Heroic Vision: A Story of Revolutionary Art and Politics

By Charles S. Olton

Heroic Vision offers parallel and intertwined accounts of politics and fine art at the time of the American Revolution and national founding. Art stories illuminate the character, depth, and tenacity of revolutionary political ideals unleashed in the 1760s and 1770s, and then consolidated in the  1780s and 1790s; political change, in turn, suggests how and why art shifted from English vernaculars to mature New World foundations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hillcrest Media Group
• Release date: Sep 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781634136730

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Bibliography

Preface

The Drama

Thomas Jefferson, who had a way with words and an occasional impulse to use them bluntly, once declared all Englishmen to be rich, proud, hectoring, swearing, squabbling, carnivorous animals. He repeated his thoughts about the English often and pungently during the 1790s because some of his fellow revolutionaries—John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and George Washington among them—seemed to have lost their way. They saw no harm in pursuing diplomatic and economic alliances with the nation Americans had denounced in 1776 as tyrannical, sinister, corrupt, and nefarious. In Jefferson’s mind his colleagues’ Anglophile leanings were madness itself.

The issue arose, of course, from colonial Americans' decision to depart the British Empire in 1776. From our modern perspective, that startling act provokes wonderment because they knew it would result in war against the world’s mightiest army and navy yet they had no military capacity. Anglo-Americans were not even a united people. Their earlier histories had included few examples of local sacrifice for common cause, their economies were separate and quite different, significant religious and social bonds were absent, and they had precious little in the way of shared political experience.

Beliefs, experience, and traditions are among the many elements of a people’s underlying culture, and culture in North America had been exceedingly diverse since the beginnings of colonization in the seventeenth century. Each province had always had a separate relationship with the English government, and connections between the thirteen were as rare as they were inconsequential. Overcoming diversity and separateness in the name of a united cause would be a major challenge in 1776. Even after independence had been won on the battlefield most Americans would have viewed a common culture as irrelevant to their lives.

The creative fine arts—high art, as distinct from popular or folk or performing arts—reveal the depths of cultural diversity in America’s late colonial years, and the continent’s two great commercial centers, Boston and Philadelphia, offer the most telling contrasts. One city had been founded by English Puritans in 1630, the other by English Quakers half a century later. By 1760, both had sufficient wealth, population density, and sophistication to support creative artists, yet the tastes of artists and patrons in each were as different as night and day. An untutored eye can easily distinguish Boston’s pictorial art from Philadelphia’s. Even a tin ear can hear differences in their music. In both content and style, the literary art that each city produced is unique.

The same can be said of their politics. Though both had strong, intellectually confident political leadership, immense differences isolated each from the other. Boston’s responses to unconstitutional imperial policies, beginning in the mid-1760s, were strenuous, sometimes violent, usually well organized, and unfailingly bombastic. In Philadelphia, by contrast, resistance behavior was languid and diffident until the very moment of revolution. If anyone had visited both cities in 1760 and spent an hour in each, chatting with local citizens on a commercial wharf or in a church or tavern, the idea of a united revolution would have seemed ludicrous.

Yet Americans achieved collective independence in 1776, and the undertaking became revolutionary when thirteen former colonies found common cause under the umbrella of republican ideology. Americans cast aside monarchy as the foundation of government, substituting the novel idea that government should be anchored in the will of the whole people and braced by the rule of law.

This revolutionary idea emerged in a slipstream of accelerating change in nearly all elements of American culture, as New World sensibilities pushed against Old World ideas. The growing appeal of revolutionary change is as visible and audible in the arts as it is apparent in political discourse. The developing strength of vernacular art on the western side of the Atlantic suggests that nascent foundations for independence were present well before the political sundering in 1776.

Forging a unified independence movement based on revolutionary republican ideals would nevertheless be immensely challenging. Once separated from the British Empire, Americans had to create a new society with its own foundation, but becoming American would prove far more difficult than the 1776 decision to become non-British. Eventually, it would require giving up provincial ways of thinking and adopting a national mindset. This was not easily accomplished because the central idea behind the revolution, the republican idea, emphasized the values of local government and society.

