| The English Problem of Identity in the American Revolution | The American Historical Review, 106.4

AHR Forum

The English Problem of Identity in the
American Revolution

DROR WAHRMAN

In early 1776, two English clergymen had an argument over tea. The first was Richard Price, the pro-American Dissenting minister whose Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty was one of the most influential pamphlets in the run up to the American Revolution. In arguing the case of the colonists, Price commented on their struggles against the tax on tea; "and at BOSTON," he reminded his readers in passing, "some persons in disguise buried it in the sea."¹ Our second interlocutor was the founder of Methodism, John Wesley, who penned one of the most influential responses to Price. Writing with the angry zeal of a recent convert to the anti-American campaign, Wesley could not let such a quick and neutral reference to what became known as "The Boston Tea Party" go by. This event, he stormed indignantly, was an "eminent instance" of the colonists' pernicious fraudulence. "The famous Mr. John Hancock, some time since, brought into Boston, a ship-load of smuggled tea . . . All Europe knows what was done: 'Some persons in disguise,' Doctor Price tells us, 'buried the English tea in the sea.' It was not so commonly known, who employed them, or paid them for their labour: To be sure, good Mr. Hancock knew no more of it than the child unborn!"² 1

     How predictable: what one pamphleteering minister accepted as part of a patriotic ideological struggle, his adversary highlighted as a cowardly, self-interested act of fraud. More striking, perhaps, is what this exchange left conspicuously unsaid. As any American child who has ever enacted this originary moment of national mythology in a school play knows, the colonists were disguised as Mohawk Indians: a fact that has since assumed considerable significance in the narrative of American self-fashioning. To cite one recent example, Philip Deloria has described the "powerful imputation of Indian identity" at the Boston Tea Party as "a catalytic moment . . . through which Americans redefined themselves as something other than British Colonists."³ On our two British commentators, however, this powerfully catalytic significance of the Indian masquerade seems to have been unglamorously lost. Rather, both chose to convey the meaning of this event by referring simply to its participants being "in disguise," be that disguise what it may. 2

     On the part of anti-revolutionary English writers, at least, this apparent omission (which was repeated by others⁴ ) may well have had something to do with an attempt to conjure up a familiar legal analog: one possible frame of reference for interpreting the actions of the Bostonians was that of the Black Act, which made the very act of disguise under such circumstances into a capital offense.⁵ But perhaps we can take the explanation further, to the particular significance and resonance of notions of disguise in the English perspective on the events in America during the mid-1770s, significance and resonance that go, I would suggest, to the heart of the ways in which Britons in the second half of the eighteenth century were forced to confront what was probably the most traumatic national crisis of their lives. That the notion of disguise was indeed at the core of these accounts of the Boston Tea Party can perhaps be inferred also from what Wesley did with the story when he came back to it a year later, after the Americans had declared independence. "The Bostonians," Wesley now wrote, "under the auspices of Mr. Hancock . . . scorning to do any thing secretly, paraded the town at noon-day, with colours flying, and bravely threw the English tea into the sea. This was the first plain overt act of Rebellion." In this retelling, not only was the disguise of the Bostonians gone, it was replaced by its precise opposite—by absolute transparency, aided by the midday sun (never mind that the actual event had begun at dusk), ensuring that nothing would be done in secrecy. This new perspective proved key to Wesley's second pamphlet: in declaring independence, he stated, the colonists "wholly threw off the mask," and showed their true colors "without any disguise, or reserve."⁶ Now that the Americans revealed their true intentions that had formerly been hidden, the Tea Party came to stand metonymically for the whole of the great American fraud. But even as Wesley reversed the narrative of the events in Boston in order to achieve this effect, his repeated recourse to the language of disguise and masquerade only grew stronger and more loaded. By the end of this essay, we may have a better sense why. 3

     In order to get there, what follows suggests that a key subtext of the American war, as experienced by the English, had to do with the realization of the limits and inadequacies of prevalent identity categories, precisely the kind of realization conjured up by such images of disguise and masquerade. In making this assertion, as will become clear, my use of "identity" is rather different from the recent excellent scholarship on the effects of the American revolutionary war in Britain (a salutary trend in itself, after many years in which it had been overshadowed by the study of the effects of the French Revolution).⁷ This body of work has illuminated "identity" in two primary ways, linked directly to the nature of the event. First, scholars have been taking a closer look at the political identities assumed by Britons during this conflict—the making and meaning of their loyalism, radicalism, or self-declared patriotism when faced with the American constitutional crisis that then evolved into the longest colonial war in modern British history. It will be seen, however, that political identities made but little difference to Britons' experiences of the problem of identity categories as discussed in this essay. Second, following the trail blazed by Linda Colley's Britons, scholars have reexamined the consequences of the American war for the development of British national identity within a reconfigured empire. In what follows, however, despite the importance of the boundaries of the nation to the argument, the focus is not primarily on collective, national identity but rather on those categories that together help constitute individual, personal identity. The effect of the revolutionary war to which I want to draw attention, therefore, exceeded the political or military reverberations of the war itself, with meanings and ramifications that were independent of it and that were to assume lives of their own. Indeed, we shall see that this particular effect of the war touched a longstanding raw nerve, a nerve placed under increasing strain decades before the American issue had become even a glint on the horizon, and without which this particular aspect of the crisis could not have been as meaningful as I would like to suggest it was. 4

     In a nutshell, this essay tries to pursue the significance of the fact that, in contrast to other wars in recent memory, the American war was irreducible to any reliable map of "us" and "them" based on a stable criterion of difference. Instead, the tension between sameness and difference—resulting, as we shall see, from the lack of clarity about who the Americans were, enemies or brethren—returned inescapably to undermine and destabilize the rhetoric of all sides. Crucial, therefore, to the way the English experienced the fraught years before and after the declaration of American independence was the fundamental inability to draw clear lines demarcating who was against whom in this national crisis.⁸ And this was not for lack of trying—we shall see observers of all political stripes imposing virtually every identity category imaginable on the American conflict, in repeated and often desperate attempts to create order out of chaos. But these attempts were time and again baffled by the actual complexities of the situation, complexities that exceeded any conceptual tools available for dealing with them. 5

     The consequences of this configuration, to repeat again, went beyond the direct political context. They led to intense pressures on received understandings of identity and to an insistent preoccupation with its constitution: its inherent versus contingent traits, its natural foundations, its boundaries and their possible permeabilities. (Such concerns about the unreliability of identities were precisely what made the idea of "disguise" so beguiling and resonant.) Ultimately, this situation created a sense of an urgent need to counteract the ever-more-apparent inadequacies of familiar notions of identity with new, more reliable ways of conceptualizing differences between people. In short, if the American war pushed the colonists toward a new and largely exhilarating sense of identity, it at the same time forced the English toward a new and largely angst-ridden sense of what identity was really all about to begin with. 6

So why the American war? This war, as so many commentators did not tire from pointing out, was perceived to be at bottom a civil war—what one pamphleteer (anti-American) dubbed "the second civil war" and another (pro-American), "the American civil war."⁹ It is hard to convey—but impossible to miss—the density of such references anywhere one looks in the mid-to-late 1770s, as writers of all sorts competed with each other on detailing the horrors of such an internecine war. "It is not our natural enemy, it is not French or Spaniards, nor rebel Scots, that we are contending with," exclaimed an anguished American sympathizer; "it is our friends, our brethren, with whom we have this unhappy and unnatural contest." "The present War," declared a relentless critic of the Americans, "is of all Wars the most unnatural," because it is an "unwarrantable civil War." As the political divergence of these few examples suggests, the many hundreds of similar utterances that one could marshal here came from across the political board, supporters and opponents alike.¹⁰ 7

     This situation has, of course, been noted often by historians, but its ramifications merit a further look. Inevitably, seeing the conflict as a civil war forced people to reflect—often with considerable apprehension—on their understandings of identity. The "evils of civil war" force us away from being "true to ourselves"; it is particularly pernicious in that "it confounds those distinctions among men which God and nature have established"; it "confound[s] all the social ties of blood."¹¹ And so it went on and on: internal strife destabilized the most basic distinctions of "us" and "them," the good guys and the bad guys, friends and foes. In this war "rag[ing] among brethren!" a fictional figure in a novel subtitled "The Miseries of Civil War" exclaimed with ungrammatical urgency, "whom are we . . . to consider them as enemy, and whom as friend?"¹² After all, the supposed enemy was, in the eyes of many, literally the Englishmen's "brethren": in relation to the English, the Americans were "of the same language, the same religion, the same manners and customs, sprung from the same nation, intermixed by relation and consanguinity." And again: "The Americans are properly Britons. They have the manners, habits, and ideas of Britons"; they have in common "the same laws, the same religion, the same constitution, the same feelings, sentiments and habits." Indeed, summarized one frustrated observer, either the Americans were English, "or they are fallen out of the clouds, or started up in America like mushrooms."¹³ These speakers—and countless more—all shared the strong and painful sense that the Americans and the English were fundamentally the same. 8

