The Nation (P-List) bickering itself into fragments

[Laura Kelber]

I've been (very slowly) reading Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898,
by Wallace and Burrows, and happen to be right at the year 1786 in the
chronology. By this point, the radical wing of the Whigs had been beaten
back by the landed, upper-crust types, in cahoots with the Tories and
conservative Whigs such as Hamilton (who's being currently recast, though I
haven't seen it, as some sort of hip-hop populist hero). The entire history
of the soon-to-be city, from the arrival of the Dutch, seems to have
centered on Ale and Demon Rum for the lower classes, rapacious
property-acquisition for the upper classes, and gross income inequality -
not so different from today.

Riffing off of the excerpt from Frederick Douglass that John posted, the
post-war period was a particularly bad one for African slaves in NY. During
the pre-war period, poor whites, indentured servants and black slaves and
freedmen seemed to mingle, more or less freely in many of the drinking
establishments - drinking and just generally hanging out and socializing
being more of a defiance to slave-owners than an opiate to prevent
rebellion. And  African-Americans enjoyed relative economic and social
freedom under British occupation. But the post-war NY colony resisted the
abolition of slavery and even enforced the right to own slaves. Laws in NYC
allowed for voluntary manumission, but required anyone freeing a slave to
certify that the slave had the means of self-support, or to post a
200-pound bond to the city to ensure that the slave wouldn't become a
public burden - not much of an inducement for slaveholders.



On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 1:25 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:

> "This Christmastide of 1786, with the War settl'd and the Nation bickering
> itself into fragments...'
>
> I've taken this as foreshadowing of the coming Constitutional Convention
> which would take place in 1787 in Philadelphia. It also sheds some light on
> the state of affairs in Philadelphia, and most importantly, the state of
> affairs of Pennsylvania. As a reference, and a good source of context, I've
> read Gordon S Wood's  *The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787. *
>
> After the Declaration of Independence (in where else, but Philly),
> Legislatures in the former colonies went about forming their State
> Constitutions. The most interesting was Pennsylvania's.
>
> In Akhil Amar's *America's Constitution: A Biography* (2005):
>
> "Most democratic of all were the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776 and the
> New York Constitution of 1777, the only two Revolution-era documents
> promising to allocate all future legislative seats solely on the basis of
> population, as measured by periodic enumerations. Pennsylvania's
> constitution announced that "representation in proportion to the number of
> taxable inhabitants is the only principle which can at all times secure
> liberty, and make the voice of of a majority of the people the law of the
> land; therefore the general assembly" was obliged to conduct a septennial
> census and reallocate assembly seats "in proportion to the number of
> taxables." "
>
> Gordon S Wood describes the Constitution making process, in the general
> sense as applied to all legislatures of the Declaration: "... the
> Revolution became something more than a move for home rule. In 1776 and
> more intensely in the coming years in different times and places, and in
> varying degrees it broadened into a struggle among Americans themselves for
> the fruits of Independence, becoming in truth a multifaceted affair, with
> layers below layers, in which men were viewed from very opposite directions
> on the political and social scale. (pg.83)"
>
> Of the Pennsylvania Constitution he writes: "The Constitution was radical;
> the ideology extreme; and the political situation revolutionary. Yet what
> happened in Pennsylvania was only an extension and exaggeration of what was
> taking place elsewhere in America. Because of the peculiar abruptness of
> its internal revolution, Pennsylvania tended to telescope into several
> months time changes in ideas that in other states often took years to work
> out and became in effect a laboratory for the developing of lines of
> radical Whig thought that elsewhere in 1776 remained generally rudimentary
> and diffuse. In the  Pennsylvania press of 1776 the typical Whig outbursts
> against Tories and Crown were overshadowed by expressions of parvenu
> resentment and social hostility. (pg. 85)"
>
> "Equality became the great rallying cry of the Pennsylvania radicals in
> the spring and summer of 1776. The former rulers, it was charged were "a
> minority of rich men," a few "men of fortune,"  an "aristocratical junto"
> who had always strained every nerve "to make the common and middle class of
> people their beasts of burden" Such aristocrats derived "no right to power
> from their wealth." The Revolution against Britain was on behalf of the
> people. And who were the people in America, but the ordinary farmers and
> mechanics? (ibid.)"
>
> It's interesting to not that by the time of the Christmastide of 1786
> these egalitarian winds were slowly dissolving into what became the
> Constitutional Convention of 1787. And the factions which resented the 1776
> State constitutions were gaining ground in the State. But they did leave
> their mark and the 1787 Federal Constitution, in the apportionment of the
> House.
>
> I doubt that Pynchon had Constitutions in mind particularly when speaking
> of the "fragments,"  but those fragments were certainly metastasizing in
> the city of Philadelphia, the state of Pennsylvania, and in the Country at
> large.
>
>
>
>
>
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