Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution

By Nicole Eustace

At the outset of the eighteenth century, many British Americans accepted the notion that virtuous sociable feelings occurred primarily among the genteel, while sinful and selfish passions remained the reflexive emotions of the masses, from lower-class whites to Indians to enslaved Africans. Yet by 1776 radicals would propose a new universal model of human nature that attributed the same feelings and passions to all humankind and made common emotions the basis of natural rights. In Passion Is the Gale, Nicole Eustace describes the promise and the problems of this crucial social and political transition by charting changes in emotional expression among countless ordinary men and women of British America.

From Pennsylvania newspapers, pamphlets, sermons, correspondence, commonplace books, and literary texts, Eustace identifies the explicit vocabulary of emotion as a medium of human exchange. Alternating between explorations of particular emotions in daily social interactions and assessments of emotional rhetoric's functions in specific moments of historical crisis (from the Seven Years War to the rise of the patriot movement), she makes a convincing case for the pivotal role of emotion in reshaping power relations and reordering society in the critical decades leading up to the Revolution. As Eustace demonstrates, passion was the gale that impelled Anglo-Americans forward to declare their independence--collectively at first, and then, finally, as individuals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Release date: Dec 1, 2012
• ISBN: 9780807838792

Nicole Eustace

Nicole Eustace is a professor of history at New York University.

Book preview

Passion Is the Gale

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail, Reason the card, but passion is the gale.

— Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man, Epistle II

Passion Is the Gale

Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution

NICOLE EUSTACE

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia, by the University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill

The Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture is sponsored jointly by the College of William and Mary and the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. On November 15, 1996, the Institute adopted the present name in honor of a bequest from Malvern H. Omohundro, Jr.

© 2008 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Designed by Kimberly Bryant

Set in Arno Pro by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Manufactured in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eustace, Nicole.

Passion is the gale : emotion, power, and the coming of the

American Revolution / Nicole Eustace.

p. cm.

Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Williamsburg, Virginia—T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3168-7 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. United States—History—Revolution, 1775–1783—Causes.

2. Emotions—Social aspects—United States—History—

18th century. I. Title.

E210.E96    2008

973.3′11—dc22

2007040049

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resouces.

12  11  10  09  08    5  4  3  2  1

For

James Michael Klancnik, Jr.,

and

James Louis Eustace Klancnik

For

Past, present, and future

Contents

   List of Illustrations and Tables

Introduction    The Rising Tempest

1 Passions Rous’d in Virtue’s Cause: Debating the Passions with Alexander Pope, 1735–1776

2 The Dominion of the Passions: Dilemmas of Emotional Expression and Control in Colonial Pennsylvania

3 A Corner Stone … of a Copious Work: Love and Power in Eighteenth-Century Alliances

4 Resolute Resentment versus Indiscrete Heat: Anger, Honor, and Social Status

5 The Passion Question: Religious Politics and Emotional Rhetoric in the Seven Years War

6 The Turnings of the Human Heart: Sympathy, Social Signals, and the Self

7 Allowed to Mourn, but … Bound to Submit: Grief, Grievance, and the Negotiation of Authority

8 Ruling Passions: Surveying the Borders of Humanity on the Pennsylvania Frontier

9 A Passion for Liberty—The Spirit of Freedom: The Rhetoric of Emotion in the Age of Revolution

Postlude   The Passions and Feelings of Mankind

Appendix   Toward a Lexicon of Eighteenth-Century Emotion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Index

List of Illustrations and Tables

Illustrations

Figure 1 Joseph Shippen. By Benjamin West

Figure 2 Frontispiece. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (London, 1751)

Figure 3 Frontispiece. Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man (Philadelphia, 1760)

Figure 4 Francis Hopkinson. By R. E. Pine

Figure 5 William Smith. By Joseph Sartain

Figure 6 Elizabeth Sandwith

Figure 7 Elizabeth Graeme

Figure 8 Benjamin Chew. Silhouette

Figure 9 Benjamin Chew. Etching by Albert Rosenthal

Figure 10 James Pemberton. By David McNeely Stauffer

Figure 11 Francis Hopkinson and Elizabeth Graeme. By Benjamin West

Figure 12 Thomas Bradford

Figure 13 Franklin and the Quakers. By James Claypoole

Figure 14 The Indians Delivering up the English Captives. By Benjamin West

Figure 15 The Indians Giving a Talk to Colonel Bouquet. By Benjamin West

Figure 16 Expiring: In Hopes of a Resurrection to Life Again. Pennsylvania Journal

Figure 17 The Deplorable State of America; or, Sc——h Government. Anonymous

Figure 18 The Deplorable State of America. By Robert Wilkinson

Figure 19 The Repeal or the Funeral of Miss Ame——Stamp. By Benjamin Wilson

Figure 20 The Bloody Massacre in King Street. By Paul Revere

Table

Table 1 Frequency of Words for Shared Feeling in the Pennsylvania Gazette

Passion Is the Gale

Introduction

The Rising Tempest

Where should a history of eighteenth-century American emotion begin? We are used to regarding the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason and to seeing the Enlightenment as dependent on the faculty of thought. Indeed, Enlightenment rationalism is generally credited with the defining role in developing theories of natural rights. Reason’s conceptual counterpoint, emotion, has seldom garnered the same attention. Though acknowledged as an important element in the Scottish school of moral philosophy, emotion’s influence has been thought to reside primarily in the private realm of family, faith, and fiction. So studies of eighteenth-century emotive history have paid close attention to the place of feeling in household functioning, religious awakenings, and literary flowering, but interest has more often waned when the topic has turned to political philosophy or power relations.¹

Yet, the very man who gave us the catch phrase the Age of Reason did so only in 1794, nearly two decades after inciting revolution with a call to every Man to whom Nature hath given the Power of feeling. That Thomas Paine’s 1776 masterpiece Common Sense relied explicitly on the notion that the common passions and feelings of mankind provided the basis for natural equality and the firmest foundation for natural rights, and that Revolutionary Americans responded so emphatically to this idea, should alert us to a crucial point. Emotion—passion, feeling, sentiment, as it was variously called—contributed as much as reason to the structure of eighteenth-century British-American power and politics.²

The conventional view of the dueling nature of reason and emotion—and of the primacy of the former over the latter—comes to us directly from eighteenth-century commentators. Even essayists in provincial colonial newspapers were apt to declare, as one author did in 1735:

Reason represents Things to us, not only as they are at present, but as they are in their whole Nature and Tendency. Passion only regards them in the former Light.…

Whilst there is a Conflict betwixt … Passion and Reason, we must be miserable in Proportion to the Struggle; and when … Reason … [is] subdued … the Happiness we have then, is not the Happiness of our rational Nature, but the Happiness only of the inferior and sensual Part of us.

