On Writing the History of Violence

On Writing the History of Violence

R AC H E L H O P E C L E V E S

‘‘We are happily removed far from the scene of confusion

and blood.’’ The Reverend Joseph McKeen spoke these words to his

Massachusetts congregation at a Fast Day service in April 1793. From

the pulpit, and in their parlors, McKeen warned parishioners about the

Reign of Terror then engulfing democratic France. Mobs and dema-

gogues had overthrown the bulwarks of social order and were commit-

ting thousands to the guillotine. McKeen predicted that a generation

would die in the ‘‘horrid scene.’’ The turbulence of bloodshed may have

seemed distant to his parishioners, sitting peaceably at home or in the

meetinghouse. But McKeen cautioned that ‘‘factious spirits’’ threatened

to involve the United States in ‘‘the calamities of anarchy and war.’’ He

struggled to impress the proximity of violence upon his listeners. ‘‘Let

us not think that we are in no danger,’’ he pleaded.1

We are happily removed far from the scene of confusion and blood.My words cut the blank page. I have in mind another bloody scene,

which could have cut my voice, and left silence in its place. Ten years ago,

Rachel Hope Cleves is a doctoral candidate at the University of California,Berkeley. She is working on a dissertation entitled ‘‘The Problem of Violence inthe Early American Republic.’’ She thanks Paula Fass, David Henkin, Alan Taylor,Amanda Littauer, Susan Haskell, Caroline Hinkle, Ellen Berg, Masha Zager,Aaron Bobrow-Strain, Kate Bobrow-Strain and Jonathan Sinnreich for their criti-cism and encouragement.

1. Joseph McKeen, A Sermon, Preached on the Public Fast in the Common-wealth of Massachusetts, April 11, 1793 (Salem, MA, 1793), 13–17; William BuellSprague, Annals of the American Pulpit, or, Commemorative Notices of Distin-guished American Clergymen of Various Denominations: From the Early Settlementof the Country to the Close of the Year Eighteen Hundred and Fifty-Five with His-torical Introductions (New York, 1857), 2: 216.

Journal of the Early Republic, 24 (Winter 2004)

Copyright � 2004 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic. All rights reserved.

642 • JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC (Winter 2004)

when I was a student at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts, a class-mate used an assault rifle to fire his way methodically through the campus.In my housing unit the phone rang, the resident advisor warned me andmy housemates that someone was shooting a gun. The phone rang again,a friend told us that the shooter was Wayne Lo—someone whom I had longfeared. Wayne and I had gotten in many classroom arguments, and Ipersonally represented for him the intolerable corruption of our profaneand permissive school. I felt my flesh calling out to his bullets. I locked thefront door and cowered beneath the windows. Wayne wounded a securityguard, killed my teacher, killed my friend, wounded three other students,and just barely missed many more, before his gun jammed and the SWATteam came to take him away.

It is my memory of violence, of that greedy demon reaching out for

me, that has propelled my research into the past and acquainted me with

the frightened minister whose words I have appropriated. But it is my

historical research into the surprising consequences of the American

conservative reaction to the violence of the French Revolution that has

led me to write about my personal experience. Political engagement with

a subject often provides an entry point for reflections on historical mean-

ing; in this essay, I use a series of correspondences between my personal

and academic narratives to demonstrate how emotional engagement can

be a valuable entry point as well. I will interweave an academic history

of writing about violence with a personal history of violence, and draw

from each to argue that rhetoric has the power to overreach limited ori-

gins and change ethical perceptions. The gothic language that early na-

tional conservatives used to condemn French democracy transcended

its context and became a powerful ingredient in progressive nineteenth-

century reform movements. When authors and orators warned about the

proximity of bloodshed to arouse audiences, they made violence a press-

ing problem that demanded redress. I have learned from this history that

descriptions of violence are not limited by their sensationalism. For ten

years I resisted writing about my experience during the shooting, be-

cause I feared creating a titillating narrative that would exploit the vic-

tims. I have changed my mind, in the hope that using my story to arouse

readers to a sense of bloodshed’s proximity will persuade this audience

to take violence more seriously as a pressing historical problem that de-

mands study. �

Cleves, ON WRITING THE HISTORY OF VIOLENCE • 643

Most American citizens embraced the French Revolution during its early

phase as a positive reflection of their own political progress.2 But as newsof the Revolution’s disorder and violence began reaching America, agradual attrition of opinion occurred among conservatives.3 The Ameri-can conservative turn against the French Revolution began as early as

1790, when John Adams published a series of essays entitled Discourseson Davila in the Federalist newspaper, the Gazette of the United States.Adams worried that the proposed single assembly in France lacked thechecks necessary to restrain men’s depraved ambitions, and thus would

2. Many authors have described how Americans initially welcomed the FrenchRevolution as an extension of their own ideals; Charles Downer Hazen, Contempo-rary American Opinion of the French Revolution (Baltimore, MD, 1897); BernardFay, The Revolutionary Spirit in France and America; a Study of Moral and Intel-lectual Relations between France and the United States at the End of the EighteenthCentury (New York, 1927); Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture,1750–1848 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1927); Esther Ernestine Brown, The French Revo-lution and the American Man of Letters (Columbia, MO, 1951); Beatrice F. Hys-lop, ‘‘American Press Reports of the French Revolution, 1789–1794,’’ The New-York Historical Society Quarterly, XLII (Oct. 1958); Judah Adelson, ‘‘The Ver-mont Press and the French Revolution, 1789–1799’’ (Ph.D. diss., New York Uni-versity, 1961); Ann B. Lever, ‘‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei: New England and the FrenchRevolution, 1787–1801’’ (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, 1971); Pa-trice L. R. Higonnet, Sister Republics: The Origins of French and American Repub-licanism (Cambridge, MA, 1988); Susan Dunn, Sister Revolutions: FrenchLightning, American Light (New York, 1999).

3. This argument revises the present historiographical consensus that violencehad only secondary influence on the American reaction to the French Revolution.In a frequently cited 1965 article, Gary Nash argues that the New England minis-try only rejected the French Revolution in 1795—after its most violent stage haddrawn to a close—when the threat of deism and disorder had increased inAmerica; see Gary Nash, ‘‘The American Clergy and the French Revolution,’’ TheWilliam and Mary Quarterly, 22 (July 1965), 392–412. Other historians whohave underestimated the importance of violence in forming the American reactionagainst the French Revolution include Brown, French Revolution; David BrionDavis, Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations(Cambridge, MA, 1990); Hyslop, ‘‘American Press Reports’’; Henry FarnhamMay, The Enlightenment in America (New York, 1976), 224; Jonathan D. Sassi,A Republic of Righteousness: The Public Christianity of the Post-Revolutionary NewEngland Clergy (Oxford, 2001), ch. 2. Ruth Bloch argues that the French Revolu-tion only acquired a reputation for violence at the end of the 1790s; Ruth H.Bloch, Visionary Republic: Millennial Themes in American Thought 1756–1800(New York, 1985), 207.


provoke factionalism, which might culminate in an episode of violence

akin to the infamous St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.4 New England

Federalist politicians, and the Calvinist ministers with whom they allied,

shared a common fear of depraved humanity’s potential for violence.