     And yet, against each assertion of sameness, one can counterpose an assertion of difference. The particular geographic and political circumstances of this "civil war" allowed many others to deny that it was in fact a civil war at all, and to dispute every aspect of the supposed common ground between Americans and Englishmen. Richard Price himself complained that every Englishman had strong opinions about America, "though perhaps he does not know what colour they are of, or what language they talk."¹⁴ The London physician John Fothergill echoed this assertion of difference: "I soon perceived when the confusion begun," he wrote, that all sides in the debate in England "were almost total strangers to AMERICA, to the Country, and to its Inhabitants: many, to such a degree, as to be ignorant whence the people sprung; what language they spoke; what religion they professed; nay, of what complexion they were."¹⁵ Tom Paine's Common Sense, the single most influential pamphlet of the American Revolution, took the argument even further. "The phrase parent or mother country"—describing England's relationship to the colonies—masked quite a different truth: "Europe, and not England, is the parent country of America," since its population consisted of immigrants "from every part of Europe." The arguments based on common ancestry and national identity, according to Paine, foundered against the simple observation that "not one third of the inhabitants . . . are of English descent." And one royalist pushed this line to a racialized extreme: unlike the loyalists, who displayed "no variety in their appearance, [being] all of one colour—white," those favoring independence were "of all sizes and of all hues! red skins, yellow-skins, green-skins, grey-skins, bay-skins, black-skins, blue-skins!" The colonists, it turned out, were not simply different, they were the embodiment of difference itself.¹⁶ 9

     Little wonder, then, that Fothergill encapsulated the conflict with the words "when the confusion begun." By the end of such assertions of difference, it turned out that the Americans were strangers to the English in terms of ancestry, religion, complexion, even language. So what common ground did remain, to justify the simultaneous representation of the very same conflict, as both Fothergill and Price found themselves doing, as a civil war involving the "sheath[ing] [of] our swords in the bowels of our brethren"?¹⁷ It is crucial for the argument here that this question did not have, could not have, a stable answer. The fundamental tension between assertions of sameness and difference irrepressibly surfaced and resurfaced, self-contradictory and unresolvable, to destabilize each supposedly well-demarcated superimposition of identity categories on the alignments of the American crisis. This, again, was true across the political board: neither side in the conflict had a necessary affinity with one pole or the other of the sameness-difference dyad. Those in favor of American independence could highlight difference in order to justify their separation from the mother country, but also sameness in order to expose how unnatural was the war waged against them and how truly English their political demands really were.¹⁸ Their opponents, in reverse, could highlight sameness in order to expose the ungrateful and unnatural essence of the American rebellion, but also difference in order to justify the resort to bellicose actions. Even as a civil war, then, this conflict was not stable; whether it was a "civil war" or "the struggle . . . of a nation against a nation" (both formulations were used by Abbé Raynal within a page of each other) depended, again, on the answer to that question that was a key part of what the whole confrontation was about, namely, who the Americans were. Nothing, perhaps, encapsulated this problem more eloquently than the scheme that the Lady's Magazine adopted for printing news during this crisis, under three distinct headings: "foreign news," "home news," and—evidently impossible to accommodate in either—"America."¹⁹ 10

     The irreconcilable tensions between assertions of sameness and difference, moreover, were undermining the internal coherence and logical consistency of interventions on both sides. Take, for instance, Matthew Robinson-Morris, the second baron Rokeby. In a passage that evidently influenced Paine's Common Sense, Rokeby, too, denied that England was "the parent country" to the Americans. "The fact is very different," he wrote; the Americans were "hardly our cousins' cousins, and no man knows how far we might mount towards Adam or Noah to settle the real relation between us." Given this emphasis on almost primordial distance, then, one may be excused the confusion when a few pages later one reads: "We are one nation with the same language, the same manners, and the same religion." So much for a coherent vision of difference, even within one single text. Another pamphlet of 1774 was no less incongruous: on the one hand, it described "our injured American brethren" as "people, descended from the same stock, governed by the same constitution, laws, religion, and wrapt up in the same common interest," but on the other hand, it also claimed that "the inhabitants of America are chiefly made up of emigrants from all Europe," and that they "are a people of a very different complexion from the natives of this island." So which was it to be? And which was it to be for the anti-American writer who similarly dismissed "the Provincials" as "a Medley of people composed of English, Scotch, Irish, Germans, Swedes, Dutch, French and Indians, . . . opposite in manners, religion, and political opinions," only to end up with a hope for reconciliation, entreating "every American to be a Briton, and every Briton to be an American"?²⁰ 11

     And yet the point of these observations is surely not simply to catch contemporaries in contradictions, as it were, in some weakness that supposedly invalidated their positions. This would hardly do as a historical methodology, or as an effective analysis of any political rhetoric in an actual lived debate.²¹ Rather, the point is to underscore the inescapable recurrence throughout the rhetoric surrounding the American crisis of such contradictory impulses in irresolvable tension with each other. And far from it being the case that the conflict neatly lined up one party rooting for Anglo-American sameness against another party rooting for Anglo-American difference, in fact each side was rent with this basic tension from within. 12

     Faced with these unsettling pressures, therefore, contemporaries employed various strategies in attempts to get around them—strategies aiming at the wishful reconfiguration of the war along more familiar and tangible lines of difference, lines that could help explain why this war was taking place at all. As we shall see, however, these efforts were doomed to fail, at least during the earlier stages of the conflict. It was precisely this muddle that made the American war such a source of unease about the inadequacies of the notion of identity itself. 13

Among the lines of difference predicated on seemingly clear-cut categories of identity that could serve to disentangle this messy situation, few presented themselves more readily than that of religion. Consider the efforts of the veteran high-Tory political hack John Shebbeare: on the one hand, Shebbeare asserted the common identity of Americans and Englishmen with a shared "national mind, if the expression may be allowed me." On the other hand, Shebbeare explained the "vile and unnatural" rebellion of the colonists in their origins in the Dissenting religious sects that had fled England (including "a religious sect called Witches"): "in these dissenters . . . rebellion is as innate and natural, as stealing poultry is in a fox, or killing lambs in a wolf." This was a radical change of tack: instead of essentializing common national identity, Shebbeare was now essentializing religious difference (a long favorite of his), by declaring Dissenting rebelliousness "innate and natural" like an animal instinct. And the effect could hardly have been more blatant: rebutting Price's appeal on behalf of "our [American] brethren," Shebbeare disdainfully asserted (using the words of Jonathan Swift) that they were "our brethren . . . in no other sense, than nature / Has made a rat our fellow creature."²² So much for the most common cliché of affinity with the Americans, "our brethren." So much, indeed, for a vision of a shared political and national identity, which was suddenly metamorphosed into one of innate difference grounded in religion. 14

     From the other corner of the religious arena, consider the Scottish Presbyterian minister John Erskine, in a jeremiad against this "calamitous civil war" against "our own countrymen, connected with us by birth, alliance, or commercial interest, so that we cannot hurt them without injuring ourselves." Continuing in a similar vein until the final two pages, Erskine suddenly shifted the discussion to an assignation of blame, placing it rather surprisingly on the pernicious proliferation of popery in England. This "truly alarming" development—leading to the increasing demands for toleration—was driven by artifice and subterfuge, not least by "many who would pass for good Protestants." And thus the connection with the American crisis, however tenuous, was brought in: "the disaffected party on the other side of the water, were particularly active in sending over priests in disguise."²³ It was on this note that the text ended, leaving the reader who had expected an analysis of the American crisis with the distinct sense that the furtive progress of Catholicism was its real cause. Moreover, not only did Erskine thus shift the line of conflict from the blurred distinctions of an "unnatural" civil war among Britons to the clear and comfortably familiar demarcation between Protestants and Catholics, he also projected its disturbing anxieties from the former to the latter: the problem of unknowable or indeterminable identities—that key problematic of this crisis—was now relocated to the Catholics, those whose cunning artifice would lead them to "pass for good Protestants" and to send "priests in disguise." 15

     Both Shebbeare and Erskine, then, complicated their emphasis on the natural affinity between the two sides in the American conflict with a shared conviction that religious difference was a key—the key—to making sense of there being two hostile sides to begin with. Not only were these assertions in tension with the affirmations of sameness with which they were coupled, they were also in tension with each other: whereas Erskine explained the war with the aid of the line dividing Catholics from Protestants, Shebbeare focused on that dividing the Church of England from Dissent.²⁴ Both, indeed, represented familiar positions reproduced by many other speakers as well. Nor were the possibilities here exhausted: the English-born missionary Charles Inglis, for instance, who was similarly convinced that "the present is a Religious War," blamed the crisis—as did Erskine—on the progress of popery, but in reverse: in his own recasting of the conflict, it was the Americans who were under pernicious Catholic influence, not the English.²⁵ So again, which was it to be—which side was in fact crypto-papist? In the end, no amount of tossing and turning could confer on this contest the crystalline clarity that characterized most of the wars of the eighteenth century, in which unblemished British Protestantism was pitted against the black powers of Catholicism.²⁶ This particular war was jumbled shades of gray, not black and white. 16

     Now it goes without saying that calling names is part and parcel of every conflict, and thus in and of itself is not much of a step forward in understanding the dynamics of the American one. Rather, the point of this quick taste of the uses of religious distinctions in interpretations of the American conflict is to show the difficulties in coming up with a conceptual map that could fix the differences between the warring sides within a stable categorical scheme. The very fact that contemporaries found themselves resorting to virtually every imaginable permutation of religious demarcations in their attempts to make sense of the conflict—Protestants versus Catholics, Catholics versus Protestants, orthodox versus heterodox Protestants—is in itself eloquent testimony to the basic lack of clarity in figuring out who was against whom and why. Moreover, whatever scheme one chose, the ineradicable tension between assertions of sameness and difference came back to undermine its coherence: at the same time that religion was claimed to be a splitting wedge separating Americans from Englishmen, it was also seen as a unifying bond pulling them together—"our Protestant Brethren." The bottom line, then: religious identity, in any shape or form, did not prove capable of becoming the sword that could cut through the American war's Gordian knot.²⁷ 17

