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Nicole Eustace's ambitious and impressive book on a range of emotions yields great rewards. She argues, convincingly, that the eighteenth century was an age of emotion. This is perhaps not surprising to many who work in this field, but no doubt it will serve as a useful corrective for those less familiar with the power of passion in eighteenth-century life. She is seeking to demolish the usual walls between reason and passion, public and private, and Europe and America (with Europe, in traditional accounts, the only key site of emotional discussion). This is all helpful, in line with much recent scholarship. She marshals a dizzying array of evidence into a coherent, well-crafted narrative. She is uncommonly adroit at elegantly weaving together sources and themes, the particular and the general. She is as capable of subtle readings of sources as she is of broad analysis. She follows William Reddy in viewing emotional expressions as sites of political and cultural contestation, ones asserting status, authority, and civility. In this world, people could prove their superiority by regulating and expressing emotion properly.

Passion is the Gale begins with an account of the fate of Alexander Pope's influential Essay on Man (1733) in the colony of Pennsylvania. Eustace argues that many Pennsylvanians, as striving colonials, found that Pope's attempted reconciliation of virtue and passion, of self-interest and social love, resonated powerfully in their own concerns. She attributes Pope's popularity in part to the specific situation of Pennsylvania, contending that “the reading of Pope in Pennsylvania came in response to uniquely colonial anxieties and opportunities” (20). Eustace is skillful in tracing out the importance of this text for Pennsylvanians. She summarizes that “in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania, self and society seemed continually intertwined” (58).

From this opening chapter, Eustace moves on to a consideration of the “passions” and notions about disposition and personality. Her goal here is in part to allow modern readers to understand the force of eighteenth-century rules for emotional expressions. She opens with a reading of the anxieties of a typical colonial, Francis Hopkinson, who, as Eustace aptly observes, wanted to rise but “didn't want to appear to want to rise” in society (88, original emphasis). Hopkinson's trajectory threads nicely through the chapter. Eustace considers such issues as the importance of injunctions to “cheerfulness,” especially for subordinate members of households and societies (such as wives). She rightly posits that enjoining cheerfulness in the face of disparities of rank both softened and strengthened notions of hierarchy. She further maintains that “such finesse became especially important in the colonial context, where heightened social fluidity both exacted and exacerbated a certain ambiguity in the signaling of hierarchy” (69). She also notes the concern for guarding emotions, and the power of emphasizing the restraining of emotion, as well as ongoing concerns about authenticity and sincerity in expressions. These could have important political implications, in, for instance, decoding the words and behavior of Native Americans and their “seeming” friendship.

By contrast, slaves were assumed to be incapable of being cheerful, supposedly suffering mainly from insensibility or a “down look.” Here, Eustace's indefatigable approach to research, and the availability of recently digitized versions of key sources such as the Pennsylvania Gazette, help to give her points greater traction. Having surveyed 3,469 mentions of “Negroes” in the Pennsylvania Gazette in the eighteenth century, she finds that only about 130 dealt with emotion. To know this is to appreciate anew the power of claims to emotional suffering by Africans and African Americans in a number of abolitionist tracts later in the century, including Ignatius Sancho's letters and Olaudah Equiano's narrative.Footnote ⁶

In one of the strongest chapters, Eustace next examines love and power, developing points from an earlier article about courtship and the political and social import of claims to affection.Footnote ⁷ Her article had focused on the paradox of the public love letter, in which courtship letters were written to family and friends of the beloved. This chapter, building on the premise that “eighteenth-century expressions of love served to veil exertions of power, yet not to end them,” extends the line of analysis into expressions of affection between ruler and ruled in the governmental realm (110). In these situations, as in courtship, gift-giving and declarations of affection served to ameliorate the disparities in power and resources between actors. Both types of situation also depended on what Eustace perceptively terms the “useful fiction of identity of interest” (128). She brings these points together in her dexterous analysis of William Franklin. When he reached an impasse in political negotiations with local Indians and in his courtship of Elizabeth Graeme, Franklin blamed the problems on failures of affection on their part (rather than his own limitations as a negotiator). In so aligning the “private” and “public” interests, Eustace is able to suggest that a similar understanding underlay both; this is a fruitful line of approach.