But focusing too closely on such negative assessments of emotion can blind us to the chance to appreciate how deeply debated such assertions actually were. For every critic of the sensual, sensate, passionate element of human nature—and of the inferior types who allowed themselves to be swayed by such stirrings—we can find adamant defenders of the naturalness and efficacy of emotion.³

Consider the views of a young Pennsylvanian named Joseph Shippen who claimed in his commonplace book in 1750:

All Passions in general are planted in us for excellent Purposes in human Life. Stoical Apathy is not a human Virtue. Agreeable to this Mr. Pope speaks in his Essay on Man, Epist. 2.—viz.

Passions, tho selfish, if their means be fair

List under reason and deserve her care.

…

In lazy apathy let stoics boast,

Their virtue fixed, ’tis fixed in a frost,

Contracted all, retiring to the breast;

But strength of mind is exercise not rest:

The rising tempest puts in act the soul,

parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.

On life’s vast ocean diversely we sail,

Reason the card, but passion is the gale.

Shippen regarded the passions as excellent, not inferior, and could turn to the words of the celebrated poet Alexander Pope to support his assertions. He believed that, though reason could provide a card (a compass) to steer by, passion alone motivated human actions and drove human decisions. The more we take note of the full range of eighteenth-century commentary on the passions, the more apparent it becomes that positive views abounded. A rising tempest of emotion was sweeping through the Age of Reason.⁴

Assessments of the weight and worth of emotion were fundamental to discussions of human nature and, by extension, to debates about natural equality. Those who derided the passions as inferior to reason often did so in an effort to discredit the emotions of social antagonists. Self-styled members of the elite sought to use emotional critiques to marginalize those they hoped to confine to inferior status. They wished to distinguish their own emotions as refined feelings while deriding the emotions of the lower orders as base passions. Conversely, when commentators like Pope and Paine insisted that the propensity for passion was universal—inevitable, invariable, and even desirable in all people—they paved the way for a new understanding of the fundamental commonalities of human nature, irrespective of artificial social divides. Passion thus mattered as much to politics and political philosophy as it did to domestic life.

Still, a shift toward appreciation of the power implications of eighteenth-century emotion should not distract us from considering the influence of emotion on everyday life. Where scholars have begun to explore the political import of passions, they have too often neglected the evidence of ordinary expression in favor of exclusive examination of the ideas unveiled in cultural productions, from philosophical treatises to poetry and novels. In fact, for every deliberative entry added to a commonplace book, people like Joseph Shippen made countless daily decisions about when, whether, and how to voice their own emotions.⁵

When we turn our gaze from Shippen’s literary interests to his living interactions, we find him equally absorbed in the issue of emotion. For example, in a letter to his father at about the same time he was compiling his commonplace quotations, Shippen declared:

The sincere concern, which I am very sensible you have ever had on my Account, … ought to fill me with the highest sense of Gratitude and Esteem … Your wholesome Advice … I hope I shall enjoy a true Relish of … by following it with the readyest Chearfulness.

The modern observer cannot ignore the intensive work of regulation the letter undertakes. Shippen did not so much express feeling for his father as demonstrate a thorough knowledge of the emotions he ought to experience and hope[d] to act on. Still a student at this letter’s writing, Shippen could ill afford to voice anything but grateful esteem and cheerful obedience to the father on whom his life’s prospects depended. His careful self-censorship reveals the social stakes of emotional expression; in addressing himself to his father Shippen had to consider the potential of emotion to challenge or affirm his father’s authority and thus to define his relative status in their relationship. Thus, the scrutiny of actual emotional exchanges—in addition to the study of abstract philosophical pronouncements—offers an important reminder. If the history of emotion cannot and should not be separated from the analysis of politics and political philosophy, no more should analysis of ordinary expression be divorced from issues of power and authority.⁶

FIGURE 1. Joseph Shippen. By Benjamin West. Shippen-Balch Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Permission The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Shippen’s claims to social authority are buttressed by visual reference to his mastery of both ancient learning and modern literature.

By collapsing distinctions between the personal and the political, by locating the history of emotion in records of daily expression and philosophical speculation alike, this study both provides perspective on the role of emotion in the articulation of eighteenth-century social and political philosophy and offers new insight into how ordinary people tested and contested such theories in the course of their daily lives. Taking the position that expressions of emotion constituted declarations of status, this work analyzes emotional language as a key form of social communication. From fathers and sons to husbands and wives, from magistrates and commoners to masters, servants, and slaves, every exchange of emotion offered implicit commentary on the state of social relations. For example, the master who posted a newspaper ad for a runaway Irish Servant Woman named Eleanor Ferrall, by describing her as red faced … very talkative, subject to Passion, and easily offended, surely intended nothing flattering by his depiction. Yet Ferrall herself evidently appreciated the way a display of passion could convey defiance of her master’s disrespect. When eighteenth-century actors decided whether to express their emotions as well as how to describe the emotions of others, they either confirmed or contested prevailing assumptions about the terms of social organization. Tracing historical patterns in who expressed what emotions when and to whom, and in how the emotions of various groups of people were conventionally categorized, can both reveal local struggles over status and actually unveil the changing social assumptions of the larger polity.⁷

If the history of colonial British-American emotion challenges traditional divisions between reason and passion as well as between public and private, it also prompts fresh recognition of certain cultural distinctions. To date, European perspectives have dominated the history of emotion in the eighteenth century. Scholars who look to literature for historical evidence of emotion have relied, of necessity, almost entirely on European output (no novels were written on American soil until 1789). As an unintended consequence, it has been difficult to consider particular American emotional streams within broader transatlantic cultural currents. To be sure, as Joseph Shippen’s engagement with Alexander Pope indicates, we cannot begin to understand the attitudes toward emotion evinced in colonial British America without reference to European writers—especially English and Scottish. Still, we err just as gravely if we simply assume that the productions of the London stage or the Glasgow lecture hall can be taken to represent the ideas and attitudes of denizens of the British Empire on both sides of the Atlantic. On the contrary, even when colonists read European authors, they always did so in the context of their own concerns.

Emotion played a key part in the colonial milieu. Though part of the appeal of colonial settlement lay in its potential to unsettle long-standing social, cultural, and political formations, the resulting instability could also cause consternation. Much as colonists throughout British North America appreciated the individual opportunities available to them in fledgling societies, they also faced difficult questions about how to sustain coherent communities. The privileging of personal passion had the potential to promote the expansion of the individual self; but, conversely, sociable feelings might bind people together in a new degree of sensus communis. Exactly because it held such transformative potential, to alternately advance individualism or cement social ties, emotion became an intense focus of personal assertion and political debate alike.

