American Revolution

The American Revolution (1775–83) was a crucial moment in the history of American masculinity. It not only severed the political relationship between the American colonies and Great Britain, but it also grounded the new nation in a set of principles that became fundamental to American understandings of manhood. Yet the Revolution's impact on constructions of masculinity was complex, both reinforcing and challenging the patriarchal social and political relations that had arrived with the earliest European colonists.

The notions of manhood that informed the Revolution were grounded primarily in a social and political ideology called republicanism and had long historic roots. The ancient Greeks and Romans, to whom American patriots looked for inspiration, had defined political participation and the rights of democratic citizenship as the purview of free men. The expansion of the early Roman republic into the Roman Empire, the American revolutionaries believed, had undermined its citizens' manliness as its republican government decayed under the influence of imperial luxury and corruption.

Revolutionary republicanism also drew on the thinking of the Whigs, political activists in eighteenth-century England. Living in an expanding British Empire, the Whigs argued that the growth of monarchical power, at the expense of the elected representatives of the House of Commons, endangered both their rights as property-owning men and their ability to act manfully and virtuously in the political realm—meaning independently of corrupting outside influence, and on the basis of moral principle rather than narrow self-interest. Whigs portrayed their concerns in sharply gendered terms: theirs was a heroic and manly defense of liberty (envisioned as a virtuous white female) against a tyrannical hypermasculine power and a seductively female corruption.

American political leaders increasingly interpreted their own position in the empire in terms of this ideology, particularly after a newly expanded British Empire began to tax the [Page 28]colonies for revenue after its 1763 victory over France in the Seven Years' War. Having previously been taxed only by their own elected assemblies, which defended their rights in the absence of representation in the House of Commons, many colonists opposed British taxation measures as efforts to reduce them to “slavery”—the opposite of independent manhood. The 1765 Stamp Act sparked a resistance movement led by groups whose names, such as the Sons of Liberty, suggested their perception of their activities as acts of manly heroism. They dramatized and put into action their movement and its attendant notion of manhood in the kinds of public spaces and activities—particularly taverns and street demonstrations—that were associated primarily with men.

Such events as the Boston Massacre (1770); the British government's response to the Boston Tea Party (1773); and the outbreak of hostilities (1775) prompted growing charges that King George III was a tyrannical patriarch whose unchecked authority and corrupt government had to be cast off. In Common Sense (1776), Thomas Paine called the king the “pretended …FATHER OF HIS PEOPLE,” and, in the first of his “Crisis” papers (1776), denounced him as “a sottish, stupid, stubborn, worthless, brutish man” (Fast, 25, 52). Many colonists further questioned the manhood of George III by noting his relative youth and inexperience—having assumed the crown in 1760 at age twenty, he was charged with lacking the maturity to govern effectively and being easily swayed by his advisers. Thomas Jefferson made George III the primary target of American grievances in the Declaration of Independence, and he praised colonial assemblies for “opposing, with manly firmness, his invasions on the rights of the people” (Koch and Peden, 23).

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