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Review Articles

Science and Nature in the Early Modern Iberian World:

A Review Essay

Emily Berquist, California State University, Long Beach

Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History

of Science in the Iberian World. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006. xiv
+ 230 pp. ISBN: 0-8047-5543-4 (hbk.); 0-8047-5544-2 (pbk.). $60.00 (hbk.); $24.95
(pbk.).
Antonio Barrera-Osorio, Experiencing Nature: The Spanish Empire and the Early
Scientific Revolution. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2006. ISBN: 978-0-292-
70981-2 (hbk.). $45.00.
Eddy Stols, Werner Thomas, and Johan Verberckmoes, eds., Naturalia, Mirabilia e
Monstrosa en los Imperios Ibéricos. Avisos de Flandes 12. x + 393 pp. Leuven:
Leuven University Press, 2007. ISBN: 978-90-5867-556-9 (pbk.). e39.50.

As the first Europeans to create settler societies in the Americas, the Spanish (and to a less-
er extent, the Portuguese) devised some of the most innovative scientific methods of the early
modern Atlantic. In order to assess the nature and people they had “found” in the so-called
New World, the Spanish created a wealth of new information-gathering techniques, such as
the massive survey effort of the sixteenth-century relaciónes geográficas, the tradition of col-
lecting natural and curious objects for display and study, and the practice of sending scien-
tific expeditions overseas to gather specimens and data. Yet the historical record often
obscures these natural history achievements. Instead, the “hard” sciences of mathematics,
physics, and chemistry that flourished in the Northern European empires are celebrated as
the beginnings of modern scientific inquiry.
When faced with such prejudices against the Iberian scientific tradition, historians of early
modern Iberian science have often responded in kind. In order to prove that Iberian science
was a key part of early modern European intellectual culture, the historians tend to seek only
the “modern”, the “Enlightened”, and the “revolutionary” in Iberian science. While this pur-
suit is an important one, it fails to fully illustrate the complex nature of early modern science
in Spain, Portugal, and their dominions. In the Iberian world of the sixteenth, seventeenth,
and even eighteenth centuries, portents, omens, and even monsters happily co-existed with
the most up-to-date empirical scientific techniques. Three recent publications that celebrate
the contradictions and grey areas that characterised the early modern Iberian scientific
approach are Jorge Cañizares’s Nature, Empire, and Nation, Antonio Barrera’s Expe-
riencing Nature, and an edited volume titled Naturalia, Milrabilia & Monstrosa en los
Imperios Ibéricos.
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Since his award-winning 2001 publication How to Write the History of the New World,
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra has reconceptualised our understanding of early modern Hispanic
science and its place within the Atlantic world. Nature, Empire, and Nation is a compilation
of his most influential essays on the history of Hispanic science from the early colonial peri-
od through the nineteenth century. Taken together, they demonstrate how the much-ignored
scientific contributions of the early modern Hispanic world in fact laid much of the ground-
work for modern scientific practices.
In “Chivalric Epistemology and Patriotic Narratives”, Cañizares demonstrates how the cler-
gy who became the first natural historians of America created “patriotic genealogies” about
the natural world of America. These described local natural features in order to demonstrate
how Spain’s American possessions were just as important and useful to the empire as the
Spanish provinces were. Such genealogies eventually became the “patriotic epistemologies”
that eighteenth-century Spanish American creoles used to defend their patrias from
Northern European detractors. Thus, the sixteenth-century practice became a central aspect
of an Enlightenment discourse. Equally groundbreaking was the “chivalric epistemology” of
early modern Spanish scientific texts. This equated the bureaucratic cosmographers who
mapped the overseas kingdoms with the crusading knights of early modern Europe.
Cañizares argues that this paradigm was influential far beyond Spanish America: famous
Northern European explorers such as Walter Raleigh and John Smith followed in the foot-
steps of the Spanish and viewed their natural history work as a crusade to capture and dom-
inate unknown nature.
