:Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution

Abstract

Although daily life regularly reveals the primacy of emotion, scholars have only recently made emotion history a distinct field. For early Americanists, study of feeling has focused on the literary culture of sensibility, women, the family, sexuality, and religion. Building on such works (including my own), Nicole Eustace moves emotion out of the private and literary and into the public, political arena. By her concluding chapter on Common Sense, Thomas Paine's title suggests not “what everyone knows” but “what everyone feels”—or, rather, “what everyone knows about what they should feel.” Eustace's focus is eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, a colony that easily demonstrates her themes of fluidity, diversity, and ambiguity. Between the 1740s and 1770s, Quakers, Presbyterians, and Anglicans competed, the urban elite quarreled with the frontier's Paxton boys, and imperial wars and slavery impelled white attention to racial difference. Taking her conceptual framework from historian William M. Reddy, Eustace sees emotion as a central component in power disputes, with emotions “mask[ing] continuing inequalities of power even as they maintained them” (p. 69). Her sources are private papers, especially letters, newspapers such as the Pennsylvania Gazette, and political proclamations, debates, pamphlets, and cartoons. Using these, she explores specific emotions—love, anger, sympathy, and grief—beginning each chapter with an individual's experience, which she then effectively interweaves with broader political issues.

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