by way of marriage, family responsibility, and fatherhood. America’s ideal couple produced order and procreated the future. But men claimed superior procreative powers: they sired children, women only carried them. Jefferson’s fantasy of men reproducing without women was reflected in Joel Barlow’s satirical poem “The Hasty Pudding,” where a farmer’s vitality (and virility) was confirmed by the fact that “Ten sturdy freeman sprung from him.” Men also procreated culture, society, and the nation. Carole Pateman remarks that modern male thinkers claimed “the procreative powers of both a mother and a father” and took credit for “masculine creation of (giving birth to) social and political order.”46 In early America’s male fantasies, female disorders and procreative powers were inferior; in early Americas patriarchal politics, disorderly men were the primary problem, procreative men the primary problem solvers.
Disorderly Men
The destabilization of the traditional patriarch, the emergence of alternative ideals, and the instability of gender relations disrupted the lives of American men. Satires mocking married men as both brutal tyrants and effeminate slaves became commonplace. Family men’s expectations that they should rule dependents were disappointed in some degree by wives’ agency and sons’ mobility. Some men reacted with an antimarital ideology; others channeled misogyny into revitalizing the traditional ideal; many experimented with the new alternatives; and most muddled through the confusion. Commentators worried that gender turbulence eroded men’s commitment to family life and intensified male licentiousness. They warned that men who failed to marry, refused family responsibility, or forswore legitimate fatherhood lacked proper self-restraint, engaged in destructive vices, and often lured sober men into depravity. The specter of masses of disorderly men causing chaos became more terrifying to civic leaders when the revolutionary rhetoric of liberty and equality weakened traditional restraints on male conduct and strengthened men’s claims to individual rights against authority.
In 1766, Jonathan Mayhew congratulated colonists for defending liberty against the Stamp Act but quickly condemned them for “riotous and felonious proceedings” compounded by cloaking their “rapacious violences with the pretext of zeal for liberty.” Mayhew warned that some American men had lost “all sense of religion, virtue, and good order” and caused a “state of general disorder approaching so near to anarchy” that they almost brought on “more dreadful scenes of blood and slaughter.” For the next forty years, public officials were haunted by visions of disorderly men indulging democratic desire as an excuse for venting passion and renewing earlier scenes of bloodshed and slaughter. It was not until 1805 that Thomas Jefferson was ready to declare a “union of sentiment now manifested so generally as auguring harmony and happiness to our future course.” Even then, Fisher Ames warned that only “grown children” were so foolish as to believe that men’s licentiousness, factionalism, and mobbish conduct had been cured.47
Why were men so apt to transform claims to liberty and equality into disorderly conduct? A frequent explanation was that males were inherently passionate, lustful, impulsive, greedy, manipulative, unpredictable creatures. That is, they were just like women. Benjamin Franklin highlighted men’s passionate nature in a satire about “Celia Single,” who sought to set straight the public record in a letter to the editor:
I have several times in your paper seen severe reflections upon us women for idleness and extravagance, but I do not remember to have once seen any such animadversions upon the men. If I were disposed to be censorious, I could furnish you with instances enough. I might mention Mr. Billiard who spends more than he earns at the green table . . . Mr. Finikin who has seven different suits of fine clothes and wears a change every day while his wife and children sit at home half naked... Mr. Crownhim who is always dreaming over the checkerboard... Mr. T’Otherpot the tavern-hunter.48
Franklin spent a lifetime satirizing male vices to mark out the common failings of men and women. And Jefferson entertained the radical proposition that men were more enslaved by ardor and ignorance than women. His correspondence with Maria Cosway proclaimed the dominion of a man’s “heart” over his “head,” and his educational plan for his daughter assumed a “fourteen to one” chance that she would marry “a blockhead” and be forced to manage her own family.49 Note that Franklin and Jefferson were optimists about male virtue and reason compared to misanthropes such as Alexander Hamilton and Noah Webster.
A related explanation was that male passions were particularly troublesome at a time when traditional restraints on male conduct were crumbling. Colonial America had been dominated by two ranks of men who, according to Gordon Wood, “had different psyches, different emotional makeups, different natures.” Gentlemen were “great-souled” men “driven by passions that ordinary people could never comprehend, by pride, by honor, and by ‘a prospect of an immortality in the memories of all the worthy to the end of time.’” Commoners were mainly farmers whose lives were shaped by the need to extract a living from the land to provision their families. What commoners most wanted “was sons to whom they could pass on their land and who would continue the family name.”50 These two ranks were bound together in equality and inequality. They shared responsibilities as family fathers who supported, protected, and managed dependents; they were freeholders with the historical rights and responsibilities of Englishmen; and they were driven by a shared desire to produce a memorable patrimony for posterity. Still, gentlemen were superiors, commoners inferiors; gentlemen cultured, commoners coarse; gentlemen patrons, commoners patronized; gentlemen militia officers, commoners rank-and-file militiamen; gentlemen governors, commoners governed. Colonial men existed within traditional, complex hierarchies constructed of personal ties, mutual obligations, cultural rituals, and the politics of preference and deference.
However, America’s hierarchical bonds were comparatively weak. Gentlemen had no formal titles, special legal status, or inherited political privileges. They relied on family name, education, talent, wealth, generosity, and reputation to achieve personal honor, social dignity, and political authority. Meanwhile, commoners’ subordinate status was compromised by America’s abundance of land, its opportunities for socioeconomic mobility, and the rapid population growth that encouraged young men to seek opportunity on the frontier or in the city. American colonists sustained a fragile balance between male hierarchy and social fluidity until their opposition to the Stamp Act overspilled the boundaries of political protest. Thereafter, Bernard Bailyn suggests, “Defiance to constituted authority leaped like a spark from one flammable area to another, growing in heat as it went.”51 Any systematic effort to impose order on the ranks of men by subordinating some men and elevating others was sure to provoke public consternation.
On the one hand, Americans were enthusiasts for liberty. Indeed, they claimed exceptional liberty against hierarchical authority. James Otis, Jr., argued in 1764, “The colonists are entitled to as ample rights, liberties, and privileges as the subjects of the mother country and, in some respects, to more.” Why more? American farmers and English freeholders were born with identical natural and constitutional rights; but American men merited exceptional liberty because they had carved a new world out of the wilderness while Englishmen wallowed in old-world corruption. In particular, Americans demanded extraordinary “natural, inherent, and inseparable rights as men and citizens” to individual liberty against royal governors and to local political autonomy against parliamentary authority. Anyone who appeared to deprive American men of their exceptional liberty stood accused of seeking to emasculate and enslave them.52
On the other hand, many leaders feared that this enthusiasm for liberty generated what David Ramsay called “undecided claims and doubtful rights” that were likely to be abused by disorderly men, who excelled at “disturbing the freest governments that were ever devised.” Disturbances often took the form of mob action. John Adams complained in 1774, “These private mobs I do and will detest. ... these tarring and featherings, this breaking open of houses by rude and insolent rabble ... in pursuance of private prejudices and passions must be discountenanced.” George Washington was outraged in July 1776 when a celebration of independence ended with soldiers toppling a statue of George III. His “General Orders” stated, “Though the General doubts not the persons who pulled down and mutilated the statue