The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic

Abstract

W TrHEN the American colonists commenced rebellion against the British government and assumed the separate and equal station to which they believed the laws of God and nature both entitled them, they found in marriage-that SOCIAL UNION, which the beneficent Creator instituted for the happiness of Man-a metaphor for their ideal of and political relationships. In the republic envisioned American writers, citizens were to be bound together not patriarchy's duty or liberalism's self-interest, but affection, and it was, they believed, marriage, more than any other institution, that trained citizens in this virtue. Thus L, writing in the Royal American Magazine in 1774, explained why this social union is so essential to human happiness. The married man, he wrote, by giving pleasure . . . receives it back again with increase. By this endearing intercourse of friendship and communication of pleasure, the tender feelings and soft passions of the soul are awakened with all the ardour of love and benevolence.... In this happy state, man feels a growing attachment to human nature, and love to his country.' Marriage was the very pattern from which the cloth of republican society was to be cut. Revolutionary-era writers held up the loving partnership of man and wife in opposition to patriarchal dominion as the republican model for and political relationships. The essays, stories, poems, and novels