As the war between the British and the Americans continued to unfold, another strategy of establishing distance from one's adversaries presented itself through the invocation of the so-far silent participants in this drama, namely the North American Indians. To describe this section as dealing with "racial" identity categories is of course anachronistic, since eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans were still undecided as to whether human differences like those distinguishing Europeans from Indians were innate and congenital (what today would be described as racial), climatic and assumable (which can therefore affect people who move from one geographical zone to another), or historical and developmental (thus placing Indians and Europeans on different points in the chronological continuum from barbarity to civilization). But we should not assume that the lack of conceptual clarity made the arguments delineating difference through such categories any less effective. On the contrary, this lack of clarity facilitated attempts on both sides to deflect the anxieties incumbent upon an unnatural civil war by associating and even conflating the enemy with the savage if not unnatural barbarity of the Indians. Such rhetorical moves were triggered by the repeated appeals to the Indians by both the English and the Americans for military support. 18

     On the pro-American side, nobody made the case more sensationally than Edmund Burke, who was infuriated by British efforts to recruit "every Class of savages and Cannibals the most cruel and ferocious." Burke illustrated "their way of making war, which was so horrible," with memorable, graphic scenes of Indians torturing, scalping, and cannibalizing. Even better than Shebbeare's witches, there was nothing like cannibals to establish ultimate and unbridgeable difference. And from here it was but a short step for others to accuse the British themselves, associating with those "unnatural and savage" Indian allies, of "Cruelties (O! Shame to Britain) unknown to the most Savage Nations."²⁸ 19

     The other side was equally melodramatic. The Americans, too, were repeatedly denounced for mobilizing "the wild Indians, those tawny savage beings, who resemble Devils more than men . . . against the King's troops." A reputed incident at Lexington, "a tale so shocking to humanity," when two wounded British soldiers were allegedly "scalped by the savage Provincials," clinched the case: having "throw[n] off the mask," the colonists themselves were turning "savage" like their Indian allies (and thus, needless to say, distinctly different from the British).²⁹ To be sure, when one Tory claimed that the rebels' rhetoric revealed them as "Indian chiefs," savages whose "Os frontis," according to "the observation of a learned physiognomist," was "uncommonly flat," his tongue was firmly in cheek. But even if the Americans were not coming to resemble the Indians physically (although a writer for the London Evening Post, for one, clearly believed in the possibility of mistaking an Indian for an American), they could readily be depicted as choosing to be like them. After all, their actions betrayed a predilection—in the words of Wesley's friend and disciple John Fletcher—for "the lawless liberty of a savage, who lives under no sort of government" instead of "the lawful liberty of a subject, who is protected by a civil government."³⁰ The Americans, quipped another, "Prefer their Mohawks, and their Creeks, / To Romans, Britons, Swiss, or Greeks." In their active preference for "the native unrestrained Freedom of a Savage" over "being Men," the Americans chose to shed their European identity and shade into an Indian one. The ensuing unreliability of identity categories was further signaled by the phrases that this last writer chose to characterize the American rebels: "men disguis'd," "Ambiguous Things," and "men undefin'd, by any Rules."³¹ 20

     It was even better to transport the troubling unease about unreliable distinctions between people still further away, to the Indians themselves. Perhaps the most common trope in describing "the merciless Indian Savages" was their "known rule of warfare [which] is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions." "Their way of making war is well known. They spare neither age nor sex."³² The characterization of the Indians as blind to these fundamental distinctions between people was repeated endlessly and even made it into the Declaration of Independence. More than scalping or cannibalizing, it became the formulaic hallmark of barbarity, on the opposite pole to civilization; and as such, we can find both sides trying to taint their adversaries with this sign of savagery, as if it rubbed off on them from their Indian allies.³³ The key point here, again, is that the inability to maintain clear distinctions, that inability haunting this conflict, was now projected onto the Indians, and thus as far from one's own domain as possible. In the most explicit projection, the Indians were declared unable to distinguish friend from foe—precisely the formulation that captured so resonantly the problematic of this civil war. The Indians, Burke roared, "murder man woman and child—friend and foe in one promiscuous carnage." Their "most barbarous acts of cruelty" were "without discrimination of friend or foe," echoed another. This latter enunciation was provoked by the incident that most famously provided tangible proof of this seeming inability of the Indians to discriminate between people. This sombre event was the death of Jane M'Crea: a young Tory woman who was engaged to one of General Burgoyne's lieutenants, but on the eve of her wedding she was shot and scalped by Indians siding with the British, who had mistaken her for a rebel.³⁴ 21

     The Indians, then, turned out to be unable to tell apart a white friend from a white foe: the ultimate demonstration, in the hands of Burke and so many others, of how different they actually were. Only that, by now, what seemed at first a strategy of distancing the enemy, and thus of clarifying the muddled mapping of who was against whom in this conflict, doubled back to achieve precisely the opposite. When the earl of Chatham painted for the House of Lords a graphic image of "the massacres of the Indian scalping knife, [and] the cannibal savage torturing, murdering, roasting, and eating—literally, my lords, eating the mangled victims of his barbarous battles!"—when he wallowed in the poignancy of these images, he was in fact using the unbridgeable distance from the Indians to shore up his anger at a war leveled against people who were not substantially different from the English. It is impossible to justify, he exclaimed, "turn[ing] loose these savage hell-hounds against our brethren and countrymen in America, of the same language, laws, liberties, and religion." And if these alleged barbarities involved the "indiscriminate murder" of "any white person, whether European or American" (as former Governor of Massachusetts Thomas Pownall put it to the House of Commons), or the inability to tell which side Jane M'Crea was on, was it really because the Indians were simply indiscriminate savages, or because this situation did not offer them any stable distinctions between the warring parties to hold onto?³⁵ 22

     The same niggling question was raised also by other invocations of the Indians, focusing not on their presumed cruelty but rather on their natural sagacity. Many stories circulated about Indians who reacted to the American war in words similar to those of the Oneida chiefs and warriors: "we cannot intermeddle in this dispute between two brothers, the quarrel seems unnatural . . . The present situation of you two brothers is new and strange to us."³⁶ Invoking the Indian presence, then, rather than somehow helping in sorting out the distinctions underlying the American war, achieved the reverse. Whether it was the image of the ravaging Indians killing the indistinguishable Jane M'Crea or of the puzzled Indians watching an incomprehensible war, the outcome did little to alleviate those difficulties in pinning down categories of identity that could have dispersed the cloud of confusion surrounding this conflict. 23

A couple of contemporary comments in the previous section—those invoking the American penchant for the "savage" state of nature—gestured toward an aspect of the conflict that has hitherto been missing from this discussion: the ideology of the American Revolution. But, of course, the egalitarian ethos permeating the rhetoric of the revolution, and its appeal to original natural rights, fed—at least for some—directly into the broader anxieties about the threat to familiar distinctions between people. Thus imagine, for instance, the possible reactions of the Cambridge audience of Richard Watson, the Whiggish future bishop of Llandaff, to a sermon in 1776, which he opened with the following words: "Mankind may be considered as one great aggregate of equal and independent individuals, whom various natural and moral causes have been contributing for above four thousand years to disperse over the surface of the earth . . . God, as an impartial parent, has put us all upon a level; we are all sprung from the same stock, born into the world under the same natural advantages." Watson continued with his discourse on equality for awhile and summed it up as a natural law: "An inferiority of one Species of Beings to another, and an equality of individuals in the same Species, are general Laws of nature, which pervade the whole System."³⁷ The natural distinction between species was for Watson a backdrop for the denial of the naturalness of any distinctions between humans: and one could readily see such language as a potential threat to the received map of categories with which people made sense of others around them. Even Burke, close as he was to the American revolutionaries, saw the danger: "it is this very rage for equality, which has blown up the Flames of this present cursed War in America. I am, for one, entirely satisfied, that the inequality, which grows out of the nature of things by time, custom, succession, accumulation, permutation, and improvement of property, is much nearer that true equality, which is the foundation of equity and just policy." Alarmed by the possible implictions of the American case, Burke was asserting here (as he was to do many times subsequently) that it is the social distinctions themselves—rather than their erasure—that have an essential basis in "the nature of things."³⁸ 24

     Critics of the Americans, therefore, were quick to point out the subversive implications of their position for maintaining the fundamental distinctions between people. One common trope—feeding also on the well-known truncated social structure of the colonies—was that of the cobbler-turned-prince and vice versa. American pretensions and insubordination, suggested Adam Ferguson, were encouraged when "one man is brought from behind the counter, to be member of a sovereign Congress; . . . [and] another from a barber to be a colonel." American republicanism, asserted "Integer," "turns coblers into kings, and gentlemen into pedlars." Upon American independence, "all ranks and distinctions will fall to the ground," echoed a third; "Men of fortune"—the words of a fourth—will "place themselves, and their Wives and Children, on a Footing with the meanest Peasants."³⁹ For some anti-American writers—though not too many—this vision of subversion of social boundaries was conveniently joined with a clear-cut mapping of the conflict along the lines of social divisions. The generality of the rebels, Henry Hunter explained dismissively, "have not much property of their own," and indulge in this rebellious act with the hope of appropriating that of their neighbors. "Every man of property" supports the government, affirmed another; while those who oppose it are "those who have neither property nor character to lose." The revolution was basically easy to make sense of if it could be seen as a war of the propertyless against the propertied.⁴⁰ 25