What is more, inhabitants of British America who sought to situate their social position (and implicitly to articulate their political vision) through expressions of emotion found themselves faced with complicated tasks of triangulation. Wish though they might to assert their full membership in the British Empire, colonists frequently found themselves placed at the literal and figurative periphery of British life, their attempts to master the emotional subtleties of British-style gentility ignored or even mocked by those in the metropolis. At the same time, proximity to the challenging presence of autonomous Indian nations augmented anxieties over civility, about the emotional comportment that should characterize the civilized even in the midst of a savage wilderness. Meanwhile, the stakes of emotion were heightened still further by early associations between the capacity for emotion and the passion for liberty. That is, emotional freedom became symbolically linked to legal standing as a free person, a proposition with significance for everything from the slave system to revolutionary rhetoric.

Such status concerns were endemic to the colonial situation, in which a geographically and socially mobile population of Europeans, Africans, and native Americans, with a variety of languages and from diverse religious traditions, made easy agreement on the meaning and morality of emotion difficult to achieve. As one local observer put it, summing up the state of colonial emotional dilemmas:

We are a people, thrown together from various Quarters of the World, differing in all Things—Language, Manners, and Sentiment.… LIBERTZ never deigns to dwell but with a prudent, a sensible and a manly People. Our general Character is, I fear, too much the Reverse. We either grovel beneath the true Spirit of Freedom; or, if we aim at Spirit, we are born by a sullen ferocity to the other Extreme. We are yet too much Strangers to that rational Medium, which is founded on a more enlarged and refined Turn of Sentiment.

Without denying the transatlantic component of eighteenth-century American emotional culture, we must remain alert to the special problems of negotiating passion in North America. Balancing the sometimes opposing emotional qualities associated with gentility, respectability, civility, liberty, and (as this passage hints) masculinity could prove uniquely challenging in the colonial context.⁸

In order to investigate such issues closely, while drawing meaningful comparisons across public and private realms, this study focuses on the history of emotion in a single British-American colony: eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Though frequently referred to as a peaceable kingdom, Pennsylvania actually endured acute social and cultural tensions. As a proprietary colony with a strong tradition of assertive representative assemblies, Pennsylvania offered its inhabitants a combustible mix of aristocratic and democratic models of society and politics. Quakers had long dominated the colonial Assembly, aided by their alliance with the colony’s many German Pietists. But, by midcentury, the colony’s leading Anglicans had set up a rival camp centered on the proprietors and their governors, intermittently supported by the colony’s growing numbers of Scots-Irish Presbyterians. Coalescing into opposing proprietary and Assembly-led factions, Pennsylvania colonists enjoyed little consensus regarding the worth of emotion, much less agreement about the kind of society they hoped to create. Yet, living in and around Philadelphia, British America’s largest and most cosmopolitan port city, they did share a conviction that their colony was maturing and had earned the right to a prominent place within the British Empire.⁹

Meanwhile, Pennsylvania colonists’ emotional politics were shaped by contact and conflict with many other groups in their midst. For example, the traditions of pacifism begun by William Penn brought the European inhabitants of the colony into closer daily interaction with Indians than in perhaps any other British-American colony. The resulting familiarity and accompanying competition made it both more difficult and more culturally urgent for colonists to try to delineate the distinguishing emotions of civilization. Furthermore, by midcentury, Pennsylvania was rapidly growing into a slave society, with as many as 20 percent of household heads relying on enslaved labor in the countryside and even higher concentrations of enslaved Africans working in urban Philadelphia. Questions about the innate differences—or inherent similarities—in the emotions of the free and the unfree took on added urgency in such a context.¹⁰

If questions about the problems and possibilities of emotion troubled people on both sides of the Atlantic and up and down the coast of British North America, explicit debates reached a fever pitch in Pennsylvania, where the sheer number and intensity of competing viewpoints pushed the issue to the fore. To illuminate the widest possible range of theoretical debates and actual exchanges, this study draws on a diverse array of sources. Chronologically, it centers on the heart of the century, from the 1740s through the 1770s, when colonial ideas about emotion would be tested and ultimately transformed. Collections of family papers at the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Haverford College Quaker Collection yield many hundreds of letters, diaries, and commonplace books, with material on emotion featured in exchanges among family, friends, and business correspondents. Manuscript evidence is then bolstered by research in printed sources, which provide information on the public expression and discussion of emotion. Thus, five decades of the Pennsylvania Gazette, from the 1720s through the 1770s, generate examples of the shifting terms of popular conversations about emotion while also allowing a glimpse of the lives of middling and lower colonists (a vantage point often more difficult to find in private papers). Indeed, in the absence of any detailed court records for colonial Pennsylvania, the paper’s mix of news reports, popular poems and stories, advertisements, and letters from contributors becomes one of the best-recorded sources of the emotional attitudes and interactions of ordinary folk. Meanwhile, the Minutes of the Provincial Council of Pennsylvania for 1754–1776 (that is, from the start of the Seven Years War through the Declaration of Independence) provides insight into the role of emotion in political negotiations, from local governance to transatlantic administration and to diplomatic relations between European and native American nations. Finally, political pamphlets and published sermons printed in midcentury Pennsylvania allow a new appreciation of the role of the rhetoric of emotion in public movements in the critical years at the close of the colonial period.

Having questioned where a history of eighteenth-century Anglo-American emotion should begin, it remains to be asked where such a study might lead. This book opens an interdisciplinary conversation about the sources and methods that can best contribute to scholarly understanding of emotion while also adding to our historical knowledge of colonial British America. In the end, these two aims add up to more than the sum of their parts; setting a study of emotion in the eighteenth century can contribute to our appreciation of emotion as a universal human attribute that nonetheless takes on distinctive meanings in culturally and historically specific contexts. At the same time, the study of emotion, and especially of the ways in which it was defined, discussed, and expressed, can help us to grasp more fully the fundamental social assumptions and daily social negotiations that collectively structured eighteenth-century British America.

