The Adulterer, Part XIV: the Truth, or Something Like it

            I have spent, over the course of what we’ll call the last five to seven years, a great deal of time studying the works of the Founding Generation of the United States of America. I have read their words in great depth, scrutinized their choice of expression, traced their references, and sought always to understand why it was they wrote what they wrote. I have learned a great many things in that time, both useful and trivial. But none is perhaps more important or more ambiguous than which this recent series brought once again to my attention. The Founders, you see, did not always speak the truth. But more often than not, they attempted to speak to it.

You’ll ask yourself, I’m sure, why I couldn’t have phrased that somewhat more clearly. My answer to you is that the point I’m going to attempt to make is not always a particularly clear one. It is, in essence, that what the Founders believed to be the truth was often only their limited perception thereof. While this might not seem like much of revelation – that people can only ever know a subjective version of reality – I’ll ask you to consider something before dismissing what I have to say. Think, for a moment, about the way popular media and popular culture treat the Founders. Think about the number of times you’ve seen someone on this or that side of an issue quote Thomas Jefferson or George Washington in support of the point they’re trying to make. So often, it seems, the people who helped to establish the United States as a sovereign republic at the end of the 18^th century are treated as the last authority on any social or political issue a modern pundit or politician cares to address. While on one hand it is encouraging to witness such a strong sense of continuity between the founders of a nation and their successors two centuries hence, on the other it is – or should be – a source of deep and abiding concern. This is because, as I said earlier, the Founders didn’t always speak the truth. By this, I don’t just mean that they could not have commented with insight and authority upon issues that would have been inconceivable to them in the 1770s and 1780s – same-sex marriage, say, or physician-assisted suicide. No, what I mean to say – and to discuss further in a moment – is that the Founders were not infrequently incapable of offering an accurate assessment of the events and the issues of their own lifetimes.

There were quite simply things they did not know, or could not have known. In addition to the kinds of demographic information we now take for granted, this was particularly so in relation to the thoughts and feelings of specific individuals. Thomas Jefferson, to take up a prominent example, did not know what kind of a man George III really was, or what motivated him to take this action or reject that one. And yet, this did not stop him from stating in the Declaration of Independence that the relationship between the colonies of British America and the Crown had by the middle 1770s become a, “History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” Jefferson did not know for a fact that the king’s purpose was to achieve this end, or course, nor likely did anyone in America. By the same token, Ethan Allen could not have known for a certainty upon his return from captivity in 1778 that the government of New York was endemically corrupt, or that Parliament and the Crown had previously used that colony as a proxy in a scheme to sow disunity and discontent in British America. Regardless, he said exactly that in An Animadversory Address to the Inhabitants of the State of Vermont. Neither man ought to bear the accusation of wilfully sowing falsehoods – doubtless both of them believed that they were speaking the truth. Rather, one should simply keep in mind when reading their words that theirs represents but one perspective on what were almost uniformly complex and multifaceted issues.

In consequence, while the Founders should not be read as speaking accurately upon every topic they addressed, their representation of this event or that individual can be taken to truthfully embody a particular perception of the same. Mercy Otis Warren’s The Adulterer presents a particularly vibrant case in point, containing as it does a vividly rendered caricature of contemporary colonial Massachusetts. Rather than attempt to provide an accurate chronicle of the controversies of the early 1770s, the personalities involved, and the consequences thereof, it instead aspires to reflect the emotional implications of the ongoing crisis from the perspective of those who believed themselves to be its victims. Rapatio, for example, is not so much a mirror image of Thomas Hutchinson as he is the embodiment of what his fellow citizens believed he must have been to commit the acts they had seen him committing. He is the version of Hutchinson that existed in the minds of an embittered people who had suffered to see their rights invalidated, their cities patrolled by armed enforcers, and their countrymen cut down in the streets. Granting that Hutchinson was far from untroubled by the actions that he believed his office required of him, and that he often personally opposed the policies he felt duty-bound to uphold, it isn’t hard to understand how his comparatively stiff and academic response to opposition protest would have offered little comfort to a people who truly believed that the essence of their liberty was under threat.

And therein lays the truth of The Adulterer, its great strength, and the danger it signifies. Warren did not represent her subjects accurately. No officer of the contemporary government of Massachusetts was as self-consciously vile as Hazelrod, no British military functionary as ruthlessly self-important as Bagshot, and no courtier of the Governor as wilfully amoral as Limput or Meagre. And yet, these perceptions were doubtless quite common among Warren’s countrymen whose resentment and suspicion had been aroused by the preceding decade of political and social upheaval. Servia was not Massachusetts, but its portrayal in The Adulterer may fairly be taken as a reasonably accurate reflection of the state to which the citizens thereof believed their country had been reduced. The Governor was not plotting with the commander-in-chief of the military to murder innocent people in the capital square, though after the events of March 5^th, 1770 there were doubtless many who believed that to be the case. Likewise, there exists no evidence to suggest that the Chief Justice ever attended the cell of an imprisoned customs officer charged with murder for the purpose of comforting him with visions of further bloodshed, though certain of Warren’s fellow citizens likely had no trouble believing that such a scene took place.