     Such observations on the dangers of leveling are of course a familiar outcome of the debate on natural equality in the American Revolution. But the perspective of the present essay allows us perhaps to see them from a different angle. Arguably, their resonance should be seen, at least on the British side, against the backdrop of the more diffuse and less articulated unease generated by this crisis, unease that both increased the emotional charge of this intellectual debate and was in turn fueled by it. At the same time that these were commentaries on the potential subversion of social hierarchy entailed by ideas of natural rights and natural equality, they were also ways of talking about the danger that colored how Britons experienced this conflict from the start—namely, the unsettling of those categories of identity that had previously been comfortably reliable. 26

     To see this different angle, let us take a second look at some of the examples just quoted. "Integer," for instance, did not limit the vision of the consequences of American actions only to the subversion of social distinctions: "we may therefore justly expect to have, in a little time, a black assembly, a black council, a black governor, and a black Common Wealth; so that we shall soon be 'black and all black.'" Not only social distinctions but also racial ones were under threat. Likewise, the anonymous writer who predicted that men of fortune in America would end up "on a footing with the meanest Peasants" also foresaw in the same breath that American society would be reduced to "Whites, Indians and Blacks, promiscuously cutting each others Throats," thus again linking the commingling of social categories with that of racial ones. And Henry Hunter, who tried to portray the revolution as a well-defined act of the propertyless against the propertied, ended up losing his confidence in this supposedly clear demarcation, admitting that the only way to restore satisfactory clarity to this war—a war unlike any other—was by physically separating all the supporters of America and persuading them to undertake "voluntary exile." In all these cases, the critique of the social implications of the revolution was inseparable from the by-now-familiar unease about the broader threat it posed to the integrity of identity itself.⁴¹ 27

     It would not be difficult to carry on this exercise for many pages. The ideology of the American Revolution could be—and was—associated with the subversion of every basic identity category, thus shading easily into the concerns about the inadequateness of these categories. As John Fletcher put it succinctly, "to attempt to bring about a representation equal in every respect, is as absurd as to attempt making all our fellow-subjects of one size, one age, one sex, one country, one revenue, one rank, and one capacity."⁴² But we may wonder whether the ideology of the revolution could, in and of itself, do the extensive cultural work necessary to produce these concerns in so many different forms. Rather, it may be suggested that it was the wider context of the American crisis, within which these aspects of the revolutionary ideology unfolded, that infused them with an additional powerful charge. The subversion of social distinctions could be used metonymically to talk about the more general problem haunting this war, that of the indeterminacy of identity. The same—vide Fletcher—was true when possible fault lines within any category of identity were brought up: which brings us to one further category that was peculiarly well suited to convey all these elements together—that of gender. 28

In the first instance, gender distinctions were introduced into the American revolutionary debate as further blows—indeed, for some, the coup de grace—to colonial notions of equality and representation. John Fletcher, quoted in the previous paragraph with regard to the leveling of all categories of distinction, was in fact preoccupied to the greatest (not to say obsessive) extent with that of gender: namely, with the absurd inducement given by the American position to women to stop obeying their husbands and demand the vote themselves, a position no more sensible than recommending "for all the women who have freeholds in England, to change their sex." In this, Fletcher was echoing the repeated barbs of his mentor, John Wesley ("by what right . . . do you exclude women, any more than men, from chusing thei[r] own governors?"), as well as many other anti-independence writers who warned against the imminent collapse of gender distinctions and matrimonial order. On one level, then, such arguments offered gender subversion as another example of the undermining of accepted identity distinctions that was projected onto the Americans; to this extent, they had the same rhetorical effect as pointing out that American ideas will bring votes to blacks or Indians.⁴³ But beyond this direct, explicit link to the immediate political consequences of undermining gender distinctions, gender appears to have performed a broader function in this debate: namely, in providing a convenient way of talking about the bigger issues of identity categories and their threatening inadequacies as they were raised by this crisis. 29

     Once we begin looking, instances of gender distinctions introduced in this fashion into the rhetoric surrounding the American Revolution prove remarkably thick on the ground. Often, the indirect role of such references is signaled by the seemingly gratuitous manner in which they were grafted onto the argument. Take, for instance, a pamphlet of John Cartwright's that concluded a discussion of the American crisis (a discussion strewn throughout with references to natural identity categories and the dangers of their subversion) with an unexpected four-page-long analogy of the British-American relationship to that of a courtship, involving a manly, protective suitor and a demure, tearful, feminine virgin; a lovely couple whose properly constituted marriage will resolve all. Carried far beyond what was required to make a rather simple political point, this analogy allowed Cartwright to wax sentimental, in a seemingly superfluous digression, on the meaning of gender distinctions and proper gender roles in marriage, as a roundabout commentary on what was going wrong in current events.⁴⁴ 30

     The examples of American-war-related comments that seemed to make similar moves are too numerous to reproduce here. To give but a flavor of a few, they included a bizarrely disconnected association of the British side with a "hermaphrodite ass, [who] would not be without its use, if it had but a sex"; an anti-American outburst that conjured up not only Catharine Macaulay's "Amazonian fire" (she did, after all, intervene in the debate) but also a completely gratuitous image of "Woffingtons in breeches" (Woffington being an early eighteenth-century actress, long dead, who had made her reputation in male "breeches parts"); an American war novel subtitled "The Miseries of Civil War," which combined heavy-handed depictions of unnatural family disruption with another disruption of nature in the shape of a woman forced—against her nature, of course, but also against the narrative logic of the novel—to dress as a man; and even a mock report of a "trial" of the sexually ambiguous castrati singers, who had formerly been much in vogue, resulting in the suggestion that their expulsion to America would be "the most effectual way of putting an end to all our intestine broils and disturbances." No less.⁴⁵ Perhaps even richer in such allusions was the flurry of publications at this time—one might be tempted to call them a mini-genre—of allegorical visions and topical flights of fancy: among those, indeed, it may take some effort to find one that does not introduce subverted gender boundaries into its commentary on current events. Many revolved around the contrast between unfeminine women ("Begirt, bebooted, and bebuckler'd") and feminized men ("Betrim'd, beribbon'd, and belac'd") or, similarly, between manly, unnatural women and properly feminine, maternal ones. Others conjured up allegorical villains characterized by gender transgression, like the Tory vision that portrayed the Americans being led astray by a double-sexed seducer, maid by day and rake by night, joined later by Lady Discord, herself a disgusting, unfeminine Amazon.⁴⁶ 31

     Furthermore, subverted gender roles and boundaries not only provided a convenient way of talking about instabilities of identities, they also had more specific overtones in the particular imagery surrounding this "unnatural" civil war. We have seen the war conceptualized as an unnatural family affair or domestic strife; in fact, it has long since been suggested that the language of disrupted family relations was "the very lingua franca of the revolution." In itself, this fact is hardly surprising. But its consequences are relevant: for it was but a short step from the anxiety about a malfunctioning family to that about proper gender roles on which the family is predicated, be they in the aforementioned relationship between husband and wife or that between parent—especially mother—and child. Was Great Britain a caring or an unnatural—and unfeminine—mother to the colonies? Was King George an unnatural father? This was a question, as Jay Fliegelman has brilliantly shown, that reverberated with considerable consequences throughout the American crisis.⁴⁷ One satirical attack on the king gendered him as feminine, "Queen Georgiana," in order to be able to describe him as an "unnatural" mother who "threw off the gauze covering of ceremony, renounced her natural feelings," and went to war against her own son. A government supporter, by contrast, stressed, perhaps over-literally, that Britain-as-mother was "more than equal to any of her sex," in contrast to her main detractor, Dr. Price, who was a bachelor, and therefore "knows but little . . . of the tender feelings of a parent."⁴⁸ Such references to family relationships and their disruptions were also clear and immediate references to proper gender roles and adequate gender identities. 32

     The impact of this preoccupation with subverted gender boundaries as a metonymic representation of the problem of the American war, however, appears to have gone far beyond the context of the political debate, and thus requires a wider perspective on its late 1770s English context. These very years, it turns out, witnessed a far-reaching shift in cultural attitudes toward gender categories and their possible limitations. Elsewhere, I have suggested that from the 1780s onward we can see a sharp increase in anxieties about the potential fault lines of gender categories and an increasing unwillingness to contemplate that they may prove porous or inadequate, even in extraordinary circumstances. This shift, which I have labeled "gender panic," can be seen across a wide array of cultural indicators, all of which point to a conspicuous distance between late eighteenth-century English understandings of gender and those of the earlier decades, characterized as they had been by considerable tolerance toward precisely those kinds of gender elasticities that later came to be seen as so threatening. Figures that embodied the limitations of gender categories—the female warrior, the macaroni, the Amazon, the lachrymose man of feeling, the female politician—had been acknowledged throughout most of the eighteenth century as possible and at times even seductive alternatives to prevailing norms of masculinity and femininity. But in the last couple of decades of the century, they all became culturally unintelligible, socially unacceptable, and allegedly unimaginable.⁴⁹ 33

     In fact, a closer look at the chronology of these developments during the late 1770s and early 1780s shows a double movement: first, an intensified preoccupation with those markers of gender play that had been stock themes throughout the previous decades, and then an anxious reaction, resulting in the repression of those same themes. The former phase was apparent, for instance, in the spate of dramatic pieces spawned by the American war with self-explanatory if repetitive titles, such as The Female Officer (1778), The Female Chevalier (1778), The Female Captain (1779), and The Female Warriors (1780), not to mention the dozens of female soldiers strutting about in numerous representations of the military camps of these years, often drawn in sharp contrast to their languishing effeminate male inhabitants.⁵⁰ The heightened preoccupation with gender boundaries, moreover, was also expressed in cultural forms and events that had, on the face of it, little or nothing to do with the war. These included the universal fascination in 1777–1778 with the chevalier D'Eon, whose story of sexual masquerade—having been declared (erroneously) to have been throughout his military and diplomatic career a cross-dressed woman—conveniently broke out just at the right time to crystallize this general interest, or—in what was perhaps the most baroque manifestation of this interest (as well as its swan song)—George Colman's eccentric production of John Gay's Beggar's Opera with all characters gender-reversed (1781).⁵¹ 34

