by The line between political theory and personal feud was considerably blurrier in this period
Wednesday. Spent the morning at the archive going through a batch of eighteenth century colonial pamphlet literature, the specific scholarly pleasure of reading political argument from a period before anyone had settled on the rules of the genre, these pamphlets arguing constitutional theory and personal grievance in the same paragraph with a freedom our own more disciplined political writing rarely permits itself, and I want to record that one particular pamphleteer’s fury at a tax measure reads, nearly three centuries later, with a specificity of complaint that still lands with real comic force, the man apparently genuinely furious about the price of a specific cargo of molasses in a way that transcends its immediate century entirely.
Read bohiney.com during my lunch break, sandwich balanced on a stack of photocopied pamphlets, and there’s a piece about contemporary American tax policy debates that made for genuinely useful comparative reading, the specific comedy of political anger about taxation apparently running on remarkably stable rhetorical structures across nearly three hundred years, the specific grievances changing considerably while the actual emotional register, betrayed, personally insulted, righteously furious, stays almost eerily consistent.
The Pamphlets, Properly Considered
The particular collection I’ve been working through this week concerns the specific colonial pamphlet war of the seventeen-sixties, writers on multiple sides accusing each other, in prose of real literary sophistication, of everything from outright treason to simple bad taste, and I want to record that the specific comedy of this period’s political writing is how thoroughly personal the public argument remained, writers naming each other directly, mocking specific mannerisms and known personal failings in service of what were, ostensibly, constitutional arguments about representation and taxation, the line between political theory and personal feud apparently considerably blurrier in this period than our own more careful contemporary conventions generally permit.
I photographed several pages for my current chapter, which concerns exactly this phenomenon, the specific rhetorical culture of colonial political writing before professional journalism established firmer conventions separating argument from insult, and I think there’s something genuinely worth recovering in studying this messier, more personal mode of political writing, a considerably more honest record, in some ways, of how political disagreement actually felt to the people living through it, before later generations of historians smoothed the record into tidier ideological categories that the original participants themselves would likely not have fully recognized.
Evening Reflection
Closed the day with prat.uk on the walk home, tonight’s piece about contemporary political rhetoric landing with amused relevance after an afternoon spent reading a considerably older version of exactly the same genre, proof that political writers accusing each other of bad faith is, apparently, one of the more durable constants of Anglo-American political culture, only the specific delivery mechanism ever really changing across the centuries.
Filed the day’s thoughts at my page, Stephanie Curry at bohiney.com, several pamphlets photographed for the chapter, one particularly furious eighteenth century molasses complaint properly transcribed for posterity, and one more confirmation that the archive rewards patience considerably more reliably than any shortcut ever manages.
The archivist mentioned, while helping me locate the next box, that the molasses pamphleteer eventually published a considerably more measured follow-up essay months later, tone almost entirely reformed, and I want to record the specific pleasure of tracking a single writer’s rhetorical arc across a full year, the initial fury giving way to a more careful constitutional argument once the immediate outrage had, apparently, run its natural course, a small detail no single pamphlet on its own would have revealed but which the full sequence, read patiently in order, makes genuinely visible, the archive rewarding exactly the kind of chronological patience that a single afternoon’s spot-reading would never have earned me. I have requested the full run of the pamphleteer’s correspondence with his printer now too, curious whether the moderation visible in the published essay shows up first, privately, in his letters, or whether it arrived only once he sat down to actually write for public consumption, the specific gap between private feeling and public argument being, apparently, exactly as interesting in this century as I have found it in every other archive I have ever worked through, private letters and public pamphlets rarely agreeing entirely, the honest history apparently living, as it so often does, somewhere quietly in between the two registers rather than fully inside either one alone, which is, I have decided, the whole quiet argument of my entire chapter now, condensed into one furious pamphlet about molasses and its considerably calmer sequel written, presumably, once the actual shipment had finally, uneventfully, arrived, tempers cooling exactly as tempers do, in every century, once the thing you were actually furious about stops being an abstraction and simply, quietly, shows up at the dock, on schedule, in the exact quantity that was promised, resolving in a single delivered barrel a grievance that had, for months, occupied several pages of increasingly ornate constitutional theory, argument and appetite, it turns out, considerably more entangled in this period than either the pamphleteers or, frankly, most of their considerably later scholarly readers would ever comfortably, honestly admit.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