Franklin's disappointments in politics and in love led to frustration; so too does Eustace turn from love to anger. She highlights distinctions eighteenth-century Pennsylvanians drew between resentment and rage: the former more justifiable and status-informed than the latter. Noting that anger had long been considered a social problem (particularly in Quaker communities), Eustace stresses that while earlier commentators thought anger should be entirely avoided, later commentators believed it should merely be moderated. In particular, she identities a transformation of “fury” as an emotion associated only negatively with nature, beasts, and “lower sorts” (such as sailors and slaves) into one of political power. Despite brief nods to Scottish philosophers and others, she attributes this change primarily to the context of frontier, wars, and relations with Native Americans. Tracing the use of fury in relation to Indians in the Pennsylvania Gazette, she finds that despite no such mentions prior to the 1750s, a slew of furious Indians appeared in its pages from the time of the Seven Years’ War on. Although she develops an explanation for this in a Pennsylvania-specific context, the phenomenon itself appears not to be Pennsylvania-specific. One would therefore like a bit more comparison here, especially since Eustace concedes that “much of the public approbation of anger appearing in the Gazette derived from sources outside Pennsylvania” (184). In the next chapter, Eustace offers a close and compelling reading of the political contests between Quaker pacifists and their more bellicose (and pro-anger) Presbyterian neighbors. Eustace argues convincingly that accusing Quakers of insensibility and lack of sympathy with the fate of Pennsylvania and its people allowed their enemies to gain political leverage.

Pro-war Pennsylvanians were not the only ones to accuse their enemies of a failure of sympathy. Such charges became more powerful ones over the course of the century, as “fellow-feeling” became an increasingly valued ideal. Eustace offers a key word analysis of words for fellow-feeling, so that “mercy” and “compassion” were what higher-ranking people offered to lower-ranking ones, while pity implied blame. Sympathy was the word that designated equality between actors. Counting these words in the Pennsylvania Gazette, Eustace finds that while “mercy” was the most-used term, sympathy made major gains between 1728 and 1800. One arena in which fellow-feeling was required was in grief. Eustace looks at this emotion and the ambivalence surrounding it, so that grief was not supposed to turn into grievance (against God, kings, governors, household heads, and others). Tears for others could be manly, unlike tears for one's own suffering. She also ponders the ways in which mourning could serve as a form of social advancement and public cohesion (as when prominent men were mourned), but also as a way of dividing colonists from Indians (who expected condolence and help in grief). These insights feed into the next chapter on the Paxton crisis, in which the murder of friendly Indians by the “Paxton boys” led to a general questioning of the universality of emotions. Those who agreed with their actions saw the inhuman ones as the elite Pennsylvanians who condemned the Paxton killers for acting, as Benjamin Franklin phrased it, as “Christian white savages.” She concludes that while scholars have tried to connect the Paxton crisis with the American Revolution by focusing on a “democratic impulse,” in fact their connection lies in the ways in which anger came to be seen as strength.

The Paxton controversy provides the entry into the final section of the book, about the relationship between the language of emotion and the coming of the American Revolution. Some of the themes developed earlier reappear here. So, in a terrific section on funerals for Liberty, Eustace connects her analysis of grief and mourning with political activity, so that protestors were able to emphasize social cohesion and manly feeling for poor Liberty. She contends that “European sensibility gave way to a new American emotional culture, in which passions served as a source of strength and compassion alone could indicate fitness to rule” (428). Eustace identifies these emotions as playing “key roles in Revolutionary political rhetoric,” and, she implies, only Revolutionary Patriot rhetoric (464–5). She looks at few Loyalist sources (and virtually no British ones). Those she does treat require a somewhat strained analysis, especially since so many Pennsylvanians did not fight on the Patriot side. So although many Quakers did not become Patriots, Eustace finds them to be essential to independence because they influenced Paine who influenced many others (457). Benjamin Chew Senior and Junior, who had both been supporters of passions (one had written an essay about them in 1741), became Loyalists; Eustace rationalizes this fact by claiming they were only Loyalists in order to preserve family fortunes. I think this could better be explained by not insisting, as Eustace appears to do, that emphasizing passions as a positive good was a uniquely Patriot American activity.

Some of these tensions underlie her discussions of Paine's Common Sense. She takes issue with Bernard Bailyn's contention that Paine had spent only one year in Pennsylvania and so was an English writer who was alien to local disputes. This is fair enough, as Paine was a canny user of local politics. Nevertheless, to argue that he was primarily a Pennsylvania writer, as Eustace appears to want to do, would seem to ignore a lifetime of training in England, as well as a background drawing on, as Sophia Rosenfeld has recently pointed out, Scottish common-sense and French bon sens philosophies.Footnote ⁸ Eustace concludes the book by asserting that neither Common Sense nor the Declaration of Independence “could bring an end to a distinctively American dilemma . . . As a people, we have never agreed how best to sit astride that awkward balance between personal advancement and community enhancement, between the pursuit of selfish passions and the promotion of social feeling” (479). Is this really a “distinctively American dilemma”?