Distinguishing between these things – the sign and what it signifies – is exceedingly important. Taken literally, The Adulterer appears to indicate that those who supported the prerogatives of the Crown and of Parliament amidst the ongoing political crisis in late 18^th century Massachusetts were guilty of conspiracy, murder, and treason. Read critically, the same material serves to indicate something significantly more complex – that the people of early 1770s Massachusetts had felt so abused by their governors, had been kept so completely in the dark as to their motivations, doubts, and intentions, that they felt little recourse but to perceive conspiracy and corruption as the most likely explanations. In light of how invested 21^st Americans remain in the story of their nation’s founding – how much of their sense of identity and purpose they derive from it – this kind distinction cannot but be of paramount significance.

The story of how the United States came to be has inspired the citizens thereof for generations, and not without reason. It was never a likely outcome that a dispute over legislative prerogatives and tax policy between one of the most powerful empires on earth and a handful of lawyers and merchants in a colonial backwater would evolve into an armed conflict whose subtext was nothing less than the proper derivation of national sovereignty, but that is what happened. It was never particularly plausible that the government that these lawyers-and-merchants-cum-statesmen created for themselves – based on a patchwork of inherited traditions and untested political theory – would survive the rigors of practical experience, but it most certainly did. The events, personalities, and ideas that underlie these narratives describe a litany of virtues, hard lessons, and insightful observations that arguably transcend their native context and may yet fruitfully serve to guide the actions and decisions of generations to come. But the examples provided by the Founding Generation and the events they set in motion cannot perform this vital function unless they are understood for what they are, rather than simply what they appear to be.

Think, for a moment, of the notion of evil. Reading the Declaration of Independence or The Adulterer literally, once might fairly conclude that the Crown, Parliament, and the government of Massachusetts were all engaged in a monumental scheme to deprive the people of British America of the rights and liberties that were theirs by right of birth. The Adulterer in particular portrays these supposed conspirators as cruel, ruthless, and corrupt – the very essence of evil against which people who grasp at virtue are obliged to array themselves. The ensuing conflict is thus almost wholly devoid of moral complexity, as one need only gaze upon such an adversary for a moment to understand why it is they must be opposed. Compelling though this perception of events might be, however – and surely it was to the citizens of Massachusetts to whom Mercy Otis Warren addressed her work – it risks eliding a far more complicated and insidious truth. It is easy to stand up to institutional wrongdoing when it is accompanied by reprehensible personal behavior, and much harder to identify wrongs that need righting when they are committed by those who in every aspect perceivable embody fairness, or virtue, or righteousness. Perhaps worse yet, it is easier still to perceive evil where none exists – to attribute the worst motivations possible to those who actions stand in opposition to our wishes, and to dehumanize them accordingly in pursuit of what we have determined to be right and good. Read plainly, The Adulterer attempts to do exactly that by transforming flawed, conflicted, and variously motivated human beings like Thomas Hutchinson, Andrew and Peter Oliver, and Thomas Gage into cartoonishly reprehensible figures like Rapatio, Dupe, Hazelrod, and Bagshot. While this was almost certainly Warren’s intention – to motivate her countrymen to action by applying a layer of moral simplicity to personalities and events that were anything but simple – modern readers would so well to look past the obvious significance of The Adulterer and attempt to grasp at something more fundamental.  

Troubling though Warren’s wilful mischaracterization of people and events in contemporary Massachusetts might now be, it cannot be denied that The Adulterer represents something quite unusual among the polemical literature of the Anglo-American crisis. Whereas most public commentators upon the topic of perceived British overreach sought either to justify or discourage resistance via references to precedent, tradition, natural rights, and the dictates of reason, Warren broached the same subject in terms that were distinctly moral. Jefferson’s A Summary View, for instance, firmly located the American claim to self-determination in the rights and liberties possessed by the founders of the relevant colonies and in the manner by which said colonies were established. Freely departing from Britain did not entail surrendering these freedoms, he asserted, and nor did the creation of new governments in America constitute an extension of Parliamentary authority. The relationship between the colonies and the Crown was rather a voluntary and customary one whereby the residents of British America acknowledged the authority of the reigning monarch without in any way submitting to the sovereignty of a Parliament in which they no longer considered themselves to be represented.