Spanish imperial science was not innovative solely in the patriotic, chivalric tradition; it was
also at the forefront of developing a scientific understanding of race. In “New World, New
Stars”, Cañizares examines how creole scientists in seventeenth-century Mexico used the
science of astrology to systematise their understanding of race. In order to demonstrate that
they were not irredeemably harmed by their New World origins, creole scientists argued that
the astrological configurations of the New World affected European and Native American
bodies differently. They argued that Europeans did not naturally deteriorate under the nega-
tive astrological alignment of the western hemisphere. However, Indians and Africans had
“racialized bodies” that were more susceptible to such negative influences. The creoles used
this idea to conveniently explain how the achievements of the Indians had deteriorated as
time progressed, while Europeans, of course, had advanced inexorably towards a brighter
future. Cañizares concludes that even though changing epistemological fashion subsequent-
ly obscured this “science” of racialised bodies, Spanish-Americans nevertheless deserve the
dubious honour of being the first to articulate a scientific understanding of race.
While Cañizares definitively demonstrates that the early modern Iberian scientific culture
was both Western and modern, his work is especially innovative in how it recognises and
embraces the aspects of this science that are not entirely modern or rational. In “From
Baroque to Modern Colonial Science”, he finds eighteenth-century Mexico to be particularly
rich in the emblematic reading of nature that was popular in the Baroque period. Creole cler-
gy found rocks shaped like crosses and collected what they believed to be teeth of giants. In
the early days of Spanish colonisation, such searches for the fantastic were de rigueur
throughout the Atlantic world, but in Spanish America, they continued long after much of the
rest of the Atlantic world had dismissed them as superstitious.
While Cañizares’s work spans the entire early modern period in the Hispanic world,
Antonio Barrera-Osorio’s Experiencing Nature: The Spanish American Empire and the
Early Scientific Revolution focuses on the sixteenth century in order to demonstrate that the
scientific techniques developed by the Spanish in America were so influential that they con-
stituted nothing less than “the early scientific revolution”. This was an essentially modern,
experimental science in which the Spanish crown oversaw a network of doctors, travellers,
ecclesiastics, and bureaucrats who gathered information about the nature of the New World.
This data was then processed through standardised channels and disseminated throughout
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the empire according to an intricately organised set of channels and processes. Barrera
argues that the early modern Spanish scientific paradigm was so advanced that the other
European powers simply sought to imitate it as best they could.
Experiencing Nature’s greatest contribution is in describing how this revolutionary
approach to natural history functioned at the local level. Barrera describes in detail the sci-
entific activities of Antonio Villasante, a sixteenth-century Santo Domingo encomendero who
studied and marketed the balsam produced by the local trees of Santo Domingo. Barrera
explains how Villasante had to secure royal monopoly rights for exploiting the product. Then,
in order to prove the commercial viability of this American version of a popular Old World
medicinal treatment, Villasante gathered information from indigenous informants who
explained their traditional uses of the plant. This data was compiled into an official report,
and then Villasante set about performing a series of tests he called esperiencias. By soaking
the balsam in water, cutting it as it dripped from tree trunks, and by heating it in a small pot,
the encomendero/scientist carefully prepared the balsam for human use. He concluded that
his “experiences” showed Santo Domingo balsam was useful for healing all types of wounds
and abrasions, for treating gout, and for minimising tooth pain. Villasante used direct obser-
vational knowledge to prove the commercial viability of the Santo Domingo balsam. He was
one of many empirical innovators whose methods would thereafter be imitated throughout
the Atlantic world.
Barrera also emphasises the role of the Casa de Contratación, or house of trade, in early
modern Hispanic science. The Casa, which was established in 1503, controlled all matters