The Declaration of Independence created thirteen sovereign states, not one nation. During and right after the war, each state interpreted the republican ideal separately, according to its customs, needs, and sensitivities, all influenced by ghosts of bygone colonial cultures. This state of affairs eventually triggered an attempt at a united national government, but the separate and competitive interests of individual states or regions were slow to subside. Disagreements over both philosophical and practical issues lay at the heart of debates about whether to ratify the 1787 Constitution and they shadowed George Washington’s entire two-term presidency. Achieving the one-sovereignty republican model envisioned by makers of the 1787 Constitution was a formidable task.

Development of a new definition of American society, rooted in an identifiably national culture, continued until the end of the century. Survival of the nation required Americans to sort out their differences and disagreements about the character and political direction of their government. It also required citizens and their leaders to determine how they would navigate relationships with England, the principal source of all earlier colonial cultures, and France, America’s ally and banker during the War for Independence and itself a newly republican society after 1789.

The problem of the 1790s came down to this: What did the American Revolution and national founding really mean? What would the country’s cultural content be? How would that culture reflect the new nation’s relationships in the rest of the Western world? Complete isolation of the North American continent would have been impossible, but resolving how the United States would connect to Europe proved challenging. As a solution began to emerge toward the end of the century, artists helped establish the country’s first truly national vision.

Cultural shifts in human societies aren’t unusual, of course, and they always involve much more than art and politics. Even without revolution, all cultures evolve over time. Revolution accelerates the process by upending a people’s entire way of thinking, believing, and living. That’s what happened in America during the latter part of the eighteenth century, as two important and visible expressions of culture both transformed themselves, revealing an unusual affinity. Painters, composers, writers, and architects consciously participated in the country’s political drama. The confluence of art and politics first emerged in the half-decade before 1776, a postwar resurgence occurred in the late 1780s, and by 1800 it had become ingrained in American national culture.

Painting, music, literature, and architecture were the only creative fine art forms in America during these years. The country’s small trove of dramaturgy was seldom published and almost never staged; theaters offered only works by English playwrights. No American practiced the art of sculpture. Choreography as an art form was unknown.

This book focuses on the fine arts because they tell a deep and important story that can be documented and studied using many art objects that survive today. Popular, folk, decorative, and primitive arts also have revealing stories to tell, but much of that material is either fragmentary or irretrievably lost and forgotten. By contrast, America’s eighteenth-century fine arts remain with us because they have never lost their intrinsic value. We can appreciate and understand these works today almost exactly as their creators intended more than two centuries ago.

To consider the fine arts and politics together is to reveal fascinating new dimensions of the country’s national birth. We can learn how these arts were born, why and how they evolved over time, how they expressed changing cultural values in the midst of revolution, and how both artists and politicians faced new challenges near the end of the century. The drama began in the early 1760s, and the curtain fell on the last act in 1800. During those years the principal actors participated in a movement that profoundly changed the course of Western history.

An Unusual Cast of Characters

America’s revolutionary history was filled with extraordinary political leaders. About a dozen, listed here roughly in the order of their appearance, play roles in this book’s drama:

James Otis, lawyer and orator

Samuel Adams, radical organizer

John Hancock, merchant and governor

George Washington, general and president

Benjamin Franklin, scientist and diplomat

Joseph Galloway, lawyer and legislator

John Dickinson, lawyer and legislator

Thomas Jefferson, governor, diplomat, and president

John Adams, diplomat and president

James Madison, legal scholar and congressman

Alexander Hamilton, financial wizard

An equal number of gifted artists, a few of whom were also politicians, played roles as well:

William Billings, composer

John Singleton Copley, portraitist

Benjamin Franklin, musician and writer

Charles Willson Peale, portraitist

John Dickinson, writer

Thomas Jefferson, writer, architect

Thomas Paine, writer

John Trumbull, history painter

Mercy Otis Warren, writer

Gilbert Stuart, portraitist

Charles Bulfinch, architect

Benjamin Latrobe, architect

A Complex Stage

Invisible and unspoken links developed between these artists and politicians during the years of the American Revolution and national founding, and considering the two groups together illuminates one of the most dramatic events in the history of Western civilization. Revolutionary artists and politicians all experienced the same triumphs, tragedies, uncertainties, frustrations, and leaps of faith. Though the two rarely considered themselves partners in the birthing and building of the nation, studying them together can lead to a deep understanding of the ideas, motivations, and excitement at the core of the country’s national beginnings.