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Knott, too, is concerned with what is “distinctively American” in the eighteenth-century history of sensibility. Her goals are in some senses more limited than Eustace's, as she tracks sensibility (not a broad range of emotions) from the later colonial era to the early republican era. Nevertheless, they are still quite lofty, as she seeks to understand the ways in which the Revolutionary moment transformed selves and indeed selfhood as a general category, the ways in which sensibility and revolution brought about “a reconstitution of self and society together” (3). Since so many novels and treatises of sensibility were European, few scholars had considered at such length the effects of this increasingly popular emphasis on sensibility in the American context. Yet Knott is not merely concerned with tracing sensibility in America. She insists that the Revolution depended upon and shaped a uniquely powerful and American history of sensibility. She maintains that the “history of the American Revolution is in part a history of sensibility” (4).

Knott's treatment of sensibility is always clever and often surprising. Throughout the book, Knott adroitly manages to transform what might seem at points like petty local squabbles into meaningful and interesting moves in a larger game of sentiment and power. She makes good on her elegant and convincing claim that “the deployment of sensibility was softly conservative and coercive,” especially in the post-Revolutionary period (257). She attends to a number of different populations. She also contends rightly that the “sentimental project sought, first, to solve problems raised or unresolved by politics” (259). In contrast to many of her subjects, she is clear-eyed and cool-headed. Altogether, her methods are sophisticated and thought-provoking, and her prose is lucid and memorable.

For Knott, Philadelphia is a useful locale in which to sketch out how transatlantic currents of sensibility affected and were affected by local circumstances. In describing sensibility, Knott treats it as “a distinctive mode of self” (5, italics original). She draws on eighteenth-century definitions of sensibility, as quickness of perception and sensation. She contends that “the sensible self was simultaneously made and expressed in social interaction by sensations of sympathy and fellow feeling, what I term a socially turned self” (5). She also acknowledges the messiness and vagueness of the disparate categories of sensibility, sympathy, and sentiment, all of which referred to styles of approach as much as to feelings themselves (50–62). She makes use of both sensibility and sentiment as key terms. How and why, Knott asks, did certain Americans draw upon sensibility as they worked to reform individuals and society?

Print and medicine form the beginning of the answer. Knott commences with the career of Robert Bell, the self-described “provedore to the sentimentalists” and Scottish printer who pitched up in Philadelphia after failing in Dublin. Considering the ways in which sensibility reached Philadelphia through works sold by Bell, Knott is able to demonstrate how transatlantic currents shaped the culture of sentiment in Philadelphia. She contends that Philadelphia was “an unusually well-prepared and labeled seedbed [and] no other bookseller in the British Atlantic world sold sentimental reading as explicitly and concertedly as did Robert Bell” (68). It would perhaps be helpful to have some sense of how Bell compared with other British Atlantic printers to give this claim more force, but it is clear that Bell and his brand of sensibility were a success in Philadelphia. Sensibility also traveled to Philadelphia with other Atlantic sojourners, such as those colonists who studied medicine in Scotland. Looking at fascinating sources, such as student notes from Edinburgh University medical lectures, Knott is able to track precisely how it was that new Scottish-inspired scientific understandings of the nerves altered colonial American understandings of the ways in which sensibility was embodied. Knott's discussion of tea, and the ways its uses were both medicalized and politicized in the late eighteenth century, is especially accomplished.

Having considered the transatlantic (British, specifically Scottish) background of sensibility, Knott moves on to its “Americanization” in Part II. Chapter 3 offers a quartet of sensibility: case studies of four individuals who found important uses for this new style. In this chapter, Knott is circling around the vexed space between prescriptive literature and lived subjectivity, the ways in which, as she phrases it, “coteries turned sensibility and nervous discourse into social practice” (149). She offers some wonderful readings of aspects of this shared culture (for instance, her ingenious analysis of cognomens, those self-conscious pen names used in epistolary friendships). A bit more by way of context and typicality might have given the case studies more grounding. Nevertheless, there are a number of important points here, especially about how these self-conscious (and often self-important) practitioners of sensibility excluded all sorts of people, from African Americans to “raw Irishmen” to servants, from their vision of universal sensibility. She also wisely identifies the ways in which sensibility frequently formed a generational culture, allowing these groups of friends to cohere and to find their own place in the world. She concludes the chapter by pointing out that her four individuals all came from Patriot households, a rather leading statement to claim a link between sensibility and Patriotism.