of sea travel; including charts, navigation, and pilots. Barrera points out that it pre-dated
Francis Bacon’s research and the Royal Society of London (est. 1660.) Just like Villasante,
the Casa privileged direct experience with the New World—it tested pilots both on their abil-
ity to read instruments and charts and on their firsthand experience navigating in America.
There is much to admire in this book, and it is a particularly suitable introduction for new
students of Hispanic imperial science. However, Barrera’s focus on the innovative and revo-
lutionary aspects of this science lead him to at times minimise those elements that do not
easily fit with his emphasis on modernity. For instance, he mentions that indigenous inform-
ants were vital sources of information in this period; but he could offer greater analysis of
their role in the new scientific epistemologies of the early modern period.
While Barrera’s argument necessitates an emphasis on the modern and the revolutionary
in Hispanic science, the essays in Naturalia, Mirabilia & Monstrosa en los Imperios Ibéricos
celebrate aspects of early modern science that are often relegated to a dark hall closet. These
essays in Spanish, Portuguese, English, and French all demonstrate how natural wonders
were integral to early modern man’s understanding of nature and the self.
One of the strengths of the book is its focus on the role of native epistemologies in early
modern Iberian science. Lidia Gómez’s piece on Nahua records of natural phenomena in the
Puebla region examines documentation on comets, eclipses, and earthquakes in order to
question how the process of recording these natural events changed when native and
Hispanic epistemologies came into contact. Using visual and documentary evidence, Gómez
concludes that while early colonial Nahua saw such portents as signs indicating threats to
their social order, as the colonial period advanced they began to see them as divine punish-
ment for their sins—just as the Europeans portrayed them. Pablo Escalante Gonzalbo also
examines the interplay of native and European epistemologies in his study of a man named
Gregorio García Díaz, who was once struck by lightning and then began an informal cam-
paign to ward off storms by performing a ritual in which he blew his cigarette smoke in the
shape of a cross. Escalante posits that this syncretic ritual, which used an Indian tradition to
create a Hispanic symbol, represents the everyday reality of magical thought in colonial New
Spain.
In addition to stressing the exchange between Hispanic and indigenous American cul-
tures, the essays in Naturalia also examine how eighteenth-century Iberian science featured
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many continuities with earlier intellectual traditions. For instance, Neil Safier’s “The
Marvelous and the Mundane in Eighteenth-Century Amazonia” traces the journey of a
Portuguese oidor named Francisco Ribero de Sampaio through the Brazilian Amazon in the
late eighteenth century. Although Sampaio was sent to make a modern investigation of the
local Indians, Safier finds him uninterested in empirical methods and direct observation.
Instead, Sampaio was obsessed with compiling relevant information from travel accounts,
natural histories, and philosophical works. This humanist technique of information gathering
demonstrates that even in the eighteenth century, the baroque still influenced Iberian episte-
mologies.
However, the most obvious and compelling example of “Baroque” survivals in early mod-
ern Iberian scientific culture was its continuing fascination with monsters, freaks, and acci-
dents of nature. Louise Benat offers an engaging study of the imperial politics of monsters,
where she demonstrates that before the age of discovery, the monstrous was easily accept-
ed since so much of the world remained unknown. By the age of colonisation, science had
trumped wonder, and monsters were willed out of existence because they were “politically
incorrect”. Likewise, the essay on “Lo Monstruoso en Nueva España” takes a more quotidi-
an approach that reminds us that despite their ouster from imperial politics, monsters were
still very much a part of everyday life—even in Enlightenment periodicals like the Gaceta de
México. The fact that the very arbiters of the Enlightenment in Spanish America regularly
reported on monsters, freaks, and their provenances, reminds the reader that even in the
midst of the Bourbon program for progress, modernity, and rational science, many aspects
of the Baroque mindset were alive and well.