     Overall, then, allowing for a short time lag between the political debate and the broader cultural scene, it is at least very suggestive to see both the surge of intense interest in the limits of gender categories in the late 1770s and the intense discomfort with which these limits were met from the early 1780s as two sides of the same coin, directly linked to the specter of unreliable identities that the American war had raised in such a loaded manner. On the one hand, the broader cultural context can help us understand the topicality and resonance of those often gratuitous invocations of markers of gender subversion that we have seen introduced into the American debate. Catharine Macaulay's "Amazonian fire," the gratuitous image of "Woffingtons in breeches," unfeminine women, female warriors, delicate feminized men—the significance of all these images, and many more, can only be appreciated against the backdrop of this wider contemporary preoccupation with the types and stereotypes on which they were drawing. On the other hand, it is the specific political context of the American conflict, which generated the unease about the limitations of identity categories explored in this essay, that may help us account for the puzzling cultural shift that seems to have abruptly overtaken British understandings of gender during the last two decades of the eighteenth century. 35

Before moving on to the concluding sections of this essay, let us take stock of the argument thus far. But rather than simply retracing our steps, we can follow the insightful analysis of Allan Ramsay, the former portrait painter to George III, which he put forth in 1775 with remarkable self-confidence as "the single light" that will dispel "the sophistry of the American Pamphleteers." Ramsay explained at length why the Americans found such sophistry necessary. "The English Nation has hitherto divided the whole human race into two classes only, viz. Foreigners, who are always supposed to be, at bottom, enemies; and Englishmen, who are always supposed to be, at bottom, friends to England." But this simplicity, "not ill founded in the nature of things," was now gone: "unfortunately, there has lately started up to view in America a new class of men, who will be found upon examination to belong to neither of those two classes." Their very existence will "give great perplexity" to the people of England "till their true nature, and their true relation to Great Britain is accurately known." By proclaiming the same descent, language, laws, customs, and religion as Englishmen, Ramsay continued, and by "the practice of calling themselves Englishmen, and us brethren, they have artfully persuaded the people of England that they are their fellow-citizens, and Englishmen like themselves, to all intents and purposes." This was the familiar argument for sameness of Americans and Englishmen, that sameness belied so blatantly by the present conflict. But Ramsay was a court propagandist, not a disinterested observer: his whole point—which would restore the clarity of a "single light"—was that "this [was] altogether a fallacy." The truth was, an American Englishman was hardly different from a "Frenchified Englishman" who chose to live in France and become assimilated there; "politically speaking," Ramsay asserted, Americans were not Englishmen.⁵² 36

     However, the Americans have made every effort to obscure this simple fact, by "avail[ing] themselves of every ambiguity in our language." Ramsay explained: "They have called themselves our Fellow Subjects, knowing, all the while, that they acknowledge themselves to be such, only from a circumstance which belongs to them in common with the people of Hanover. They have talked constantly of their Mother Country, and have founded their absurd pretensions on their British descent; when they know, that there are thousands amongst them who join in those demands upon their Mother Country who were born in Westphalia . . . , and they have lately talked to us, in the tragic strain, about the horrors of a civil war, when they know, that . . . there will no true Englishman fall in it, except he be from amongst those brave men who have lately sailed from England." Here was the whole problem of the American war in a nutshell: whether this was a civil war among Englishmen or a war with aliens (many of whom—recall Tom Paine—were not even of British descent) masking themselves as Englishmen, with the aid of linguistic ambiguity and confusing representations. This, Ramsay asserted, was the problem that will "ever continue to perplex" Englishmen until the "true nature" of the identities underlying these contradicting claims of sameness and difference was unequivocally clarified. 37

     And indeed, we have seen the diverse ways in which this problem did perplex Britons of all shades and stripes, as they struggled to make sense of the American war through some reliable map of lines of differentiation. Eighteenth-century wars, as Linda Colley has so memorably pointed out, had typically been glorious nationally formative experiences that played a key role in shoring up a common national identity.⁵³ But in this perhaps civil war, when national identity as such was more the problem than the cure, contemporaries mobilized practically every category of difference imaginable—religion, race, class, gender, even the human/animal distinction—in more plausible or less plausible attempts to stabilize, to explain, to grasp a conflict that so many believed was an unprecedentedly momentous one.⁵⁴ But we have also seen how these attempts repeatedly floundered: the American war, to use a fashionable formulation, was a war without a stable "other." As a consequence, the very adequacy, and thus usefulness, of prevalent notions of identity was put in doubt. They were now in urgent need of reconstruction, with a more solid foundation in what Ramsay called their "true nature." Small wonder, therefore, that we can find Paine laying in Common Sense a bedrock of reliable categories—"Male and female are the distinctions of nature, good and bad the distinctions of heaven"—as a reassuring (and necessary) Archimedean point from which to begin, or that another commentator on the events of these years, who had variously noted the destabilization of distinctions between Indians and whites, men and women, Catholics and Protestants, Americans and Britons, admitted even more forthrightly the need for the institution of newly anchored, essential, invariably dependable categories of identification. "The times," this writer declared, "render it necessary that new distinctions should take place, not as badges of petulance and illwill, . . . but such distinctions as must in their very nature discriminate between the lover of the country, and the betrayer of it."⁵⁵ Wishful thinking indeed. 38

"The times," then, "render[ed] it necessary" that change should take place: a phrase that referred clearly, in the passage just quoted, to the political circumstances that have framed this essay so far. Indeed, the above pages have followed this writer in creating the impression that the American war was like the waving of a magic wand that suddenly cast a transformative spell on an unsuspecting nation. But this is not the whole story: surely, "the times" can stand for different scales of chronological frameworks, some of which stretch much longer than a few years. Rather, as is often the case with traumatic events that exceed the political realm to become major national quakes, the American war brought to a cataclysmic head trends that had long been developing gradually and imperceptibly beneath the surface, turning them from tentative potentialities to overbearing actualities. This observation, in fact, was already Edmund Burke's. "Many things have been long operating towards a gradual change in our principles," he declared in April 1777, "But this American war has done more in a few years than all the other causes could have effected in a century."⁵⁶ 39

     None of "all the other causes" that Burke must have had in mind as having been long transforming England was more important, probably, than the long-term commercialization of society. Most certainly, none was more important for our story here. Although a detailed discussion will have to be taken up elsewhere, it is crucial to note the consequences of the emergence of commercial society for the issues central to this discussion: namely, the gradual erosion of confidence in traditional notions of identity and the increasing preoccupation with the plasticity and deceptiveness of appearances. As Jean-Christophe Agnew has wonderfully pointed out, a key axis for the ways that commercial society was experienced—whether to be embraced or resisted—was that of transparency versus artifice. As the concreteness of pre-modern commodity exchange in the marketplace gave way to monetized market relations based on anonymous exchange, they lost their former transparency and accountability. They became more opaque, more mediated, more dependent on representations—a development pushed further by new mediums of exchange that were strictly representational, culminating in the worst bugbear of all, paper money.⁵⁷ As representation and its validation came to the center of market relations, the ensuing doubts became increasingly analogous to those that have long been associated with the theater, that ultimate arena of mutable identities. Meanwhile, in a parallel development at the same time (a development that has been discussed by various scholars, from Richard Sennett to John Brewer), the "consumer revolution" of this period presented Britons with a baffling array of goods, goods that used to be important signifiers of social distinctions. In this case, it may be suggested, it was the nervous discourse on fashion (rather than theater), often grounded in the ubiquitous critiques of luxury, that came to embody the concern with the mutability and transience of forms, and in particular those forms that affected people's signs of identity, now available for anyone willing to pay the price.⁵⁸ 40

     In the confines of the present essay, these telegraphic comments are intended simply to flag the underlying long-term pressures that characterized the decades preceding the American crisis and that fed the potential unease about the possibility that identities can prove to be mutable, unreliable, and ultimately unknowable. It is against the background of this longstanding cultural undercurrent that we should understand the resonant pitch of the agitation generated by the American war: here was the nightmare come true. The stakes changed almost overnight. The problem of unreliable identities turned from the uneasiness of moralizers, pontificators, and doomsayers, alarmed by the fashionable consequences of commercial society, into a disturbing, inescapable underpinning of the conflict that was threatening to pull the British nation and empire apart. Moreover, if there was one part of that world that could be expected to deliver this final blow to traditional notions of identity, America may well have been it. In another long-term development that contributed to the gradual build-up of such pressures, the New World experiences of uprooting emigration and encounters with different racial, social, and gender configurations had long been chafing away at the confidence in received categorizations, thus making America a particularly apt context for this problem to erupt.⁵⁹ 41

     And to round up these adumbrated pointers toward an argument that must be developed more fully elsewhere, the language that throughout the eighteenth century captured much of this unease was that of artifice and dissimulation, masking and disguise. As Rousseau famously put it in Emile: "The man of the world is entirely covered with a mask; he is so accustomed to disguise, that if, at any time he is obliged for a moment to assume his natural character his uneasiness and constraint are palpably obvious . . . Reality is no part of his concern, he aims at nothing more than appearance."⁶⁰ Think of the masquerade: not for nothing did the masquerade become for the eighteenth century both a quintessential cultural institution and a potent symbol for all that was good and bad in society.⁶¹ So if one is looking for signs of contemporary nervousness about the contingency and unreliability of identities, the language of masking and disguise would be a good place to start. 42

