Inventing Foundations
THE DISTANCE FROM PHILADELPHIA’S Bettering House in July 1776 to the building we now know as Independence Hall was barely three-quarters of a mile. To imagine it, you have to whisk the modern city out of your mind’s eye. Setting off from the Bettering House across the rural buffer that separated the morally quarantined poor from the city that supported them, your walk would have started out through open fields and farmsteads. Abutting the Bettering House’s grounds you might have paused to admire a second monumental institution of the city’s philanthropic elite, the Pennsylvania Hospital for the free care of the city’s sick poor. Reaching Sixth Street where the commercial city began, you would have passed yet a third charitable institution, the Loganian Library, the gift of one of William Penn’s secretaries who had devoted a part of his merchant-made fortune to accruing one of the largest book collections in British North America. Although it did not turn out quite as James Logan had originally hoped, he had intended to bequeath his collection for public use, free to any ambitious reader who wanted to use it. Finally, swinging around the corner of Chestnut Street you would have come up on the Pennsylvania State House, known in our day as Independence Hall. In all, the walk would have taken you less than fifteen minutes.1
But in historical distance, that journey would have taken you from a cultural-political world whose links to Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” were still discernible to a world in which he would have been radically out of place. In Philadelphia’s great charitable institutions, Winthrop would have recognized the bonds of assistance between unequals whose importance his Model had so insistently underscored. When Winthrop wrote that “we shall be as a city upon a hill,” the “we” in his mind was a people held together by their acts of common faith and mutual obligation. However quickly dissension would shake its covenant claims, the society Winthrop’s Model envisioned was, at root, a consensual rather than a legal-political one: a voluntary company of “godly” English Protestants in search of a place of settlement, purity, obedience, and exile.
The “we” that was under construction in Independence Hall in June and July of 1776 was part of an altogether different global experiment in nation making. “We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Independence boldly announced. The agent of that new collective purpose was not simply the delegates who signed the document. It was not a cluster of refugees on an unfamiliar shore. It was a political entity that Winthrop and his peers had never remotely anticipated: a newly invented nation.
Ultimately, conscription into that nationalist project would change everything about the ways in which “A Model of Christian Charity” was read and understood. Nation making fostered a new search for foundations: for texts and founders who could be imagined to stand at the very beginning point of a nation’s history. It encouraged a radical foreshortening of time so that a nation’s origins and future could be imagined as seamlessly connected. It held out a special place for each nation in the designs of providence and of history; it imbued nations with missions that far exceeded their borders and their mere self-interest. It was in this context that “A Model of Christian Charity” would, much later, be rediscovered and remade, and that its status as a foundational text in the American civic canon—indeed its foundational place in the story of the nation itself—would be invented and broadcast.
It is routinely suggested that Winthrop’s words impressed their mark all across the emergent culture of American nationalism: that the providential themes he articulated in his last pages poured into the new nation to articulate its deepest, inchoate ambitions. But that misreads the history of both the text and the nation. For three centuries after its writing, except for scattered references to its charity theme, “A Model of Christian Charity” lay out of sight, virtually invisible as a cultural reference point. Its “we” was almost never identified with the ideas of nation swelling in volume around it. Most attempts to identify direct echoes of Winthrop’s words in documents written before the twentieth century are false sightings, in which phrases that Winthrop had lifted directly from the Bible or nationalist tropes constructed independently of Winthrop’s uses are mistaken for evidence of the Model’s influence.
“Chosen people,” “city on a hill,” “manifest destiny,” and “mission” to the world: all across the world’s new nationalist cultures, key phrases the Model is said to have set in motion proliferated. Fueled by desires to wrap nations in language grander than that of mere contrivances, they were passed from one nation to another in circuits that swept both through and far beyond the United States. This transnational production of cultures of patriotism should not startle us. Paradoxical as it may seem, nationalism was an international project. Reworking borrowed material, nationalism’s articulators across Europe and the Americas filled the political air with variations on claims to special destiny and visibility. Ultimately those claims would absorb “A Model of Christian Charity” in their embrace. When Winthrop’s words finally came into general circulation in the second half of the twentieth century, they would be read in the light of assumptions and desires that the constructors of the idea of the nation had prearticulated for them.
As in Winthrop’s day, moreover, the formula of a chosen people, set as a city upon a hill, could not be held within any single meaning. With a twist of setting, the words could be turned from celebration into dissent. They could become critical. They could be carried elsewhere for replanting to an alternative nation, farther from the sins of the one in which they originated. They could be hurled like grenades across the most savage fields of war.
Following some of these instances of reappropriated words and ideas, partial resemblances, and radically proliferating employments will almost never bring us directly to Winthrop’s text until the twentieth century. But if “A Model of Christian Charity” all but vanishes from center stage during the long nineteenth, its larger story does not. The era’s burgeoning culture of nationalism, filled with new hungers for identities, history, and foundations: this, too, braids into the lives of Winthrop’s city upon a hill.