To understand the creative fine arts in their cultural context, one must experience artists’ works as art, not merely as illustration or documentation of a political story. Studying America’s revolutionary drama in an artistic context and understanding the power of artists’ links to politics and politicians requires direct encounters with art objects themselves. Such encounters appear throughout this book and may be easily accessed by clicking the buttons in margins.

BOOK I:

TWO CITIES

TWO CULTURES

1760-1776

Chapter 1

Boston: A Politically Mature City

A MENACING CRISIS

On a crisp autumn day, October 1, 1768, an event of thundering magnitude occurred in Boston, the principal city of Great Britain’s most important North American colony. No one present would ever forget it. A fleet of British warships, the mightiest naval vessels in the world, sailed into the harbor. They anchored in an arc that followed the shoreline, opened gun ports, and aimed their big cannons at the city. Before long, two regiments of well-trained soldiers in bright scarlet uniforms, bayonets gleaming, disembarked and marched to the center of town.

A more intimidating spectacle could not have been staged, and it wasn’t a mere symbolic show of force. Within a few weeks, the ratio of soldiers to citizens in Boston would reach one to four. In case anyone failed to grasp the Redcoats’ intent, the first to come ashore that autumn day mounted a portable cannon and pointed it at the Town House, where the colonial legislature met.

A week later, someone claiming affiliation with a shadowy group known as the Sons of Liberty mutilated a portrait of Francis Bernard owned by Harvard College. Bernard held the office of Royal Governor, the British Empire’s ranking representative in Massachusetts. The anonymous vandal cut a heart-shaped section out of his painted chest. A Boston portraitist, the most celebrated and accomplished pictorial artist in North America, had painted the picture. He was John Singleton Copley, and he agreed to repair the damage.¹ A freelance writer simultaneously praised and mocked him: By the surprizing art of his pencil, [he] has actually restored as good a heart as had been taken from it; tho’ upon a near and accurate inspection, it will be found to be no other than a false one. *Copley never spoke in public about the episode. He was a shy man, and he wanted to avoid all things political. But his wish to live the high-profile life of a successful artist without being drawn into Boston’s sizzling politics would prove naïve.

In the city’s South End, a composer named William Billings had neither hesitation nor qualms about taking sides when Great Britain’s soldiers landed in 1768. He resented what amounted to a military occupation of his city. His Majesty’s customs collectors had recently been engaged in provocative enforcement activities that would now be backed by military force. Billings joined others in a resistance movement.

Boston’s royal government called the resisters and protesters outlaws, but in the composer’s opinion the real criminals worked for the government itself. He wrote a short song of protest that could easily have qualified as sedition.

Play William Billings, Chester

Many citizens believed that Boston was being callously wronged in 1768, but Billings spoke more bluntly than most:

Let Tyrants shake their iron Rods,

And Slav’ry clank her galling Chains;

We fear them not, we trust in God,

New England’s God forever reigns.

The art vandalism and the angry song were ominous signs of the times. Boston would soon be rocked by volcanic, life-transforming events. Cascading torrents of political invective would appear in newspapers and broadsides, fanning flames of public ire. Royal government would become paralyzed. Men who had amassed huge mercantile fortunes and held high political office would be threatened and eventually driven away. By late 1774 the bearing walls of Boston's civic enterprise would begin to crumble.

As early as 1768 the city’s culture and people had reached, perhaps even crossed, an invisible line between resistance and revolution. Turning back would become increasingly difficult, despite the enormity of the decisions Bostonians would face.