Hamilton’s A Full Vindication (published, like A Summary View, in 1774) meanwhile sought to justify the recent actions of the Continental Congress – namely the implementation of a boycott on British trade – by establishing the manifest practicality of every decision that had been made and enforced. The delegates to Congress, Hamilton avowed, had, “Devised and recommended the only effectual means to secure the freedom, and establish the future prosperity of America upon a solid basis.” The manner by which he arrived at this conclusion was eminently logical. The rights and liberties guaranteed to every citizen of the colonies under the British Constitution were being actively threatened by the claims of Parliament to make law for America in spite of failing to represent a single American constituency. At the same time, the customary mode of securing a remedy – described by Hamilton with the phrase “REMONSTRANCE and PETITION” – had failed to achieve anything like a satisfactory result. As the people of British America remained in every sense entitled and obliged to defend the freedoms to which they were entitled, and as the body to which they delegated the authority to achieve this defence – the Continental Congress – was a representative assembly of the people of British America, it thereby stood to reason that whatever action Congress recommended was both necessary and proper.

Without in any way denigrating the significance or the quality of these assertions – or of any like them – it cannot be denied that they lack a certain quality of emotional resonance. Granting that a certain type of person would surely have responded to such rigorous, insightful, and eloquent commentary with acclaim and enthusiasm, a significantly larger portion of the contemporary population of British America would likely have been wholly unmoved by any such academic explanation of their present plight. Lacking – for better or worse – advanced knowledge of law, Anglo-American history, or political theory, their aggregate perception of the events of the 1760s and 1770s was doubtless quite straightforward. Parliament had attempted to lay taxes where they had no right to, colonial officials had betrayed their countrymen in cooperating with this mistaken effort, British soldiers had been rather provocatively stationed in key American cities, and several unarmed citizens had been killed as a result. Whatever Britain claimed as justification, and whatever the colonial opposition argued in turn, the explanation which surely felt the most true, plain, and obvious to the largest number of people was that America had been wronged and had a moral imperative to defend itself.

Mercy Otis Warren seemed to understand this to a greater degree than most of her contemporaries, or was more willing to respond in kind. The Adulterer was the result. A mixture of satire and tragedy, it almost completely excused itself from any reflection upon the legal or philosophical origins of the ongoing crisis. Its guiding lights were rather moral and emotional in nature, and its methodology rooted in exaggeration, association, and sentimentality. Warren did not attempt to explain to her countrymen why they ought to resist recurrent attempts to render the colonies of British America more amenable to the dictates of Parliament. Instead, she simply showed them a representation of something with which they were already quite familiar – i.e. Servia, its suffering people, and its wicked government. She did not quibble, did not attempt to complicate the feelings and experiences with which she had doubtless become familiar. The Adulterer thus represents a kind of emotional mirror of contemporary Massachusetts. The resulting image is not a particularly accurate one, or measured, or even-handed. But it is most certainly vibrant, often brutal, and wholly unambiguous as to its moral sensibilities. This quality of urgency – of portraying a conflict then ongoing as being between good and evil, virtue and vice – is in large part what makes Warren’s theatrical work so compelling, so unusual, and so easy to digest. Rather than discuss the history of British liberties, the nature of individual and collective sovereignty, or the logic of self-preservation, The Adulterer instead acknowledges and portrays what countless Americans already believed in their hearts to be true – that crimes had been committed, that restitution was wanting, and that America bled in the interim.

Limited though this perception of events might be, its importance should not be discounted. For all that facts can and do communicate about the past – for all that scrupulous accuracy can tell us about why things happen the way that they do – they rarely record how the human beings involved in the wars, and crises, and social movements actually felt about the things that they witnessed, and relished, and suffered. Bearing in mind that the purpose of studying the past is ostensibly to help people better understand how things got to be the way that they are, it would therefore seem fitting to react against this tendency towards dry recitation to seek out the people whose history is being retold and attempt to grasp the more human qualities of their existence. The Adulterer is one such fragment that serves this purpose in rather spectacular fashion. Not only do its lively descriptions of heroism and villainy, sacrifice and sin make it possible to better comprehend the moral sensibilities of the average citizen of Massachusetts amidst the controversy which preceded the American Revolution, but it serves as evidence of the multiplicity of perspectives on that controversy nurtured and propagated by the Founders of the American republic. Some were concerned with what was legal or traditional, others with what was practical or logical. For her part, and somewhat unusually, Mercy Otis Warren appeared to be concerned with what was right.

Anyway, that’s me. By all means, take a look for your own self.