The Nation (P-List) bickering itself into fragments

[Smoke Teff]

"[...]the Times are as impossible to calculate, this Advent, as the
Distance to a Star."

On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 4:24 PM, Smoke Teff <smoketeff at gmail.com> wrote:

> All really good stuff.
>
> It's worth trying to mentally reconstruct just how anarchistic and
> precarious this must all seem to contemporary observers, Cherrycoke et al.
> The situation in '86 is so fragmented that you have, on the one hand,
> Shay's Rebellion, and on the other, a massive centralization of political
> power into the federal system. Meanwhile, there's no compelling historical
> reason for anyone to think this particular vaguely democratic, kingless
> state has any possibility of enduring.
>
> On Thu, Dec 21, 2017 at 3:38 PM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>
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