They believed that human rights were not innate, but social; the people’s

freedoms had to be created and secured by a strong social order that

could control human brutality.5 Prior to the American Revolution, fears

about human depravity were contained by the hierarchical politics and

society of the colonies, which concentrated power in the hands of an

elite. During the war for independence, violence served as a political

tool, a necessary means to expel the British. After the Revolution, when

the germ of democracy challenged traditional patterns of deference, and

the ideal of citizen virtue as a bulwark of social order lost its wartime

sheen, violence became a more urgent concern.6

The new republic seemed especially susceptible to violent political

disorder in light of the lessons of classical history and contemporary

experience. In classical texts, early American political theorists read

about the brief lifespan of the ancient republics. Representative govern-

ments had foundered when citizens substituted their private interests for

4. John Adams, Discourses on Davila. A Series of Papers, on Political History.Written in the Year 1790, and Then Published in the Gazette of the United States(Boston, MA, 1805). John Quincy Adams and Gouverner Morris, who lived inFrance from 1789 to 1793, also sounded early warnings about the incipient chaosof the Revolution.

5. For arguments about the social construction of man’s rights, see NathanielChipman, Sketches of the Principles of Government (Rutland, VT, 1793); JamesKent, Dissertations: Being the Preliminary Part of a Course of Law Lectures (NewYork, 1795); Noah Webster, An Oration Pronounced before the Citizens of NewHaven on the Anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, July, 1802 (NewHaven, CT, 1802). Two perceptive historical inquiries into Federalist ideologyare Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent; Imagery and Ideology in JeffersonianAmerica (Ithaca, NY, 1970); James M. Banner, To the Hartford Convention: TheFederalists and the Origins of Party Politics in Massachusetts, 1789–1815 (NewYork, 1970), especially chapter 1.

6. The decline of deference is treated authoritatively in Gordon S. Wood, TheRadicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1993); Joyce Oldham Appleby,Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (NewYork, 1984); James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: TheNew Nation in Crisis (New Haven, CT, 1993); Stanley M. Elkins and Eric L.McKitrick, The Age of Federalism (New York, 1993).


the public good, splitting nations into contending factions, inviting the

rise of demagogues, and leading to eventual civil war. Civil wars were far

more dangerous than other wars because they disunited the people,

causing extremes of violence, and leading to eventual anarchy.7 Current

events supported the lessons of ancient Greece and Rome, when in 1786

Daniel Shays led a tax revolt among western Massachusetts farmers. To

conservatives, Shays and his followers appeared to be placing private

financial interests above the needs of the common weal. Their selfishness

threatened to doom the nation to ‘‘fire, sword and blood.’’8 The rebellion

culminated in a large-scale attack on a federal arsenal and the death of

four men in Shays’s army.9

The French Revolution raised the tone of conservative concerns about

the republic’s vulnerability to violence, from studied warnings to shrill

cries. Conservatives feared that by dismantling the social order, the Ja-

cobins were casting the French people into an ‘‘uncivilizing’’ process and

returning them to savagery and unrestrained butchery. Democracy, by

teaching men disobedience and by overturning traditional structures of

hierarchy, threatened to initiate a reign of anarchy. These fears were

reinforced by the French revolutionary assault on Christianity. Only

Christianity, Calvinists and Federalists believed, could redeem man from

his depraved nature, and thereby soften his violent passions. Along with

political disorder, the rise of ‘‘infidelity’’ persuaded American conserva-

tives that the world was hurtling toward the millennium, when all hu-

manity would be swept into a vortex of bloodshed.10

These fears placed conservatives at odds with American democrats,

led by James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, who shared the progressive

Enlightenment faith in man’s innate capacity to govern himself. They

viewed human rights as natural, requiring the protection of government

7. Revolutionary era concerns about classical examples of fragile republics aretreated in the standard defining texts on republicanism; Gordon S. Wood, TheCreation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 (New York, 1993); Bernard Bailyn,The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 1992); JohnR. Howe, ‘‘Republican Thought and the Political Violence of the 1790s,’’ Ameri-can Quarterly, XIX (Summer 1967), 147–65.

8. David Humphreys, The Anarchiad: A New England Poem, 1786–1787, ed.Luther G. Riggs (Gainesville, FL, 1967).

9. Wood, Creation of the American Republic, 409–13.10. Bloch, Visionary Republic.


but only at a minimal level. Many American democrats were saddened

by the reports of French political disorder and violence, but they be-

lieved the bloodshed was a regrettable aberration—the French people’s

understandable reaction to centuries of political and ecclesiastical tyr-

anny, as well as to counterrevolutionary subversion. The violence did

not reflect badly on democracy itself. In the spring of 1793, when news

that France had declared itself a republic reached the United States along

with initial reports of the bloodshed that would become known as the

Reign of Terror, American democrats did not hesitate from gathering to

celebrate French events. The Boston parade to commemorate France’s

victory at the Battle of Valmy rivaled any American civic feast since the

Grand Federal Procession to celebrate the ratification of the Constitu-

tion.11

The seeming democratic indifference to French bloodshed planted

terrified visions in the fertile minds of American conservatives. ‘‘France

is madder than Bedlam,’’ wrote the Massachusetts Federalist Fisher

Ames to a political colleague, in October 1792. The civic feasts and

democratic ebullience of 1793 convinced Ames and his compatriots that

America was following course.12 Democratic societies, seemingly mod-

eled on Jacobin clubs, had sprung up across the United States and issued

statements criticizing the government.13 A democratic opposition party

11. See descriptions of the feasts to celebrate French republicanism in JohnBach McMaster, A History of the People of the United States, from the Revolutionto the Civil War (New York, 1883), vol. 2; Simon Peter Newman, Parades andthe Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadel-phia, PA, 1997); Len Travers, Celebrating the Fourth: Independence Day and theRites of Nationalism in the Early Republic (Amherst, MA, 1997).

12. Fisher Ames to Thomas Dwight, Oct. 4, 1792, in Fisher Ames, Works ofFisher Ames: With a Selection from His Speeches and Correspondence, ed. JohnThornton Kirkland and Seth Ames (Boston, MA, 1854), 121. See Ames’s lettersdated January and February 1793 for his fears of the existence, in America, of a‘‘spirit of faction, which must soon come to a crisis’’; Ames, Works of Fisher Ames,128.

13. See, for example, James Nicholson, An Address of the Democratic Society,of the City of New-York, to the Republican Citizens of the United States (Newport,RI, 1794). Histories of the societies include Philip Sheldon Foner, The Demo-cratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800: A Documentary Sourcebook of Constitu-tions, Declarations, Addresses, Resolutions, and Toasts (Westport, CT, 1976);Eugene Perry Link, Democratic-Republican Societies, 1790–1800 (New York,1942); Albrecht Koschnik, ‘‘The Democratic Societies of Philadelphia and the


had emerged in the government at the national and state levels. The

democratic press slurred leaders of the Federalist Party—even the vener-

able Washington—and attacked clergymen who preached politics.14

American democrats paraded, toasted, and feted Gallic democracy, using

these occasions to criticize the ‘‘aristocratic’’ elites at home. Mobs gath-

ered in Philadelphia, the nation’s capital, to protest President Washing-

ton’s refusal to join or support France’s war with Britain.15 Angry

whiskey distillers in western Pennsylvania, led by members of the local

democratic societies, attacked federal agents who attempted to collect

the excise.16 Conservatives fulminated that traitorous democrats wished

America to follow its ‘‘sister republic’’ into the vortex of political vio-

lence.

