Renegade: Henry Miller and the Making of "Tropic of Cancer" Read Free Page B

more serious threat than Shays’s Rebellion and with good reason: pioneer Americans drank whiskey all day long at a per capita rate of five gallons a year and would not brook an excise tax on what was for them meat and drink and a form of money.
    There was another tax revolt in that same state in 1799. More serious still in its potential implications was Aaron Burr’s murky plot that may have aimed ultimately at the dissolution of the Union. At the outset of the War of 1812 there were numerous antiwar protests, as well as violent demonstrations in support of it, including one in Baltimore where in June a mob destroyed the offices of the antiwar Federal Republican. When the paper tried to resume publication from a private house, that place was also attacked by superpatriots. On this occasion, Light Horse Harry Lee, hero of the Revolution (who had also foughtagainst the insurgents in the Whiskey Rebellion) and who was defending the paper’s right to publish, was so severely beaten by the mob that he eventually died of his injuries. More civil but more serious was the dissension evident at the Hartford Convention of 1815, which among other things challenged the very notion of a federal system that could appropriate customs money collected by the constituent states.
    This turbulent history helps explain why Washington, Adams, Benjamin Rush, Fisher Ames, Alexander Hamilton, and others of the founding fathers viewed the American people as volatile and unruly, and why Hamilton is said to have called them a “great beast.” Whether he actually said this or not, there is little doubt that he viewed his fellow citizens with alarm. At the Constitutional Convention he observed that the masses “are turbulent and changing: they seldom judge or determine right.” Therefore, it was necessary that they be “sternly governed by the rich & wellborn”—not exactly a ringing endorsement of a democratic republic.
    Perhaps no document surviving from the republic’s early moments better preserves the striking contradictions between the radical idealism that fueled the founding of the nation and the violent, anarchical, racist tendencies lying beneath this than J. Hector St. John Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer. Well known in its author’slifetime, the book has enjoyed a sustained popularity ever since as a classic example of American idealism seen at its formative, generative roots. Here were stories of nameless immigrants who had come to these shores with nothing but pluck and who had swiftly prospered. Here were the fisherfolk of New England, bearing their hardships with a ruddy fortitude. Here were the yeoman farmers—God’s chosen, as Jefferson had remarked—living lives of admirable simplicity and daily gratitude. And here too was that “fresh, green breast of the new world” (as F. Scott Fitzgerald was to put it in The Great Gatsby), a place of such inexhaustible plentitude as to seem positively para-disal to the newcomers. The American, Crèvecoeur writes in letter three, is in fact a new man, Adamaic in an unspoiled world and destined to carry the arts of industry ever westward, toward the gilded East that Columbus had vainly sought, and so complete the circle of human destiny.
    It is true that the sustained popularity of Letters rests on Crèvecoeur’s almost ecstatic evocation of America in the shining hour of its infancy. But there are darker tones here as well that speak of that baffled incredulity and vengeance that were the consequences of the unlooked-for finding of the New World, and Crèvecoeur had seen too much and was too honest to write only in praise. In theAmerican South where he was received by the gentry he saw the “peculiar institution” of slavery at work, and in the woods of South Carolina he stumbled upon a shocking scene—the punishment of an insubordinate slave—that called into the gravest question those egalitarian ideals that had gone into the making of the American Adam. 2 At