TRADITIONS OF WEALTH, AUTHORITY, AND ART

Francis Bernard had arrived in Boston long before the 1768 crisis. He was English, an Oxford man, and a former London barrister of modest means and robust political connections. Bernard had served as Royal Governor of New Jersey for two years. He had been successful there, but governance in Massachusetts required skills, temperament, fortitude, and sensibilities that would prove beyond his remarkably scant capacity. Yet in 1760 the new governor’s future seemed bright, and he had every reason for optimism. He was in charge of royal government in a stable colonial society. Its principal city appeared to have uncommon economic momentum.

Long Wharf, onto which Governor Bernard alighted in the summer of 1760, played a pivotal role in Boston’s phenomenal success, and his arrival there had symbolic significance. The wharf’s massive wooden structure, anchored by a stone base and deep pilings, stretched nearly half a mile out into the harbor. Its fifty-yard breadth handled loading and disgorging of cargo for hundreds of oceangoing ships—24,000 tons a year by one estimate. The governor saw swarms of maritime artisans, mechanics, seamen, draymen, and common laborers at work on the structure’s rough planks. Merchants, customs officials, and ship captains came and went, their personal and business needs met by countless vendors, some of whom lived in small shacks on the wharf itself.

Long Wharf was Boston's economic engine, its sole economic engine. The Town House (now the Old State House, built in 1711) originally stood at the wharf’s shoreward end. An open marketplace occupied the ground floor and the city's government had the floors above, as if to braid the economic and political strands of the city's life. Landfill had gradually moved the water's edge further into the harbor, so the city built King Street (now State Street), leading straight from the wharf's receding threshold to the Town House. Scores of streets and alleys spread north and south from King, which became a borderline dividing the North End from the South.

Governor Bernard knew that Long Wharf and the dozens of small finger piers to its left and right made Boston the biggest, busiest, and richest commercial port in America, even though New York had a better harbor and Philadelphia’s population was fast becoming larger. He understood that in the absence of the wharf’s maritime frenzy, the city's colossally profitable trade with the West Indies, Africa, and the British Isles would be impossible. And without the trade, Boston would be nothing.

As he walked off the wharf and into the nearby streets, the new governor met conspicuously rich men and women dressed in high fashion. Many rode in liveried carriages, their needs and wants attended by servants or African slaves. Boston’s richest citizens were urbane, well mannered, and intelligent people of aristocratic mien. Life treated them well, and they savored extravagant displays of their gratifyingly formidable wealth. They had refined tastes, sophisticated interests, and voracious appetites for luxury goods imported from England.

Bernard also encountered large numbers of ragged and underfed people, a sizable portion of them unskilled and chronically underemployed. Many lived in dismal poverty. And he noticed Boston’s unkempt, disorganized look. Roads met at odd angles, and crooked alleyways, jammed with houses and shops, abounded. Long Wharf and King Street aside, the place appeared to have grown helter-skelter.

Boston was a compact city, and a brisk walker who knew the way through the tangle of streets and alleys could cross it in under an hour. The city had little potential for geographic expansion because it was virtually an island, surrounded by swampy harbor shoals. Its only link to the rest of Massachusetts was Boston Neck, a low spit that sometimes disappeared under spring tides.

About 16,000 souls lived in there in 1760. Unlike the heterogeneous populations of many colonies to the south, most Massachusetts people, or their ancestors, came from England. Artisans, traders, shopkeepers, mechanics, preachers, teachers, innkeepers, and tavern and coffeehouse proprietors made up perhaps forty percent of the city’s population. Most were middle-class entrepreneurs who owned property and the tools of their trades. Merchants, along with lawyers and professional men, occupied the top of the social and economic pyramid. These aristocrats accounted for less than five percent of Bostonians. Many were linked by blood or marriage, and they controlled public policy and the agencies of government. They also possessed the lion’s share of Boston’s wealth.

The rest of the inhabitants consisted of day laborers and common seamen, journeymen, indentured servants and apprentices, whores, beggars and thieves, the enslaved, the down-and-out and desperate, the deranged and disabled. Though comprising the bulk of the population, these people owned only a miniscule portion of the city’s wealth.

