The Post-Revolutionary Contestation and Nationalization of American Citizenship

Abstract

On July 17th, 1799, the poet, editor, and publicist, Robert Treat Paine Jr. delivered an oration at a meeting of the Committee of the Young Men of Boston.1 In this oration, Treat Paine commemorated the annulment of the 1778 Treaty of Alliance with France. The Franco-American defensive alliance against British military aggression forged in the midst of the American Revolutionary War had lasted for exactly twenty years. Its dissolution, approved by Congress on July 7, 1798, as France and the United States were locked in an undeclared naval war, was not simply the end of a military pact, Treat Paine made clear, but symbolized a deep political and intellectual rift between the ‘sister republics’. ‘The struggle between Liberty and Despotism, Government and Anarchy, Religion and Atheism, has been gloriously decided’, Treat Paine commenced his oration. ‘It has proved the victory of principle, the triumph of virtue. France has been foiled, and America is free’.2 Treat Paine did not deny that France was once ‘considered an amiable nation’.3 For his graduation ceremony at Harvard in 1792, he had written a poem tellingly entitled The Nature and Progress of Liberty in which he, like so many Americans had done at the time, expressed his admiration for the revolution in France. ‘May struggling France her ancient freedom gain, May Europe’s sword oppose her rights in vain’, some of the more expressive lines of the poem read. Following a couplet in which the young graduate wished Edmund Burke’s fame to rest in ‘dark oblivion’, the poem went on to record the intimate