Certain American democrats contributed to conservative fears by

making public statements condoning the Reign of Terror, or even revel-

ing in its bloodshed.17 Some American democrats believed that the terror

was a just means to accomplish a glorious end. In 1794, Benjamin

Bache—democratic organizer, editor of the democratic newspaper the

Aurora, and an unqualified enthusiast of the French Republic—published a

translation of a speech made by Maximilien Robespierre that defended

terror as a tactic of revolution. The Jacobin leader argued in his ‘‘Report

upon the principles of political morality’’ that the spring of a popular

Limits of the American Public Sphere, Circa 1793–1795,’’ The William and MaryQuarterly, 58 (July 2001), 615–36.

14. The Federalist press published plentiful vituperation of its own; see DonaldHenderson Stewart, The Opposition Press of the Federalist Period (Albany, NY,1969); Jeffrey L. Pasley, ‘‘The Tyranny of Printers’’: Newspaper Politics in theEarly American Republic, Jeffersonian America (Charlottesville, VA, 2001).

15. McMaster, History of the People, vol. 2.16. Steven R. Boyd, The Whiskey Rebellion: Past and Present Perspectives

(Westport, CT, 1985); Richard H. Kohn, Eagle and Sword: The Federalists andthe Creation of the Military Establishment in America, 1783–1802 (New York,1975).

17. See, for example, the boast made at a July 4, 1794, oration that France had‘‘immolated a tyrant at the altar of Liberty, and they will not hesitate at makingher fumes to smoke with the sacrilegious blood of those wretched miscreants whoviolate her mandate and wage war against her votaries’’; James D. Westcott, AnOration, Commemorative of the Declaration of American Independence: Deliveredbefore the Ciceronian Society, on the Fourth of July, M,Dcc,Xciv; and Published atTheir Request (Philadelphia, PA, 1794), 13.


government during a revolution should be ‘‘virtue combined with terror:

virtue, without which terror is destructive; terror, without which virtue is

impotent.’’ Robespierre pithily summarized his argument in the maxim:

‘‘Terror is only justice prompt, severe and inflexible.’’18 Bache’s evident

approbation of Robespierre’s argument, signified by his desire to publi-

cize and disseminate the speech, helped to persuade conservatives that

American democrats had violent intentions. Benjamin Russell, who re-

ported Robespierre’s speech in his Federalist newspaper the ColumbianCentinel, was leery enough of the opposition to publish rumors that

American democrats had been overheard saying such things as ‘‘It is

time we had a guillotine erected’’ or ‘‘I wish to see the National Razor in

a state of permanent operation.’’19

In private letters as well, some American democrats persuaded their

conservative correspondents that they approved of French terror tactics.

During the summer of 1792, William Short, an American diplomat in

the Hague, and Gouverner Morris, the Ambassador to France, began

writing letters to Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson informing him of

the Jacobin efforts to use violence to subvert the constitutional govern-

ment. ‘‘We may witness some Outrages of the most flagitious kind,’’

Morris wrote Jefferson in June, ‘‘my Heart bleeds when I reflect that the

finest Opportunity which ever presented itself for establishing the Rights

of Mankind throughout the civilized World is perhaps lost and for-

ever.’’20 By August and September, Morris and Short’s letters to Jefferson

offered details of massacres, of the gruesome murder of Madame de Lam-

balle, and of the flight of the Marquis de Lafayette (once a close friend

to Jefferson).21 Short called the Jacobins ‘‘monsters’’; soon Morris

stopped even referring to the Jacobins by name, calling them simply

18. Maximilien Robespierre, Report Upon the Principles of Political Morality:Which Are to Form the Basis of the Administration of the Interior Concerns of theRepublic. Made in the Name of the Committee of Public Safety, the 18th Pluviose,Second Year of the Republic (February 6th, 1794) (Philadelphia, PA, 1794).

19. Columbian Centinel, July and Aug. 1794; Mar. 1795.20. Gouverner Morris to Thomas Jefferson, June 17, 1792; Thomas Jefferson,

The Papers of Thomas Jefferson, ed. Charles T. Cullen, John Catanzariti, andJulian P. Boyd (30 vols., Princeton, NJ, 1950), 24: 94.

21. See, for example, William Short to Thomas Jefferson, July 31, Aug. 15,Aug. 24, Sept. 18, 1792; Gouverner Morris to Thomas Jefferson, Aug. 16, Sept.10; ibid.


‘‘the violent party.’’22 In January 1793, Jefferson fired back a salvo at his

correspondents, rejecting their criticisms of the Jacobins. The Jacobin

party, Jefferson wrote, had saved France from despotism, and their vio-

lence was entirely justifiable. In fact, a holocaust of the human race

would be justifiable, if in the cause of freedom: ‘‘Were there but an Adam

and an Eve left in every country, and left free, it would be better than as

it now is.’’23

To counter the Jacobin threat, early national conservatives began pub-

licly attacking French democracy, focusing in graphic detail on the flow-

ing blood, corpse-strewn fields, and maimed bodies of its victims. They

launched a rhetorical offensive, a torrent of sermons, orations, pam-

phlets, newspaper copy, magazine essays, and letters, alerting citizens to

the potential for bloodshed in the United States. They referred to do-

mestic democrats as Jacobins, and warned about homegrown Robespier-

res.24 Historians have typically dismissed this linguistic outpouring as

disingenuous cover for an elite effort to preserve power from the assault

of popular politics. With slightly more sympathy, some historians have

described fears of violence as paranoid ravings based in republican ideol-

22. Gouverner Morris to Thomas Jefferson, Dec. 21, 1792, ibid., 24: 792.23. Thomas Jefferson to William Short, Jan. 3, 1793, ibid., 25: 14. Jefferson’s

reply to Gouverner Morris, who was his political enemy, is more brief; it defendsthe violence committed by the Jacobins as righteous. Jefferson did not share Mor-ris’s and other conservatives’ fear of violent disruption of the social order. ToTench Coxe, a former Federalist then changing allegiance to the Democratic-Republicans, Jefferson scoffed concerning the danger of violence: ‘‘Let Rawheadand bloody bones come’’ (May 1, 1794; 28: 67).

24. Regarding American Robespierres, see The Massachusetts Magazine, Dec.1795; Daniel Davis, An Oration Delivered at Portland, July 4th, 1796. In Com-memoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Portland, OR, 1796);Ezra Sampson, The Sham Patriot Unmasked, or an Exposition of the Fatally Suc-cesful Arts of Demagogues (Connecticut, 1802). The best-known incident of con-servative hysteria concerning the dangers of American Jacobinism is the Illuminaticrisis of 1798–1800, during which leading orthodox ministers including TimothyDwight, David Tappan, and Jedidiah Morse terrified their congregations with talesof a Masonic conspiracy to overthrow religion and social order in the UnitedStates; see Vernon Stauffer, New England and the Bavarian Illuminati, vol. LXXXII,no. 1, Columbia University Studies in History, Economic, and Public Law (NewYork, 1918); Joseph W. Phillips, Jedidiah Morse and New England Congrega-tionalism (New Brunswick, NJ, 1983).


ogy.25 Either way, since conservative fears were never realized, their

gothic language has rarely been treated as historically relevant. But de-

scriptive accuracy or intellectual disinterestedness are not the only rea-

sons to study discourse. The fact that violence did serve as a useful tool

to arouse and manipulate audiences is more reason, not less, to take it

seriously. �How can we understand the rhetoric opposing the French Revolution if

we do not appreciate the conservative conviction in human depravity?

