Republicanism

The term republicanism refers to an ideology that outlined principles of social and political order and the privileges and obligations of citizenship in the Anglo-American world from the seventeenth century through the early nineteenth century. Because it developed in a setting in which masculinity was a prerequisite of citizenship, republicanism necessarily constituted a prescription for ideal manhood as well. Frequently ambivalent and contradictory, republicanism embraced a range of ideas about political society, including notions of hierarchical and organic social order that emphasized mutual obligation over the pursuit of self-interest; a liberal, possessive individualism that stressed the individual's right to seek, accumulate, and dispose of property; and a civic humanism that called for devotion to the public good as the primary responsibility of citizenship. It also required both resistance to tyranny and subordination to legitimate rule and authority. (Bloch, 37-58)

As a prescriptive code of manliness, republicanism aimed to inspire men to exercise their rights and obligations as citizens in an orderly society. Its critical task was to constrain self-interest and redirect it into socially and politically desirable channels. The central quality of ideal citizenship and ideal republican manhood was virtue, defined as the capacity to control, and sometimes sacrifice, one's selfish interests for the common good. Only in the 1820s did states begin to introduce universal adult white-male suffrage, so, prior to this, the full privileges of republican citizenship and the status of republican manhood were confined to a white, propertied, patriarchal elite.

Republicanism became the dominant political value of Americans during and after the American Revolution. The "Founding Fathers" were strong advocates of republican values, especially Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, George Washington, Thomas Paine, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Alexander Hamilton(Bloch, 37-58)

During the early nineteenth century the concept of republican manhood became increasingly problematic and contested as the new nation was transformed by industrialization, urbanization, the market revolution, political democratization, and western expansion. These developments stimulated the development of newer concepts of manhood—such as the Yankee entrepreneur, the “self-made man,”and an egalitarian ideal of democratic manhood—that undermined the notions of hierarchy and organic social order that had previously framed republican manhood. These trends presented a challenge to the traditional monopolization of political power by propertied male elites. Furthermore, while republicanism was intended by men to relegate women to subordinate social and political roles, it also opened the way to women's empowerment by stimulating a women's rights movement that resisted the male monopoly on political power, while the ideal of republican motherhood also encouraged the education of women. Similarly, African-American abolitionists interpreted republican manhood in ways that challenged its traditional association with whiteness. (Boydston, 32-99)

Yet republicanism also understood mothers as critical to the reproduction of republican society, not only sexually, but also socially, since it defined women as exemplars of moral virtue who would raise their sons to become responsible republican citizens. Furthermore, because wives tied their husbands to their households and counteracted the corrupting effects of political power, women were deemed essential to grounding men in republican civil ...