The Nation (P-List) bickering itself into fragments

[gary webb]

Thanks Laura, I haven't seen seen Hamilton either, but his appeal might
have something to do with his origins as an immigrant kid from the
Caribbean (Maybe?). In 1786, there was also Shay's Rebellion in Western
Massachusetts. Reactionary forces, like Hamilton/Madison, saw this period
as a kind of anarchy, and as a failure of the self-government experiment
thus far, prompting them at the Annapolis Convention (1786) to call for a
larger scale convention (which would be attended by Washington himself) to
reform the National government.

Like most periods in American History, a period of zeal and liberty (The
Spirit of 1776), is followed by an equal and opposite conservative
reaction.



On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 3:35 PM, Laura Kelber <laurakelber at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20171221/dbdf2215/attachment.html>