Founding Fathers and Revolutionary Heirs

Helena M. Wall, Pomona College

Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint L’Ouverture?: A Biography. New York, NY: Pantheon
Books, 2007. xii + 340 pp. ISBN: 978-0-375-42337-6 (hbk.). $27.00.
R. William Weisberger, Dennis P. Hupchick, and David L. Anderson, eds., Profiles of
Revolutionaries on Both Sides of the Atlantic, 1700-1850. Social Science
Monographs. New York, NY: Columbia University Press, 2007. vi + 338 pp. ISBN: 0-
88033-970-5 (hbk.). $40.00.
Gordon S. Wood, Revolutionary Characters: What Made the Founders Different.
New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2006. xiv + 322 pp. ISBN: 978-0-14-311208-2 (pbk.).
$25.95.
Craig Nelson, Thomas Paine: Enlightenment, Revolution, and the Birth of Modern
Nations. London and New York, NY: Penguin Books, 2006. xviii + 398 pp. ISBN: 978-
0-14-311238-9 (pbk.). $27.95.
Consider the following thumbnail sketch of a late-eighteenth-century revolutionary in the
Atlantic world. He is a charismatic military leader fighting a larger, better-equipped enemy,
who survives several reverses to secure eventual victory for his side. He is a slaveholder who
comes to oppose slavery. He owns substantial property and takes a lively interest in business
ventures but is careful not to seem money-grubbing. An honoured leader of his people, he
is increasingly criticised for autocratic tendencies. He is a Freemason. And he is highly self-
conscious about his place in society and history and is ever-attentive to his self-presentation
and public image.
Most Americans know that George Washington fits this profile. Few would recognise that
so does Toussaint L’Ouverture. And therein lies a tale. It is a tale that these books—biogra-
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phies of Thomas Paine and Toussaint L’Ouverture, one collection of essays on the American
founders, and another on a number of revolutionary leaders from the Americas to Europe—
help us understand as we reflect on common elements and divergent responses in the expe-
riences of several leaders in the Age of Revolutions.
We can begin with Gordon Wood’s Revolutionary Characters, a collection of essays on
eight American founders, including the odd man out, Aaron Burr. These are framed by open-
ing and concluding essays on the founders’ relationship to the Enlightenment and then to
modern public opinion and the expansion of print and the political public. These essays are
revised versions of pieces published elsewhere and they take up several issues examined in
some of Wood’s larger works, notably The Radicalism of the American Revolution and The
Americanization of Benjamin Franklin. These are graceful and illuminating essays, and they
direct our attention to several common themes in the lives of the revolutionaries and the
world they helped change. To begin with, despite some significant differences in their per-
sonal histories, they were roughly similar in their social position, which was not that of a tra-
ditional political elite born and bred to rule. As Wood notes, as “political leaders they consti-
tuted a peculiar sort of elite, a self-created aristocracy largely based on merit and talent…”
(Wood, 11). This is most obvious in the cases of men such as Hamilton, that “bastard brat
of a Scotch peddler”, and Paine and Franklin and Adams, all men who rose to influence by
dint of ferocious combinations of talent, energy, ambition, and determination, all men who
could respond nimbly to well-timed offers of patronage and to opportunities they saw or
seized. But even Jefferson and Washington were, Wood notes, first-generation gentlemen;
most of them marked the first generation in their families to attend college, and Washington
always remained a bit defensive and self-conscious about his lack of education. The one
great exception to this pattern, the one founder who seemed by birth, breeding, education,
worldliness, and social ease to belong to the elite was Aaron Burr. But he squandered his
birthright by his libertine ways, and the chronic whiff of financial desperation that enveloped
him, together with his blatant self-interestedness, opportunism, and slipperiness. Washington
and Adams and Franklin worked hard to become gentlemen and they took seriously all that
was required of them in that position. Burr flaunted the privileges but shirked the responsi-
bilities of his status—indeed, he seemed to sneer at the high-minded aspirations of his
cohort. In doing so, he betrayed not only his class but the liberal, disinterested ideals of the
revolutionary leaders.
And these liberal, disinterested ideals, Wood makes clear, defined this group of leaders
more powerfully than any other elements. Their views and their aspirations were rooted in
what it meant to be a “gentleman” in the Age of Enlightenment. It is a measure of how
removed we are from the intellectual world of the eighteenth century that it requires some
effort to excavate—and perhaps rehabilitate—the term “gentleman”. For the revolutionary
leaders, to be a gentleman carried moral and political meaning far more than it designated
social status—although that was never irrelevant. “It meant”, Wood writes,

being reasonable, tolerant, honest, virtuous, and “candid”, an important eighteenth-

century characteristic that connoted being unbiased and just as well as frank and
sincere. Being a gentleman was the prerequisite to becoming a political leader. It
signified being cosmopolitan, standing on elevated ground in order to have a
larger view of human affairs, and being free of the prejudices, parochialism, and
religious enthusiasm of the vulgar and the barbaric. It meant, in short, having all
those characteristics that we today sum up in the idea of a liberal arts education
(Wood, 15).