     Which brings us back to the American revolutionary crisis. For if the language of disrupted family relations was the lingua franca of the revolution, then the language of masking and disguise was a not-too-distant second. This language has already been with us variously in the above pages: recurring in Erskine's Catholic "priests in disguise," in the unnatural motherhood of "Queen Georgiana" revealed as s/he "threw off the gauze covering," in the savage nature of the scalping Americans that was supposedly revealed once they, too, have "throw[n] off the mask," or in their characterization as "men disguis'd." In fact, these are but a few random soundings of the pervasive recourse to this language throughout the American debate. At times, it was invoked quite literally: as in stories about Americans disguised as Indians in pursuit of their savage war, or of gentlemen disguised as rabble, or of women disguised as men.⁶² More generally, few formulations were hurled more frequently (and inconsistently) at the Americans and their supporters than the accusation that they were falsely wearing "the mask of patriotism" and "put[ting] on every Disguise," but also that they "have boldly thrown off the mask" (in the words of George III) to reveal their true intentions. On the other side, Jay Fliegelman has already noted how Americans repeatedly identified Britain with artifice, dissimulation, and theatricality.⁶³ The sustained recourse to this language was not at all partisan. Its capacity to synthesize the problem of identity categories and their limits at this juncture is nicely illustrated in what may well qualify as one of the most convoluted charges ever raised against a politician for being unfaithful to his true self: "your lordship," The Crisis accused Chatham when it suspected him of reneging on his pro-American support, "has at last thrown off your American mask, and not only resumed the Englishman, but commenced a ministerial man; . . . If your lordship will not now confess yourself an American once more, I must tell you that you are unworthy to be called an Englishman."⁶⁴ The mask here stood at the epicenter of what was so clearly—almost to a comic effect—an unresolvable muddle. 43

     Moreover, just as we have seen the anxieties about gender boundaries transcend the political debate into a wider cultural sphere, the same was also true of the intensified preoccupation at this very juncture with disguise and masquerading. From all corners came the urgent warnings against what Henry Hunter (whom we have already met) pronounced as the present "criminal" penchant for "Disguise and Dissimulation." "Beware of counterfeits," another writer admonished, "for such are abroad." The plague of the present times was the ubiquity of "impostors," who threaten "people in every part of the world." And just as the chevalier D'Eon was such a convenient peg on which to hang the peak of interest in gender blurring, so did the events of these years produce a fortuitous case for the crystallization of the English preoccupation with artifice, dissimulation, and unreliable identities, in the shape of the notorious impostor Mrs. Rudd and her (indistinguishable!) twin brother accomplices. Their complex forgery-cum-masquerade swindle that led the latter two to the scaffold in the winter of 1776 captured the public imagination, as Donna Andrew and Randall McGowen point out, with an "immense energy" (often overshadowing even the reports of events in America) that can only be explained within a broader context of "a growing uneasiness about the unreliability of appearances in social and economic life."⁶⁵ Theirs was a key metaphor for the ills of the times: "But as mankind in general seem to act the impostor, I think we may with equal propriety compare human life to our modern masquerade." Indeed, the masquerade itself went in the late eighteenth century into a sudden, precipitous decline—nothing short of "a kind of cultural amnesia," in the words of its best-informed student, Terry Castle—a decline that Castle finds inexplicable ("a historical enigma") but that may begin to make sense within the framework of the contemporary concern about the treacherousness of identities, as signaled by disguise, masking, and dissimulation.⁶⁶ 44

     So finally, having gone a long and circuitous route, we are ready to get back to the exchange between Wesley and Price that opened this essay. Both, we may recall, fixed their attention—and that of their readers—on the use of disguise in the Boston Tea Party, without further consideration of what that disguise might have been (namely, the Indian costumes). This was an emphasis reinforced in Wesley's subsequent retelling of the story, which did away with the actual disguise altogether but still represented the event through the same lens of transparency versus dissimulation. However unself-conscious these selective representations of the Boston events may have been, by now we can begin to see the depth of the overtones conjured up by their focus on disguise. The language of disguise and masquerade, reverberating with the echoes of endless repetitions, signaled the problem of the potential inadequacy and unreliability of identities—a problem that was an endemic, loaded, and inescapable preoccupation of Britons of all political stripes as they strove to make sense of their own experiences of the American crisis.⁶⁷ The questions of whether the colonists were brethren or enemies, whether American identity had evolved far enough to make this a foreign rather than a civil war, whether one could put forth any stable category of identity to clarify who was against whom in this conflict and why, whether identity categories could now be trusted at all—the faint palimpsest of all these questions could be read in the tea leaves that got Price and Wesley into an argument in that fateful spring of 1776. 45

This essay still requires a short postscript. On the one hand, the consequences of the crisis of confidence in categories of difference, a crisis long in the making and now brought to a head by the American war, were arguably long-term ones, feeding into a re-anchoring of notions of identity in what may be seen as more "modern," essentializing foundations.⁶⁸ At the same time, however, the actual cause of this crisis of confidence disappeared from view as swiftly as it had begun. The turning point, of course, was the entry of the French (and the Spanish) into the war, a development that despite its gravity released an audible national sigh of relief as Britons now rallied to a war against their perennial, natural foes. From now on, the war could make sense, even in defeat. Historians have commented before on the surprisingly swift and radical excision of the trauma of the American civil war from British national consciousness.⁶⁹ It is only such a national effort at erasure that can explain how Joseph Cawthorne, in 1782, could write with a straight face about the mistake of "an unnatural internal war" in America, and turn out to have meant not that heavy, disconcerting weight that these very same words had carried with them only a few years back but rather the simple strategic mistake of choosing to fight "an internal perilous war, in an enemy's country (for so we may call it) against nature"—rather, that is, than picking a more advantageous battleground.⁷⁰ Likewise, it is perhaps only such a concerted national effort at collective forgetting that can explain why, when King George III continued to bemoan the loss of the American colonies throughout the 1780s in terms that were little more than replications of those widespread apocalyptic formulations of the 1770s, his refusal to partake of the national amnesia was taken to be a clear sign that the king was, indeed, downright mad. 46

Dror Wahrman teaches at Indiana University. He is the author of Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (1995), and several publications on the history of Palestine and of early photography in the Middle East. He is also co-editor with Colin Jones of The Age of Cultural Revolutions: Britain and France, 1750–1820 (forthcoming from the University of California Press, 2002). The present article emerges from his wider project on eighteenth-century understandings of identity and their late eighteenth-century transformation, forthcoming under the tentative title The Making of the Modern Self (Yale University Press).

