Abstract
In his View of the Causes and Consequences of the American Revolution, published in 1797, Reverend Jonathan Boucher recounted a sermon he was supposed to deliver to mark the 1774 opening of Charlotte Hall School at Port Tobacco in Charles County, Maryland. The Anglican cleric from nearby Prince George’s County had intended to inform his audience that the first master of the new school should be a devout Anglican and should take an oath of loyalty to the crown. That master would in turn disavow classical writing, rhetoric, and oratory in case students accepted “the sentiments and principles of our great masters in the art, who were republicans.” The preacher was worried that “as subjects, we are at least preposterously, if not dangerously, educated, when we are taught to prefer republicanism.” For Boucher, furthermore, republicanism was a pernicious social as well as political doctrine. Its egalitarian implications not only threatened monarchy, but the entire social order. As the Great Chain of Being linked God to angels to monarchs to gentlemen and to others on down to servants and slaves, Boucher intended to remind his listeners that “according to the subordination of conditions (which, for the good of all, our Maker has established among mankind), some must toil and drudge for others.”
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Notes
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© 2013 Steven Sarson
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Sarson, S. (2013). Introduction. In: The Tobacco-Plantation South in the Early American Atlantic World. The Americas in the Early Modern Atlantic World. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137116567_1
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