Class and the Making of American Literature

Created Unequal

Andrew Lawson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136774317
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book refocuses current understandings of American Literature from the revolutionary period to the present-day through an analytical accounting of class, reestablishing a foundation for discussions of class in American culture. American Studies scholars have explored the ways in which American society operates through inequality and modes of social control, focusing primarily on issues of status group identities involving race/ethnicity, gender, sexuality, and disability. The essays in this volume focus on both the historically changing experience of class and its continuing hold on American life. The collection visits popular as well as canonical literature, recognizing that class is constructed in and mediated by the affective and the sensational. It analyzes class division, class difference, and class identity in American culture, enabling readers to grasp why class matters, as well as the economic, social, and political matter of class. Redefining the field of American literary cultural studies and asking it to rethink its preoccupation with race and gender as primary determinants of identity, contributors explore the disciplining of the laboring body and of the emotions, the political role of the novel in contesting the limits of class power and authority, and the role of the modern consumer culture in both blurring and sharpening class divisions.

Part I

Class in Early American Literature

1 The Shays Rebellion in Literary History

Ed White

Given its basic, brutal significance—the largest domestic insurrection in U.S. history prior to the Civil War—the so-called Whiskey Rebellion poses something of a puzzle to the cultural historian. In 1794, the rebellion culminated in the paramilitary mobilization of yeomen in Virginia, Maryland, and Kentucky, but mostly western Pennsylvania, with orchestrated crowd actions against tax-collectors and other elite placemen. President Washington called up militia units from neighboring states, at first personally leading the expedition with Alexander Hamilton at his side; with the arrest, intimidation, torture, and interrogation of leaders and participants, the rebellion was put down. And while the executive did not execute any leaders, the suppression weakened plebeian self-organization—already attacked in the form of the Democratic-Republican societies—until the elections of 1800. These logistical facts, sometimes recited in sanitized form in textbooks, obscure the broader class conflict of the moment, buried in details about taxation and credit. In 1790, Treasury Secretary Hamilton had begun advocating a centralized banking system to promote capital accumulation and investment. Crucial to this program was the consolidation of national and state debt, which entailed the payment of debts incurred during the Revolution. The war had been significantly financed by the poor and the middling, who purchased bonds that quickly devalued from wartime inflation; debt speculators had bought much of this debt at a fraction of the original cost. Hamilton’s successful proposal to honor that debt—calculated at some $830,000—ratified a massive transfer of wealth from the working classes to the financial bourgeoisie. This transfer of wealth was, in turn, significantly financed by a tax on distilled spirits—a privileged form of currency among yeomen farmers—that disproportionately hurt small producers. As the best historian of the rebellion has noted, “Hamilton’s whiskey tax didn’t merely redistribute wealth from the many to the few, subdue rural economies, and pound the restless, defiant west,” but in fact “served as one of the heavier cogs in a machine for restructuring all of American life” (Hogeland 69). In some instances, taxation drove “self-employed farmers and artisans into the [distillery] factories of their creditors” (Hogeland 70). This was a massive assault on small agrarian producers as part of a major plan to finance capitalist development, culminating in plebeian self-organization and an armed insurrection against the new Constitution’s first executive administration.

One might well then wonder: why does the Whiskey Rebellion not loom large in early U.S. writing? Granted, one of the prominent multifaceted intellectuals of the moment, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, treated the uprising in his multivolume novel Modern Chivalry (1792–1815) and wrote one of two contemporary narratives of the rebellion. But this particular association of Brackenridge with the insurrection—he was discussed as a ringleader in Washington’s cabinet meetings, and later personally interrogated by Hamilton—rather proves the point, exposing, by contrast, a surprising literary hush about the event. And arguably, the silence among eighteenth-century cultural producers heralded the fascinating silence by later historians and cultural critics. The Whiskey Rebellion, like many agrarian uprisings, has been more frequently read as a political rather than economic phenomenon—as a “trial” for the “young nation,” in the claptrap of so many textbooks. We may admit that the conceptual challenges of treating such events as fundamental to U.S. class conflict are formidable, overdetermined as they are by the seemingly arcane details of taxation and currency supply, not to mention grain marketing; the apparently archaic modes of political organization among yeoman crowds; the relatively sparse archive; the apparent insularity and marginality of yeoman actions; and a still-too-common disinterest, even among marxist critics, in rural small producers. In the last case, the track record of Marx and Engels is itself quite mixed. On the one hand, much of their early writing obscures the situation of small producers under the label “petty bourgeois” or “middle-class,” anticipating the later Leninist and Trotskyist hostility to the kulaks. One sees here, as well, an urban bias that finds in the small farmer the potentially dangerous protocapitalist, although such urban counterparts as artisans are read as heroically anticipating proletarian movements. Still another Marxian variant dismisses rural classes as feudal throwbacks—from the French peasantry as a “sack of potatoes” in Marx’s “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte” (187), to the hostile, Eurocentric, and orientalist comments about India and China (Anderson 493–94). On the other hand, there is the late-Marxian tradition brought to the fore by late twentieth-century peasant studies, most notably in Teodor Shanin’s work, reconsidering the situation of the Russian peasant against a nascent “Marksist” movement. Scholars in the British Marxist tradition, including E.P. Thompson, Brian Manning, and James Holstun, have uncovered and theorized an organizational and intellectual tradition among small producers that not only pioneered an early communism, but also posed historic challenges to British capitalist development and the Marxist histories of capitalism grounded in the British isles.¹