For those who live within the claims of nations now, it takes some effort to imagine their novelty when they burst onto the scene. The architects of modern nationalism were not only inventors of new devices for governance; they were fashioners of a new form of political identity, underwritten by the new rituals, historical myths, and practices of belonging. The more loosely constructed polities that preceded them in Europe and its empires were, in comparison, patchworks of authorities, customs, laws, and regions. Stitched together by dynastic alliances, accretion, or conquest, they rarely tried to impose a uniform law or political culture across their quilts of difference. Loyalties were typically local or regional. Winthrop’s Massachusetts Bay colony had been part of a distended empire of this sort: a patchwork of allied states, globally dispersed “plantations,” voluntary ventures like Penn’s and the New England colonies, and quasi-public commercial companies on the East India Company model.
Although one can find premonitions of modern forms of nationalism in the seventeenth century, it was not until the last decades of the eighteenth century that a new figure, the citizen, loyal in the first instance not to a locale or a distant crown but to the nation, stepped out of the French and American Revolutions onto the political stage.2 States that succeeded in joining their citizens into new phalanxes of loyalty turned out to be political entities of extraordinary power. Late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century nations learned to tax, to legislate, to conscript, to punish, and to wage war still more energetically than the realms they displaced.
But to make all this possible, nations needed to enlist the allegiance of their subjects in deliberately new ways. It was not enough simply to burnish older bonds of ethnic or social affinity. “More than a sentiment,” David Bell writes, “nationalism is a political program, which has as its goal not merely to praise, or defend, or strengthen a nation, but actively to construct one [by] casting its human raw material into a fundamentally new form.”3 If nations were to succeed, their leaders had to will their citizens into a new collective sense of themselves, their history, and their solidarity.
Construction of the new nationalist cultures of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was no easy task. Nations often failed. They split apart into fragments; they collapsed in civil war; counterrevolutionary backlash overwhelmed them; they fell prey to stronger powers greedy for expansion; they sank into global insignificance. In the breakaway nations of Latin America that emerged out of the implosion of the Spanish empire, the strains of nation making were particularly pronounced as coups and countercoups, war and rebellion, civil uprisings and the militias’ dissolution into the private forces of rival caudillos kept much of the region in turmoil for decades.4 In the United States, too, the success of the nationalist project was a much less certain thing than the dominant line of American history books commonly acknowledges. Neither the formal declaration of independence nor the ensuring war immediately knitted the peoples of British America together. The revolutionary armies had difficulty recruiting; militias often refused to fight beyond their home grounds. Slaves fled by the thousands across the patriot lines to the freedom the British authorities promised them. Backcountry Southern whites, divided by long-standing grievances from their wealthier seaboard cousins, often chose the loyalist cause. In Philadelphia, as elsewhere, many of the elite sided with the familiar British order rather than with the rough crowds and their haranguers in the streets.5
Caught in pressures like these, proponents of the new nationalisms everywhere intensified their efforts to shore up their popular foundations. Symbols proliferated to condense the newly imagined nations into tangible forms. Consciously engineered “technologies” of modern nationalism circulated between the new regimes. By the 1790s the red Phrygian cap and red cockade of the French Revolutionaries had become badges of identity for American nationalists, too, who feared their revolution was being hijacked by forces of reaction. Liberty trees and liberty poles became ubiquitous parts of the nationalist landscape. National anthems on the British model of 1740 gathered popularity; Southern Confederates would enthusiastically take up “La Marseillaise” as their own in 1861. Heroes were singled out for honor, or dragged out of obscurity, or invented altogether. In the United States, George Washington was recast as the new American nation’s patriotic saint. The French poured their sense of nation into the figure of Marianne and the goddess of liberty.6
In this invented riot of symbols and practices, history held a particularly important place. Ancient traditions were exhumed, generalized, or created anew to bind nations to deep, imagined pasts. Scots authors reinvented the Highland kilt as if it ran back to the beginnings of Scottish history. French nationalists donned the costumes of republican Rome. Folklorists found a German Volk far older and more foundational than the new German nation. Southern Confederates invented a Norman heritage for themselves, radically different from the overbearing Anglo-Saxonism of Northern Unionists. Historical pageants re-created dramatic versions of the past. Schoolbooks broadcast narratives of patriotic history. Historical societies spread to collect, honor, and valorize the texts that would give nations a sense of depth and lineage.7 Through means such as these, Mona Ozouf writes, the “the new social bond was made to be manifest, eternal, and untouchable.”8
Integral to all these projects was a reconstruction of time. The older logic of typological history in which Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity” had been immersed did not wholly disappear. To live within the tropes of Old Testament time, to believe that contemporary history unfolded on patterns prefigured in the Bible, to read the signs of the moment through a screen of preset analogies—all this persisted in the new era of nation making. Even patriotic phrase makers who had themselves shaken off the core of Christian beliefs knew the rhetorical utility of biblically prefigured history. Thus Deist Tom Paine could liken George III to the Pharaoh of the book of Exodus. Thus Benjamin Franklin’s proposed design for the Great Seal of the new nation could show the Red Sea’s waters engulfing the Egyptian army. Jefferson’s Great Seal design would have depicted the Israelites being led through the wilderness by a cloud and pillar of fire. Providentialist readings of contemporary events endured. So did the Jeremiad’s explanation of each national setback as God’s punishment of a morally inadequate people.9
