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The Sentimental Paradox: Humanity and Violence on the Pennsylvania Frontier
Nicole Eustace
The hardiness demanded of savages diminishes their humanity; and, perhaps, the delicate sensibility required in civilized nations sometimes destroys the masculine firmness of the character.
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| —Adam Smith1 |
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| Enlightenment interest in moral sentiments—in emotion's role in the promotion of humane virtue—evolved amid extraordinary imperial bloodshed. Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, for example, first appeared in print in 1759 at the height of the Seven Years' War. The experience of colonial contact provoked marked uncertainty among European colonizers about how to define the limits of civility and how to establish their authority to patrol those bounds. From Smith's Scottish lecture halls to the frontier settlements of North America, eighteenth-century inhabitants of the British Empire strained to confront the contradictions created by conquest. Britons sought to wrest control of North America by force yet preserve their exclusive claims to superior humanity. This enterprise depended on the assertion that British Americans enjoyed a delicate sensibility lacking among savages—that they could rely on moral sentiments unique to civilized nations to ensure that their aggressive appropriations of land, labor, and resources would somehow retain the patina of virtue. Yet colonists also struggled with the nagging possibility that the emotional sensitivity supposed to safeguard their morality simultaneously endangered their masculinity. In concord and in conflict, British Americans on the ground had countless opportunities to appreciate Indians' "masculine firmness of the character." From treaty councils reliant on Indian emotional metaphors to captive adoptions that created emotional bonds, colonists also had ample occasion to observe the even more confounding displays of moral sentiment on the part of Native Americans.2 |
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Such facts presented British American men with deep dilemmas. They believed that two of the most prized qualities, masculinity and humanity, required contradictory emotional comportment, even as they perceived that Indians might make claims to both. Furthermore, colonists divided among themselves on these issues; competing claims about degrees of manliness and humaneness within their diverse ranks easily devolved into disputes about the measure of emotional gentleness required for social gentility. British Americans expended great effort in the late colonial period trying to resolve these conundrums through painstaking emotional regulation. Their attempts set the stage for the subsequent emergence of the American nation as an "empire of liberty," a state whose citizens deliberately valorized violence while professing to pursue humanitarian aims.3 |
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Eighteenth-century moral philosophers often considered the prevalence of violence amid a culture of sensibility more as a problem to be explained than as a pairing to be expected. If, as Norman S. Fiering famously phrased it, "modern humanitarianism may be defined as the widespread inclination to protest against obvious and pointless physical suffering," then the deliberate perpetration of violence seems to constitute a failure of those "qualities of human emotion" supposed to supply an "automatic mechanism for social good." Such were the arguments of those who, like the 3d Earl of Shaftesbury, claimed that "to delight in the torture and pain of other creatures ... is wholly and absolutely unnatural." They asserted that sympathy and compassion constituted the essential emotions of the eighteenth century and that humanitarianism was the highest value of the Enlightenment. Yet such conceptions overlook another of the key "characteristics of men" of the eighteenth century; masculinity mattered to them as well as humanity and was believed to require a different set of underlying emotions. Though few argued that manliness and humaneness were necessarily mutually exclusive—even Smith could bring himself no further than the speculation that "perhaps" the civilized sacrificed "masculine firmness of the character" in the service of delicate sensibility—people nevertheless regarded these as competing qualities that rested on distinct emotional supports.4 |
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