The next chapters make more robust this connection of sensibility and Patriotism. A British officer, John Andre, was executed for treason but nonetheless charmed Americans with his genteel sensibility. Chapter 4 considers responses to his execution, building on an earlier article.Footnote ⁹ An excellent insight—that, despite appearances to the contrary, sensibility and war were not always at odds with each other—underpins this analysis. She considers the ways in which sensibility was, however, changed by war. The same kind of masculine sentimental friendship that allowed the coteries covered in the previous chapter to flourish also apparently bound the officer class of the American cause together, giving them “a reason why men fought for each other” (163). This shared sensibility also separated them from the rank-and-file soldiers, who, in Knott's account, did not claim sensibility. Women formed a major audience for this elite masculine display of feeling, so that the literary figure of “virtue in distress” was deployed by Patriots for political ends. In Knott's formulation, sensibility helped to mobilize a weak state with a variety of interests against the powerful British Empire, so that sensibility was a key means of knitting Patriots together. She argues that, as she rightly phrases it, “sensibility was used to help arrange minds in the culture wars” (177).

Culture wars continued to jolt Philadelphia after the Revolution, as debates about national government heated up. In a beautiful example of “making the problem the solution,” Knott begins with a key national text that would appear to have little to do with sensibility: the Federalist Papers. Like a dog with a bone, Knott returns to them again and again in this chapter, trying to sniff out their relationship with this sentimental culture. In the end, by attending to the full context in which they were written, she is able to demonstrate that they may be more engaged with the culture of sensibility than first appears. At their heart, they deal with a key concern in this culture: should lawmakers be like us, or better than us? Sensibility in this text and era became less about making the government respond to people than about making people respond to the government. Knott thus connects them with other discussions of sensibility, such as the debate between Benjamin Rush and Samuel Stanhope Smith over race, environmentalism, and millennialism, as well as the uses of sensibility in the Columbian Magazine and in the writings of Lutheran minister Nicholas Collin. She posits that sensibility became at once domesticated and also grander in intent.

Inevitably, the sentimental project itself increasingly came under attack, even in the United States. Usually the reason given for what is seen as a roughly coterminous decline of the culture of sensibility in both Britain and the US is the French Revolution and its perceived excess of feeling. Knott instead contends that the American Revolution brought the end of this culture in Britain, and that it only came into decline in the US in the 1790s for reasons that had more to do with American post-Revolutionary settlements than with French ones. So Part III considers the backlash against sensibility, in various Philadelphia debates and plays. She gives considerable weight to the fallout from the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 and the war scare of 1798. Sensibility's unifying culture was also increasingly split along lines of race, gender, and other variables. Such themes resonated in the ever more rancorous debates between James Thomson Callender and “Peter Porcupine,” or William Cobbett. Problematic fissures also show up in the staged treatment of sensibility, such as John Murdoch's local 1795 play The Triumphs of Love. The city's free black population provoked a variety of anxieties as well as recasting ideas about African American capacity for sensibility. Such tensions came to a head in the print war about responses to the 1793 epidemic, in which African American ministers Richard Allen and Absalom Jones derided their exclusion from the history of the epidemic by printer Matthew Carey. These stresses also appear in concerns (in Benjamin Rush's medical theories and elsewhere) about women's nature and capacity for education. These cracks in the unifying armor of the culture of sensibility did not entirely spell the end of sensibility, but they do, with a brief epilogue, form the conclusion of Knott's main account.

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Despite similarities, then, there are also many differences between Eustace's and Knott's accounts of feeling. In some senses, Knott extends the chronology of Eustace, and of course highlights sensibility alone. But there are also major differences in the issues about the transnational nature of feeling. Eustace would seem to find a distinctive use of emotion as early as the 1730s and 1740s, as her treatment of Pope in Pennsylvania suggests; she implies that this Americanization gained forced over the 1750s and 1760s, in part leading to the American Revolution. Knott sees the change in the culture of sensibility at the moment of Revolution itself. How do we square Knott's account with Eustace's? Perhaps these accounts can be made to cohere (since passion is not sensibility), but they also suggest a larger problem: how do we identify a distinctively American culture of emotion or sensibility without a more thorough grounding in something other than American sources?

