattoes, and later the de-Africanization and the ‘civilization’ of the enslaved, the dominant classes not only restored the plantation regime of production during the era of the Atlantic Revolution, but also laid the ground for a colonialist type of ‘emancipation.’ [WP # 01016]
Erika Pani. “ ‘Actors on a most conspicuous stage’: The Citizens of Revolution”
This paper traces the transformation of the concept of ‘citizen’ in the North American thirteen colonies and in New Spain during the Atlantic Revolutions. In both regions, and despite the different traditions on which they drew, the term came to describe the basic unit of a new political order. In a context of both independence and revolution, the label radically redefined the borders of political community and social identity. The creation of the Republic in the United States and the civil war and the Constitution of 1812 in Mexico gave birth to different conceptions of citizenship, which would have a deep impact on the ways in which men and women thought about political power throughout the next hundred years. [WP # 01008]
James G. Patterson. “The Aftermath of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 in Antrim and Down”
This paper maps the course of continued resistance in east Ulster during the years between the defeat of the Great Irish Rebellion of 1798 and the final collapse of organized republican activity with the failure of Robert Emmet’s rising of 23 July 1803. More specifically, I challenge the historiographical con-sensus that the Presbyterians of Counties Antrim and Down made the rapid transition from rebel to loyalist, abandoning their Enlightenment-influenced, nonsectarian ideals in the process. The traditional view also holds that the Presbyterians of these two counties, who had been at the heart of the movement from its inception seven years earlier, made a rapid transition from rebel to loyalist, often embracing the Orange Order in the process. Completing this model is the reemergence of Defenderism, which, with equal speed, reverted to its Catholic sectarian roots. In fact, it is apparent that a large number of northern dissenters, particularly of the lower orders, were coopted into the hitherto predominantly Catholic Defender movement, where they continued to actively resist until 1801 and beyond. [WP # 01012]
Gustavo L. Paz. "The 'Rights of the Pueblos': The Emergence of the First Sovereignties in Argentina’s Revolution for Independence"
This paper deals with the ideological bases used by the criollo elites of Argentina to justify separation from Spain. They embraced the theory of popular and contractual origins of power based upon Natural Law, combined with the revival of the concept of the limited nature of the Spanish monarchy. According to these ideas the cities (pueblos) that made up the Spanish monarchy had ceded their sovereignty to the king, in whose absence the pueblos would recover their natural “rights” to self rule. The independence movement in Argentina made this theory its revolutionary creed. In turn, this theory fostered the emergence of the “first sovereignties” in Argentina, as many cities tried to enact these rights and achieve political autonomy. Two competing views were held on the “rights of the pueblos” based on two different interpretations of the old constitution of the Spanish monarchy. This debate revolved around the recurrent petition for autonomy of the city of Jujuy before the revolutionary authorities in Buenos Aires. This debate had an important bearing on the outcome of the political system of Argentina in the nineteenth century. [WP # 01004]
Kirsten Schultz. “The Transfer of the Portuguese Court to Rio de Janeiro and Early Readings of Political Economy in Rio de Janeiro: The Portuguese Empire and the Revolutionary Atlantic, 1808-1821”
This paper examines the ways in which the Portuguese empire was redefined in the wake of the transfer of the royal court to Rio de Janeiro in 1808. Using official archival documentation from members of the royal cabinet concerned with imperial affairs (from the National Archive, Rio de Janeiro), and pamphlets and books published by the Royal Press established in Rio following the court’s arrival, the paper focuses, above all, on the ways in which contemporaries, especially the Brazilian-born statesman José da Silva Lisboa, used the “new science” of political economy to envision an imperial future following the establishment of a new capital at Rio de Janeiro and the opening of Brazil’s ports, decreed in 1808 upon the Portuguese sovereign’s arrival at Brazil. Along with the creation of a “United Kingdom” (1815), an economy of open ports was cast as having dismantled colonial hierarchies to provide the basis for unity and a truly empire-wide prosperity. Yet, while the United Kingdom and open ports promised to “restore” an ancient imperial glory, the politics of the 1810s also produced circumstances that seemed to undercut this glory and the well-being of residents of the new royal court: the presence of British merchants and their quest to remake Brazil into a market for their manufactures. As Rio’s residents then proposed, political economy, used to justify the opening of Brazil’s ports, could also be used to criticize the commerce that these open ports allowed. [WP # 01017]
Paul Tonks. “The Scottish Defense of Empire in the Era of the Atlantic Revolutions: George Chalmers and the Meaning of the American Revolution for Great Britain.”
This paper examines the historical and strategic lessons drawn by George Chalmers, the leading Loyalist and British imperial official, in the broader context of the conceptions offered by eighteenth-century Scottish commentators who viewed the American colonies’ relationship with the metropolis in the light of Scotland’s own historical evolution. It is crucial to examine these positions because they help us to comprehend the reasoning behind metropolitan hostility to the local political authority defended by colonial Americans. Appreciation of the sophisticated arguments deployed by Scottish defenders of metropolitan sovereignty such as Chalmers enables us to come to a deeper understanding of the evolution of British imperial policy and of the resulting irreconcilable clash of perspectives in the American Revolution and beyond. [WP # 01018]
David J. Weiland III. “The Demise of the Last Medieval Empire: Spain, Spanish America, and the Fiscal Revolution of 1763-1820”
This paper will explore three distinct periods of Spanish finance during the Age of Revolution: the project of military reform immediately following the Seven Years War from 1762 to 1775; the era of the American Revolt and its aftermath circa 1775-1792; and the response to the rise of Revolutionary France from 1795 until 1820. Each period was for Spain increasingly “revolutionary” as they steadily abandoned centuries-old fiscal practices in favor of more modern techniques of national finances. Spain’s goal was to meet the rapidly rising expenses involved in defending its empire and in maintaining the lifeline to Spanish American silver that had sustained it for so long and that served as the foundation of all these reforms. [WP # 01014]
Ashli White. “The Politics of ‘French Negroes’ in the United States”
This paper examines the influx of black and colored Saint Dominguans--or, as Americans called them, “French Negroes”--to the United States during the Haitian Revolution. Because of the exceptional circumstances surrounding their flight, the “French negroes” provoked controversy in U.S. cities as white Americans weighed the potential impact of their presence. White residents, however, responded to the population based on a stereotype of the “French negro,” informed more by portrayals in the press than by interactions with those in their midst. This characterization of the “French negro” yielded a variety of reactions that offer insight into American debates about slavery and freedom. [WP # 01020]
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© 2002 by The President and Fellows of Harvard College.Created October 22, 2001; last revised May 31, 2002.