Reading the Early RepublicReading the Early Republic focuses attention on the forgotten dynamism of thought in the founding era. In every case, the documents, novels, pamphlets, sermons, journals, and slave narratives of the early American nation are richer and more intricate than modern readers have perceived. Rebellion, slavery, and treason--the mingled stories of the Revolution--still haunt national thought. Robert Ferguson shows that the legacy that made the country remains the idea of what it is still trying to become. He cuts through the pervading nostalgia about national beginnings to recapture the manic-depressive tones of its first expression. He also has much to say about the reconfiguration of charity in American life, the vital role of the classical ideal in projecting an unthinkable continental republic, the first manipulations of the independent American woman, and the troubled integration of civic and commercial understandings in the original claims of prosperity as national virtue. Reading the Early Republic uses the living textual tradition against history to prove its case. The first formative writings are more than sacred artifacts. They remain the touchstones of the durable promise and the problems in republican thought |
Contents
9 | |
The Dialectic of Liberty | 51 |
The Commonalities of Common Sense | 84 |
Becoming American | 120 |
The Forgotten Publius | 151 |
Finding Rome in America | 172 |
Gabriels Rebellion | 198 |
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Alexander Hamilton Ameri American Revolution answer Benedict Arnold Benjamin Boston British Broteer Cambridge century citizen civil claim classical colonial Common Sense conception Constitution Convention Cooper Cora Court culture danger Dickinson discourse early republic early republican eighteenth-century Eliza England Enlightenment explain Federal Federalist figure Fisher Ames freedom George Washington Girard happiness Harvard University Press Hawk-eye Henrico County Ibid ideological intellectual James James Fenimore Cooper Jay's John Adams John André John Jay Joseph Story language Last leaders legal positivism Letters liberty Magua Major André ment mind Mohicans Monticello narrative Nathaniel natural law novel Paine's pamphlet past philosophical political problem Public Papers question reason rebellion religion religious repressed Revolutionary rhetorical secular slave social society speaker Story Thomas Jefferson Thomas Paine thought tion trial turn understanding union United Virginia virtue vols Webster William words Writings wrote York