The world appears so different when every person is revealed to possess

the terrifying potential for violence. According to Karen Halttunen, it is

only since the antebellum era that we have differentiated murderers as

‘‘moral monsters,’’ utterly unlike ordinary people. Before then execution

sermons served to remind listeners of their own innate sinfulness, and

the inestimable blessing of redemption. Colonial Americans believed that

anybody might succumb to their depraved passions and lash out with

violence.26

I grew up in the late twentieth century, fearing vampires and Nazis,not the people who walked in daylight, who crossed the street beside me,whose bodies pressed close in the crowded subway during the morningcommute, who rode the elevator, waited on line, sat at the adjacent desk,who mirrored me in all the quotidian acts of daily living. Even the sus-

25. For status-threat explanations of violent rhetoric see Marshall Smelser,‘‘The Jacobin Phrenzy: Federalism and the Menace of Liberty, Equality, and Fra-ternity,’’ The Review of Politics, XIII (Oct. 1951), 457–82; Marshall Smelser,‘‘The Federalist Period as an Age of Passion,’’ American Quarterly, 10 (1958),391–419; Smelser, ‘‘The Jacobin Phrenzy: The Menace of Monarchy, Plutocracy,and Anglophilia, 1789–1798,’’ The Review of Politics, XXI (1959), 239–58. Forthe republican explanation, see Howe, ‘‘Republican Thought.’’ The new culturalhistory of the early republic has been no more sympathetic to fears of violencethan earlier interpretations; see Andrew Burstein’s argument that the Federaliststransformed ‘‘sensibility’’ into a negative force: ‘‘now passion was merely exposingthe destructive sentiments of terror and panic instead of feeding sympathy andgenerosity,’’ in Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of Ameri-ca’s Romantic Self-Image (New York, 1999), 182.

26. Karen Halttunen, Murder Most Foul: The Killer and the American GothicImagination (Cambridge, MA, 1998).


tained aggression of my older brother, verbal sadism accompanied at timesby physical blows, did not disrupt my essentially trusting conception ofhuman nature. Only the shooting at my college awakened me to a counter-world of human possibilities. Wayne Lo did not kill me, but he made memorbid. I became terribly aware of the proximity of violence—sensitive tothe thrumming of bloody possibility that rippled the orderly surface ofeveryday life. In my personal geography before the shooting, the worldhad divided between dangerous places and safe places. Home was safe. Anighttime street in the wrong neighborhood was dangerous. My collegecampus, so small that everybody knew everybody, was supposed to be safe.But the shooting cracked the thin veneer of security that overlay the famil-iar. Walking down the sidewalk, I passed a mother bent over a baby car-riage. It seemed to me she could rise up cradling a gun and begin to shoot.The mechanism of self-deception we use to protect ourselves had slippedgears in my brain, now the banal raised alarms.

Could even I (that most known and familiar object) have hidden poten-tial for violence? In my dreams I mercilessly beat and bloodied enemies. Ibegan a novel about two young women on a road trip to the Pacific North-west, armed with guns to shoot the leader of a white supremacist move-ment. By fashioning ordinary girls into killers I wanted to defy thereaders’ expectations that violence existed outside the bounds of normallife. I bought gun magazines with glossy photos of semiautomatics for re-search. I wrote a scene in which one of the girls threatened to castrate atruck driver who had manhandled her friend. Then I got very drunk onenight and repeated the speech word for word, like a wooden dummy, to afriend’s boyfriend who was chauvinistic and controlling. I felt the seduc-tive power of wrath. I shouted curses and insults at the men who maderude comments to me in the streets, wishing their public humiliation. Idrew a gruesome picture of Kali, the Hindu goddess of destruction, andtaped her to my computer for inspiration. I wanted to immerse myself inthe culture of violence; to roll my garments in blood, in the words of theprophet Isaiah. I wanted to be the bloody standard after the battle so Icould warn people of the horrors of war.

Halttunen argues that the gothic genre, with its graphic descriptions

of violence, developed as a language to understand murder after the

religious conception of depravity had lost its potency. The power to

arouse readers with descriptions of violence depended on the new pro-

gressive view of humanity, with its sympathy for other people’s pain and


suffering.27 But my morbid turn reflected a crisis in my faith in fellow

human beings. It was my new awareness of the terrible/ordinary that

made violent language and violent images compelling. I argue for an

alternative genealogy for the American gothic. In the early nineteenth

century, the linguistic and ethical fascination with human violence arose

from a traditional fear of human depravity, which had been greatly inten-

sified by the creation of a republican political structure that posed new

challenges to the maintenance of social order.�The sunny mood of optimism that Americans shared after the passage of

the Constitution was washed away by the bloody rain of news from

France. Soon, the writings of opponents to the French Revolution were

deluged in red. American conservatives wallowed in an efflux of gore,

using disturbing detail to recount the crimes of French democrats. They

execrated the Jacobins as ‘‘masters of blood,’’ ‘‘ferocious inhuman blood-

hounds,’’ ‘‘sanguinary demons,’’ and ‘‘violent’’ and ‘‘barbarous’’ sav-

ages.28 They painted France as a ‘‘field of blood’’; a place of ‘‘war and

slaughter,’’ of ‘‘anarchy and ferocity,’’ where rage could only be satisfied

27. Karen Halttunen, ‘‘Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain inAnglo-American Culture,’’ American Historical Review, 100 (Apr. 1995), 303–34.

28. Charles Crawford, Observations Upon the Revolution in France (Boston,MA, 1793), 42; Thomas Cushing Thacher, A Sermon. Preached at Lynn, Novem-ber 20th, 1794: Being the Day Appointed for the Annual Thanksgiving (Printed inBoston, MA, 1794); Samuel Deane, An Oration, Delivered in Portland, July 4th,1793: In Commemoration of the Independence of the United States of America(Portland, ME, 1793), 10; Noah Webster, The Revolution in France, Consideredin Respect to Its Progress and Effects (New York, 1794); William Cobbett, Porcu-pine’s Works; Containing Various Writings and Selections, Exhibiting a FaithfulPicture of the United States of America; of Their Governments, Laws, Politics, andResources; of the Characters of Their Presidents, Governors, Legislators, Magis-trates, and Military Men; and of the Customs, Manners, Morals, Religion, Virtuesand Vices of the People: Comprising Also a Complete Series of Historical Documentsand Remarks, from the End of the War, in 1783, to the Election of the President,in March, 1801 (London, 1801), I: 167; Nicholson, An Address of the DemocraticSociety; Enos Hitchcock, An Oration, in Commemoration of the Independence ofthe United States of America: Delivered in the Baptist Meeting-House in Providence,July 4th, 1793 (Providence, RI, 1793), 15.


by the guillotine.29 A young Congregationalist minister, the Reverend

Elijah Waterman, terrified his congregants with imagery of the streets of

Paris ‘‘drenched in blood. Her citizens mad to fury, seeking for some

miserable victim which may be sacrificed to their rage.’’30 The Reverend

Samuel Kendal dwelled at length upon the ‘‘thousands of victims’’ who

fell a sacrifice to [the Jacobins’] relentless fury! . . . Massacres, assassinations, and

more general butchery, prevailed, struck the nation with a panic, and presented

little else but horror to the affrighted imagination! Indiscriminate slaughter hath

sometimes heightened their terror and consternation. The hoary sire, aged matron,

inexperienced youth, lisping infant, and virgin innocence, have fallen a prey to the

brutal rage of man!31

Benjamin Russell’s Columbian Centinel included bloody descriptions

of the Reign of Terror in every edition throughout the spring of 1795.