The historical approach to scholarship on emotion makes its theoretical contribution by highlighting the interplay of change and stasis in human emotion, for the very kinds of questions about the particularity or universality of emotion that so troubled eighteenth-century observers still bedevil modern scholars. History can intervene in running debates between contemporary scholars of universalist and constructionist orientations, who have staked out sharply opposing views on the constancy of human emotional capacities across time and space. Theorists who argue for the universality of emotion claim that the experience of emotion is a neurochemical process common to all human beings in every age. By contrast, those who argue from the vantage point of constructionism counter that emotions can be created only through discourse. Feelings must be filtered through language, which is highly culturally specific. A historical approach can eschew such extremes.¹¹

One of the first scholars to advance such a hybrid perspective was the historian William Reddy. Reddy asserts that feelings are universal; it is their descriptors that vary across time and culture. There is a space between subjectivity and expressivity, that is, between the initial feeling of emotion and the subsequent application of linguistic descriptors to it. The distinctions between this formulation and the strict constructionist stance are important. For, if all people have the potential to feel the same emotions, then patterns in who expresses what and when and to whom assume real political significance. As Reddy so succinctly puts it, Emotional control is the real site of the exercise of power: politics is just a process of determining who must repress as illegitimate, who must foreground as valuable, the feelings that come up for them in given contexts and relationships. To study emotional expression, then, is necessarily to investigate power relations.¹²

My attention to the historical element of emotion, to the changing ways in which emotion was subjectively verbalized and socially categorized, highlights the practical and theoretical utility of combining biological and cultural approaches. On the one hand, we are able to analyze eighteenth-century emotion today only because of the existence of a shared physiology of feeling that stretches over the centuries. On the other hand, we cannot simply assume that eighteenth-century emotional expression can now be understood transparently and without translation. In fact, the very meaning of many terms of emotion changed discernibly from the eighteenth century to today. (This point is detailed in the discussion of eighteenth-century Anglo-American words for the concept of emotion featured in the Appendix.) Moreover, the conditions in which emotional exchanges were conducted have also changed dramatically.¹³

The historical perspective especially accords with anthropological approaches when it comes to questions about the shifting nature of the self. Much of modern psychologically oriented theorizing about emotion presupposes that each party to an emotional exchange brings to the interaction a stable and autonomous identity that can be expressed or repressed, but not fundamentally altered, by the act of emoting. Yet such a model proves utterly inadequate to understanding how emotion functioned in the eighteenth century. The mid-eighteenth century was a transitional period in which traditional communal visions of the self as created through social relations coexisted and competed with modern individualized notions of the self as autonomous and independent of social roles. Because eighteenth-century actors could not yet conceive of a self entirely separate from the social order, their expressions of emotion could never be entirely personal. Rather, they were inherently relational. The subject of this study, then, is not the internal experience of emotion, but rather the external expression of emotion through language. Refining William Reddy’s analysis, I document that eighteenth-century expressions of emotion inevitably served as the vector for social communication, for the assertion and contestation of status, never simply for the outer realization of inner consciousness.¹⁴

At the same time, a historical view of emotion proves equally unsupportive of a strict constructionist approach to discourse. No notion of culture as a closed system, in which social actors are irreducibly constrained by the language with which they seek to articulate feeling, can stand up to the reality of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. In British America, myriad languages and emotional styles mixed and remixed in innovative and unpredictable ways, producing new opportunities for consciousness as well as for culture. My work shows how emotional competition and contestation among various groups can allow for advances in the political potential of emotion.

Substantively, then, this study focuses on emotional exchanges, revealing emotion’s cultural and political significance in eighteenth-century British America through scrutiny of social interactions. In the early decades of the century, Pennsylvanians indeed looked to Europe for their ideas about emotion. Yet, from the very beginning, the works they preferred revealed local peculiarities. In particular, colonists were drawn to the ideas of Alexander Pope, whose singular poem An Essay on Man offered a far more emphatically positive view of the passions than nearly any other philosophical work. A preliminary chapter describes the transatlantic context of Pennsylvania’s passion debates, focusing on the American reception of Pope’s Essay, from the 1730s, when it was imported by learned elites, through the 1760s and 1770s, when it was printed locally in inexpensive popular editions. Pope’s ideas proved pivotal, over the course of this period, to increasing acceptance of the legitimacy of personal passions and to expanding belief in the universality of human emotional attributes.

Subsequent chapters then explore specific dilemmas of emotional expression and control common to the colonial condition. Unlike other marks of rank associated with eighteenth-century British America (such as those encoded in styles of dress and other forms of consumption), articulations of emotion gave unmatched flexibility and immediacy to moments of social assertion. That is, expressions of emotion not only conveyed information about global status claims in the world at large but also could create and communicate microhierarchies in unfolding dialogues between particular people. Chapters devoted to the explication of central emotions—selected for the notable frequency of their appearance in primary sources—include one each on love, anger, sympathy, and grief. These chapters offer close semantic analysis of the vocabulary of emotion employed by Pennsylvanians and give careful attention to recurring motifs in utterance and attribution. Linguistic decisions, such as whether to express and discuss anger as unbridled rage or as measured resentment, about whether to share feeling in the form of benevolent mercy or of judgmental pity, allowed not just for the imposition of power but also for subtle negotiations, even unmistakable stands of resistance. Pennsylvanians expended considerable effort deciding how to describe their own emotions and those of others according to the social ranks and relations they wished to establish.¹⁵

At moments of public crisis, the cultural disputes and social confrontations over the expression of emotion that were ever simmering in the colonial context took on heightened strategic significance. Chapters devoted to key political turning points, including the Seven Years War of 1754–1763, the Paxton crisis of 1764, and the revolutionary protest movement from the Stamp Act of 1765 to the Declaration of Independence of 1776, explore the role of emotional rhetoric in civic debates. Emotion served vital political purposes: in contests between Quaker pacifists opposed to anger and proarmament Anglicans and Presbyterians convinced of the crucial links between passion and action during the Seven Years War period; in questions about the connections between inhumanity, insensibility, and cultural or racial proclivities that swirled around Indians, frontier commoners, and elite critics after the Christian Indian massacres at Paxton; and in mass demonstrations of the spirit of liberty that revolutionary protesters claimed as evidence of their natural right to freedom. As a Postlude devoted to describing and documenting the Pennsylvania origins of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense makes clear, Pennsylvanians’ deliberations from the Seven Years War through the Revolution helped shape the emergence of emotional language as the lingua franca of Revolutionary American political culture.