There has been a great deal written and even more said in the last decade or so about Atlantic history.Footnote ¹⁰ Both of these books, but especially Eustace's, suggest that its inroads may be more limited than might be expected. Eustace from the start wants to see Pennsylvanian reactions to Pope as distinctive, and this exceptionalist tendency grows stronger with each chapter. Even Paine becomes primarily a Pennsylvanian. Knott's perspective is wider, informed by the historiography on the French Revolution. She is attentive at many points to the European comparison (for example, British reactions to Andre's execution). However, even in her account, Britain recedes. This trajectory raises some questions. For Knott and especially Eustace, would considering Loyalist and British sources at greater length have undermined claims that sensibility and a general valorization of emotion and passion formed a uniquely American, Patriot, or Pennsylvanian strategy?

It would be pleasing if this straightforward political connection, of Patriot American and passionate and sensible, worked, but is it entirely sustainable? After all, it was not, as Knott seems to argue in her pivotal chapter on the Revolution itself, only Patriots who exploited “virtue in distress” for political purposes. Eustace and Knott emphasize Patriot images of “fair America” or “fair Liberty,” but what about “fair Britannia,” an exceedingly popular image in this period? Anti-independence Britons and Loyalists also exploited repeatedly the image of “virtue in distress” to highlight the terrible predations of Patriots. Familiarity with British rhetoric in the revolutionary period would to my mind suggest that this is not a uniquely American culture, but rather that Patriots—and, incidentally, Loyalists and the British—harnessed popular languages of feeling—whether passions or sensibility—to serve their own political ends. In any case, I think the question is more open than these rather neatly Americanized accounts suggest. Otherwise, there is a risk of re-enforcing more recent stereotypes: emotionally expressive Americans against stolid British.

British stiff upper lips have their place, but I don't think that that place is the eighteenth century, even that of the 1760s, 1770s, and 1780s. The history of British abolition is one striking example among many of the ways in which languages of feeling, sensibility, and what I have elsewhere termed “family feeling” retained political force in Britain in the 1790s.Footnote ¹¹ This is not to say that I am not sympathetic to the objectives here. I believe the exceptionalist tendency stems from two goals: one, to make a strong case for the connection of the language of feeling, usually coded as feminine, with broader (masculine) national political movements; and two, to make emotion as central in North America's history and Revolution as it has been in Europe's. Both authors are largely successful in achieving these goals. However, I am still not certain that the traditional narrative—that it was the French Revolution and its attendant wars and controversies that caused the demise of this Anglo-American culture of feeling and sensibility (a culture which had never been uncontested in either Britain or America)—does not remain the more persuasive one.

The emphasis on politics may also have led these authors to underplay other significant points, ones which had underpinned earlier scholarship on emotion and sensibility in Revolutionary America. Some of these works had actually emphasized that the “cult of sentiment” in fact accelerated in the early nineteenth century, providing a haven for those caught in political and economic dilemmas.Footnote ¹² Certainly, economics, religion, and family—forces that many might consider key driving ones of eighteenth-century emotions and not insignificant to the American Revolution and its settlements—get surprisingly short shrift in these accounts. After all, debt and credit produced some of the century's most affecting narratives of self and emotion, including those relating to the American Revolution. It is also curious, especially given that Eustace's time frame includes the Great Awakening and revivals, to see so little attention to issues about religion and feeling, especially those surrounding “enthusiastick” passions. While both authors thread issues of family throughout their narrative, neither fully exploits the power of family as an analytical category. Knott raises considerations about the relationship between sensibility and the antipatriarchal family (work fleshed out by Rhys Isaac, among others), only to dismiss them in pursuit of a story about the re-shaping of selfhood in society, a story she characterizes as “both smaller and larger” than the family-driven narrative.Footnote ¹³ I am not sure this larger story can be fully elaborated without reckoning much more on families and shifting ideas about them.

Nevertheless, these books suggest that new perspectives, ones skating lightly over tired divisions between public and private, masculine and feminine, European and American, offer great pay-offs. Sophia Rosenfeld has contended that appreciating emotion has prompted inventive methodologies in scholarship on the French Revolution. The same can now be said for the American Revolution. This trend—in books dealing with material culture, among other things—looks set to continue.Footnote ¹⁴

Altogether, Eustace and Knott offer rich and innovative accounts of a place and a range of people in it, outlining compellingly how expressions of emotions molded that place and those people. They are consistently attentive to issues of class, gender, and race in productive ways. Indeed, it is the fact that both tell stories that are not only “distinctively American” that makes them so powerful. It is a testament to two original and important books that they raise so many questions and provoke so many thoughts. If they have not solved the endlessly vexing issues about the relationship between transnational frameworks and nationalist trajectories, between private passions and public dilemmas, both have brilliantly opened up new ways of thinking about “the power of feeling” in eighteenth-century America.