The advantages of Boston's sturdy aristocracy were not lost on its new governor as he began the administration of His Majesty's government. The colony’s political and social equilibrium derived from a traditional assumption: authority belonged to men whose wealth, education, success, and breeding set them apart. But another feature of Boston society gave Bernard pause. Everyone, regardless of social class or occupation, seemed to be politically charged, in fact quarrelsome, and forever making demands. They wrote pamphlets and broadsides, and sometimes held street demonstrations to set forth their political views to those in power. They talked a lot about their liberties, which they said included the right to challenge the very authority to which they otherwise deferred with respect. This dichotomy between authority and democratic enthusiasm, curious and puzzling to Governor Bernard, had deep roots in New England's Puritan heritage.

The Puritans who founded Boston in 1630 had been Calvinists. Like John Calvin, they believed that every human community should serve God by creating and maintaining social conditions in which salvation, if dispensed by the Almighty, would find its way into the souls of otherwise hopelessly sinful and untrustworthy people. A small number of citizens, having received clear signals from on high, assumed responsibility for assisting others along the paths of righteous preparation for the next life. These men established the laws and ordinances under which everyone’s opportunity to receive God’s grace would be amplified. The Puritans' City on a Hill was in this way an authoritarian society, a theocracy. Ministers and magistrates exercised the power to set standards, adjudicate disputes, punish sinfulness, indolence and sloth, and administer all the essential rules.

Puritan ideology simultaneously created a basis for challenging authority. Families lived in towns, in houses crowded around a village green, with fields and pasturage out behind. In light of the importance of pious life in this society, Puritans believed that keeping people together in consolidated communities would help them identify errant ideas and behavior, making it easier to correct aberrance or sin. Every town had a meetinghouse that served both secular and religious purposes. In community debates related to town governance Puritan citizens demanded and achieved lively public discourse to guide and tame authority. These crusty settlers seldom hesitated to use their village gatherings to call leaders to account, notwithstanding an ingrained reverence for traditional authority. Therein lies the wellspring of New England's consuming passion for town meetings, neighborhood caucuses, and other boisterous public assemblies.

This political tradition would haunt Francis Bernard for his entire time as governor of Massachusetts. He never understood how the leadership of a natural aristocracy defined by wealth and breeding could thrive in the context of populist habits and commitments.

When Bernard took the reins of His Majesty’s enterprise in Massachusetts, no one contemplated challenging his authority. But the citizens believed they had a right, even a civic duty, to criticize, contest, or impugn his performance when necessary. They never hesitated to make strongly worded demands, pointing out neglect, error, or presumption. Citizens of wealth, education, and social standing played important roles in Boston’s raucous politics, but like early Puritan leaders, many had a populist concept of their social responsibilities. Links to the middle class, and sometimes the poor, gave them muscle when they disagreed with the governor and his administration.

Everyone professed loyalty to the principle of royal authority, represented by the governor. But Bostonians also felt comfortable arguing with this principle, even flouting it, if it became bothersome and especially if it impeded their insatiable pursuit of wealth on Long Wharf. Men of substance had little difficulty convincing other citizens, most of whom depended on the success of Long Wharf as much as they did, to follow their leadership.

In early Puritan society, affluence had helped identify and establish a person’s achievement, merit, and social rank. No one considered its visible manifestations inappropriate or evil so long as wealth and material bounty did not eclipse the preponderant quest for salvation. Nor did Puritans object to art, though they worried that its more decorous and lavish forms could distract worshipers from the demands of a pious life.

Religion remained important in Boston’s late-eighteenth-century society, but daily life became increasingly secular. Prosperous citizens filled their palatial homes with fine furniture, collected delicate china and crystal, and indulged other extravagances, including fine art, at levels early Puritans would have considered scandalous. Boston’s artisans manufactured few of the items coveted by the city's aristocracy, but that mattered little to merchants whose ships frequented ports in the British Isles. By the 1760s, trade in British luxury goods was a major business on Long Wharf.

But one commodity remained lamentably absent. Pictorial art, especially handsome portraits of aristocratic gentlemen and their ladies, could not be had at any price due to the absence of skilled artists. Robert Feke, John Smibert, and a few other local limners had answered the call for art during the 1740s and 1750s, but the limitations of their work—murky and dense paint; flat, two-dimensional images; weak anatomical form, and awkward poses—were obvious. Feke’s The Reverend Thomas Hiscox and Smibert’s Francis Brinley suggest the primitive quality of even these painters’ best works.