Attention to emotion reveals colonial British America as a society in flux, where individual and communal models of the self overlapped, personal passions and sociable sentiments could have contradictory implications for the growth of individualism or the promotion of communalism, and the universal presence or differential prevalence of human attributes remained open to debate. Elite efforts to discriminate between the sociable feelings of the genteel and the selfish passions of the masses, the better to fix supposedly natural divisions in the social order, foundered in the face of mounting arguments that all emotions were naturally universally pervasive. Because of emotion’s eighteenth-century links to developing moral sense philosophy and awakened Christianity, the marking of social divisions on the basis of emotional difference had the seeming potential to cloak social dominance in moral probity. However, elite attempts to lay exclusive claim to refined emotions (while denying a propensity for base ones) could not be sustained in the course of ordinary social interactions. Instead, emotional exchanges revealed the underlying commonality of human potential across artificial status divides.

The study of emotion thus exposes the centrality of hierarchical notions of rank and authority to eighteenth-century understandings of society while confirming how fragile and contingent such status divisions truly were. Indeed, though members of eighteenth-century colonial elites initially turned to emotion in search of a reliable mark of exclusivity, they could not hinder emotion’s eventual emergence as a key element of natural equality. Thomas Paine’s invocation of the passions and feelings of mankind announced a new vision of society, in which the natural equality of all would be acknowledged and increased opportunities for personal advancement would augment, not undermine, devotion to the nascent community. Having had numerous occasions to test such ideals in the course of daily emotional exchanges over the preceding decades, Revolutionary Americans were uniquely prepared to embrace Paine’s radical stance.

To argue that emotion was central to Paine’s revolutionary philosophy is not to say that an emphasis on emotion would always have progressive implications. Indeed, as demonstrated by today’s scholarly debates, the question whether emotion is universal has never been finally decided. Moreover, efforts to differentiate between desirable and risible emotions continued to be a potent weapon of social division through the nineteenth century. We cannot forget that even Paine, the man who launched the loudest and best-heard plea for recognition of the passions and feelings common to all mankind, eventually gave up emphasizing emotion in favor of commemorating the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason. Part of the work of this project, then, is to attempt to understand the limitations as well as the possibilities of emotion as a medium for social and political innovation. Still, if we ignore the prominent place of passion in the eighteenth century, we miss the chance to appreciate the standpoint of the countless colonists like Joseph Shippen, who used the adage, Passion is the gale, to argue that emotion had a potent part to play in the reordering of Anglo-American life. If Pennsylvania began as a point of reception for the writings of Europeans like Alexander Pope, it emerged by century’s end as an original site of production for a new American emotional culture, one with revolutionary—if never fully realized—social and political potential.

1 Passions Rous’d in Virtue’s Cause

Debating the Passions with Alexander Pope, 1735–1776

Better for Us, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discompos’d the mind: But all subsists by universal strife; And Passions are the elements of Life.

—Alexander Pope,

An Essay on Man, Epistle I, 165–170

When a small, select group of Pennsylvanians gathered at the behest of Benjamin Franklin to form the Library Company of Philadelphia in 1731, they believed that much more than personal amusement or even literary advancement was at stake. As they explained to proprietor Thomas Penn, they intended their members-only lending library (the first of its kind in the colonies) to help Philadelphia become the future Athens of America while allowing her Sons [to] arise, qualified with Learning, Virtue, and Politeness for the most important offices of Life! Enamored of an emerging eighteenth-century transatlantic culture of politeness, Pennsylvania colonists nevertheless remained divided about how best to pursue virtue in the colonial context. Classical conceptions of virtue had called for stoic self-sacrifice in the interest of the common good, but newer philosophical fashions hinted that personal passions might well serve social as well as selfish ends. Among eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians at least as eager to ensconce themselves in the most important offices of life as to see their colony accorded a place alongside Athens, pure self-sacrifice was unpalatable. They wanted, instead, to balance the interests of self and society, to pursue personal progress while promoting communal constancy. An innovative means of straddling such extremes was soon to be proposed by Alexander Pope in his 1733 poem, An Essay on Man. Not surprisingly, the aspiring members of the Library Company lost little time in importing a copy for their collection.¹

With his Essay on Man, Pope claimed to have arrived at a solution to the question of how to reconcile civic virtue and personal passion. He announced in a preface to prospective readers of the book-length work that the science of Human Nature could be "reduced to a few clear points. With words that would resound with Pennsylvania readers, he declared, If I could flatter myself that this Essay has any merit, it is in steering between doctrines seemingly opposite … and in forming out of all a temperate yet not inconsistent, and a short yet not imperfect system of Ethics. What doctrines" did Pope’s poem promise to steer between? His Essay asserted that, while reason could play important functions, passions were universal and socially useful elements of Life. Meanwhile, his claim that Self-love and Social be the same offered the enticing prospect that proper emotional modulation could reconcile the competing claims of individual ambition and social cohesion.²

Alerted by returning travelers from abroad that a new essay by the illustrious English translator of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey was the talk of London, members of the Library Company moved quickly to obtain the Essay on Man, taking receipt of first-edition copies of the poem by April 1735. Thus began Pennsylvania’s engagement with Pope’s Essay, a passionate interest that would stretch over decades. From that first copy to arrive in Philadelphia to the edition of Pope’s collected works offered for sale by Franklin’s partner in the printing business, David Hall, in 1774, Pope’s Essay on Man featured in Pennsylvania importers’ advertisements and booksellers’ catalogs more than two dozen times in the forty-odd years between the publication of the Essay and the onset of the American Revolution. So great was Pennsylvanians’ interest in Pope’s Essay that it was eventually not only imported but also published in the colony itself, going through three editions in thirteen years, one in 1747 and two in 1760. Few other English works could claim such popularity. That fact begs an important question: why did Pennsylvanians respond so emphatically to Pope?³

There was something singular about the pull of Pope’s Essay on Man in the colonies. Of course, part of the Essay’s success simply sprang from an ever-growing interest in European literature and philosophy among colonists as well as from the rapid general development of colonial print culture. Pope’s work shared shelf space with numerous other eighteenth-century literary giants: moral philosophers like David Hume, Francis Hutcheson, John Locke, the earl of Shaftsbury, and Adam Smith; novelists like Henry Fielding and Samuel Richardson; and satirists and dramatists like Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Jonathan Swift. Yet, unlike writers in the Stoic tradition who urged the avoidance of all emotion, or the latest moral philosophers who encouraged emotion only in the service of others, Pope offered people an out. He urged them to embrace their own passions fully, secure in the belief that emotions were as natural and irreducible as the very elements of life.⁴

