RESULTADOS

rupture in the shape of history, with “the sword drawn, and the scabbard thrown down the gulf of time.”292 Quite when peace would return was therefore “an event enwrapped in the womb of futurity.”293

Whilst reconfiguring the dimensions of human history, of altering the disconcerting content of the future, appeared possible, this could only truly be realised, as Paine constantly reiterated, within the contracting time flow – the “now” – of the Revolution. “The present winter,” he observed in late 1775, was “worth an age if rightly employed,” since the future- historical redirection of America following independence would be so immense; but if it were “lost or neglected,” then “the whole continent” would likely “partake of the evil.”294 _{The task} was thus simultaneously liberating and onerous: the time available in which to reshape the future, after all, constantly depleted. The “progress and changeability of times and things” exerted novel pressures upon contemporaries since one false move might jeopardise the shape of the American future. “Every one who has a hand in this glorious Revolution,” wrote the New Hampshire delegate, William Whipple, “will consider that the Happiness of future Generations, as well as the present, depend on their doings.” The problem was that failure would not only entail trans-historical consequences, it would also be “our own fault.”295 _{In the} months preceding independence, the temporal scope of the present shrank even further under the stresses of this open future. In his fourth ‘Forester Letter,’ Paine illustrated how, within the accelerating stream of the revolutionary “now,” the formation of swathes of future historical time might be formed – or wrecked. By citing the loyalist delegates returned to the Pennsylvanian State Assembly in early 1776, Paine characterised those still seeking

reconciliation as having “travelled to the summit of inconsistency, and that, with such accelerated rapidity as to acquire autumnal ripeness by the first of May.” “Back to the first plain path of nature,” he instructed, “and begin anew, for in this business your first footsteps were wrong.”296 _{The anxiety that accompanied temporal claustrophobia confronted the}

delegates of the Continental Congress with the finitude of cyclical time. If America

squandered the political potential of the accelerating present, it would very swiftly confront

Thought and History (New York, NY., Atheneum, 1971); see, in the context of the early Republic: Major L.

Wilson, ‘The Concept of Time and the Political Dialogue in the United States, 1828-48,’ American Quarterly 19 (4, Winter, 1967), pp.619-44.

292 _{Warren, History, I, p.178.}

293 _{Warren to Catherine Macaulay (1 February, 1777), in Jeffrey H. Richards and Sharon M. Harris, eds., Mercy} Otis Warren: Selected Letters (Athens GA., University of Georgia Press, 2009), pp.84-5; see: Kate Davies, Catharine Macaulay and Mercy Otis Warren: The Revolutionary Atlantic and the Politics of Gender (Oxford,

OUP, 2005), pp.180-219, 248-303, and Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and

Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (Oxford, OUP, 1996), pp.96-112. 294 _{Paine, ‘The Crisis, No.I,’ in Norman, ed., The Crisis Papers, p.1.}

295 _{William Whipple to Joshua Brackett (23 July, 1776), in Smith, ed., Letters of Delegates, IV, p.532.}

296 _{Thomas Paine, ‘The Forester’s Letters, IV (8 May, 1776)’, in Collected Writings: Common Sense, The Crisis,} and Other Pamphlets, Articles and Letters… (New York, NY., The Library of America, 1955), p.85.

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its “rotting time,” and be dragged to decay by the crumbling moral edifice of the British Empire.

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As the crisis continued to gather pace, the deliberations of Congress and the will of the people – as interpreted by the Committees – began moving at different speeds.297 _{During an alleged} interrogation of “a loyal Constitutionalist” by a New York Committee, one member extolled the primacy of popular action by pointing to its velocity: “What, do you drink Tea? Take care what you do…for you are to know the Committee command the mob, and can in an instant let them loose upon any man who opposes their decrees, and complete his destruction.”298 Serious discussion and due diligence were all very well, the Committee member argued, but the patience of the people was almost exhausted. “At a time when Slavery is clanking her infernal chains,” read one handbill, stuffed through the letter-boxes and beneath the doormats of every house in New York city, “when Oppression, with gigantick strides is approaching your once happy retreats…will you supinely fold your arms, and calmly see your weapons of defence torn from you, by a band of ruffians?” “How long will ye patiently bear insult and wrong?”299 In Congress, meanwhile, the discarded petitions and pleas piled up. On 3 May, the Massachusetts provincial congress beseeched delegates to “stem the rapid Progress of a tyrannical Ministry.” Resolute to ensure reconciliation with “the mother country,” Dickinson, James Duane, Edward Rutledge and other moderates played for time. “[I]f they were to be regarded,” Samuel Adams later complained, “they would continue the conflict a century.”300 Still, when moderate delegates proposed that a further petition – an Olive Branch – be sent to the king, a critical number of radicals relented. Congress had signalled “their indulgence of Mr. Dickinson,” recalled Jefferson, a consequence “of their great desire not to go too fast for any respectable part of our body.”

As the leaves turned and the rough winter winds chilled Philadelphia, the gathering sense of temporal claustrophobia became intolerable. Bouts of panic regularly threatened to

297 _{In his diary, James Allen even defined the character of the largely conservative elites and radical committeemen}

in terms of their relative political velocities: “Thinking people uneasy, irresolute & inactive. The Mobility triumphant. […] The madness of the multitude is but one degree better than submission to the Tea-Act…”: ‘Diary of James Allen, Esq., of Philadelphia, Counsellor-at-Law, 1770-1778,’ The Pennsylvania Magazine of History and

Biography 9 (2, July 1885), pp.176-96, here: p.186.

298 _{Extract of a Letter from New-Haven, to Mr. Rivington, New-York (1 April 1775), in American Archives, II,}

p.252-3; on the emergence of street politics and its radical potential, see: Peter Thompson, Rum Punch &

Revolution: Taverngoing & Public Life in Eighteenth-Century Philadelphia (Philadelphia, PA., University of

Pennsylvania Press, 1999), pp.148-58; Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture

in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia PA., University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), pp.11-43.

299 _{Account of the Seizure of Powder and Arms (New York) (27 December 1774), American Archives, I, p.1071.} 300 _{Samuel Adams to James Warren (16 April 1776), in Wells, The Life and Public Services of Samuel Adams, II,}

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