During the past four years, wrote Russell, France had been immersed in

a ‘‘bath of blood.’’ He insisted on publicizing the crimes committed by

the ‘‘villains, tigers, and bloodsuckers’’ in France, in order to awaken

Americans to the dangers posed to them by the Jeffersonians. Russell

wrote about the ‘‘mournful plaint of infants killed at their mother’s

breasts, and carried on the points of bayonets’’; he wrote about the

shootings, drownings, live burials, the mockery of justice, the ‘‘deluge’’

of blood.32 Many authors pictured French blood as flowing uncontrolla-

bly, suggesting that the violence it symbolized, once unleashed, could

not be contained, and would engulf any political system. Numerous min-

29. Samuel Williams, The Love of Our Country Represented and Urged: In aDiscourse Delivered October 21, 1792, at Rutland, in the State of Vermont (Rut-land, VT, 1792), 20; David Tappan, A Sermon, Delivered to the First Congregationin Cambridge, and the Religious Society in Charlestown, April 11, 1793; on theOccasion of the Annual Fast in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts (Boston, MA,1793), 28; Deane, An Oration . . . 1793.

30. Elijah Waterman, An Oration Delivered before the Society of Cincinnati,Hartford, July 4, 1794 (Printed in Hartford, CT, 1794), 16.

31. Samuel Kendal, A Sermon Delivered on the Day of National Thanksgiving,February 19, 1795 (Boston, MA, 1795), 11–12.

32. The Columbian Centinel, Jan. 3, 1795; Feb. 28, 1795; Mar. 4, 1795; Mar.7, 1795.


isters and orators described France as flooded by ‘‘torrents of blood.’’33

Others referred to ‘‘brooks of human blood’’ or ‘‘rivers of blood.’’34 An-

other phrase repeated in numerous sources that condemn the Terror is

‘‘garments rolled in blood,’’ a quotation from the Book of Isaiah (9:5).

This image comes from a verse describing the horrors of war and calls

to mind a battlefield so imbrued in blood that its victims are literally

wallowing in gore.35

Critics frequently pictured France, like the battlefield in Isaiah, as a

landscape of death. In this symbolic system, violence dominated all other

possible understandings of the Revolution; the imagery of holocaust de-

nied any power to the Revolution’s promise of a utopian future. In his

July 4, 1793, oration, John Quincy Adams blamed France for transform-

ing Europe into a ‘‘corpse-covered field’’; the French had ‘‘poured the

torrent of destruction over the fair harvests of European fertility; which

have unbound the pinions of desolation, and sent her forth to scatter

pestilence and death among the nations.’’36 Nothing could grow from

33. Jonathan Freeman, A Sermon Delivered at New-Windsor and Bethlehem,August 30. 1798. Being the Day Appointed by the General Assembly of the Presbyte-rian Church, in the United States of America: To Be Observed as a Day of SolemnHumiliation, Fasting and Prayer, in All the Churches under Their Care (NewWindsor, NY, 1799); Kendal, A Sermon . . . 1795, 11; William Linn, A Discourseon National Sins Delivered May 9, 1798; Being the Day Recommended by thePresident of the United States to Be Observed as a Day of General Fast (New York,1798); David Tappan, Christian Thankfulness Explained and Enforced: A Sermon,Delivered at Charlestown, in the Afternoon of February 19, 1795. The Day ofGeneral Thanksgiving through the United States (Boston, MA, 1795), 27.

34. Timothy Dwight, The Duty of Americans at the Present Crisis: Illustratedin a Discourse, Preached on the Fourth of July, 1798 (New Haven, CT, 1798);David Osgood, The Devil Let Loose, or the Wo Occasioned to the Inhabitants ofthe Earth by His Wrathful Appearance among Them Illustrated in a DiscourseDelivered on the Day of the National Fast, April 25, 1799 (Boston, MA, 1799).

35. See, among many examples, Thacher, A Sermon . . . 1794; Ezra Sampson,A Discourse Delivered February 19, 1795: Being the Day of National Thanksgiving(Boston, MA, 1795); John Andrews, A Sermon, Delivered February 19, 1795:Being a Day of Public Thanksgiving, Throughout the United States of America(Newburyport, MA, 1795), 9.

36. John Quincy Adams, An Oration, Pronounced July 4th, 1793: At the Re-quest of the Inhabitants of the Town of Boston, in Commemoration of the Anniver-sary of American Independence (Boston, MA, 1793), 19–20.


this wasted countryside. As successive French governments entangled

the nation in a series of wars that extended until the close of the Napole-

onic era, the imagery of a land blighted by death recurred frequently. In

1799, a Federalist artillery captain, Amos Stoddard, described France as

‘‘a forest of bayonets’’; her countryside, ‘‘instead of flowers and the blos-

soms of vegetation, is covered with the bones of immolated citizens.’’37

Critics also characterized France as a bloody and grotesque monster.

Robert Treat Paine’s popular song from 1798, ‘‘Adams and Liberty,’’

described France as a beast whose ‘‘huge limbs bathe recumbent in

blood.’’38 Many antirevolutionary texts depicted France as a ferocious

and bloodthirsty carnivore. A song included in a primarily nonpolitical

book of sea chanties, published in 1800, versified France as a bear who

wished to crush the United States in his paws. Though ‘‘gorg’d to the

full,’’ the bear was ‘‘not yet sated with blood’’ and still howled for more

food.39 William Cobbett called the French bloodthirsty dogs.40 Oppo-

nents denounced France as a tiger or a wolf.41 Other critics emphasized

the human aspect of revolutionary depravity, calling the French cannibals

human ghouls who devoured their own kind. A European book entitled

The Cannibals’ Progress, which chronicled French Republican atrocities

committed during the invasion of the German states, attracted an enor-

37. Amos Stoddard, An Oration, Delivered before the Citizens of Portland, andthe Supreme Judicial Court of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on the FourthDay of July, 1799 Being the Anniversary of American Independence (Portland, ME,1799). See also Timothy Dwight and Barbara Miller Solomon, Travels in NewEngland and New York (4 vols., Cambridge, MA, 1969), 4: 268; John M. Mason,Mercy Remembered in Wrath: A Sermon, the Substance of Which Was Preached onthe 19th of February, 1795, Observed Throughout the United States as a Day ofThanksgiving and Prayer (New York, 1795), 15; Samuel Miller, A Sermon, Deliv-ered May 9, 1798 Recommended, by the President of the United States, to Be Ob-served as a Day of General Humiliation, Fasting, and Prayer (New York, 1798),26. The ‘‘Ode for Independence, 1793’’ published in the Massachusetts Magazine,July 1794, described revolutionary France as ‘‘Death’s vast empire.’’

38. Robert Treat Paine, The Works in Verse and Prose, of the Late Robert TreatPaine, Jun., Esq (Boston, MA, 1812), 245.

39. The Festival of Mirth, and American Tar’s Delight: A Fund of the NewestHumorous, Patriotic, Hunting, and Sea Songs. With a Variety of Curious Jests,Bon Mots, Entertaining and Witty Anecdotes, &C, (New York, 1800).

40. Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, 1: 167.41. Mar. 4, 1795, The Columbian Centinel.


mous readership in the United States.42 According to an excerpt pub-

lished in the Philadelphia Monthly Magazine in 1798, the French

Republican army had gang raped young girls until they died, then raped

the corpses. They raped women who had given birth only hours before.

The French were cannibals, ‘‘reeking with human gore, arrayed in all the

bloody splendor of rapine and murder.’’43

Yet the authors of these bloody narratives hoped to do more than

terrify their readers; they used accounts of French violence to highlight

visions of American peaceableness. Conservatives routinely followed

their condemnations of violence in France with celebrations of American

nonviolence. Many praised America’s Revolution for its supposed free-

dom from violent disorder.44 They celebrated America as an asylum from

war, contrasting her golden harvests to France’s fields of blood.45 They

borrowed the language of the Hebrew prophet Isaiah both to describe

the violence Americans should beware—the ‘‘garments rolled in blood’’

42. William Cobbett and Anthony Aufrere, The Cannibals’ Progress; or theDreadful Horrors of French Invasion as Displayed by the Republican Officers andSoldiers, in Their Perfidy, Rapacity, Ferociousness, and Brutality, ExercisedTowards the Innocent Inhabitants of Germany (New London, CT, 1798). Formore examples of the French depicted as cannibals see Theodore Dwight, AnOration, Spoken at Hartford, in the State of Connecticut, on the Anniversary ofAmerican Independence, July 4th, 1798 (Hartford, CT, 1798); John Lowell, AnOration, Pronounced July 4, 1799, at the Request of the Inhabitants of the Townof Boston in Commemoration of the Anniversary of American Independence (Bos-ton, MA, 1799), 22; Stoddard, Oration . . . 1799, 17; Francis d’Ivernois, Authen-tic History of the Origin and Progress of the Late Revolution in Geneva(Philadelphia, PA, 1794), 17; Cobbett, Porcupine’s Works, 1: 164, 2: 21.

43. The Philadelphia Monthly Magazine, July 1798.44. See Gazette of the United States, Jan. 16, 1793; Charles Backus, A Sermon

Preached before His Excellency Samuel Huntington . . . Governor . . . Of the Stateof Connecticut. May 9, 1793 (Hartford, CT, 1793); Thomas Fessenden, A Sermon,Preached in Walpole, on Thursday, February 19, 1795: The Day Appointed by thePresident of the United States for a Publick Thanksgiving (Walpole, NH, 1795),7; George Tillinghast, An Oration, Commemorative of the Nineteenth Anniversaryof American Independence: Delivered at the Baptist Meeting-House in Providence,on the Fourth Day of July, A.D. 1794 (Providence, RI, 1794), 11. Also AlexanderHamilton, ‘‘Americanus No. II,’’ for the American Daily Advertiser, Feb. 7, 1794,Alexander Hamilton, The Papers of Alexander Hamilton, ed. Harold Coffin Syrett(27 vols., New York, 1961), 16: 18.

45. For an extensive history of American claims to virtue and benevolence, seeBurstein, Sentimental Democracy, especially chapter 8.


(9:5)—and the paradise to which they should aspire—when they would

‘‘beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning

hooks’’ (2:4).

The vision of American peacefulness expounded by early national

conservatives did not accurately reflect the era’s political realities or revo-

lutionary history. Rather, conservatives employed imagery of violence in

a dialectic with imagery of peace in order to stifle democratic dissent

and strengthen the Federalist political order. To argue that conservative

rhetoric against disorderly violence served a political purpose, however,

does not lessen its power. Ideologies function precisely because people

do use them to interpret the world. The fear of violence and the projec-

tion of a fantasy of American benevolence were sincere in the sense that

they were supported by belief. Conservatives meant what they said, and

their words had consequences. The new language opposing violence

affected conservative attitudes not only toward the practice of politics,

but toward their society in general. Social institutions that encouraged

violence came to be seen as a threat to the civilizing process on which

the new republic depended for stability. Opposition to violence led con-

servatives to support projects that would ameliorate the condition of

humanity. Humanitarian reforms became integral to the political agenda

of strengthening the social order.�My morbid sensitivities diminished after a couple of years, and I stopped

trying to embody the horror. I quit yelling at people in the streets. But

during graduate school, when it came time to focus on a subject, violence

seemed the natural choice. The shooting was an unfinished part of my

personal history. In dreams I found myself back on my college campus,

with the sense of having something left to do. I carried the shooting with

me through every new stage of life. So I concentrated my coursework

and my research on violence in the United States, in the Ottoman Empire

and the Balkans, on the Holocaust, Stalinism, and the sociological theo-

ries of violence. I avidly read reports that the history of violence was an

expanding field. I wrote violence, I read violence, I taught a course on

violence.

I remember, sometime not long before the shooting, there was a viewingof Taxi Driver on the big projection screen in the science lecture hall. Iwent with a couple of friends; my backpack bulged with bottles of beer (not


permitted on our campus, where almost all the students were undertwenty-one). They clinked and clanked as I sidled down an aisle of seats,past Wayne Lo. Paranoia hit me, as it often did in his presence, would hetell campus security and get me in serious trouble? I looked over once ortwice during the beginning of the film, to see if he was watching us, buthe seemed transfixed by the screen. I could drink my beers securely. DidWayne get the idea to shoot us that night? Did he see himself in TravisBickle, a good man isolated in a corrupted world? Wayne didn’t go homefor the Thanksgiving break immediately before the shooting. He stayed oncampus watching Full Metal Jacket over and over again. It’s easy to imag-ine that these movies, intended by their creators to expose the evils ofviolence and war, seduced Wayne with their powerful narratives of retri-bution. The night of the shooting, Wayne wore a sweatshirt emblazonedwith the name of a hard core band: ‘‘Sick of it All.’’ Many newspaperarticles noted this detail, and more than one opinionator earnestly in-quired into the effects of heavy metal music on America’s youth.

My fixation with violence did not lead me to buy a gun. After a long

time, I realized that I needed to do more in my scholarship than recount

tales of slaughter. During orals preparation, I fell in love with Norbert

Elias’s The Civilizing Process, a book that imaginatively inquires how

western European cultures gradually limited the violence of individuals

over many centuries.46 It inspired me to quit the trampled pursuit of the

origins of exceptional rates of violence in the United States and start

asking how historical developments have limited violence.47 Inquiries

into American violence are often based on assumptions of deviance; we

ask why Americans have departed from an unstated norm of peaceful-

46. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Inves-tigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott (1994; revised ed., Malden, MA, 2000).

47. For examples of histories, as well as works in the social sciences, that seekto explain American violence, see Richard Maxwell Brown, No Duty to Retreat:Violence and Values in American History and Society (New York, 1991); BertramWyatt-Brown, Honor and Violence in the Old South (New York, 1980); RichardSlotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier(Middletown, CT, 1973); James Gilligan, Violence: Our Deadly Epidemic and ItsCauses (New York, 1996); Fox Butterfield, All God’s Children: The Bosket Familyand the American Tradition of Violence (New York, 1995); Frankling E. Zimring,Crime Is Not the Problem: Lethal Violence in America (New York, 1997); HughDavid Graham and Ted Robert Gurr, eds., Violence in America: Historical andComparative Perspectives (Beverly Hills, CA, 1979).


ness. Perhaps we have so thoroughly assimilated the rhetoric of America

as asylum that we cannot view our historical traditions of murder and

brutality as anything except a terrible falling off from a higher standard.

But the shooting caused me to stop believing in a normal, nonviolent,

social equilibrium. This loss of faith has not made me cynical and hope-

less. Rather, it has caused me to believe that nonviolence must be con-

structed, and thus compelled my interest into the mechanics of that

process. My research locates the origins of a new ideology opposing

violence in the early American republic. I am not recovering these beliefs

in the hopes of reviving them. The beliefs I discuss belong to a specific

historical moment in time and space and are not directly applicable to

the present. My aspirations are mimetic. I hope that by describing an

older nonviolent ideology I will become a voice of nonviolence in the

present.

I fear that by writing about the shooting I am exploiting the deaths of

my friend and my teacher. I fear that the retelling of my story will inure

me to its pain, and I will betray the memories of the dead by no longer

feeling their loss. I fear that a desire to dramatize the events will cause

me somehow to exaggerate or prejudice the story to accentuate my own

part, and again, that I will have betrayed the dead. I fear that I have

nothing instructive to say about the shooting and so any discussion of

the events must be sensationalistic. These are reasonable fears. But my

research has given me hope that writing about the shooting may also

have good consequences. Language has the power to exceed its author’s

limits. A new way of writing about violence, its origins enmeshed in an

antidemocratic political offensive, proved a powerful means to promote

freedom. I am searching for a way of writing that will allow my own

narratives to overspread their boundaries and promote positive change.

David Brion Davis wrote that ‘‘for those of us who still think of history

as a kind of moral philosophy teaching by examples, it is precisely the

multiple character of truth—the varied angles of vision that are also the

subject of imaginative literature—that one must seek to capture.’’48 Here

are two visions of the dead to whom I dedicate this essay:

Nacunan, I see you in our seminar room, feverishly discoursing on

48. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 154.Cited in Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners (BatonRouge, LA, 1985), 40.


Foucault, stalking up and down alongside the table, wrapping and un-wrapping the scarf you wore around your neck. I’ve dreamed of your office,a flurry of papers fallen to the floor, a student struggling to put them intoorder.

Galen, in my memories you are so solid, so corporal, thick hair, big fea-tures, skilled hands, soft eyes, dressed in patched clothes. I remember sittingon you once and accidentally burning you with my cigarette ash, I’m sorry.You loved my joke that I was ten feet tall—like a tree, half my height wasroots. Your memory is rooted in me till the big storm strikes me down.�In 1831, John Quincy Adams wrote to Alexis de Tocqueville: ‘‘the

crimes of the French Revolution have made a strong impression upon

us; there has been a reaction of feeling, and this impulse still makes itself

felt.’’49 The endurance of the imagery of French bloodshed is attributable

to the profusion and novelty of the language that described it. From

1790 to 1815, America was saturated in texts denouncing the French

Revolution.50 These narratives ‘‘got into every farm house’’ wrote one

conservative commentator in 1799, and ‘‘they won’t go out, till the sto-

ries of the Indian tomhawk and war dances around their prisoners do.’’51

Many of these narratives included detailed descriptions of torture and

brutality and used explicit language that would have shocked readers

only five years before. The violence of the French Revolution so dis-

rupted American sensibilities that it required the development of a new

language, an American gothic mode of writing, to capacitate its enormi-

ties.52 John Cotton Smith argued in a July 4, 1798, oration that ‘‘new

49. Quoted in Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America, from the Revolu-tion to the Civil War, 1st ed. (New York, 1965), 4.

50. Ibid.51. Chauncey Goodrich to Oliver Wolcott, July 1799 in George Gibbs and

Oliver Wolcott, Memoirs of the Administrations of Washington and John Adams,Edited from the Papers of Oliver Wolcott, Secretary of the Treasury (2 vols., NewYork, 1846), 2.

52. Literary scholars place the origins of the gothic style in Europe. CharlesBrockden Brown is commonly credited for having first adapted the gothic genrefor an American audience in his 1798 novel Wieland; Charles Brockden Brownand Caleb Crain, Wieland, or, the Transformation: An American Tale and Other


words, new sounds, must be invented, if they are ever to comprehend,

in any measure, the unparalleled atrocities which have marked the prog-

ress of the French Revolution.’’ The events of the French Revolution

were ‘‘written in lines of blood’’; its histories would have to be so as

well.53

Yet a dangerous irony threatened to subvert the rhetorical offensive

against Jacobin violence. The endless recitations of French crimes, which

were intended to persuade Americans of the need for self-restraint and

obedience to the social order, could have the reverse effect. The bloody

imagery might seduce readers into a fascination with violence. In 1800,

a poet for the Columbian Centinel warned that the new gothic style could

create a hunger for narratives of bloodshed: ‘‘A single death in times of

yore/ Was subject for a nation’s tears;/ Whole nations weltering in their

gore/ Will scarcely satiate modern ears.’’54 If they did not make readers

bloodthirsty, narratives of violence had the equally undesirable potential

to desensitize readers. The Balance and Columbian Repository argued

that ‘‘the reading of murderous battles never yet made man, woman, or

child either wiser or better: it only serves to harden the mind by inuring

it to scenes of blood.’’ Nonetheless, the newspaper’s conservative editors

Stories, 2002 Modern Library ed., The Modern Library Classics (New York,2002). Brown, who as editor of The Monthly Magazine and American Review,reported on the Reign of Terror, allegorized the dangers of French democracy inWieland.

53. John Cotton Smith, An Oration, Pronounced at Sharon, on the Anniversaryof American Independence, 4th of July, 1798 (Litchfield, CT, 1798), 5. John WardFenno, son of the arch-conservative editor of the Gazette of the United States,delivered a similar verdict on the course of federal-style republics throughout time:their history was ‘‘written by the hand of violence in characters of blood;’’ JohnWard Fenno, Desultory Reflections on the Political Aspects of Public Affairs in theUnited States of America (New York, 1800), 29.

54. The Columbian Centinel, Aug. 16, 1800. Karen Halttunen, who dates theemergence of the gothic genre a generation later, describes this paradox as ‘‘thepornography of pain.’’ The same increasing sensitivity to the pain of others thatnineteenth-century reformers relied upon to persuade their readers to the causesof abolition and temperance, also made readers more likely to be thrilled by de-scriptions of whippings and beatings; Halttunen, ‘‘Humanitarianism.’’ DavidReynolds discusses the subversive sensationalism of gothic reform literature dur-ing the second third of the nineteenth century in David S. Reynolds, Beneath theAmerican Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson andMelville (Cambridge, MA, 1988).


joined their colleagues in publishing detailed accounts of the bloodshed

that had terrorized France. The editors judged gothic accounts of the

French Revolution commensurate with its stated intention that the paper

‘‘would not teach people how to kill, but it will teach how to save life.’’55

Perhaps the editors recognized that the power of language to overreach

its intended purposes not only created the danger of sensationalism, it

could also redeem graphic descriptions of violence by arousing readers

and shifting ethical perceptions.

The positive intention of American conservatives, to foster a reaction

against violence by attacking the Reign of Terror, had the negative poten-

tial to cause prurient excitement. But conversely, their negative intention,

to limit American democracy, was overreached by the articulation of a

new humanitarian ethic. The conservatives who so assiduously cata-

logued the misdeeds of the Jacobins created a mode of writing, ‘‘a moral-

ity of form’’ in the words of Roland Barthes, that transferred to more

progressive causes.56 Most importantly, the opponents of democracy de-

veloped a new gothic critique of slavery that focused on the institution’s

violence. In the 1790s, conservative reactionaries began to criticize the

brutality of slavery in terms remarkably similar to their attacks on the

French Revolution. The language of antiviolence, inspired by fears of

democracy, fed into a new antislavery rhetoric that focused less on ab-

stract claims to the Rights of Man, or Christian salvation, and more on

the bloody brutality of the institution to its victims.

