The exhilaration Americans felt in 1776 came not simply from their belief that they were in the vanguard of a worldwide republican revolution that would eventually topple decrepit monarchies everywhere. They also believed that they were destined to bring about a new flowering in the arts and sciences; they would become the leaders of the international “republic of letters.” Many American intellectuals came to believe that the torch of civilization was being passed across the Atlantic to the New World, where it would burn even more brightly. Despite their rejection of the luxury and corruption of the Old World, the American Revolutionaries never meant to repudiate the best of English and European culture, but rather to embrace and fulfill it. “The enterprising genius of the people,” declared an excited Joel Barlow, “promises a most rapid improvement in all the arts that embellish human nature.”
In light of their former colonial status and their earlier widespread expressions of cultural inferiority, their presumption of becoming the cultural leaders of the Western world is jarring, to say the least. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that Revolutionary leaders and artists imagined America eventually becoming the place where the best of all the arts and sciences would flourish. When the Revolutionaries talked of “treading upon the ground of Greece and Rome” they meant not only that they would erect republican governments, but also that they would in time have their own Homers and Virgils—in the words of historian David Ramsay, their own “poets, orators, criticks, and historians equal to the most celebrated of the ancient commonwealths of Greece and Italy.”
Such dreams, bombastic as they seem in retrospect, were grounded in the best scholarly thinking of the day and had helped to give Americans the confidence to undertake their Revolution. They knew, as philosopher David Hume had pointed out, that free states bred learning among the populace, and a learned populace was the best source of genius and artistic talent. But they knew as well that the arts and sciences were inevitably moving westward. From mid-century on, they had read and extolled Bishop Berkeley’s “Verses on the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America,” which set forth the conventional notion of a western cycle of empire from the Middle East to Greece, from Greece to Rome, from Rome to western Europe, and from western Europe across the Atlantic to the New World. As early as 1759, an unsympathetic British traveler noted that the colonists were “looking forward with eager and impatient expectation to that destined moment when America is to give the law to the rest of the world.” So common became this theme of the transit of civilization westward that it led to the creation of a new literary genre, “The Rising Glory of America” poem, which, it seems, every gentleman with literary aspirations tried his hand at.
Of course, not every American intellectual was sure of the New World’s ability to receive the inherited torch of Western culture, and some doubted whether America’s primitive tastes could ever sustain the fine arts. But many of the Revolutionary leaders envisioned America’s becoming not only a libertarian refuge from the world’s tyranny, but also a worthy place where, in the words of Ezra Stiles, the enlightened president of Yale, “all the arts may be transported from Europe and Asia and flourish with . . . an augmented lustre.”
If Americans were to exceed Europe in dignity, grandeur, and taste, they would somehow have to create a republican art that avoided the Old World vices of overrefinement and luxury. The solution lay in the taut rationality of republican classicism, which allowed artistic expression without fostering corruption and social decay. It emphasized, as the commissioners who were charged with supervising the construction of public buildings in Washington, D.C., put it in 1793, “a grandeur of conception, a Republican simplicity, and that true elegance of proportion, which correspond to a tempered freedom excluding Frivolity, the food of little minds.”
Such a neoclassical art was not an original art in any modern sense, but it was never intended to be. The Americans’ aim, in their literature, painting, and architecture, was never to break irreparably from English forms but to give new and fresh republican spirit to old forms, to isolate and exhibit in their art the external and universal principles of reason and nature. Poets in the wilds of the New York frontier thus saw nothing incongruous in invoking comparisons with Virgil or Horace. The Connecticut poet John Trumbull was compared to Swift. Milton, Dryden, and Pope were all adopted without embarrassment as models for imitation. Even Noah Webster, despite all his experiments with developing a peculiar American language, never intended that the elegant style of Addison should be abandoned.
The criterion of art in this neoclassical era lay not in the genius of the artist or in the novelty of the work, but rather in the effect of the art on the audience or spectator. Consequently, someone like Joel Barlow could believe that his long epic poem The Vision of Columbus (1787), precisely because of its high moral and republican message, could excel in grandeur even Homer’s Iliad. And the painter John Trumbull, not to be confused with his cousin the poet, could conclude that the profession of painting was not trivial and socially useless as long as the artist depicted great events and elevated the spirit of the viewer. Washington, as much as he loved the theater, could only justify it on the grounds that it would “advance the interest of private and public virtue” and “polish the manners and habits of society.” There was nothing startling about Thomas Jefferson’s choice of the Maison Carrée, a Roman temple at Nîmes from the first century A.D., as a model for the new republican state capitol to be built along the mud-lined streets of a backwoods town in Virginia. Since architecture to Jefferson was “an art which shows so much,” it was particularly important for the new nation that appropriate inspirational forms be adopted, even though a Roman temple was hard to heat and acoustically impossible.
The cultural relics of these neoclassical dreams are with Americans still: not only in the endless proliferation of Greek and Roman temples, but in the names of towns like Syracuse and Troy; in the designation of political institutions like the capitols and the senates; in political symbols like the goddess Liberty and numerous Latin mottoes; and in the poetry and songs, such as “Hail Columbia.” But the spirit that once inspired these things, the meaning they had for the Revolutionaries, has been lost and was being lost even as they were being created. How many Americans today know what the pyramid and eye on the Great Seal mean, even though the device appears on every dollar bill? Who today reads Joel Barlow’s epic poetry or Timothy Dwight’s Conquest of Canaan? Much of the art of the 1790s, except for portraits, was neglected and scorned by subsequent generations. All of these neoclassical dreams were soon overwhelmed by the egalitarian democracy that resulted from the Americans’ grand experiment in republicanism.