Notes

For comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Donna Andrew, David Armitage, Eitan Bar-Yosef, David Bell, Ian Burney, Christopher Clark, Seth Denbo, Rebecca Earle, Jim Epstein, Eliga Gould, Colin Jones, Sarah Knott, and Kathleen Wilson.
¹ Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty . . . , 3d edn. (London, 1776), 64.
² John Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty: Occasioned by a Late Tract (London, 1776), 6–7.
³ Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, Conn., 1998), 2, 6; followed by Alfred F. Young, The Shoemaker and the Tea Party (Boston, 1999), 103–04. Compare, among many, Edward Countryman, Americans: A Collision of Histories (New York, 1996), 42–43.
⁴ Compare another response to Price, which likewise recounted how "a small part of the people had separated from the rest in order to disguise themselves; and, being so disguised, entered all the ships, hoisted out the tea, and cast it into the sea." Experience Preferable to Theory: An Answer to Dr. Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty . . . (London, 1776), 64–65. In castigating the Bostonians for "being so disguised," this writer, too, did not deem any further detail necessary. This repeated oversight is even more significant, given that for writers of Wesley's frame of mind the association of the colonists with Indians might have become another potentially effective weapon of denigration. For one more example, see Sagittarius's Letters and Political Speculations, Extracted from the Public Ledger (Boston, 1775), 18.
⁵ This, for instance, was how the issue was discussed in the House of Commons: The Parliamentary History of England, from the Earliest Period to the Year 1803, vol. 17, 1771–1774 (London, 1813), cols. 1185–86. This omission, moreover, was not due to lack of information—compare col. 940, where the report of the Boston events appears complete, Mohawk disguises and all.
⁶ John Wesley, A Calm Address to the Inhabitants of England (London, 1777), 10–13.
⁷ Key contributions to this burgeoning literature, going beyond the former focus on high politics, policymaking, and constitutional thought (shaped, most notably, by Sir Lewis Namier), include James E. Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England: Petitions, the Crown, and Public Opinion (Macon, Ga., 1986); John Sainsbury, Disaffected Patriots: London Supporters of Revolutionary America, 1769–1782 (Montreal, 1987); Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, Conn., 1992); Jonathan C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty 1660–1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge, 1994); Peter N. Miller, Defining the Common Good: Empire, Religion and Philosophy in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, 1994); Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715–1785 (Cambridge, 1995), chap. 5; H. T. Dickinson, "'The Friends of America': British Sympathy with the American Revolution," in Michael T. Davis, ed., Radicalism and Revolution in Britain, 1775–1848: Essays in Honour of Malcolm I. Thomis (Basingstoke, 2000); Eliga H. Gould, The Persistence of Empire: British Political Culture in the Age of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2000); Stephen Conway, The British Isles and the War of American Independence (Oxford, 2000).
⁸ Americans, for their part, also partook of these unsettling experiences, albeit from their own distinctive angle on the threshold of the new republic. See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, "Dis-Covering the Subject of the 'Great Constitutional Discussion,' 1786–1789," Journal of American History 79 (1992): 841–73; David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997). The interesting differences between the American and English experiences cannot be further pursued here. Also, it should be noted that the nature of the evidence used below has limited the focus of this essay to primarily English—rather than more inclusively British—developments.
⁹ Remarks on Dr. Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, &c. (London, 1776), 34; Civil War: A Poem, Written in the Year 1775 (n.p., [1775]), 3.
¹⁰ London Evening Post, no. 8391 (December 30, 1775–January 2, 1776): 4; Independency the Object of the Congress in America: or, An Appeal to Facts (London, 1776), 6, 18. For a quick sample of such utterances on the pro-American side, see the petitions reproduced in Bradley, Popular Politics and the American Revolution in England, appendix 1. And see Philip Lawson, "Anatomy of a Civil War: New Perspectives on England in the Age of the American Revolution 1767–82," Parliamentary History 8 (1989): 142–52; Colley, Britons, 137; Clark, Language of Liberty, 296–303; Wilson, Sense of the People, chap. 5; and Gould, Persistence of Empire, 184–85.
¹¹ The Delusive and Dangerous Principles of the Minority, Exposed and Refuted, in a Letter to Lord North, by a Friend to the Public (London, 1778), iii, v; Samuel Stennett, National Calamities the Effect of Divine Displeasure, A Sermon . . . on Occasion of the General Fast, February 21, 1781 (London, [1781]), 8; The Complaint: or, Britannia Lamenting the Loss of Her Children; An Elegy, Inscribed to . . . Benjamin Franklin (London, [1776?]), 2.
¹² [Samuel Jackson Pratt], Emma Corbett: or, The Miseries of Civil War, Founded on Some Recent Circumstances Which Happened in America (Dublin, 1780), 173.
¹³ In this sample, it may be worth noting once again, some voices were for the American cause and some against it, and for our present purpose it does not really matter which was which. Observations on American Independency (n.p., [1779]), 6; The True Interest of America Impartially Stated, in Certain Strictures on a Pamphlet Intitled Common Sense, By an American, 2d edn. (Philadelphia, 1776), 52; [Arthur Lee], An Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain, 4th edn. (London, 1776), [3]; Licentiousness Unmask'd: or, Liberty Explained (London, [1776]), 40. These assertions were echoing formulations that had been repeated for years, ever since the American crisis had begun to unfold: see Gould, Persistence of Empire, 66, 119 and passim.
¹⁴ Richard Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty . . . , 8th edn. (Edinburgh, 1776), 22, my emphasis. And see an exasperated response to this observation in Remarks on Dr. Price's Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 16.
¹⁵ John Fothergill, An English Freeholder's Address, to His Countrymen (London, 1780), 2; and compare his letter of 1768 cited in P. J. Marshall, "A Nation Defined by Empire, 1755–1776," in Alexander Grant and Keith J. Stringer, eds., Uniting the Kingdom? The Making of British History (London, 1995), 220.
¹⁶ Thomas Paine, Common Sense [1776], in The Thomas Paine Reader, Michael Foot and Isaac Kramnick, eds. (Harmondsworth, 1987), 81–82; A Triumph of the Whigs: or, t'Other Congress Convened (New York, 1775), 4. For more examples, on both sides of the political divide, see The Farmer Refuted: or, A More Impartial and Comprehensive View of the Dispute between Great-Britain and the Colonies . . . (New York, 1775), 19; The Honor of the University of Oxford Defended, against the Illiberal Aspersions of E—d B—e Esq. . . . (London, [1781?]), 27. And compare Colley, Britons, 134; Gould, Persistence of Empire, 192.
¹⁷ Price, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty, 39; compare Fothergill, English Freeholder's Address, 14.
¹⁸ As has often been pointed out, American radicals and their sympathizers repeatedly presented the Americans as the "undegenerated descendants of their British ancestors," therefore "desir[ing] a Constitution perfectly English": [Arthur Lee], A Speech, Intended to Have Been Delivered in the House of Commons, in Support of the Petition from the General Congress at Philadelphia (London, 1775), 4; Morning Post, no. 707 (February 1, 1774): 4. On the revolution as fueled by Americans' insistence on their claim for the rights of Englishmen, see John M. Murrin, "A Roof without Walls: The Dilemma of American National Identity," in Richard Beeman, et al., eds., Beyond Confederation: Origins of the Constitution and American National Identity (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1987), 333–48; Jack P. Greene, "Empire and Identity from the Glorious Revolution to the American Revolution," in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire, Vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), esp. 227–29. As the revolution progressed, however, American assertions of difference naturally grew stronger than those denying this difference.
¹⁹ Abbé [Guillaume] Raynal, The Revolution in America (London, 1781), 29–30; Lady's Magazine, 1775 and subsequent years. And note the revealingly oxymoronic reference of one M.P., without the least sense of irony, to "a civil war with America": Parliamentary History of England, 18: 186. The dual nature of the American war is captured in the aptly awkward phrase used by P. J. Marshall, "Nation Defined by Empire," 222, "the war of Britishnesses."
²⁰ [Matthew Robinson-Morris, Second Baron Rokeby], Considerations on the Measures Carrying on with Respect to the British Colonies in North America (London, 1774); in English Defenders of American Freedoms 1774–1778: Six Pamphlets Attacking British Policy, Paul H. Smith, ed. (Washington, D.C., 1972), 64, 81; America Vindicated from the High Charge of Ingratitude and Rebellion: . . . By a Friend to Both Countries (Devizes, 1774), 9–10, 22, 24; [John Knox], The American Crisis, by a Citizen of the World: Inscribed to Those Members of the Community, Vulgarly Named Patriots (London, 1777), 19, 26.
²¹ Contemporaries, on the other hand, often drew attention to "such contradictory arguments" in the rhetoric of their adversaries, though they typically preferred to see in them proof of the opposition's cynicism and deception rather than consider the possibility that the problem was perhaps inherent in the conflict itself, affecting all sides. For examples, see David Hartley, An Address to the Committee of the County of York, on the State of Public Affairs (London, 1781), 28–29 (quoted); Caleb Evans, A Reply to the Rev. Mr. Fletcher's Vindication of Mr. Wesley's Calm Address to Our American Colonies (Bristol, [1776]), 26; [Josiah Tucker], A Series of Answers to Certain Popular Objections, against Separating from the Rebellious Colonies, and Discarding Them Entirely . . . (Gloucester, 1776), 55; [Tucker], Tract V: The Respective Pleas and Arguments of the Mother Country, and of the Colonies, Distinctly Set Forth . . . (Gloucester, 1775), vi.
²² J[ohn] Shebbeare, An Essay on the Origin, Progress and Establishment of National Society, in which the Principles of . . . Dr. Price's Observations, &c. Are . . . Fully Refuted . . . (London, 1776), 21, 91, 93, 108, 119, 135. Shebbeare's notoriously splenetic views had been rewarded by a government pension.
²³ John Erskine, Shall I Go to War with My American Brethren? A Discourse Addressed to All Concerned in Determining That Important Question . . . (Edinburgh, 1776), [iii], 7, 18–19.
²⁴ The emphasis on the Dissenting descent of the colonists often turned (as it did for Shebbeare) into claims of congenital sedition and republicanism: they were "the offspring of [a] turbulent and bloody race," and had "an hereditary disaffection to the English constitution." Indeed, for one such penny geneticist, these "innate principles" rendered the "general character" of the colonists as a nation "so opposite to the noble and generous character of Britons" that the war became immediately comprehensible. Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, no. 711 (February 6, 1775): [1]; Myles Cooper, National Humiliation and Repentance Recommended, and the Causes of the Present Rebellion in America . . . (Oxford, 1777), 13; Considerations on the American War, Addressed to the People of England (London, 1776), 3–5.