These gentlemen were pre-eminently men of ideas, engaged and passionate citizens of the
Republic of Letters. It is not surprising that so many of them were drawn to Freemasonry,
with its emphases on enlightenment, improvement, brotherhood, and universalism. As R.
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William Weisberger notes in his introduction to Profiles of Revolutionaries in Atlantic

History, 1700-1850, connections between revolution and Freemasonry appear not only in
British North America and Haiti, but among the Brissotins in France, the leaders of inde-
pendence movements in South America, and the Decembrists of Russia. In fact, a memo-
rable witness to the appeal of Freemasonry is the character of Pierre in War and Peace,
whose efforts to find enlightenment and purpose in Freemasonry are of a piece with his plans
to improve the lot of the peasantry and his study of manuals on more efficient and innova-
tive agricultural techniques. Like Pierre, these revolutionaries wanted to apply their ideas to
reform the world according to rational, scientific, liberal principles, and to create a kind of
“international republican politics” (Wood, 211). They wanted to spread, in Craig Nelson’s
words, the “religion of light” throughout the world, banishing prejudice, superstition, and
selfishness in favour of progress, freedom, and reason (Nelson, 24).
Among such thinkers, no one was more passionate or more hopeful than Thomas Paine,
as both Wood’s essay and Nelson’s smart, lively, and often moving biography demonstrate.
Both authors note the ways in which Paine was closely linked to the American founders but
seemed, always, just a bit out of place among them, both at the time and in historical mem-
ory. He never succeeded in wearing lightly the airs of gentility and he completely lacked—
sometimes with disastrous consequences—any political agility or ability (or willingness) to
temper utopianism with pragmatism. Yet no one served the cause of the Republic of Letters
so fervently or effectively as Paine. Wood calls him America’s “first public intellectual”, and
both he and Nelson succeed in restoring Paine to a deserved, central place in late-eigh-
teenth-century politics and thought. A skilful participant in and beneficiary of the expansion
of print media in this period, Paine wrote with incisiveness and urgency, blazing his way
through pamphlets and treatises. His writing expressed often radical ideas and abstract prin-
ciples but they were also high-energy calls to political action—a combination Nelson cap-
tures nicely in calling Common Sense a “self-help book, the help being for those who could
never imagine life without a monarch” (Nelson, 84). In this, too, Paine was joined to the more
familiar founders who were emphatically doers as well as thinkers. Wood notes the distinc-
tiveness of this union of the abstract and the practical and considers it one of the essential
qualities that sets this group apart in American history: “Somehow for a brief moment ideas
and power, intellectualism and politics, came together—indeed were one with each other—
in a way never again duplicated in American history” (Wood, 10).
Paine and the rest of the founders displayed another quality that set them apart: their high
degree of self-consciousness about their status as civilised gentlemen in the provinces, their
role in society, and their place in history. (Here, too, Burr is the exception that proves the
rule.) Much of their character and their ambition were rooted in their acute awareness of their
standing as provincials, the great distance between the crudity of American society and the
sophistication of England. As William Livingston observed, America was “just emerging from
the rude unpolished condition of an Infant country…” (in Wood, 20). One result of this
heightened self-awareness was to sharpen their interest in enlightened ideas and society. As
Wood notes, “all the talk of acquiring the enlightened attributes of a gentleman had a spe-
cial appeal for all the outlying underdeveloped provinces of the greater British world,
Scotland as well as North America” (Wood, 20). It resulted, too, as Bernard Bailyn has argued
and (as Wood also notes), in the appearance of highly creative, original, and imaginative
political thinking, a greater willingness “to create the world anew”, among both Scots and
Americans.1
All of the American founders in one way or another expressed their sense of the historical
opportunity they faced and their obligation, as public figures, to bring their historical moment
to fruition. Here again was a signal contribution of Paine; he turned the American Revolution
“into a world-historical event and the harbinger of world citizenship and world peace”, Wood
writes. “Other Americans conceived of the revolution in these grandiose universalist terms,
but no one was able to say it as he did” (Wood, 212). Paine’s Letter to the Abbe Raynal cap-
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tures the depth of this conviction that the American Revolution would change the world in
fundamental ways:

Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary
than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with
other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used. We can look
back on our own prejudices, as if they had been the prejudices of other people. We
now see and know they were prejudices and nothing else; and relieved from their
shackles, enjoy a freedom of mind, we felt not before (in Nelson, 162).