Pope’s emphatic endorsement of the passions spoke strongly to colonists struggling to find a way to advance self and society simultaneously. With a reputation as the best poor man’s country where people could enjoy unprecedented degrees of religious freedom and democratic government, Pennsylvania promised its inhabitants myriad new social, political, and economic opportunities. What is more, Philadelphia’s position as a premier colonial port city gave it access to the constant transatlantic transportation of people, goods, and ideas, which gave Pennsylvania colonists an expansive sense of possibility and mobility. Reflecting such hopes, Library Company members declared to Penn their conviction that the colony’s moment had arrived. Though well aware that when Colonies are in their Infancy, the Refinements of Life … cannot be much attended to, members believed that Pennsylvania was at last ready for refinement.⁵

Yet fluidity could also foster an atmosphere of uncertainty. Founded by Quakers on the principle of religious liberty, the colony’s very openness provided wide doorways for divisiveness. By the middle of the eighteenth century, restive coteries of Anglicans and Presbyterians began to challenge Quakers’ long-standing social and political dominance. The emerging elite of all religious persuasions remained eager to have their social position validated by their British peers. Meanwhile, of course, the ranks of the would-be colonial elite remained ever indistinct, vulnerable to repeated challenges and incursions. People could never be sure precisely where they stood vis-à-vis their fellow colonists or the countrymen they had left behind. At a time that might have been highly conducive to the emergence of individualism, most Pennsylvanians remained preoccupied with establishing communities and defining their position within them.

Ultimately, then, colonists’ desires for self-advancement coexisted uneasily with a wish for social stability, since individual shifts in status threatened to create aggregate social flux. In light of this dilemma, emotion had the paradoxical potential to strengthen (or threaten) self and society simultaneously, depending on whether it was turned inward or outward. Pope’s Essay on Man resonated so strongly with colonists because it seemed to offer a solution to this conundrum.

By declaring self-love and social to be the same, Pope provided an apparent rationale for the pursuit of self-advancement as an avenue to social good. Taken up first by elite members of the Library Company, many of them Anglican and Presbyterian rivals of establishment Quakers, over the ensuing decades the poem touched wider and wider circles of ambitious colonists. Elite Company members wished to consolidate their claims to refinement and their consequent right to fill important offices; nevertheless, an ever-expanding range of Pennsylvania readers embraced the poem as their own. In so doing, they evinced their interest in passion and the pursuit of self-love. While Company members had initially imported Pope as part of an effort to assert their mature status as full partners in the British Empire, the reading of Pope in Pennsylvania came in response to uniquely colonial anxieties and opportunities. Passion’s volatility meshed well with colonial conditions of social mobility.

The goal of this chapter is to explore the debates on the passions that Pope’s poem helped provoke, to chart the ways in which ever-widening circles of Pennsylvanians made use of the poem, and, finally, to sketch how positive views of the passions influenced five tumultuous decades of religious and political upheaval. Positions on passion and the pursuit of self-love helped to define key debates on everything from the morality of slavery to the defensibility of war. Many of these topics are developed in greater depth later in this book. The present chapter offers an overview of issues and events as well as a chance to underscore their transatlantic cultural context. Subsequent chapters deal more broadly with other categories of emotion (including affections, feelings, and sentiments) as well as more specifically with particular varieties of emotion (including love, anger, sympathy, and grief); this chapter focuses on the passions.

Passion, because of its highly particular relation to the self, was the most vexed and contested of all emotional categories. Fundamentally, passion could be defined as a fit or mood marked by stress of feeling or abandonment to emotion; a transport of excited feeling. The sense of abandonment carries with it the idea that passions involved selfish capitulation to the will, a flouting of all social and self-restraint—qualities that had traditionally led to associating passion with sin. Still, passion could also be linked with positive attributes—action, movement, transport—and therein lay its dormant attraction for colonial British Americans. Over the course of the eighteenth century, many eventually became enamored of the idea that, because of its intrinsic connection to human will, passion alone, of all varieties of emotion, could confer the socially useful power of action. And many Pennsylvanians adopted Pope as passion’s spokesman.⁶

To appreciate the stir Pope’s position on passion caused among colonists and to understand the contentious contemporary questions his poem helped them to confront requires investigation of the response of readers to An Essay on Man. Fortunately, colonial Pennsylvanians made casual private references to Pope almost as frequently as they published advertisements for his work. At least two dozen references to Pope, from almost as many individuals, survive in the letters, diaries, and other writings of colonial Pennsylvanians, and half of them mention, either directly or implicitly, An Essay on Man. Listening in on Pennsylvanians’ discussions of Pope, peering over readers’ shoulders as they made marginal notes on the poem can allow us to see how colonists called on his promise to steer a virtuous path between extremes, how they sought to use the passions to articulate and negotiate the ideal relationship between self and society. Taken together, the central decades of the eighteenth century might well be called the era of the passion question, when concerns about the optimal development of personal passions became a matter of the most pressing public importance.⁷

The 1730s: Logan and Franklin on Presumptuous Men and Poison Fruit

Colonial Pennsylvanians could not get enough of Pope. As Benjamin Franklin remarked to one London bookseller, Everything, good or bad, that makes a noise [in London] … has a run in Philadelphia. Of Pope specifically, he added, That Poet has many Admirers here, and the Reflection he somewhere casts on the Plantations … is injurious. Concerned that an author like Pope would cast reflections on colonials and criticize them for having provincial literary tastes, Franklin declared, Your authors know but little of the Fame they have on this Side [of] the Ocean. At a moment when the members of an emerging local elite saw their colony as approaching maturation, nothing could prove to a British audience that they had come of age like a sophisticated appreciation of the most up-to-date works of European language and literature.⁸

Regardless of how they sought to position themselves, Pennsylvanians could not escape the distinct coordinates that defined their social, cultural, and political place in the transatlantic system. Their location was marked not only by their distance from London markets, by their central spot on the eastern coast of British North America, and by their proximity to a western hinterland but also by the diverse ethnic and religious origins of the colony’s inhabitants. The competing viewpoints various groups brought to questions about emotion and virtue ensured that Pennsylvania debates on the topic would be contentious. Any consensus would have to incorporate diverse influences. Eager though they might have been to demonstrate that they appreciated Pope’s work as well as any Englishman living on the other Side [of] the Ocean, colonists could not but develop distinctive reactions to Pope’s teachings on the passions as put forth in An Essay on Man.

Try as they might, Pennsylvanians could never read Pope on exactly the same terms as Englishmen did at home. For Pope’s praise of passions ran counter to the settled opinions of the colony’s traditional Quaker elite. At a time when restive members of rising Anglican and Presbyterian factions had begun to agitate for influence, Pope’s teachings appeared simultaneously more dangerous and more desirable than they otherwise would have.