²⁵ [Charles Inglis], Letters of Papinian: In Which the Conduct, Present State, and Prospects of the American Congress Are Examined (New York and London, 1779), 71–73, 78. Compare also Hypocrisy Unmasked: or, A Short Inquiry into the Religious Complaints of Our American Colonies, 3d edn. (London, 1776); and A Short Appeal to the People of Great Britain: Upon the Unavoidable Necessity of the Present War with Our Disaffected Colonies, 2d edn. (London, 1776). The Quebec Act of 1774 was often put forth as evidence for the charge of ministerial crypto-Catholicism. The latter, moreover, was readily linked to that of Scottish influence—another line of distinction between people that some used to make sense of the American war, in ways that cannot be pursued here.
²⁶ Of course, as Eliga Gould reminds us, Persistence of Empire, 7, in truth these earlier eighteenth-century wars were not really all that clear cut in terms of their religious alignments, with Britain often finding itself joining forces with Catholic allies (like the devoutly Catholic queen Maria Theresa in the War of the Austrian Succession in the 1740s). But these earlier conflicts had been readily representable as following unambiguous religious lines, a feat that proved much more elusive for the American war.
²⁷ Jonathan Clark, Language of Liberty, 305, has claimed the American war to have been "the last great war of religion in the western world." Perhaps. But what the present argument suggests—and what Clark may have failed to appreciate sufficiently—is that many people had a pressing stake in trying to portray it in just this way.
²⁸ Edmund Burke, Speech on the Use of Indians, February 6, 1778 ("universally thought the very best [speech] Mr. Burke had ever delivered"), in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, W. M. Elofson and J. A. Woods, eds. (Oxford, 1996), 3: 356, 361; Burke, Draft Petition on Use of Indians [1775; never used], p. 180 (and compare his Address to the King and his Address to the Colonists, both of January 1777, pp. 267, 281–82). The Crisis, no. 21 (June 10, 1775): 135; no. 49 (December 23, 1775): 322. Compare also Thomas Day, Reflexions upon the Present State of England, and the Independence of America (London, 1782), 25.
²⁹ London Evening Post, no. 8393 (January 4–6, 1776): 3; An Address to the People on the Subject of the Contest between Great-Britain and America (London, 1776), 10; [John Lind], An Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress (London, 1776), 56, 102.
³⁰ London Evening Post, no. 8509 (October 1–3, 1776): 2; Thomas Bolton, as cited in Jay Fliegelman, Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, Calif., 1993), 75; J[ohn] Fletcher, American Patriotism Farther Confronted with Reason, Scripture, and the Constitution . . . (Shrewsbury, 1776), 62. For a denial of the alleged affinity between Americans and Indians, claiming that they were "totally distinct," see [Lee], Appeal to the Justice and Interests of the People of Great Britain, 15.
³¹ The Patriots of North-America: A Sketch, with Explanatory Notes (New York, 1775), 3, 12, 18, 27, 33, 39n (this pamphlet was prefaced with the assertion that it was written for English as well as American readers). On the other side, note Edward Long's apologetic assertion that England's Indian alliances did not turn them into cannibalistic savages: Long, English Humanity No Paradox: or, An Attempt to Prove, That the English Are Not a Nation of Savages (London, 1778), 82.
³² [Lind], Answer to the Declaration of the American Congress, 106; London Evening Post, no. 8475 (July 16, 1776): 4. These two examples, again, came from the opposite sides of the political spectrum.
³³ For examples of the Americans as unable to distinguish men, women, and children, see "Extract of a Letter from the Hon. Lieutenant-General Gage to the Earl of Dartmouth," in Gentleman's Magazine 45 (September 1775): 446; William Allen, The American Crisis: A Letter, Addressed by Permission to the Earl Gower . . . on the Present Alarming Disturbances in the Colonies . . . (London, 1774), 13 (here associated with the practice of slavery). For examples on the opposite side, see The Conquerors, A Poem Displaying the Glorious Campaigns of 1775, 1776, 1777, &c. &c. (London, [1778]), 56, 58; and Burke's sarcasm of General Burgoyne's speech to the Indians in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 3: 361. Also compare Gould, Persistence of Empire, 196–97.
³⁴ Burke, draft of the Speech on the Use of Indians, February 6, 1778, in Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, 3: 366; Boston Gazette, as cited in Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: The American Revolution against Patriarchal Authority, 1750–1800 (Cambridge, 1982), 138, and see 137–39 for the story of Jane M'Crea.
³⁵ Genuine Abstracts from Two Speeches of the Late Earl of Chatham . . . (London, 1779), 55–57 (and compare 39). Pownall's speech, of February 6, 1778, is cited in A View of the History of Great-Britain, during the Administration of Lord North . . . in Two Parts (London, 1782), 293n.
³⁶ London Evening Post, no. 8463 (June 15–18, 1776): 4; and compare no. 8244 (January 26–28, 1775): 4. Other examples include General Evening Post, no. 6587 (March 12–14, 1776): 3; Raynal, Revolution in America, 128–29.
³⁷ Richard Watson, The Principles of the Revolution Vindicated: In a Sermon Preached before the University of Cambridge, on Wednesday, May 29, 1776 (Cambridge, 1776), 1–4.
³⁸ Edmund Burke to John Bourke [November 1777], in The Correspondence of Edmund Burke, G. H. Guttridge, ed., vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1961), 403.
³⁹ [Adam Ferguson], Remarks on a Pamphlet Lately Published by Dr. Price, Intitled, Observations on the Nature of Civil Liberty . . . (London, 1776), 42; Letters to the High and Mighty United States of America, by Integer . . . (New York and London, [1780]), 47; A Letter to Lord North, on His Re-election into the House of Commons, by a Member of Parliament (London, 1780), 34; Independency the Object of the Congress in America, 44.
⁴⁰ [Henry Hunter], A National Change in Morals, in Measures, and in Politics Necessary to National Prosperity: A Discourse Preached on . . . the Day Appointed for a General Fast (London, 1780), 37; Letter to Lord North in Morning Post and Daily Advertiser, no. 708 (February 2, 1775): 1. Compare The Voice of God: Being Serious Thoughts on the Present Alarming Crisis . . . (London, 1775), 10.
⁴¹ Letters to the High and Mighty United States of America, by Integer, 29, 76; Independency the Object of the Congress in America, 47; [Hunter], National Change in Morals, iv, 21–22, 40.
⁴² Fletcher, American Patriotism Farther Confronted with Reason, 27. Compare Fletcher, Vindication of the Rev. Mr. Wesley's "Calm Address to Our American Colonies," 61–62.
⁴³ Fletcher, Vindication of the Rev. Mr. Wesley's "Calm Address to Our American Colonies," 16–17; Fletcher, American Patriotism Farther Confronted with Reason, 25, 60–63; Wesley, Some Observations on Liberty, 12–16. And see the heated argument over which side was preparing the ground "for what, in vulgar phrase, is styled petticoat government" between Evans, Reply to the Rev. Mr. Fletcher's Vindication of Mr. Wesley's Calm Address, 74–75, and Fletcher's American Patriotism Farther Confronted with Reason, 36–37. Other examples include Opposition Mornings: With Betty's Remarks (London, 1779), 11–12; [David Williams], The Morality of a Citizen: In a Visitation Sermon . . . (London, 1776), 9–10. For a warning that the American ideology will lead to votes for Indians, see John Martin, Familiar Dialogues between Americus and Britannicus . . . (London, 1776), 57–59.
⁴⁴ [John Cartwright], A Letter to Edmund Burke, Esq: Controverting the Principles of American Government, Laid Down in His Lately Published Speech on American Taxation . . . (London, 1775), 25–28. The same simile, to the same purpose, is repeated in A Letter to Those Ladies Whose Husbands Possess a Seat in Either House of Parliament (London, 1775), 7–9.
⁴⁵ An English Green Box: or, The Green Box of the R—t H—e E—D L—D Churllow . . . (London, 1779), 92 (and note the imputation of social and racial indistinctiveness to Lord Thurlow in 100–01). Liberty and Patriotism: A Miscellaneous Ode, with Explanatory Notes, and Anecdotes (London, 1778), 2, 11 (and note the subversion of social boundaries invoked there as well). [Pratt], Emma Corbett: or, The Miseries of Civil War; for a reading of this novel along these lines, see my "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England," Past and Present 159 (1998): 156–59. The Remarkable Trial of the Queen of the Quavers, and Her Associates . . . (London, 1778), quoted, 147 (and see J. P. Carson, "Commodification and the Figure of the Castrato in Smollett's Humphry Clinker," The Eighteenth Century 33 [1992]: 37). To this aspect of the debate, we may also link the curious rumor that George Washington, the father of the new American nation, was in truth a woman: see Daily Advertiser, January 25, 1783, in D'Eon MSS, Brotherton Library, Leeds University, England, second volume of newspaper cuttings.
⁴⁶ XSMWPDRIBVNWLXY: or, The Sauce Pan (London, 1781), quoted 41, 55; The Patriots: or, An Evening Prospect on the Atlantic . . . (London, 1777). Other examples include An Epistle from a Young Lady to an Ensign in the Guards, upon His Being Ordered to America (London, 1779); Matrimonial Overtures, from an Enamour'd Lady, to Lord G— G-rm—ne (London, 1778); The Castle of Infamy: A Poetical Vision in Two Parts (London, 1780); [Joseph Peart], A Continuation of Hudibras in Two Cantos, Written in the Time of the Unhappy Contest between Great Britain and America, in 1777 and 1778 (London, 1778); The Family In-Compact, Contrasted with the Family Compact . . . (London, 1778); Heroick Epistle from Hamet the Moor, Slipper-Maker in London, to the Emperor of Morocco . . . (London, 1780). To be sure, gender concerns turned up in the context of other wars as well—think of the critiques of effeminacy during the Seven Years' War. But in the case of the American war, these concerns went far beyond the predictable comments on the war as a test (whether failed or successful) of manliness against womanish opponents, becoming a conspicuous and multifaceted subtext that cannot be subsumed under the familiar patterns of wartime machismo.
⁴⁷ E. G. Burrows and M. Wallace, "The American Revolution: The Ideology and Psychology of National Liberation," Perspectives in American History 6 (1972), quoted, 168; Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims. See also Winthrop D. Jordan, "Familial Politics: Thomas Paine and the Killing of the King, 1776," Journal of American History 60 (1973), esp. 299–301. The common "metaphoric transfer of civil war from an external, political realm to inner conflict over sexual choice and the proper gender roles" is discussed in Margaret R. Higonnet, "Civil Wars and Sexual Territories," in Helen M. Cooper, et al., eds., Arms and the Woman: War, Gender, and Literary Representation (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1989), quoted, 87; and compare also the analogous argument about the effects of the intra-Grecian Peloponnesian War in Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1982).
⁴⁸ The Annals of Administration, Containing the Genuine History of Georgiana the Queen-Mother, and Prince Coloninus Her Son: A Biographical Fragment . . . (London, 1775), 14, 16, 19; Martin, Familiar Dialogues between Americus and Britannicus, 5, 40.
⁴⁹ See Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue"; and Dror Wahrman, "Gender in Translation: How the English Wrote Their Juvenal, 1644–1815," Representations 65 (Winter 1999): 1–41. The full case is presented in my forthcoming The Making of the Modern Self (tentative title), New Haven, Conn., chaps. 1–2.
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