Copley had taught himself to paint. In the absence of teachers, almost all American artists of his time learned by copying English works as much as was possible at a distance of more than three thousand miles, at least six weeks of sailing on unforgiving Atlantic seas. But inevitably copying led to shortcomings. Copley’s learn-by-imitation method resulted in works with a look of their own, quite unlike English portraiture of the time. His art spoke in a vernacular voice, developed under the influence of New England’s unique cultural history. Both he and his patrons drew spiritual sustenance from the colony’s seventeenth-century Puritan beginnings.

Successful and proud people inhabited Boston in 1760, the year Copley painted his first mature portrait. The French and Indian War drew to a close at about this time, all but extinguishing France’s vast colonial empire in the Western Hemisphere. Bostonians expressed pride in the British victory. They appreciated the end of the French and Indian menace to the north and west and prepared to begin exploiting new economic opportunities that England’s military triumph had unlocked in Canada, the Ohio Valley, and the Caribbean. They envisioned the disappearance of French culture in America, along with its Catholic religion. Great Britain had become truly great—the biggest, strongest, richest imperial enterprise of the modern world. Art blossomed throughout this magnificent empire, celebrating the glorious achievement. In America, Boston was its epicenter, and John Singleton Copley its luminary.

Ironically, the victory also would become the undoing of the British Empire, at least in North America. Winning the war burdened England’s government with a walloping debt, and the much larger empire it created would be costly to administer and defend. Taxes necessary to support such an enormous enterprise would trigger significant resistance in the thirteen American colonies. As resistance and then revolution crept into Boston’s politics during the coming fifteen years, no one would be immune to the turmoil.

A LAWYER, A FEMINIST, AND AN ARTIST

In the fall of 1760, a month after Governor Bernard stepped ashore, a young man named James Otis made his political debut. He was a Harvard graduate from a prominent Massachusetts family. His verbal dexterity, quick wit, and feverish energy fascinated everyone who met him. He savored the raucous excitement ever present in Boston town meetings where his speaking talent and occasional bombast made him a popular figure.

Otis was a gifted lawyer and a member of the colony’s legislature. He soon distinguished himself as one of colonial America’s bitterest and most tenacious critics of royal government. He became Bernard’s constant and never silent bête noire. He picked fights with Lieutenant Governor Thomas Hutchinson as well, squabbling about administrative failures, delaying government funding, and denouncing perceived errors of gubernatorial judgment. Otis never seemed to tire of assigning impure motives to actions taken by His Majesty's representatives in the colony, always couching his case in meticulous legal logic. He innocently claimed to be engaged in a modest and humble endeavor, by calm reason and argument, to convince mankind of [Bernard’s and Hutchinson’s] mistakes when they happen to be guilty of any.

Otis’s preference for the high road, his wish to convince mankind of the government's failings rather than just Bostonians, amounted to more than rhetorical flourish. Examining issues others might consider simple matters of public policy or politics, he discovered governmental transgressions that he believed violated the very essence of the British constitution. His opponents called him an incendiary, which he was, but he was not a reckless radical and never meant to be a revolutionary. Quite the contrary: Speaking without cynicism or sarcasm he said he wished to uphold the timeless principles of liberty embedded in Great Britain’s ancient unwritten constitution. It consisted in legal precedents accumulated since the Magna Carta of 1215 and he believed it was now threatened in Massachusetts by the corrupt and illegal behavior of Governor Bernard, Lieutenant Governor Hutchinson, and their minions as well as by imperial policy makers across the ocean.

As he mounted his opposition, Otis anticipated the content and tenor of resistance to the policies and practices of the English government in all the American colonies for years to come. He said his unremitting attacks on royal government were meant to purify and strengthen an otherwise benevolent and constitutionally superior British Empire. When stated this way, his mission echoed a distant Puritan belief that exemplary life and thought in the New World might reform and redeem the Old.

From Otis’s point