The best way to appreciate what so attracted many Pennsylvanians to Pope’s Essay may be to consider what made it repulsive to one of its first colonial readers, prominent Philadelphia Quaker James Logan. Mayor of Philadelphia in the 1720s and acting governor of the colony itself in the 1730s, Logan probably read Pope’s Essay some time shortly after the Library Company’s copy arrived on April 18, 1735. In any case, one day that year, perhaps while sitting in the large and comfortable second-floor library of the stone mansion called Stenton that he had built for himself on the outskirts of Philadelphia, Logan penned a poem of his own, On Reading Pope’s Essay on Man, by J.L. In it, he denounced Pope’s poem as poison. Dipping quill in ink, he began:

Illustrious Pope! How Truth triumphant Shines

In the Strong Periods of thy laboured Lines!

How just thou shews the active Passions’ force

And by what Culture they each Talent nurse!

These initial couplets sound positive enough. But, as will shortly become clear, Logan’s opening salvo belied his true purpose.⁹

Logan’s first lines summed up exactly what so many eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians found so captivating about Pope: his open and unequivocal embrace of the passions. While classical philosophy had promoted the virtues of Stoicism and many contemporary moral philosophers were forcefully advocating selfless benevolence, Pope alone took a dramatic stand in favor of personal passions, arguing that they were the active force behind the human will. Such a position would prove enticing, even intoxicating, to colonists of many faiths who, though long schooled to contain their emotions and submerge their sense of self in favor of the greater social good, saw in Pennsylvania the opportunity to pursue personal advancement.¹⁰

Far from being blind to the traditional notion that selfish and willful emotions were the source of sin, Pope mounted the novel argument that vice could nurture virtue, much, one might say, as manure can be used as fertilizing mulch. Pope himself favored botanical metaphors and explained his position by comparing the relation of virtue and sin, of selfless benevolence and selfish passions, to the relation between a fruit-bearing limb and the ordinary trunk, or stock, onto which it is grafted.

As fruits ungrateful to the planter’s care

On savage stocks inserted learn to bear;

The surest Virtues thus from Passions shoot,

Wild Nature’s vigor working at the root.

What crops of wit and honesty appear

From spleen, from obstinacy, hate, or fear!

—Epistle II, 181–186

Pope’s contention was, not simply that passionate emotions were not necessarily sinful, but rather that they were an essential element of effective virtue. Just as the support and nourishment provided by the host tree allowed grafted branches to flower, so, Pope argued, attention to self and to selfish passions strengthened social life and maximized the public good. Hating a person could be what motivated someone to take positive action and tell the truth about that person. In other words, Pope argued that vice (such as hate) could strengthen virtue (such as honesty); thus the more one felt for one’s self, the more likely one would be able to feel for others.¹¹

Logan found this point of view appalling and used the rest of his poem, On Reading Pope, to counter this logic couplet for couplet. He began with a gibe at Pope’s own wit and ended by asserting that, beautiful as Pope’s poem—the fruit of his wit—appeared to be, it was deadly for readers to eat. Rejecting the notion that savage stocks could ever be made to bear wholesome produce and writing as if to address Pope directly, Logan exclaimed:

The feeble Cyon [Scion] of thy Wit

On th’ Energetic Stock of Malice hit

By whose full strength vast Productions Shoot

Infernal "vigorous working at the root."

Hence beauteous blooms, hence spangled fruit appear

That charm the astonish’d sense, yet viewed more near

The glittering streaks still their Root’s Livery bear

And while th’ Ear’s ravish’d with thy Sounding Strain

We Spy the Poison creeps through all thy vein.

Though Logan mixed his metaphors, comparing Pope’s poem simultaneously to spangled fruit and ravishing strains of music, he made his point about its toxic origins and effects quite clearly. As far as this Quaker grandee was concerned, Pope’s poem and the passions it promoted were simply bitter poison.¹²

Logan’s concerns over passion’s poison grew out of the Quaker conviction that, while inner feelings might open the way to God for individual believers, selfish passions could fatally undermine communal bonds. Quakerism itself rested on an exquisite tension between self and society. As a Society of Friends, it both encouraged the development of individual faith and insisted on the importance of joining individuals in communal worship. On the one hand, members of Quaker meetings were taught to search their own feelings as a means to receive God’s grace and perceive his will. Yet, they were encouraged to share in the feelings of other meeting members in an effort to achieve religious concord, communal agreement on the true direction of divine leadings. In Pennsylvania, these tensions between self and society followed Friends out of the meetinghouse, affecting social and political philosophy as much as theology. Logan worried that Pope’s positive position on the passions—his claim that savage stocks could be made to bear beauteous blooms—might tip the unsteady philosophical and political balance Quakers had strived so long to maintain.

Indeed, Logan was remarkably prescient in his assessment of Pope’s potential impact, for, if his reaction to reading Pope’s Essay on Man was unusual in its perspective, it was typical in its fervor. Benjamin Franklin soon made sure that even many ordinary readers could easily encounter the essential ideas of the poem, by including an Essay excerpt in the pages of the 1736 edition of Poor Richard, An Almanack for … 1736. Published in advance in 1735 (the year the Library Company imported the Essay), the Almanack introduced Pennsylvania commoners to Pope. Many buyers would have owned few other books, yet, through the Almanack’s pages, a growing market of recreational readers could gain access to literary quotations. On page 4, Franklin included a few crucial lines from Pope.

Presumptuous Man! the Reason wouldst thou find

Why form’d so weak, so little, and so blind?

First, if thou canst, the harder reason guess

Why form’d no weaker, blinder, and no less?

Ask of the Mother Earth, why Oaks are made

Taller or stronger than the Weeds they shade?

Or ask of yonder argent Fields above,

Why JOVE’s Satellites are less than JOVE?

These verses announce a key argument that runs through Pope’s work: God made man only as virtuous as he was supposed to be, in accordance with a divine plan unknowable to mankind. In seeming to lecture people not to question acts of God, Pope could be seen as excusing them from the shame of original sin. Small wonder, then, that the devout James Logan regarded the Essay itself as a poisoned apple.¹³

This section of Pope’s poem concludes with a direct endorsement of the passions.

… In the scale of reas’ning life, ’tis plain

There must be, somewhere, such a rank as Man;

And all the question (wrangle e’er so long)

Is only this, if God has plac’d him wrong?

…

When the proud steed shall know why Man restrains

His fiery course, or drives him o’er the plains;

…

Then shall Man’s pride and dulness comprehend

His actions’, passions’, being’s, use and end;

…

Then say not Man’s imperfect, Heav’n in fault;

Say rather, Man’s as perfect as he ought.

