Samuel Cooper’s sermon on the day of the commencement of the Massachusetts constitution of 1780 further demonstrated such reasoning. The Bostonian reverend explained to his adherents: ‘Rome rose to empire because she early thought herself destined for it,’ and Romans ‘did great things because they believed themselves capable, and born to do them’. Americans, however, have ‘an object more truly great and honourable. We seem called by heaven to make a large portion of this globe a seat of knowledge and liberty, of agriculture, commerce, and arts, and what is more important than all, of Christian piety and virtue’ (Cooper 1780).8 The American empire, at least in this cleric’s vision, would become a Protestant Rome (not to be confused of course with the popish Rome; Zakai 1992: 81–82). Here, as elsewhere, America was described as better than her original, pagan predecessor. Nevertheless, even when described as a new and better Rome, it would always be understood in and compared to its classical predecessor’s terms.
Patriots commonly looked backward to antiquity to evaluate their present achievements and prospects. The ‘poet of the Revolution’ Philip Freneau asked, after prophesying that America would become a new Greece or Rome, ‘how could I weep that we were born so soon,/In the beginning of more happy times!’ (Freneau 1772: 21). The ‘more happy times’ to which Freneau referred were those when Americans would equal the Romans. John Adams referred to such an epoch in a 1776 letter to George Wythe (described by Thomas Jefferson as a ‘Cato without the avarice of the Roman’): ‘You and I, my dear friend’, Adams wrote, ‘have been sent into life at a time when the greatest lawgivers of antiquity would have wished to have lived’ (Richard 1994: 57, 83). Similarly, the Continental Army’s general Charles Lee reflected, again during the year of Independence, ‘I us’d to regret not being thrown into the world in the glamorous third or fourth century [BCE] of the Romans; but now I am thoroughly reconcil’d to my lot’ (Richard 1994: 84).
5.5 American Catones
As we have just seen, revolutionary Americans universally understood the United States as a new incarnation of the Roman Republic. That view was crafted and buttressed with the revolution’s leaders perceived as the re-embodiment of the greatest Romans. Hence, on the morning of 6 March 1775, Dr Joseph Warren, a leader of the fermenting rebellion in Boston, burst into the city’s Old South church, donned in a toga, to deliver the fifth annual Boston Massacre commemoration oration. The toga was the principal garment of a freeborn Roman male citizen. It consisted of a single piece of material of irregular form – long, broad and flowing, without sleeves or armholes. To wear such a garment was of course highly unusual in revolutionary America and was seen justly as a stark political statement. Similarly, depicting the rebellion in Boston as led by a group of revered Roman republicans in popular dramas was a powerful mode of infusing historical meaning in the American revolutionary movement. That was exactly what Mercy Otis Warren’s (not related to Joseph Warren) dramas The Adulateur (1772) and The Defeat (1773) did, portraying the revolution in Boston as led by Roman republicans such as Brutus, Cassius and Cato. These performative contexts through which revolutionaries could perceive a classically infused present reveal the ease with which American patriots could perceive fellow patriots as Romans operating in American settings and project such perceptions into a burgeoning revolutionary public sphere. Mercy Otis asked her audiences to imagine a street corner in Boston where Cassius appealed to Brutus, his co-conspirator to free the republic of the menace of Caesar, ‘Oh! Brutus, our noble ancestors, who lived for freedom, and for freedom died’), who ‘grasped at freedom, and … nobly won it,’ (line 18) would be proud to see the young generation’s ‘generous bosoms flow with manly sentiment’ (The Adulateur (in Franklin 1980): Act 1, Scene 1, lines 12–13, 18, 50–51). Instead of confusion, these elaborate performances entrenched the understanding that Roman history was playing itself in America, that Rome was reborn on western shores.
Another remarkable example of such a mindset which is worth examining in depth is Jonathan Mitchell Sewall’s A New Epilogue to Addison’s Cato, which served as the concluding section to Joseph Addison’s Augustan tragedy Cato (1712), the most popular play in the colonies throughout the eighteenth century (see Litto 1966: 431–449). Sewall’s New Epilogue was first performed and published in 1778 together with the play to which it served as a concluding section. Literary historian John Shields speculates that this American Epilogue was performed many times during the Revolution, possibly even in front of Washington and his men at Valley Forge (Shields 2001: 192). Sewall, a lawyer and occasional poet (not to be confused with the loyalist Jonathan Sewall, his great-uncle), became well-known as a Revolutionary War versifier. His Epilogue replaced the older British ending section written by Dr Garths in America between 1778 and 1793, in which Sewall obviously intended to Americanise the timeless Addisonian allegory (Shields 2001: 174–193).9
Sewall presented in the Epilogue a Manichean worldview in which he contrasted ‘heroic fortitude’ and ‘patriotic truth’ with ‘tyrannic rage’ and ‘boundless ambition’; in the current battle, Britannia occupied the role of the wicked, while ‘what now gleams with dawning ray, at home, Once blaz’d… at ROME’ (Sewall 1778). Sewall thus identified the protagonists of his epilogue and established a historical link between America and Rome, a ‘ray’, which once blazed in Rome and currently dawned in America. Like the Roman Senate, the American ‘senate’, the Continental Congress (the ‘aristocratic’ branch of its successor legislature soon to be significantly named the United States Senate), had armed a ‘virtuous few’, to fight the ‘British Caesar’. America has found a worthy candidate to re-enact the Catonian role in the face of a British Caesar: ‘For a CATO’ she has armed ‘a WASHINGTON.’ The identification of the two leading antagonists marked the beginning of an elaborate effort to assign Romans to contemporary American figures.
While Washington was a Cato, and the British monarch a Caesar, Sewall laid out an extended list, matching American protagonists with Roman heroes, and British villains with nefarious ancients. The elaborate matchmaking list is extraordinary and shows the lengths to which Americans could go in order to explain their revolution as a re-enactment of a classical spectacle.10 The Epilogue asserted the relations between ancients and moderns in a string of prepositions, adjectives, verbs and indefinite articles: ‘in [General Nathaniel] Greene … we see … Lucius, Juba, Cato, shine in thee’; ‘Montgomery like Scipio died’; ‘Arnold … a second Hannibal’; ‘Marcus blazes forth in Sullivan’; and ‘We’ve had our Decius’. Naming Americans as the ‘second’, ‘western’ or ‘like’ of classical heroes was a trademark of typological thinking, conveying the notion of incarnation and latter-day fulfilment. While the revolutionaries were not actual Romans, they were meant to reanimate and re-enact those ancients’ role on an American stage.
By drawing a laminated map of American champions overlaying Romans, Sewall provided a key to understanding Cato as an American play. Such a legend, which affixed to each classical persona an American protagonist, developed the richness of the image of America as the new Rome to an extraordinary degree. Similarly, Mercy Otis Warren’s aforementioned revolutionary plays, which described revolutionary Boston in Roman terms, enabled contemporaries to imagine their experiences