The immediate aftermath of the American Revolution seemed to justify such universalist
dreams. As David Armitage notes in The Declaration of Independence: A Global History, the
“ultimate success of the Americans’ claim to independence encouraged others to follow their
example, not only in claiming statehood as an escape from empire, but also declaring inde-
pendence as the mark of sovereignty”. Furthermore, the “American Declaration also provid-
ed the primary model for the first great wave of declarations of independence that swept the
trans-Atlantic world in the first half of the nineteenth century”. But there soon came a sharp
reminder that the American model would prove inadequate to some cases. As Armitage indi-
cates, the Haitian declaration was a telling exception to the pattern of countries, such as
many in South America, emulating the American example. The first draft of the Haitian dec-
laration, it is true, did imitate the American document but was rejected as too mild. In lan-
guage far from mild, the writer of the revised version, Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, explained
why. “’To draw up the act of independence”, he wrote, “we need the skin of a white man for
parchment, his skull for an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen’.”2
The Haitian revolution had moved too far beyond the modest goals of its origins to equiv-
ocate at the moment of independence. Begun as a colonial rebellion against France by priv-
ileged white and mulatto colonists, with slaves in the northern part of the island rebelling not
to end slavery but to reform it and improve its conditions, and with L’Ouverture’s own con-
version from royalism to republicanism occurring well along in the movement, the radical-
ism of the Haitian revolution took time to emerge. But by 1 January 1804, when Dessalines
issued the declaration—months after L’Ouverture’s death in a French prison—Haiti had com-
pleted the first successful slave revolt in the hemisphere and established the first free black
republic. Its achievement, far from vindicating the American founders’ hopes, made many of
them queasy. In fact, the United States only recognised Haitian independence in 1862, long
after France itself had done so.3 To Thomas Jefferson and many others, the Haitian success
was a slaveholder’s nightmare, not an Enlightenment dream.
American uneasiness with the Haitian Revolution brings us face-to-face with the glaring
problem of slavery in the American Revolution and the founders’ responses to it—as well as
our responses to them and to the failure of the revolution to eliminate slavery. Wood notes
that all of “the revolutionary leaders became aware of the excruciating contradiction between
their revolution on behalf of liberty and American slavery” (Wood, 38). But they responded in
divergent ways. Hamilton, who had grown up amidst West Indian slavery, strongly opposed
it and worked for antislavery initiatives in New York—alongside Aaron Burr, as it happens.
Jefferson’s many tortured reflections on the subject are well known and bulk large in any his-
torical bill of indictment against him. Neither he nor Madison followed Washington in freeing
their slaves; and Washington’s position evolved only slowly, gradually, and privately. One of
Benjamin Franklin’s first acts upon retirement was to acquire slaves, a visible display of his
newly established rank and his newly acquired freedom from labour. Yet, as William Pencak
discusses in his essay on Franklin in Profiles of Revolutionaries, Franklin petitioned Congress
to abolish slavery just before his death in 1790, and his last work was an antislavery tract
(Pencak, in Weisberger, Hupchick, and Anderson, 66). And it is of course no surprise to find
Thomas Paine outraged and fervent in his opposition. In African Slavery in America (1775)
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he asked, “Is the barbarous enslaving [of] our inoffensive neighbours, and treating them like
wild beasts subdued by force, reconcilable with divine precepts? Is this doing to them as we
would desire they should do to us? If they could carry off and enslave some thousands of us,
would we think it just?—One would almost wish they could for once; it might convince more
than reason, or the Bible” (in Nelson, 65). Wood suggests that it was the founders’ own mis-
guided optimism—or wishful thinking—that allowed them to defer the question of slavery,
persuaded that it was headed toward gradual extinction (Wood, 27). Perhaps so. But while
that explanation may be intellectually persuasive, it is bound to be morally unsatisfying for