—Epistle I, 47–50, 61–62, 65–66, 69–70

In many ways, then, Franklin’s inclusion in the Almanack of the Jove excerpt from Pope’s Essay stands as a rhetorical rebuke to the poem Logan wrote in the same year. Passions might not be perfect, but they were part of God’s plan. What the Quaker met with alarm, the civic innovator greeted with complaisance and even approval. Though close associates, they maintained sharply opposing worldviews. Their contradictory reactions neatly summarize the broader debates in which Pennsylvanians would engage in the coming decades.¹⁴

Try though men like Logan might to hinder Pope’s influence, his poem spoke to the concerns of a great number of Pennsylvanians, particularly those growing restive with Quaker rule. To be sure, Franklin himself remained a Quaker ally until the eve of the American Revolution, and some Quakers did join the Library Company. Yet Franklin did not hesitate to oppose Quakers as he saw fit (notably, as we shall see, regarding colonial defense). Meanwhile, many elite families early associated with the Library Company, including the Hopkinsons, the Morgans, and the Chews, would soon emerge in the arena of politics and polemics as Quaker antagonists. The Essay on Man offered the ambitious the seductive suggestion that a focus on self-advancement might be not only an expedient response to colonial conditions but also the truest enactment of divine intentions. Radical though the embrace of passion and the virtual elimination of original sin seemed to many, such innovations also held great attraction in this new, enlightened age. Pope was thus ideally poised to become the unofficial poet laureate of eighteenth-century Pennsylvania.

Franklin, for one, did what he could to assure the spread of the Essay’s popularity. Not only did he publish snippets of the Essay in his Almanack; he also featured Pope in his newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette. One especially suggestive entry from this early period comes from a comic poem published in 1736. Purportedly sent to the printer by a fellow colonist who had recently been traveling in London and introduced by an unsigned letter to Mr. Franklin, it began with the witty observation: There is nothing more uncertain than the Guesses made at the Author of an anonymous Piece. The Sentiments and the Stile are the only two Things we have to found a Conjecture on, and we are frequently deceiv’d in both. Franklin’s correspondent explained:

In a late Conversation at London, upon this Subject, a Gentleman chanc’d to say, he thought any of our modern Poets, might easily be imitated; which being deny’d by the rest of the Company, he was put upon making the Experiment himself; They gave for the Subject TOBACCO, and he undertook the Performance; in Imitation of Mr. Pope.

In printing this letter, Franklin invited his colonial customers to imagine themselves as citizen-subjects in a transatlantic British community of letters. Though far from London’s social whirl, Pennsylvania readers could participate vicariously in the diversions of polite society, so long as they schooled themselves in the literary style of authors like Alexander Pope.¹⁵

The farcical poem that followed this letter, "TOBACCO, In Imitation of Mr. Pope," took as its model none other than Pope’s Essay on Man and revealed once again the peculiar appeal of that work. Some of its more significant lines ran:

BLEST Leaf, whose Aromatick Gales dispense,

To Templars Modesty, to Parsons Sense;

…

Poison that cures—a Vapour that affords,

Content more solid—than the Smiles of Lords.

Tweaking Pope’s lines about sure virtues shooting from savage stocks, in a way that coincidentally echoes Logan’s thoughts on poison, this ditty boasted that, like the passions, tobacco could have paradoxically positive effects. Gales of tobacco smoke—like gales of passion—could promote virtue, even impart modesty to the swaggering barristers of the Inner Temple at London’s Inns of Court. Perhaps most significant, such gales could promote true social contentment. Only readers already conversant with Pope’s Essay would be able to appreciate this riff on the celebrated author’s popular poem, so the social anxieties it laid bare could be partly assuaged by the satisfaction of being in on the joke. In reprinting the poem for his Pennsylvania audience, Franklin both indicated and expanded the extent of the Essay’s colonial popularity.¹⁶

Pennsylvanians’ preoccupation with Pope betrayed a set of problems and concerns growing out of colonial social uncertainty and local political rivalry. Try as they might to use an author like Pope to showcase their readiness for what the Library Company referred to as the refinements of life, Pennsylvanians’ readings of and reactions to Pope hastened the development of a specifically colonial and ultimately American perspective on the passions.

The 1740s: William Bradford, Joseph Shippen, and the Popularization of Pope

Franklin offered Pope’s collected works for sale numerous times in the coming years, so those readers left out of the London gentleman’s tobacco joke in 1736 had ample opportunity to amend their ignorance. In fact, by 1743, some booksellers had begun importing stand-alone copies of An Essay on Man, slim books that were cheaper and thus more accessible than multivolume sets of Pope’s complete oeuvre. Still, many ordinary readers of the kind in the market for Franklin’s Gazette or Poor Richard’s Almanack would have balked at the cost of purchasing a copy of the poem that was available only through importation. This situation did not change until 1747, when William Bradford, one of Franklin’s competitors in the printing business, produced the first-ever edition of An Essay on Man to be published in the colonies.¹⁷

Bradford’s determination to publish An Essay on Man represented a significant sally into the refined territory staked out by the Library Company in the 1730s. While members of the Library Company might well have intended to keep Pope’s justification of the passions largely to themselves, the encouragement that his Essay offered to those interested in the pursuit of self-love and self-interest could not be easily contained. Franklin’s brief early forays into popularizing Pope smoothed the way for the entire poem to become more widely read and appreciated. Though many among the emergent elite might have liked to confine opportunities for advancement to the ranks of those who had already largely arrived, they simply did not have the ability. The market for Pope and a positive view of the passions expanded apace.

The title page of Bradford’s edition pointedly announced that it was a Philadelphia reprint of a London edition (London, Printed: Philadelphia: Re-printed, and Sold by William Bradford). Yet the volume Bradford offered differed markedly from the versions of Pope’s Essay printed in Britain; it was much simplified in content and design. By 1747, two years after the death of Alexander Pope, most British editions of his Essay included substantial introductory material and copperplate illustrations. Bradford omitted these extras and thus produced a pamphlet of just fifty-two pages, at a point when bound British versions often numbered at least seventy. Whereas a two-tone title page set off with both red and black ink had become almost standard in London, Bradford printed his Philadelphia edition in basic black. Together, these economies indicate that Bradford intended to position his edition as an inexpensive alternative to imported copies of the Essay, to appeal to a broader spectrum of colonial book buyers than had ever before been able to own and read Pope’s work.¹⁸

Yet the Bradford edition simultaneously eliminated many of the intellectual and ornamental details that would have been recognized as important elements of refinement. Once again, then, efforts to increase the inclusiveness of transatlantic culture succeeded only in highlighting the peculiarities