With this historiographic context in mind, I want to suggest here that the literary-cultural silence about the Whiskey Rebellion must be understood as the expression of an elite, largely Federalist, pro-capitalist hegemony that coalesced almost a decade earlier, around 1786, arguably persisting through the Jefferson administration into the 1810s. The consolidation of that hegemony, furthermore, occurred around a cluster of concurrent, largely agrarian predecessors to the Whiskey Rebellion, of which one—the Massachusetts Regulation, recast as “Shays’ Rebellion”—emerged decisive. The sheer number of imaginative writers for whom this event proved definitive has been fundamentally underappreciated, and my primary goal in this chapter is less to explore the nuances of their engagements than to map out, in a sort of “distant reading,” the remarkable literary bloc that emerged in response. In short, I will argue that the conjunction of 1786 amounted to one of the major “literary” events of the period, establishing a field of force that subtly imbues much imaginative writing of the period, even as it continues to distort U.S. literary history. It was this formation that largely relegated the Whiskey Rebellion to history’s dustbin as an archaic and mindless act of political resistance, turning its sights instead to the philosophical and literary radicalism of the Thomas Paines and Ethan Allens. The irony has been that progressive scholarship, two centuries later, largely follows suit.

This critical blindness is somewhat registered by the current historio-graphic assessment of the Massachusetts Regulation. In an insightful 1998 essay, “Teaching Shays/The Regulation,” Ronald P. Formisano persuasively identified the great stakes in mislabeling the 1786 farmers’ mobilization in Massachusetts (24). That it has long been called “Shays’ Rebellion” (or the “Shaysite Rebellion”), he argued, is a classic instance of conservative historiography written by the winners. Daniel Shays was, in the larger scheme of things, a minor participant, and the definition of the event—or rather the movement—as orchestrated by one individual was in keeping with the reactionary practice of tagging popular mobilizations with a proper name: the magnified portrait of a demagogue suppresses the more accurate “history from below,” thereby minimizing the larger class struggle and its aftermath. Better, argues Formisano, to locate the Massachusetts action in a long Anglo- and Irish-American history of popular actions whereby small producers asserted a local “moral economy” against regional, urban, mercantile elites seeking to order the economy on a much grander scale, typically through monetary reforms favoring commercial and financial class blocs. Formisano draws on the scholarship of E P. Thompson and others in reconstructing the Anglo-Atlantic contours of this tradition, but in this instance specifically focuses on movements extending from (at least) the North Carolina Regulators of the 1760s, the Pennsylvanian “regulation” movements from the 1760s into the 1780s, and ahead to the Whiskey and Fries Rebellions in Pennsylvania and neighboring states, not to mention smaller yeoman mobilizations in the South, the mid-Atlantic, and New England, most notably in Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. The North Carolina Regulators had first used the term in 1768, proclaiming that they had formed “an Association to assemble [themselves] for conferences for regulating publick Grievances & abuses of Power” (Saunders 671).

Formisano is correct about the larger historical point, and one might usefully imagine an alternative history of eighteenth-century North America, which gives those movements prominence, even seeing their structural continuities and conflicts with two other forms of resistance from below: the slave rebellion and Native American military resistance. Such a narrative would inevitably decenter the American Revolution, seeing it not as a mass mobilization of democratic impulses orchestrated by the Founding Fathers, but rather, and more accurately, a series of regional conflicts that in some cases educated and politicized small producers, in others strengthened elites in their control of regulation movements, at times setting small producers against independence, and in still others creating devastating and dire conditions for the future. Nonetheless, one may make a case for the value of the Shays label, which, if not an accurate descriptor of events, was something more than propaganda. The dual nomenclature should be preserved precisely to foreground the occlusion of the Regulation, by intellectuals then and now.

