Richard D. Brown. Self-Evident Truths

Self-Evident Truths is Richard D. Brown’s third book that traces how a specific theme developed across a wide swath of early American history, joining Knowledge Is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865 (1989), and The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870 (1996). This volume explores how Americans after 1776 dealt with the prodigious legacy of having based their national founding on a claim to universal equality. Brown’s conclusion: it’s complicated. “This book contends that the Declaration’s fateful phrase was not merely high-flown rhetoric,” Brown announces at the outset. “For many Revolutionaries,” he continues, “it expressed their profound commitment to a new political and social contract” (ix). At several points he invokes Bernard Bailyn’s phrasing of the Revolutionary “contagion of liberty” as an expression of this commitment (245, 300, 308). Over eight chapters based mostly in New England, Brown examines rhetorical debates, legal processes, and political movements that revolved around whether women, children, poor people, African Americans, immigrants, Catholics, and Baptists really could enjoy the ideal of equal rights as set out in the Declaration of Independence in the years after the Revolution. Some did better than others, with religious minorities and immigrants gaining greater traction than women or free blacks did. As that suggests, scholars will find little new ground through much of the book’s argumentation; Brown discusses well-covered topics such as Thomas Jefferson’s hypocrisy in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) and women’s growing political consciousness in the 1830s–1840s stemming from abolition.

Art · Declaration of independence · Immigration · Literature · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rhetoric · Rhetorical question · Sociology · Theology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies