Ever since Plato around 355
BC brought to the world the story of the lost continent of Atlantis, visions of an imaginary ideal society in the western hemisphere
have been an integral part of utopian mythmaking in Europe. Though relatively little known during the medieval period, the
legend of the antediluvian world of Atlantis was rediscovered by humanists in the early modern period. The fall of Constantinople
in 1453 had accelerated the recovery of ancient scientific texts, while the concurrent invention of movable type printing
allowed the faster and wider propagation of learning. These developments inaugurated a scientific revolution
, which saw great advances in scholarship in areas ranging from geography, astronomy, chemistry, physics, and mathematics
to manufacturing and engineering. This expansion in human understanding broke the mold of the humanists’ earlier
non plus ultra attitude to their ancient inheritance. But it was the discovery of the New World that added a fresh and invigorating inflection
to the ancient myth of the lost utopia. Adam Smith famously described the discovery of America, along with that of a passage
to the East Indies by way of the Cape of Good Hope, as “the two greatest and most important events recorded in the history
of mankind.”
1 Coming close on the heels of Columbus’s voyage, printed narratives such as Thomas More’s
Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon’s
New Atlantis (1527) capitalized on the excitement following the historic event by rallying Europeans to join the revolution in empiricist
scientific exploration and speculation.
The key question in this scientific inquiry was not what the discovery of America meant for that continent, but what the discovery
of the New World meant for the
Old World. That is to say, the geographical, ethnographical, historical, and topographical narratives of America that began to
appear in ever-growing numbers in the course of the seventeenth century were in fact
narratives of self-exploration and self-critique. It was for this reason that the discovery of “America” was as much a mental
process as a historical event. By the same token, “America” was as much a concept or a metaphor as a self-evident geographical
space. As in the case of Plato’s dialogues of
Timaeus and
Critias, which hold the original references to the island of Atlantis, the abiding significance of such narratives as Richard Hakluyt
the Younger’s
Discourse of Western Planting (1584), Thomas Harriot’s
A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1590), and John Smith’s
Generall History of Virginia (1624) is that they mobilized contemporary readers – often indirectly and unintentionally – to examine their own ideas of
political and economic power, and hence of government and society.
It was thus that factual and fictional American travel narratives
became implicated in the Enlightenment’s pursuit of natural rights – which, being supposedly inalienable, it considered to
be self-evident and universal. Identifying man’s natural rights as the right to “life, liberty and estate,” John Locke designated
the right to property as an extension of the right to self-determination and freedom of action. According to Locke, in primitive
society, or “the state of nature,” labor was the origin and justification of property, so that whatever a man “mixed his Labour
with,” was his to use.
2 From this, Locke extrapolated that the purpose of government in civil society was the protection of property. In thus rationalizing
the concept of individual rights and the new constitutional settlement in Britain, Locke was crucially guided by the colonial
experiment that was then underway in the Americas.
3 For Locke, America represented the original “state of nature”: “In the beginning,” Locke observed in his
Second Treatise on Civil Government, “all the world was
America, and more so than that is now; for no such thing as Money was any where known. Find out something that hath the Use and Value
of Money amongst his Neighbours, you shall see the same Man will begin presently to enlarge his Possessions.”
4 Thus, more or less from the moment it was discovered, America was assimilated into the development of the colonial system
and global mercantilist capitalism.
This economic dependency caused the continent to become a key pawn in the imperial rivalries that held much of Europe in sway
throughout the Renaissance and early modern period. From the early sixteenth century onwards, a host of European explorers,
adventurers, traders, scientists, missionaries, and wilderness tourists duly began to create visions
of “America” that in various ways represented the imperial ambitions of the emerging nation states in Europe. Many of these
accounts presented an eclectic blend of myth and fact, conjecture and prejudice, fear and wonder.
In the course of the eighteenth century, however, as ideological and geopolitical clashes between European colonizers and
the people of the Americas – as well as between the European colonizing nations themselves – intensified, the American travel
narrative evolved from imaginary or quasi-scientific New World myth into a fiercely contested “site of truth.” Depending on
the traveler’s agenda, “America” now came to be perceived as a storehouse of nature, an egalitarian utopia of political justice,
an ideal setting for a physiocratic millennium, a transatlantic Jacobin republic, or a sad case of evolutionary degeneration.
As the demand for reliable, “factual” knowledge about America grew, the travel narrative developed more and more sophisticated
strategies of authentication. These varied from the use of the firsthand and documentary witness (often in the shape of fictive
“letters
from America”), to a wide range of scientific discursive formats (topographical, ethnographic, economical, biological, geological,
anthropological, statistical, and so on). Yet, paradoxically, with the increasing validation of empirical modes of truth,
print
ed claims to truth soon came to interfere with the truth of the material world that was being claimed. In the course of the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, competition between the various “discourses of fact” had rendered the travel narrative
so self-conscious of its status as a printed medium that “the historicity of the act of publication itself could seem to supplant,
and to affirm, the historicity of that information which print putatively exists only to mediate.”
5 Nonetheless, in an emerging public sphere that was predominantly constituted by the medium of print, published accounts of
the New World de facto constituted the known, or perceived, “facts” about America. Thus, by the time Bishop White Kennett
published his
Bibliothecae Americanae Primordia in 1713, effectively the first systematic attempt to create a bibliography of Americana, “America” was well and truly a transatlantic
territory imagined, written, and printed in Europe.
This was particularly pertinent to the British colonies in North America. Whereas Spanish accounts of the Americas were closely
dictated by the religious and political vagaries of the centralized colonial administration and the royal court in Spain,
American travel literature produced in Britain from the 1680s onwards inexorably rode the ebb and flow of domestic political
controversy. The deep rift that opened up between the Whigs and Tories over the new religious and constitutional settlement
during the Exclusion Crisis of 1679–81 would continue to dominate the British political landscape right through to the end
of the eighteenth century. Not only did this political rivalry translate into differences over colonial rights and
liberties, it also fed into the way the American
colonies were represented in British print
culture. In fact, with both parties actively soliciting or even bankrolling sections of the printing community, the American
travel narrative became a fiercely contested ideological battleground in the formation of a new, bipartisan political discourse
in Britain. That is to say, “America” became a discursive site where Tories and Whigs would clash over the relative merits
of such issues as natural versus civil rights, the social contract, parliamentary representation, and social justice.
With printers
and pamphleteers largely split along party lines, London’s already sizeable and highly competitive print market expanded
exponentially in the course of the eighteenth century, as the imperial crisis deepened and the American travel narrative became
a mode of domestic political wrangling by proxy. The steep rise in the volume of publications on America evolved in three
incremental and partially overlapping stages, which will be described in greater detail in the body of this chapter. The first
surge was prompted by the American degeneracy theory, which was originally expounded by Buffon in his
History and Theory of the Earth (1749). The controversy over the alleged degeneracy of biological life forms in North America gradually emerged as one of
the Enlightenment’s most contentious debates. Accompanied by countless charts, tables, and maps and adorned with hundreds
of copper plates, Buffon’s treatise was an absolute goldmine for printers, with editions and reprints appearing in several
European languages well into the nineteenth century.
6 Several abridged editions, all lavishly embellished with illustrations, appeared as high-end coffee-table books, thus locking
Buffon’s observations and hypotheses into the popular imagination. The second stage in the ascent of the eighteenth-century
transatlantic travel narrative was marked by the American Revolution debate of the 1760s, 1770s, and early 1780s. The imperial
crisis that erupted in the wake of the French
and Indian War caused a systemic shift in the way America came to be represented by opponents of British colonial rule. In
their account of the crisis, America began to emerge as the guarantor of the “British” liberties that had been progressively
dissipated by their own government. This, in turn, triggered a hardening of the Tories’ stance on the existing constitutional
arrangement between the mother country and the colonies. The so-called “American Revolution” was therefore to all intents
and purposes a
British Revolution in America. The third and final stage in the development of the eighteenth-century American travel narrative occurred
in the 1790s and was closely intertwined with Britain’s response to the French Revolution. When America gained independence,
the British empire had effectively been cut in half. Yet two decades later,
as the French
Revolution once again split the nation
into two opposing political factions, the nation still had to make up its mind what precisely it had lost with the Peace
of Paris: a transatlantic beacon of social and political justice that would one day enlighten the nations of Europe and dispel
the clouds of prejudice and despotism; or the jewel in the crown of Britain’s trading empire and hence an important pillar
of global economic and military hegemony. It was within this specific historical constellation that the battle over “the national
mind” between the Jacobins and anti-Jacobins came to be dictated by the question of what America’s successful bid for independence
might, in retrospect, mean for the social and political future of Britain.
7 Constituting, in effect, the American
front of the French Revolution debate, the extraordinary upsurge during the 1790s in the number of printed documents relating
to America helped usher in the birth of the modern political subject in Britain. This impassioned collision between radicalism
and conservatism generated a new language of political controversy, which permanently erased the middle ground in British
politics.
A number of interim conclusions can be drawn from the discussion so far, which, taken together, form the main thrust of my
argument in this chapter. First, when we talk about the Anglophone “transatlantic” travel narrative, this is not to suggest
that there was a bilateral, reciprocal relation between two equal geopolitical and ideological domains. Not only were virtually
all English-language narratives about the Americas written and printed in England (and frequently reprinted in Scotland
or Ireland
), but roughly until 1820 the very
idea of America – i.e. what the discovery and settlement of America signified in political, economical, social, anthropological,
ethnographical, and historical terms – was conceived and defined in Britain, as an integral part of that nation’s own process
of self-inquiry and self-definition. Second, and conversely, if British colonial inscriptions of America necessarily reflect
the asymmetrical relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, this does not mean that the British settlers in North
America tapped into an ideology that was inherently different from that of the mother country. Even at the height of the imperial
crisis, Britain and America were fundamentally
joined, not divided, by the ideology of the “capitalist Atlantic.” Unlike the Revolution in France, therefore, the American Revolution
was at the end of the day a regime change, not a system change. Third, while the process of nation making in Britain inevitably
involved efforts to appropriate, assimilate, and domesticate the new, the strange, and the foreign, this was crucially a
dialectical process. That is to say, negotiating with the evolving idea of “America” changed
and shaped British society perhaps as much as it changed and shaped the colonies themselves. More to the point, in defining
itself vis-à-vis its American colonies, the British empire generated a socio-political discourse that allowed it to pose critical
questions about itself and about its relations to the transatlantic “other.” Fourth, if the relation between Britain and her
American colonies was essentially an
overdetermined one, so was that between the eighteenth-century Anglophone transatlantic travel narrative and the emergence of a partisan
political discourse in Britain in the 1790s. Print was not ontologically prior to political discourse, nor political discourse
to print
. Being thus both a document and agent of social and political change, the transatlantic travel narrative contributed in significant
ways to the bifurcation of the political landscape that would dominate British politics from the early nineteenth century
onwards.
The thought of curing society’s ills by returning to a pristine state of nature had haunted the imagination
of European writers and thinkers throughout the early modern period. Instead of looking for the “natural man” in themselves,
they initially began to search for him in the wild – and by all accounts, nature did not get much wilder than in the New World.
The key development in the conceptualization of the New World during the eighteenth century was a shift away from seeking
the utopian
ideal exclusively in nature to seeking it primarily in the native savage himself. Much of this transition in utopian thinking
can be attributed to the impact of the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, notably of his
Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755). In the decades following the 1763 Peace of Paris, which consolidated Britain’s hegemony in North America, increasing
numbers of British travelers of a certain kind or another struck out for America’s western wilderness in the hope of catching
a glimpse of a real-life specimen of Rousseau’s “savage man.” When their accounts of America’s pristine wilderness and its
natural inhabitants reached excitable audiences in Europe, many believed they recognized in them the very “state of nature”
that Rousseau had written about in his
Discourse. Rousseau’s “immense forests, whose trees were never mutilated by the axe” became the American wilderness; his “savage man”
became the American Indian.
8In the course of the second half of the eighteenth century, the American Indian became uncomfortably poised between nature
and civilization. This was caused by the fact that the conceptualization of the native in the eighteenth century reflected
two competing modes of thought. First, there was
the Enlightenment, with its broad emphasis on rationalism, empiricism, and scientific inquiry; and then there was the reaction
against it, notably the cult of sensibility and, from the 1760s onwards, the early onset of Romanticism
. Both movements inspired their own brand of utopian
ism, which in one of its manifestations involved the utopian desire to imagine, establish, or discover an ideal society in
the pristine natural environment of the New World. Both, too, developed a concept of the noble savage as the contented inhabitant
of this untouched paradise. Of course, there was a crucial difference between Enlightenment utopian-progressivism and Romantic
utopian-primitivism. While empiricist rationalism tended to be idealist and highlight the New World’s potential to be brought
into the light of civilization and reason, Romanticism tended to seek the ideal society in the moral purity of an existing
or quondam pastoral garden. However, although approaching the ideal society from different directions, both rationalism and
Romanticism offered a perfectionist conceptualization of the world that was essentially timeless, outside the complexities
of historical development. From this ensued a fundamental paradox in eighteenth-century utopian thought, which left its mark
on virtually all accounts of America that portrayed it as an idealized economy of paradise and the noble savage. If the noble
savage lived in an earthly paradise and if the American land, as analogue of this paradise, was capable of perpetual improvement,
then the American Indian, as analogue of the noble savage, would gradually have to take on the character of a civilized man
– and, hence, cease to be a “noble savage.” As long as he was an exemplar of a timeless paradisiacal order, the noble savage
was sacrosanct; as the American Indian and a subject in historical time, he was doomed.
The school of natural historians who propounded the American degeneracy theory, of course, had argued all along that the American
Indian was doomed, as was the very continent he inhabited. Although this was less obvious at that time than now, reductionist
philosophes like the Comte de Buffon, Cornelis de Pauw, Abbé Raynal, and William Robertson were not primarily interested in scientific
objectivity. Their “scientific” mission was to refute the views of Rousseau and other utopian-primitivists in order to vindicate
– what they believed to be – the superiority of European civilization. Although they developed a concept of America and the
American Indian that was distinctly dystopian, their thesis sparked such an intense outburst of public excitement and indignation
in the second half of the eighteenth century that it acted unwittingly as a dynamo for the utopian-primitivist movement, thus
triggering a deluge of utopian treatises vindicating the New World.
The American degeneracy controversy had not essentially been a dispute about climate and population, but about conflicting
ideologies of progress. By offering utopian representations of America and the American Indian, Rousseauesque agrarian-primitivists had promoted a radical rupture between
images of an alternative future society and the social reality of the day. Being deeply invested in the infallible progress
of European civilization, the supporters of the degeneracy thesis, on the other hand, had adopted a dismissive stance towards
the “New World.” Both positions vis-à-vis the idea of progress had far-reaching repercussions for the way in which they approached
the concept of history. The utopian-primitivists espoused the concept of an ideal history, in order to imagine the social reality of the future. Their pragmatic counterparts, by contrast, adhered to a notion
of history as a human construct and as a series of innovations: hence, they based their interpretation of contemporary European
society, as well as their vision of its future progress, on the necessity of historical evolution.
Thus, the social and political debate that ushered in the great revolution
s of the late eighteenth century witnessed an encounter between utopianism and the idea of progressive history. However, in
practice both schools of thought fed off each other. While the discourse of utopianism absorbed and modified themes associated
with the idea of progress and reform, the discourse of historical progress in turn adapted and transformed utopian themes.
In France, this encounter generated both utopian narratives of imaginative history and treatises on radical perfectibility
– the latter most typically those associated with Condorcet’s necessitarianism. For many reformist thinkers, the ability of
utopian discourse to direct the imagination towards the pragmatic took precedence over its escapism. This meant that, as far
as they were concerned, the utopian text comfortably existed on an equal footing with political, economic, and social treatises.
Accordingly, utopian texts were widely represented in encyclopedias and scholarly collections devoted to social and political
problems. Indeed, in France during the second half of the eighteenth century, knowledge of utopias was generally considered
to be prerequisite to an enlightened mind.
9However, pre-Revolutionary France’s agrarian – effectively feudal – socio-economic structure and its strict religious orthodoxy
prevented the discursive amalgamation of utopianism and social reform from blossoming forth into practical utopian experiments
on any significant scale. In contrast to the Enlightenment in France, however, the English and Scottish
Enlightenment had fostered new and reformed intellectual communities and institutions, which sustained rational pragmatic
debate: universities, academies, literary clubs, reforming societies, and complex cultures of print, ranging from magazine,
newspaper, and pamphlet publications to the
Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a result, in Britain the convergence of utopian
views and pragmatic reform
did lead to an intellectual climate in which the possibility of putting social dreams into practice was widely discussed and
contemplated.
Initially, the Enlightenment in England was less robust than in Scotland. Until the 1760s, roughly, the synthesis of science and moral philosophy, which was at the heart of the Scottish Enlightenment,
failed to materialize in England. Following the example of Lord Shaftesbury, British philosophers and moral historians tended
to take a more idealist, sentimental approach to human nature than most of their Scottish counterparts. For instance, Bishop
Berkeley, Edmund Burke, and others were deeply committed to such notions as social virtue, social affections, moral sentiments,
benevolence, sympathy, and compassion. Early in George III’s reign, however, the reawakening of the cause of parliamentary
reform at home, rumblings of political unrest in the American colonies, and the emergence of new religious and scientific
ideas began to stir up debate about good governance, the will of the people, and pragmatic proposals for social reform.
Yet for British reformists to conceive of “America” as a “practical” utopia, it not only needed to epitomize for them an ideological
alternative to Britain, but also a knowable geographical and historical space. That is to say, reformists had to be persuaded that “America” was simultaneously a utopian
seat of liberty and social progress, and a terrestrial asylum where they could settle and rebuild their material lives. Crucially, it was the American crisis debate
in Britain that became the discursive site where residual strands of Golden Age utopianism, sectarian millenarianism, and
various contemporary propositions for social and political reform came together and formed new strategic alliances – thus
generating pragmatic ideas for a paradise on earth rather than promises of salvation in heaven. As the discourse of utopianism
was synthesized into a discourse of reform, the erstwhile “imaginary voyage” to Arcadia was recast as the – supposedly – real-life
“emigration” to America. In this way the interaction between utopian dreams and reformist hopes contributed to the development
of progressive ideas that came to dominate the ideologies of England’s “enlightened” middle-class elite.
As one of the main spokesmen for the political establishment, Edmund Burke made parliamentary history with his impressive
speeches in favor of a political settlement with the colonies. Yet it is important to remember
that the key debate between the bourgeois supporters and Tory opponents of American independence largely bypassed parliamentary
politics. It was London’s pamphlet shops – and by extension its coffeehouses, taverns, and inns – not the Westminster Parliament
that became the main platform for debate that enlightened and informed the British people regarding the merits and demerits
of American independence. Printers such as Joseph Johnson, John Almon, Lockyer Davis, and John Stockdale (who printed works
by Priestley, Price, Crèvecoeur, and Jefferson, respectively) sustained the cross-pollination and dissemination of the reformist
ideas that energized the American crisis debate. In doing so, these printers
facilitated the transformation of the earlier, idealist image of “America” as a bucolic New Eden into the socio-political
concept of a practicable utopia in the here and now. In the radicalized print culture of the 1760s and 1770s, “America” no
longer stood for dependence and colonial subjugation but for liberty
and national sovereignty; instead of biological degeneracy and the doom of civilization, it came to designate social progress,
modernity, and the pursuit of happiness.
By contrast, the opponents of American self-rule constantly found themselves on the back foot in their efforts to influence
public opinion regarding the rebellion in the colonies. This is not to say that there was no real debate, or that the imperialists
failed to muster significant support for their colonial policies among London’s printers and pamphleteers. On the contrary,
there were many on the right that were willing to publicly vindicate the authority of Parliament over the colonies and to
justify the British government’s decision to tax them. Yet the problem for the Tory press (and, indeed, for the government)
was that ultimately all they could do was repeat the same argument over and over again, viz. that Britain’s American policies
were both economically pragmatic and constitutionally justifiable. British imperialists had always been more concerned about
the preservation of the sovereignty of Parliament than about imposing taxes on the colonies. Having wrested the constitutional
settlement from the hands of despotism during the Glorious Revolution, they were quite loath to relinquish it. Indeed, regarding
a sovereign Parliament as indispensable to the stability of British society and the security of the nation, they were even
willing to go to war
with the colonies to defend it. In the long run, however, their strategy came to be seen as dogmatic and intransigent, not
only by the Whigs, but also by many who were neutral in the colonial conflict. The Whig argument, on the other hand, was more
evocative, and evolved over time, as the imperial crisis deepened and what had started as a constitutional dispute over taxes
and representation gradually became a dispute about parliamentary
sovereignty. The intrinsically mercurial, unpredictable nature of the pamphlet press allowed British friends of America and
colonists alike to turn the medium of print
into a discursive field of extra-parliamentary political resistance.
It has been estimated that British authors produced around a thousand pamphlets and other texts that dealt with aspects of
the imperial crisis.
10 Yet even a cursory glance at a few of the most significant publications allows us to reconstruct the overall trajectory of
the American
Revolution debate in Britain. It was Thomas Pownall who first alerted British readers to the historic changes that were afoot
in the colonies. Thus, in
The Administration of the Colonies (1764) he noted that far from having restored tranquility on the American continent, the end of the French and Indian War
had created a “nascent crisis” in Anglo-American relations, which urgently needed to be addressed if it was to be contained.
11 His recommendation that Britain and her Atlantic colonies be united in a “grand marine political community” was echoed by
John Cartwright, who in his
American Independence the Interest and Glory of Great Britain (1774) proposed a similar dominion-style settlement as his preferred solution to the imperial crisis (“two separate nation
s” inhabiting “one empire”).
12 One of the most influential tracts in the imperial crisis debate was John Dickinson’s
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768). First published in book format in Boston in 1768, Dickinson’s
Letters were widely disseminated throughout the American colonies as well as in Europe. Written in protest to the passage of the
Townshend Act of 1767, the
Letters were instrumental in popularizing and consolidating political support in the colonies for the principle of “no taxation without
representation.” Yet, more importantly, Dickinson’s
Letters crucially triggered a fundamental shift in imperial discourse, from trade to liberty and from taxation to legality. Paradoxically,
some of the most powerful arguments in support of American independence were offered by one of the colonies’ most vitriolic
critics. A precursor of the free-market economists such as François Quesnay and Adam Smith, the rabidly conservative Anglican
clergyman Josiah Tucker was an outspoken opponent of Britain’s mercantilist policies towar
ds the colonies. By the mid-1770s he had come to the conclusion that the colonies were entirely irrelevant, if not detrimental
to Britain’s trading interests and hence to its national security. Never a man to mince his words, Tucker hence greeted Cornwallis’s
surrender to the French at Yorktown in 1781 with outright excitement and jubilation: “if this Defeat should terminate in a
total Separation from
America,” he gloated, “it would be one of the happiest Events, that hath ever happened to
Great Britain.”
13
America’s experiment in republicanism proved to be as controversial during the French
Revolution debate as it had been during the American
Revolution itself. Although in the course of the 1780s the nation
had managed to regain some of its former self-confidence under William Pitt’s patriotic leadership, the radicalization of
the French Revolution and the start of the war against France in 1793 reactivated Britain’s unresolved collective trauma over
the loss of the American colonies. Significantly, both friends and foes of American independence typically conveyed the separation
of the American colonies from Britain in a medical discourse, thereby symbolically confirming that the nation remained viscerally
aware of its imperial loss even in the 1790s. William Godwin, for instance, observed in the
Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) that the recent political “experiment” in America had caused a “concussion” in the “minds of men.”
14 Reflecting the views of many on the other side of the political divide, William Atkinson warned that the republican arguments
for emigrating to America proffered by Joseph Priestley in the preface to his 1794 Fast Sermon would result in the “Death
or Amputation” of Britain.
15 It was within this particular historical setting that “America” metonymically came to represent for the British people the
choice between two diametrically opposed models of social justice and political participation.
One of the ideological bones of contention most fiercely fought over by the Jacobins and anti-Jacobins in the 1790s was emigration
to America. On the one hand, post-Bastille British radicals time and again seized upon the prospect of emigration to some
socially just utopia in America as a political tool to undermine the power of the privileged classes at home and to argue
for parliamentary reform. Charles Pigott reflected the thoughts of many radicals when he defined “America” in his
Political Dictionary (1795) as “a bright and immortal example to all colonies groaning under a foreign yoke, proving the invincible energy and
virtue of Freedom, and enjoying a state of prosperity, since she has thrown off her dependence on Great Britain, hitherto
unknown in the nations of Europe.”
16 For anti-Jacobins and other Gallo-phobic conservatives, however, a person’s stance towards emigration to America was a test
of his or her patriotism. Failing that test was regarded by them as evidence for someone’s
sans-culotte sympathies and hence amounted to treason. Thus, at the end of a series of fictitious letters, ostensibly by a “gentleman
lately returned from America,” the anonymous author thus casually dismisses the transatlantic emigration rage: “But, it may
be asked, ought no description of persons to emigrate?
The reply is obvious – The guilty
must, and the very unfortunate
will, though the prejudices of the natives are too apt to confound the latter with the former.”
17Especially after the repressive government reaction had set in with the Treason Trials of 1794 and the 1795 Gagging Acts,
there was a marked increase in the number of radicals that left Britain and emigrated to America. By the middle of the decade,
emigration
to the New World had become so popular in radical circles that “America” had become a byword for an asylum for radical emigrants.
Thus, Charles Pigott defined the word “emigrant” as “one who, like Dr. Priestley or Thomas Cooper, is compelled to fly from
persecution, and explore liberty in a far distant land, probably America.”
18 The word “refugees” Pigott annotated as “English Patriots, as Dr. Priestley and his family, Mr. Cooper, of Manchester, &c.
&c. who…were obliged to quit a country pregnant with bigotry and persecution.” Writing in 1795 in his journal
The Tribune, John Thelwall reported that the “political and natural calamities” that had recently hit the country had triggered a “rage
of emigration.”
19 He estimated that in the summer of 1794 alone some 80,000 people had emigrated to America.
20 This figure is almost certainly inflated and would in any case have included only a relatively small number of radical activists.
Not without reason, William Atkinson for his part pilloried the would-be radical emigrant as “a modern
voluntary exile, whining out [his] grievances to the destruction of [his] honest, zealous, but mistaken countrymen.”
21Even so, emigration to America was very much part of the spirit of the age and hence became a widely discussed topic in the
Jacobin/anti-Jacobin controversy. Tapping into an already existing body of topographical, natural historical, and travel writing
about America (mainly from 1783 onwards), as well as into an older tradition of transatlantic agrarian writing, British reformist
writers in the 1790s developed emigration to America as a central trope in their writings and thought. For many radicals,
emigration may have been an ideological ploy rather than a real-life choice, yet the conservatives took their pro-emigration
stand seriously and began to attack it with fervor. The two sides in this ideological conflict released an unprecedented stream
of documents relating to North America in general and to travel and emigration to America in particular, thereby contributing
significantly to an already buoyant and prolific print culture.
Thus, the decision of Joseph Priestley to settle in America in 1794 and build an agrarian utopia in the Pennsylvania wilderness
was greeted with much enthusiasm by progressive literary figures in Britain, including Samuel Coleridge; yet it was derided
with as much passion by the
anti-Jacobins, most notably by William Cobbett.
22 Generally speaking, the Jacobin writers tended to depict America as an ideal republic in which Godwinian ideals of liberty,
democracy, emancipation, and the perfectibility of mankind could be realized. More than any other novel from the period, Gilbert
Imlay’s Jacobin romance
The Emigrants (1793) resonates with the popular appeal of the radical emigration
movement to America. Imlay’s novel in many respects simply puts into fictional form the ideological concerns of his earlier
manual for the prospective emigrant,
A Topographical Description of the Western Territory of North America (1792). Both give us a taste of a Jacobin interpretation of rural England transplanted to American soil and scenery.
The Emigrants was extraordinarily influential in the 1790s and initially generated a string of imitators, including Frances Jacson’s
Disobedience (1797) and the anonymous
Henry Willoughby (1798).
As the counter-revolution
ary movement began to gain momentum,
The Emigrants became the target of bitter anti-Jacobin vituperation. Increasingly fearing massive shortages of skilled labor and dire economic
disruption, the anti-Jacobins vehemently attacked the emigration movement, dismissing emigrants in pamphlets and broadsides
as anti-patriotic traitors and vagabonds. Thus, in its issue for May 1793 the
Gentlemen’s Magazine reported that, “[s]everal of our periodical publications have of late abounded with essays written to prove the superior
felicity of American farmers, and to recommend our husbandmen to quit their native plains, and seek for happiness and plenty
in the Transatlantic desarts.”
23 However, the economic argument that emigration would cripple the nation
was mere expediency. Underneath it there was a deeper-seated fear that the social and physical mobility of people would fatally
destabilize existing economical, social, legal, and political structures, notably those of class
, property, democratic participation, and the division of labor. Hence, the dominant ideology of upper- and upper-middle-class
Britain insisted on continuity, tradition, and experience as a way to legitimize their ancient claims to socio-political hegemony.
Thus, animated by a mixture of disgust and blind panic, the conservative intelligentsia hired a host of hack writers who unleashed
a barrage of anti-American and anti-emigration diatribe. While initially fairly mild and sarcastic, as in Henry James Pye’s
novel
The Democrat (1795) or the anonymous
Berkeley Hall (1796), the conservative response quickly became more vitriolic, particularly in the pages of the
Anti-Jacobin Magazine (from 1798 onwards) and in such novels
as George Walker’s
The Vagabond (1799). In the Jacobin/anti-Jacobin print war of the 1790s, “America” thus became a crucial site of contestation where supporters
of the “new philosophy” and detractors of Jacobinism
met in discursive battle over Britain’s cultural capital – staging, in effect, in America’s imagined backwoods a British version
of the French
Revolution, which the increasingly repressive political climate prevented from taking place in England’s green and pleasant
land.
What this suggests is that, in comparison to the imperial crisis debate, the French Revolution debate in Britain was a distinctly
plebeian affair. The process of nation
al introspection that followed the Fall of the Bastille was both more widespread and more democratic. This rapid increase
of popular participation in the political debate was reflected in a sharp rise in the annual production rate of British novels
that in some form or other dealt with American topics and scenes – whether in the plot, in an episode, in dialogue, or merely
in passing references or the title. Whereas the general publication rate of novels fell in the period following the radicalization
of the Revolution in France (1792–95), the number of novels dealing with American content rose in those years, to over 60
percent. That number consolidated in the second half of the decade to around 50 percent.
24 With the Jacobin novel thus pitted against the anti-Jacobin novel, both radicals and Tories enlisted the fictional American
travel narrative in their efforts to draw a non-elitist, plebeian audience into a public debate about national issues.
It is crucial to be aware, then, that the 1790s’ “mania of emigration
to the United States,” as Paine’s friend Thomas Clio Rickman once described it, was first and foremost a discursive phenomenon.
25 Rather than a socio-historical or demographical process, that is, the issue of emigration to the New World was overwhelmingly
understood and validated through public discourse and debate. Although what was at stake was nothing less than the future
shape of British society, the deep controversy over emigration to the United States was part of an extended dialogue conducted
within the wider print
war between radicals and conservatives, rather than a formal political dialogue conducted as part of the parliamentary process.
The expansive body of travel and emigration literature that emerged in the course of the 1780s and, particularly, the 1790s
constituted a degree of intertextuality seldom seen before or since in the history of print in Britain. It is this very printedness
of the 1790s’ emigration debate that uniquely allows it to be explored and recovered as part of what was a complex transatlantic
sociology of texts.
Despite the mass of American histories, novels, and travel narratives
that was produced in the course of the 1780s and 1790s, there was a growing feeling amongst writers on both sides of the
Atlantic that the true America was still largely a
terra incognita. Thus W. Mathews boldly declares in his 1789 book
Historical Review of North America that America “is a country
hitherto little known.”
26 In the same vein (and the same year) the American geographer Jedidiah Morse complains in
The American Geography that “Europeans have been the sole writers of American Geography, and have too often suffered fancy to supply the place of
facts, and thus have led their readers into errors, while they professed to aim at removing their ignorance.”
27 In all sorts of ways, America was discovering that it was considerably “more difficult to declare independence from Samuel
Johnson than it had been to reject George III.”
28 At the start of the nineteenth century, this situation had not materially changed. In a review essay entitled “A Sketch of
American Literature, 1806–7,” Charles Brockden Brown – America’s first professional man of letters – laments that “if the
inhabitants of Bristol, York, Edinburgh, and Dublin [got] their cloths from Manchester, their hardware from Birmingham, and
their books from ‘the great manufactory of London’, so [did] the citizens of Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.”
29 Although America had plenty of talent and had fostered a viable domestic print market, Brown had to concede that in terms
of the volume of original publications “the American states [were]…no more than a province of the British empire” – bearing,
in this respect, “an exact resemblance to Scotland and Ireland.”