antw. re Re: MDDM Gershom's Intervention

[Paul Mackin]

To give some idea of what  any 18th Century idea of social equality was up
against I quote this passage in Gordon S. Wood's The Radicalism of the American
Revolution. Hope I'm not violating fair use.


So distinctive and so separated was the aristocracy from ordinary folk that many
still thought the two groups represented two orders of being. Indeed, we will
never appreciate the radicalism of the eighteenth century revolutionary idea that
all men were created equal unless we see it within the age-old tradition of
difference. Gentlemen and commoners had different psyches, different emotional
makeups, different natures. Ordinary people were made only "to be born and eat
and sleep and die, and be forgotten." Like Mozart's Papageno, they knew "little
of the motives which stimulate the higher ranks to action, pride, honour, and
ambition. In general it is only hunger which can spur and goad them on to
labour." Ordinary people were thought to be different physically, and because of
varying diets and living conditions, no doubt in many cases they were different.
People often assumed that a handsome child, though apparrently a commoner, had to
be some gentleman's bastard offspring. At times the aristocracy thought that
common people resembed Jonathan Swift's Yahoos, having only appetites and being
little more than "cattle." George Washington called ordinary farmers "the grazing
multitude" Colonel Landon Carter, a leader of one of Virginia's most
distinguished families, saw little to respect among ordinary people and thought
that some of them were "but Idiots." Even John Adams early in his career refered
to them as the "common Herd of Mankind. " "Common Persons," he said, "have no
idea [of] Learning, Eloquence, and Genius," and their "vulgar, rustic
Imaginations" were easily excited. To Nathanael Greene "the great body of the
People" were always "contracted, selfish, and illiberal," and not to be confused
with the "noble" natures of gentlemen. As the ambitious son of a Rhode Island
ironmonger desperate for distinction and feeling surounded by a "mist [of]
ignorance," Green was bound to exaggerate the inferiority of the vulgar. But
often other, more established gentry also regarded the common poople as
narrow-minded and bigotted with little awareness of the world. Despite the best
efforts of enlightened elites to spread orthodox Christianity and reason, many
ordinary people still believed in an occult world of spirits and demons and still
relied on a wide variety of magical practices. They were presumably unimaginaitve
and unreflective and rarely saw beyond their own backyards and thier own bellies.
The had, said Gouverner Morris, "no morals but their interests."

p. 27