But increasingly these ways of reading time and history were displaced by others. One powerful axis of nationalist time leapt forward to the promises of the future. One can hardly begin to read through the patriotic literature of the American Revolution without being struck by the force of the future tense. America had hardly been born but that it was bent on future glory, the Fourth of July orators insisted. Its liberty, the virtue of its citizens, the genius of its commerce and agriculture, and the sheer size of its territory all surely destined it to be one of the great powers of the world. “It may seem presumptuous for us, who are a nation of but yesterday, to arrogate to ourselves the merit of having enlightened mankind in the art of government,” David Ramsey declared in an Independence Day oration in Charleston, South Carolina, in 1794. But where else, he went on, were rights so fully secured and happiness so widely diffused? Where else were a nation’s people so orderly, peaceable, and virtuous? “To what height of national greatness may we not aspire?” he continued. A “golden age” was around the corner, Samuel Stillman urged in the same vein in Boston in 1789, when American “science, arts, industry, religion, freedom, and public happiness, shall exalt her to the most distinguished eminence among the nations of the world.” John L. O’Sullivan was to put it more tersely in 1839: America was “the great nation of futurity.”10
A second axis of nationalist time, especially prominent in invented nations like the United States, celebrated the nation’s heroic break with the past. Destruction of the symbols of the ancien régime—the street crowds’ toppling of statues and trampling of coats of arms; the cartoonists’ and pamphleteers’ vicious libeling of former rulers—were not only acts of political defiance. They were assertions that the new nation had shattered history’s chains and encagements: that time itself was starting anew. “The birthday of a new world is at hand,” Tom Paine urged Americans in 1776—if only they would cut their ties with a rotten and tyrannical king and seize the new world’s promise. Asserting that time’s restart had already begun, the Jacobin Convention declared in 1793 that henceforth the beginning year of the French Revolution would be known as Year I.
But a nation suspended only in predictions of future greatness or a moment of radical break with the past could not fully command the affections of those on whose loyalty it depended. Consciously or half-consciously, the architects of nationalism were driven not only to pronounce their nation’s novelty but, just as urgently, to disguise it. Whether in the case of the scattered British settlements in North America, or the political patchworks of late nineteenth-century Italy and Germany, the legitimacy of new nations was made to rest, in part, on a sense that they had always existed. Traditions and texts invented for particular occasions were taken out of time as if their roots ran back to the unchanging foundations of the nation itself.
An early example of the effort to enshrine written words with meanings that could transcend their contingency-strewn, politically fraught, and hasty circumstances was the exhuming of the Magna Carta as the very foundation stone of English liberty. A royal concession that had been all but forgotten by the fifteenth century, the Magna Carta was revived in the seventeenth century by parliamentary opponents of the Stuart kings, who inserted it into British nationalist tradition as if it had been, all along, the keystone of England’s “ancient constitution.”11 The French did the same after 1848 with the slogan of the modern French nation, “Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.” Liberté and égalité had been quickly codified during the Revolution. But the word fraternité had carried too many associations with Jacobin social radicalism for conservatives and centrists (who much preferred “order” or “property”) to accept until decades later—but then to present it as if it had been the nation’s birth cry from its beginnings.12
This was to be the way the Declaration of Independence was absorbed into the history of the American nation as well. It was not at the beginning a timeless text. Once its purpose of declaring independence to the nation and the world had been accomplished, the historian Pauline Maier writes, the Declaration of Independence was “all but forgotten.” When the text came back into currency in the 1790s it was as a partisan document: a polarizing manifesto in a newly polarized political culture. Democratic-Republican Party rallies made the Declaration of Independence’s reading the centerpiece of their Independence Day celebrations, all the more enthusiastically once the hand in its authorship of Thomas Jefferson, their party hero, became more publicly known. Federalist newspaper editors, by contrast, deemed its philosophically central sentence (“We hold these truths to be self-evident …”) too abstract, too French, and too alien to American circumstances. Federalist newspaper editors disdained to print it in their Independence Day issues; Federalist rally organizers almost never read it. Not until the tensions of the first party system eased a half century after independence did the “sacralization” of the Declaration of Independence begin.13
Nations needed to promise newness; they needed to display their break with a senescent past. But to manufacture the citizens’ consciousness that nationalist loyalty depended upon, they needed to appear to be timeless as well. The past needed to be reinjected into the present. If the nation did not possess foundational documents—and, in sober fact, few did—the impulse to invent them or to remake others for that purpose ran too hard to dismiss. As Drew Faust writes of Confederate nationalism, the new nations’ proponents everywhere worked hard to help their citizens see that “their new departure was, in reality, no departure at all.”14 In this service history needed to be folded over upon itself.
This reworking of history would in time fundamentally remake the meaning of Winthrop’s “Model of Christian Charity.” In the twentieth century the Model would not only be enshrined in the canon of American foundational texts, it would be reimagined as having been there all along. The historical distance between past and present would be foreshortened. Winthrop’s words would be made to seem, like the Magna Carta, impervious to time.