Although emotion is an elusive subject for research, it can provide insight into a society's workings. In early America, emotions colored every aspect of the new society from domestic to diplomatic relations. Historians examining the years 1754 to 1829 have found fairly ample evidence of how early Americans both described and prescribed emotional ideals—the cultural expectations of emotion. Yet evidence of the social expression of emotion—records of how people communicated and negotiated emotion—is harder to come by. Most problematic of all in the study of emotion during the early American period is finding surviving traces of the inner dimension of emotion, or subjective experience.
In the wake of the Enlightenment, emotion achieved a newfound appreciation in the culture of the Old and New Worlds. A tremendous number of writers and thinkers devoted themselves both to describing and prescribing emotional ideals. According to their prescriptions, achieving civility required that people cultivate yet carefully control their emotions.
Scottish moral philosophers frequently read in America—Francis Hutcheson in On the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections (1728); David Hume in Treatise of Human Nature (1739); and Adam Smith in Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—argued for the efficacy of emotion in fostering virtue. Benevolence, based on the ability to feel for others, was to be the glue that bound individuals together in society. Likewise, advice and conduct books, such as Lord Chesterfield's Letters of Advice to His Son (1775), urged the cultivation of finer feelings alongside the restraint of unruly personal passions. Popular literature—such as articles in the eighteenth-century periodical The Spectator, published in England by Joseph Addison and frequently reprinted on the other side of the Atlantic, and the first original novel ever published on American soil, William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1795)—also celebrated emotion. At the same time, American theologians preached the importance of emotion for Christian conversion. Jonathan Edwards helped provoke the First Great Awakening with his Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746); his grandson Timothy Dwight assumed the presidency of Yale College and helped begin the Second Great Awakening in 1795.
Notably, these emotional ideals, far from being associated exclusively with femininity, applied to men and women alike. And although there were certain associations between emotional sensibility and gentility, by the time of the Second Great Awakening the capacity for feeling was widely understood to cut across lines of race and rank as well as gender.
American emphasis on emotion was sparked in part by the confrontations among cultures brought about during the Seven Years' War (1756-1763). During that war the British and British Americans, the French, and Native Americans alike contested the rules of savagery and civility, using emotion as a means of keeping score. Indeed, emotions played key roles in mediating colonial encounters: Europeans participated in Indian condolence ceremonies, and the French and English competed in the arena of civility and sensibility, as spelled out in both popular political pamphlets and official communiqués. Throughout the period 1754 to 1829, Americans preferred to cast themselves as inherently civilized and all Indians as savage. Yet they could not help admiring what they saw as the Indians' natural elegance of emotional expression. In 1785 Thomas Jefferson praised the eloquence of Shawnee Chief Logan in his Notes on the State of Virginia, and at the Treaty of Greenville in 1795, General Anthony Wayne paid tribute to his Indian opponents' civility and capacity for sympathy.
Emotional expression also contributed significantly to political language. Thomas Paine called on all Patriots to consult "the feelings and passions of mankind" in his 1776 pro-Revolution pamphlet Common Sense. In 1783 George Washington delivered an emotional speech on behalf of the new nation in response to the Newburgh conspiracy. Countless new senators and representatives sought to use their own finely honed senses of sympathy and resentment as a means of displaying their honor in the course of conducting the business of government. American political leaders relied on expressions of emotion to define and defend their positions.
In many areas of public life outside politics as well, expressions of emotion helped send important messages. Reform movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, especially abolitionism, used the language of humanitarian sensibility as a rallying cry. Like the evangelical minister John Wesley, who demanded (in a piece widely reprinted in the 1770s and after called Thoughts on the Keeping of Negroes) that slaveholders pay attention to "the flowing eyes, the heaving breasts" of those they held in bondage, activists urged their fellow citizens to show the strength of their feeling for others by having compassion for the enslaved.
To track changing ideas about emotion or shifting levels of expression is one thing, but it is quite another to attempt a history of emotion as experienced internally. Historians who investigate records with the potential to reveal personal emotions, such as speech recorded in court testimony, letters exchanged among friends and family members, and the emotions mentioned in diaries, agree that between 1754 and 1829 people devoted ever-increasing amounts of effort to the deliberate regulation of their emotions. Some emotions, such as social sympathy and romantic love, appear to have been granted greater importance; other emotions, such as anger, inspired ambivalence. Ultimately, however, beyond the general conclusion that Americans increasingly valued emotional control, determining the relative prevalence of any given emotion presents great difficulties.
Historians of emotion have turned to theories and methods drawn from many other disciplines, especially psychology, anthropology, and sociology, along with philosophy and literary theory. Historians influenced by psychological theory tend to argue against significant change over time, convinced that certain universal emotions largely transcend the particularities of time and place. Conversely, scholars influenced by anthropological theories tend to emphasize that emotion is contingent—that is, emotional experience is shaped through discourse. Between these two extremes lie approaches that try to account for both the commonalities of human emotion across culture and the very real variations in prescriptions for and expressions of emotion. If all human beings have the same potential to experience emotion, yet variations in the apparent occurrence of emotion are real, then attention to the patterns of which emotions are prized or pilloried, expressed or repressed can tell scholars a good deal. Such trends can reveal much about the structuring of society and may also ultimately offer clues to changing subjectivity.