Revolutions without Borders by Janet Polasky

Author:Janet Polasky
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780300208948
Publisher: Yale University Press

SEVEN

Correspondence between a “Virtuous spouse, Charming friend!”

Correspondence gave husbands, wives, lovers, and friends a toehold in this mobile society when revolution disrupted traditional social bonds. Men and women alike, in revolutionary France as in newly independent America, relied on letters for the companionship of spouses called to serve in distant lands they imagined only through letters. The letters of French diplomat Louis Otto courting the young Philadelphian Nancy Shippen; of Ruth Barlow from Connecticut and her husband Joel Barlow posted in France and Algiers; of Thomas Short, Jefferson’s secretary in Paris, and the duchesse de la Rochefoucauld; and of the quintessential transatlantic couple, América Francès de Crèvecoeur and Louis Otto, to the contrary reveal the commonalities as letters shrank the distances separating lovers and spouses.

Revolutionary virtue was in the air and gender a favorite topic of revolutionary travelers writing letters home. Diplomatic postings and commercial ventures required long absences generating voluminous correspondence, often across the Atlantic. Husbands, wives, and lovers professed their devotion and friendship to those left behind in the sentimental terms of novels as they decried the distance that their letters were meant to bridge. In correspondence intertwining private sentiments and public affairs, itinerant spouses and lovers described revolutionary leaders they met in salons and heard speak in parliaments, speculated on business opportunities, and documented the trials of daily lives and intimate relationships, sometimes strained and other times emboldened by revolution.

Letters exchanged across the Atlantic reminded recipients of Wollstonecraft’s counsel in the Vindication of the Rights of Woman that husbands and wives share responsibilities at home and beyond. Family correspondence not only described the challenges of everyday life apart during the revolutions, it guided futures to be lived together. Like the novelists, these husbands, wives, and lovers envisioned a domesticity not confined to the home that was often quite different from the lives they had left behind before the revolutions. Most thought that future was within their reach.

Correspondence was limited for the most part in the late eighteenth century not only to the literate but to the elite with the time to sit at a writing table with a quill pen and ink set, and with the funds to post or to receive letters.1 Regular letter writing allowed physically separated family members to exert control over their family networks and commercial infrastructure.2 In their letters, correspondents worked out their politics in private. Generally just the well placed saved their letters for posterity. Others of lesser means sent letters occasionally, but few have survived.

Letters were typically written on folded sheets of paper. Postage was charged to the recipient by the page, so to spare expense, correspondents usually wrote addresses on the outside sheet rather than on separate envelopes. The pages were sealed with hot wax to lessen the chance, especially in wartime, that they would be opened en route by probing authorities. So unreliable was the post that correspondents often numbered their letters to alert their recipients if one went missing. Even when correspondence arrived safely, letter writers despaired

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.