The Journal of American History

Issues

June 1998
Volume 85, No. 1

Deference or Defiance in Eighteenth-Century America? A Round Table
Was early America the land of the unfree? Did ordinary colonists - laborers, mechanics, farmers - submit to their social superiors, as Aaron S. Fogleman implies, or did they defy their betters, flout the law, and assert their own will, as Michael Zuckerman suggests? At stake in our round table "Deference or Defiance in Eighteenth-Century America?" is the proposition, entrenched in scholarship, that British North America was a deferential society. If that claim is wrong, historians must revisit the narrative of colonial politics and society and the meaning of the American Revolution.
Tocqueville, Turner, and Turds: Four Stories of Manners in Early America
Taking dead aim at the current conventional wisdom that deference characterized colonial America, Michael Zuckerman reasserts a commonplace of earlier generations: American society was remarkably unruly and even egalitarian. He founds his argument on the structure of the large politics of public authority and, much more, on the little politics of personal relations. Analyzing personal compositions of laboring and small-owning white men - almost the only autobiographical records produced by such men that survive - he tries to recover the mentalité of the menial. Those compositions express no subordination to betters. Arguing that deference is in the outlook of the lowly or nowhere, he concludes that in colonial America, it was nowhere.
From Slaves, Convicts, and Servants to Free Passengers: The Transformation of Immigration in the Era of the American Revolution
How revolutionary was the American Revolution? How much did it affect American society? Historians have often argued that it involved only politics or that it merely ratified already-accomplished changes. In the first comprehensive statistical overview of all pre-1820 immigration into the thirteen colonies and the early United States, Aaron S. Fogleman throws new light on those questions. The article considers African slaves and all other free and servant migrants, providing estimates for both European and African ethnic groups. Until the era of the American Revolution, unfree migrants - convicts, servants, and slaves - predominated. Then free migrants began to outnumber the unfree. Was the shift toward freedom in the wake of revolution a coincidence? Fogleman gives reasons for thinking it was not.
Antiauthoritarianism and Freedom in Early America
Drawing unintended lessons from Michael Zuckerman's and Aaron S. Fogleman's essays, Kathleen M. Brown asks what the transition to a free immigration and the flourishing of antiauthoritarianism meant to African Americans and white women. Although they were unfree - indeed, enslaved people continued to be unfree migrants as they were forced to move across the South - she finds that they withheld deference. Brown suggests that eighteenth-century Americans may have been both unfree and undeferential - that hostility to deference in American history sprang less from a new freedom born of the decay of European hierarchies than from the widespread unfreedom of condition in early American society.
In the Land of the Free and the Home of the Slave, Maybe There Was Room Even for Deference
Was the Revolution truly a watershed in American history, as Aaron S. Fogleman argues in his essay on immigration? Or were the American colonies, as Michael Zuckerman insists, already so egalitarian, so hostile to European traditions of deference that the Revolution made little difference? John M. Murrin sides with Fogleman in this debate and suggests alternate readings of Zuckerman's fascinating tales of life near the bottom of North American society shortly before and during the Revolution. Deference did exist, and its power was growing. But so was resistance to the political and cultural claims of the elite. It took a serious revolution to give victory to the antideferential forces in American life.
The Impudent Historian: Challenging Deference in Early America
If Michael Zuckerman is to be believed, libertarian and populist "habits of the heart" have animated Americans from early on. Robert A. Gross complicates that view. His essay locates the mainspring of colonial life in the continuing contest between deference and democracy - a struggle that persists to our own time.
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Articles
"Pillars in the Same Temple and Priests of the Same Worship": Woman's Rights and the Politics of Church and State in Antebellum America
Who may represent another? What marks some opinion as legitimately public? In answering such fundamental questions of political philosophy, Nancy Isenberg argues, nineteenth-century Americans often looked to religious institutions as models for political arrangements. Exploring the debates between woman's rights advocates and their opponents - ministers, politicians, journalists, and jurists - she reveals the rationale for denying women public roles: In 1873 a United States Supreme Court justice drew on church precedent and divine authority to justify denying women - as representatives - the right to practice law. More, Isenberg illuminates the radicalism of the early woman's rights movement, its challenge to the basis of public life and civil society.
This Is the Army: Imagining a democratic Military in World War II
Americans used to worry about the place of the military in a democracy. For the past four decades that once-perennial concern of mainstream American political culture has been marginalized. Benjamin L. Alpers catches the moment of change, in the midst of World War II. Drawing on popular movies, writings of social scientists in uniform, and handbooks and films used to indoctrinate American troops, he discovers both lingering anxiety about the dangers of militarism and efforts to interpret life in the armed forces as expressive of such democratic values as personal autonomy and rational, voluntary cooperation. That historians have been slow to consider the unease about the military and democracy during World War II is powerful testimony to the effectiveness with which the war effort put such concerns to rest.
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Exhibition Reviews
"Textiles in America," by Regina Lee Blaszczyk "Mathew Brady's Portraits: Images as History, Photography as Art," by David P. Peeler "Abraham Lincoln and the American Experiment," by William A. Firstenberger "The Canadian Cowboy," by Richard W. Slatta "Holland: A Vision of Lakeshore Prosperity," by Tom Dietz "Main Street Five-and-Dimes: The Architectural Heritage of S. H. Kress & Co.," by Julie H. Ernstein "A New Deal for the Arts," by Helen Tangires
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Book Reviews
A complete listing of book reviews is available here.
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Letters to the Editor Announcements Recent Scholarship
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On the cover: Pretending to be a letter and a drawing by a "strong-minded American Woman," this political cartoon states that the "American female" delivers lectures, edits newspapers, and may "utter her soul from the platform." But the real mark of woman's emancipation here is that she has "asserted her right to [man's] garb, and especially to that part of it which invests the lower extremitites." Indeed, the "American female Emancipist marches on her holy war under the distinguishing garment of her husband." See Nancy Isenberg, "'Pillars in the Same Temple and Priests of the Same Worship': Woman's Rights and the Politics of Church and State in Antebellum American." Reproduction of "Woman's Emancipation," in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, August 1851.