DISCUSION DE RESULTADOS

delegates. Whilst it is employed here as primarily a literary device, it also conforms to the psychological landscape of the early Revolution, which was marked by delusions, neuroses, and paranoia. These responses were conditioned by the experience of revolutionary historical time. In September 1774, one Falmouth minister observed how his congregation had begun evincing “a discontent bordering upon madness,” a response, he deduced, to “the late Proceedings of Parliament respecting America,” which “spreads fast amongst them.”317

The primary rhetorical gestures of the period, meanwhile, emphasised enclosure: the colonists, it was claimed, were being placed “in shackles,” they were to be “enslaved” and ensnared by the forces of British ministerial, and later monarchical, despotism. Washington collapsed these two fixations – enslavement and temporality – when, in a letter of August 1774, he wrote that, “the Crisis is arrivd” when the colonists would need to decide between “our Rights” or to a train of events – a new historical trajectory, in effect – that “will make us as tame, & abject Slave, as the Blacks we Rule over…”318 This sensation of suffocation – translated into a fixation with the political future of the colonies – was a commonplace amongst the revolutionaries. As Hutson concludes – contra Bernard Bailyn – the conviction that “the British ministry was conspiring to enslave America” was not a realistic response to recent history; it is instead “explicable by the principles of psychology rather than a theme in intellectual history.”319 _{If viewed as a response to contemporary experiences of historical} time, however, the category of claustrophobia synthesises these two perspectives. The belief that their “Ministerial enemies” were conspiring to enslave them was patently ridiculous and borne of colonial paranoia.320 _{This paranoia, however, was fostered within a system of slowly} disseminating information and rapidly accelerating events. The sense of historical

compression this occasioned was not so much a response to the contents of recent history as to its dynamics. A disruption in traditional intellectual appreciations of historical structure and sequence occasioned a psychotemporal response akin to claustrophobia – an anxiety disorder activated by a fearful response to enclosed (or enclosing) spaces.321

317 _{James B. Bell, A War of Religion: Dissenters, Anglicans and the American Revolution (Basingstoke, Palgrave}

Macmillan, 2008), p.126.

318 _{Washington to Bryan Fairfax (24 August, 1774), in W. W. Abbot, Dorothy Twohig, eds., The Papers of George} Washington. Colonial Series (10 vols., Charlottesville, University Press of Virginia, 1995), X, pp.154-56.

319 _{See: Hutson, ‘Triumph of a Delusion,’ p.190, as compared with, Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics}

(Cambridge, MA., Harvard University Press, 1968), p.53.

320 _{This term – “paranoia” – is used to evoke a general world-view, and does not diagnose a specific clinical state;}

for its historical usage, see: Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, p.17.

321 _{It may therefore be useful to view the period of the Continental Congress as a counterpart to the Great Fear of}

1789 in France, for example, where the noxious mixture of sparse, uncertain information, rapid political

developments, and a tradition of rural paranoia contributed to revolutionary upheaval, all of which is discussed in detail below. See: Samuel Adams, An Oration delivered at the State-House, in Philadelphia to a very numerous

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It was only when the conflicting speeds of popular and Congressional deliberation re- converged on 4 July that the potential uncontrollability of revolutionary time was – for the moment – assuaged. In the immediate term, the spontaneous will of the people was subsumed by the urgencies of war. In a circular letter sent in December, John Hancock hoped to corral this energy in a bid to defend the besieged Fort of Ticonderoga: the “Affairs of our Country are in a Situation to admit of no Delay,” he wrote, expressing his hope that, “by your Regard for succeeding Generations, you will, without a Moment’s Delay, exert yourselves to forward the Troops for Ticonderoga from your States.”322 _{The imperial crisis and the onset of}

independence had nonetheless altered the perception of historical time. In less than two years, the colonies had overthrown a century-and-a-half of British authority and established an entirely new, albeit loosely confederated state. The historical duration of political chronology was consequently reduced from centuries and decades to weeks and days. “We have crowded the business of an age into the compass of a few months,” reflected Paine in 1777: “Truly may we say, that never did men grow old in so short a time!”323

The decision to issue the Declaration offered no guarantee that the recently minted American republic would regain control over this torrential sense of time. The act of independence, after all, was also an act of improvisation. It was not a moment of political foresightedness, nor the culmination of a carefully calculated political programme. It was a response to the rush of events; it was a decision arrived at by a small group of panicked men, many of whom now found themselves behaving in unfamiliar ways. “What do you think must be my sensations, when I see the Congress now daily passing Resolutions which I most earnestly pressed for against Wind and Tide, Twelve Months ago?”324 _{Whilst the gathering} imminence of the future would not be entirely effaced by the Declaration, it could now be freely confronted.

III. Secular history, divine time

The Declaration of Independence classified the United States as a Republic in time.325 Conceived in “the course of human events,” it was the product of historical forces, many of

322 _{John Hancock to Certain States (25 December 1776), in Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates , V, p.664.} 323 _{Thomas Paine, ‘The Crisis, No.III,’ in Norman, ed., The Crisis Papers, p.24.}

324 _{John Adams to James Warren (20 May 1776), in Taylor, ed., The Papers of John Adams, IV (1979), p.195:}

“Every Post and every Day rolls in upon Us Independence like a Torrent!”; but the “gloomy Prospect of Carnage and Devastation that now presents itself in every Part of the Continent,” Adams concluded, “is too affecting to give me Pleasure.”

325 _{Thomas M. Allen, A Republic in Time: Temporality and Social Imagination in Nineteenth-Century America}

(Chapel Hill, VA., University of Virginia Press, 2008), p.6: “Precisely because New World nations constituted themselves within the span of history – within time as human beings had known it – they staged the process of

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