The Massachusetts Regulation of the 1780s, which culminated in the elite state suppression of 1786, was in fact one event in a confluence that included the smaller and less successful New Hampshire regulation and one of the concluding episodes in the long-running Yankee-Pennamite War in Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley, a sustained clash between settlers that mobilized Connecticutland speculators. Though historians have not, to my knowledge, considered this conjunction, it emerges quite clearly in a consideration of the intellectual and specifically literary mobilization against small producers.

What came to be called the Yankee-Pennamite War had its roots in the scarcity of arable land in Connecticut in the 1720s and ’30s.² In the 1730s, farmers and land speculators in the colony formulated a theory that Connecticut’s charter leapfrogged over New York’s Hudson Valley and extended on to the far sea. Appealing, as well, to increasingly popular policy arguments about the need for interior “barrier” colonies to protect the coastal colonies from the French and various Native American polities, the Susquehanna Company began pursuing the formation of a “New Connecticut” along the northern portion of what would eventually become the state of Pennsylvania. Settlement began more aggressively in the 1750s, with colonial authorities in Philadelphia taking notice in the 1760s. Centered in the Wyoming Valley, the Yankee settlement was so remote from Pennsylvanian authority that the notorious Paxton Boys, after their violent action against Native Americans and the Penn family in the winter of 1763–64, found refuge there. Small-scale violence began in the 1770s, first with the 1775 Plunket Expedition (Pennamites assaulting Yankees), followed by two Yankee counter-attacks in 1776. At this point, the conflict—essentially about forms of settlement and allegiance to a state entity capable of enforcing land claims—became overdetermined by the Revolutionary conflicts. In 1778, Pennamite Loyalists joined forces with British officers and Iroquois warriors, mounting an attack on the Wyoming Valley in which at least two hundred Yankee militiamen were killed in less than an hour. The event, which came to be known as the Wyoming Massacre, became a notorious example of British and Native American brutality, inspiring the Irish poet Thomas Campbell’s famous “Gertrude in Wyoming” (1809) and the eventual naming of the western territory of “Wyoming.” In the final years of the Revolution, the competing claims of Pennsylvania and Connecticut became the most significant of the intra-state land dispute facing the United States government,³ and in 1782, an arbitration court in Trenton awarded the territory to Pennsylvania. Nonetheless, Connecticut land-owners and investors made a last push to maintain their claims, appealing to agrarian radicals to the North to provide organizational support in their conflict with Pennsylvania authorities.

Here we can discern an initial cluster of intellectual responses to agrarian resistance, though two among them were anomalous to the configuration that followed. First we may note that Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur largely structured his writings of the 1780s around the Wyoming conflict. Though the canonical Letters from an American Farmer so frequently taught today reads like a rather benign, if slightly disjointed, celebration of the agrarian pastoral, the 1782 version published in Britain radically streamlined and selectively edited a much larger project focused on the Yankee-Pennamite conflict. Crèvecoeur’s broader project emerges from a consideration of his unpublished English manuscript writings, and those works collected in the two French editions of Lettres d’un Cultivateur Américain (1784, 1787), in which Farmer John—a generic, vernacular, American philosopher in the canonical view of the Letters—is more precisely a pacific Pennsylvanian contrasted with a series of fractious Yankee settlers. A number of these other pieces treat the military conflicts between Yankee revolutionaries and Pennamite loyalists, with greater theorization as well of the problem of the interior colony distinct from its coastal counterparts. One might even argue that Crèvecoeur was the most sustained observer of the small producers’ phenomenon of “regulation,” though we can only speculate about Crèvecoeur’s interest in the New England actions of 1786.⁴ Though he served as a French consul to New England from 1783 to 1792, he resided in the United States from late 1783 to June 1785, and from July 1787 to June 1790, passing the year of the regulations’ suppressions in France.

The other anomalous figure was the leader of the agrarian radicals invited to aid the Yankee settlers of Wyoming: Ethan Allen, leading th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Routledge Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Literature
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part I Class in Early American Literature
• Part II Class in the Antebellum Period
• Part III Class in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Period
• Part IV Class in the Early to Mid-Twentieth Century
• Part V Class in Contemporary American Literature
• Part VI Teaching Class
• Contributors
• Index