The new gothic antislavery dwelled in morbid detail on the abuse

suffered by slaves, the ‘‘flowing blood’’ and the ‘‘purple tort’ring

wounds.’’57 To the self-styled friends of order, the violence of nonstate

55. The Balance and Columbian Repository, Feb. 2, 1802.56. Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero, trans. Annette and Colin Smith La-

vers (New York, 1997), 15.57. ‘‘Reflections on the Slavery of the Negroes,’’ a poem published in The

Rural Magazine, June 1796. For more examples see Amynto, Reflections on theInconsistency of Man, Particularly Exemplified in the Practice of Slavery in theUnited States (New York, 1796); Alexander McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable:A Discourse (New York, 1802); Humanitas, Reflections on Slavery with RecentEvidences of Its Inhumanity (1803). The three anonymous texts titled ‘‘Reflec-tions’’ all bear interesting similarities. They argue for immediate abolition andblack racial equality, and two include positive allusions to the Haitian revolution.They also share commonalities with a series of antislavery essays published inThe Balance and Columbian Repository during 1802, including similarly phrased


parties—whether executed in the course of a revolution or in the institu-

tion of slavery—posed a threat to the community because it could not be

contained. Violence flowed like the blood that was its symbol, a deluge

that threatened to engulf any nation that released its potential. Winthrop

Jordan, who has also noted this shift in antislavery literature, describes it

as ‘‘atrocity-mongering,’’ ‘‘a failure of nerve,’’ and a ‘‘retreat from rational

engagement with the ethical problem posed by Negro slavery.’’58 Alter-

natively, the genesis of gothic antislavery can be viewed as an innovative

response to the lessening potency of revolutionary antislavery rhetoric.59

The anonymous author of ‘‘Reflections on the Inconsistency of Man,

Particularly Exemplified in the Practice of Slavery in the United States’’

(1796) directly connected his antislavery position to his horror at the

Jacobin violence in France, and his fear of the potential for violence in

America. ‘‘Reflections’’ condemned southern slaveholders as brutal ty-

rants who threatened to bring a Reign of Terror over America. In those

states ‘‘where slavery is yet raging in all its horrors, a furious democracy

copied from the Jacobin principles of France appears to be the wish of

most of the southern gentry.’’ The author linked American slaveholders

to French democrats in terms of their common ‘‘violence and cruelties.’’

The association between slaveholders and Jacobins was strengthened by

statements regarding the hypocrisy of American complaints about Algerine piracy,and quotations from the poetry of Cowper.

58. Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro,1550–1812 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1968), 367–71. The appearance of a new gothicand sentimental vein in antislavery literature during the late eighteenth centuryhas also been previously noted by Lorenzo Dow Turner, Anti-Slavery Sentimentin American Literature Prior to 1865 (Washington, DC, 1929). Other authorswho have discussed the gothic vein of antislavery literature tend to position itlater, in the middle third of the nineteenth century. See, for example, Halttunen,‘‘Humanitarianism’’; Reynolds, American Renaissance; Elizabeth B. Clark, ‘‘TheSacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rightsin Antebellum America,’’ Journal of American History, 82 (1995), 463–93; Rich-ard H. Brodhead, ‘‘Sparing the Rod: Discipline and Fiction in Antebellum Ameri-can,’’ Representations, 21 (Winter 1988), 67–96.

59. Kimberly Smith describes the use of sentimentality and sympathy in slavenarratives as a valuable corrective to the over-rationalized discourse of politics thatemerged in the late-eighteenth century; Kimberly K. Smith, The Dominion ofVoice: Riot, Reason, and Romance in Antebellum Politics (Lawrence, KS, 1999),ch. 6.


the southern leadership of the American democratic opposition. The

Jacobins had committed ‘‘horrid enormities’’ and ‘‘deluged the Earth in

blood.’’ Likewise, American slaveholders brutalized their chattel with

unrelenting ferocity: ‘‘ ‘tis no uncommon sight to see children, with

whips and cudgels, striking and mauling poor old decrepid Negroes.’’

Page after page of the enraged text compared the barbarism of slavery to

the violence of Jacobinism. The rationalization, made by slave owners,

that their chattel would starve on their own was akin to the Jacobins’

refusal to supply King Louis XVI with a razor for shaving, when they

intended to guillotine him. Both scenes presented horrors, in both lands

‘‘the voice of brothers blood crieth unto me from the ground.’’60

Conservative attacks on slavery operated within the context of domes-

tic political battles; slavery was a tarring brush to discredit political op-

ponents. Federalists used gothic descriptions of slavery to connect

American democrats to French Jacobins, claiming that both parties were

comprised of sanguinary tyrants and demagogues, who cared only about

their own interests and used violence to achieve their ends. Theodore

Dwight, a Federalist lawyer-editor-politician and brother of the Calvinist

minister Timothy Dwight, delivered a 1794 oration to a Connecticut

abolition society, indicting slavery for its brutalizing consequences on

the character of masters. Ownership of human beings transformed peo-

ple into tyrants, causing even women and children to ‘‘indulge them-

selves in paroxysms of rage and . . . seize the instruments of torture.’’ If

slavery were not abolished, Dwight warned, Southern slaveholders might

cause America to suffer the same fate as France, where a ‘‘violent and

bloodthirsty junto . . . forced the infatuated republic to assassination and

ruin.’’61

Antislavery served as an important political weapon in the arsenal of

early republican opponents to democracy. Yet acknowledging the utility

of the gothic critique of slavery only serves to reveal its power to influ-

ence people’s minds. While the application of gothic language to the

problem of slavery may have had antidemocratic inspirations, we cannot

assume that its conservative origins effectively limited the rhetoric’s re-

60. Amynto, Reflections on the Inconsistency.61. Theodore Dwight, An Oration, Spoken before ‘‘the Connecticut Society, for

the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bond-age’’: Convened in Hartford, on the 8th Day of May, A.D. 1794 (Hartford, CT,1794).


ception. David Waldstreicher has made the functionalist argument that

Federalist critiques were ‘‘only a limited contribution to antislavery be-

cause they were not meant to end slavery; they were meant to discredit

southern Jeffersonians and their allies.’’62 To the contrary, the conserva-

tive gothic critique provided a language for radical abolitionism and in-

vigorated the abolitionist effort to change American popular sentiment.

Early national conservatives may have been limited by their antidemo-

cratic sentiments and their concern for political union from pursuing

attacks on slavery to the point of forcing abolition on the southern states.

But the gothic critique gradually changed the ethical perception of mil-

lions of Americans, leading to the creation of a powerful constituency

who would, in the future, support forced change. The inability of au-

thors and orators to limit the impact of the language they use gives a

reason to study the consequences of rhetoric, even when its origins may

appear disingenuous. Fears of violence often bear this stamp because

they are, by nature, rhetorically useful. Tales of bloodshed and pain serve

to attract audiences, like a porch light does moths. But for my sources,

and I hope for myself, the dangers of incineration are offset by illumina-

tion.

62. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of Ameri-can Nationalism, 1776–1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997), 252.

On Writing the History of Violence

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