Americans reflecting on the origins of their nation.
The problem of slavery is at the heart of another broad and vexing issue about these
Atlantic revolutionaries, the strange career of their legacies, and it arises most acutely in the
American case. Toussaint L’Ouverture, to be sure, remains an enigmatic and complex figure,
a screen on which to project different views of the Haitian revolt. He is remembered, as
Madison Smartt Bell suggests in his informative, sparely narrated biography, as either a lib-
erator, or the first in a line of Haitian dictators, or both. But the importance of a successful
slave revolt, and the establishment of an independent black republic, speaks for itself.
L’Ouverture—and the French—recognised that the promise of the Haitian Revolution went
far beyond one man. As L’Ouverture said, as he boarded the boat that would take him to his
French prison cell, “In overthrowing me, you have only cut down the trunk of the tree of lib-
erty of the Blacks in Saint Domingue: it will spring back from the roots, for they are numer-
ous and deep” (in Bell, 265).
The American revolutionaries, by contrast, had a much more troubled view of their lega-
cy and largely felt that they had failed. John Adams, never the sunniest temperament, wrote
to Benjamin Rush in 1812 that for over fifty years he had felt that he “constantly lived in an
enemies Country” (Wood, 202). But even the ever-optimistic, naively sanguine Thomas
Jefferson wrote gloomily on the subject: “All, all dead, and ourselves left alone amidst a new
generation whom we know not, and who knows not us…I regret that I am now to die in the
belief that the useless sacrifice of themselves by the generation of 1776…is to be thrown
away by the unwise and unworthy passions of their sons…I have sometimes asked myself
whether my country is the better for my having lived at all” (in Nelson, 337).
Wood argues that the founders’ laments arose not from failure but from the very success
of the Revolution, from expanding democratic and egalitarian impulses that the revolution-
aries had unleashed but afterwards could not control or trust. But some of the same ambiva-
lence, the same difficulty in making sense of the Revolution and its legacy, underpins mod-
ern Americans’ unusual and somewhat troubling relationship to the framers. As Wood notes
in opening his collection: “No other major nation honors its past historical characters…in
quite the manner we Americans do” (Wood, 3). From historical re-enactments to actors
giving speeches and press conferences in the personae of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin
Franklin, on one side, to fits of debunking and wholesale rejection of the framers as elite
racists, on the other—from filiopietism to hero-worship to castigation, there is something
downright odd in Americans’ continuing interest and emotional investment in the framers.
Perhaps Americans find it too difficult to come to terms with the full complexity of the
Revolution and its leaders, its achievements as well as its ambiguities and limitations. But
surely a politically responsible, as well as intellectually tenable, course would be to abandon
the costumery and apologetics and denunciations, and focus instead on the Atlantic revolu-
tionaries’ ideas and aspirations. Craig Nelson offers a sensible and shrewd conclusion to the
question of how and why, and in what useful ways, we should attend to the revolutionaries:
“[I]t could be said that the most significant reason to read the works of Thomas Paine today
is an act of fealty, for anyone living in a modern nation will already know by heart every one
of his ideas and innovations, as they have been so completely adopted by modern govern-
ment and society as to seem as though never needing invention…Yet, for anyone needing to
be reminded of core Enlightenment beliefs—that government can only be empowered by its
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citizens; that such citizens are born with certain natural rights; that none are born superior to
any other; that all will be treated equally before the law; and that the state has a duty to help
the neediest of its people—reading Paine offers a political and spiritual inspiration, one that
has driven men and women to achieve greatness across history” (Nelson, 338-39).

Notes

1 Bernard Bailyn, To Begin the World Anew (New York: Knopf, 2003).
2 David Armitage, The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2007), 113, 114-15. See review in this issue of Itinerario.
3 Armitage, Declaration of Independence, 117.