'As distinct as nature has formed them': Race, class, and nation in the early Republic (Phillis Wheatley, Thomas Jefferson, Royall Tyler)

“No nation imagines itself coterminous with mankind,” Benedict Anderson has declared. But that was the idealistic implication of the natural rights rhetoric that justified the founding of the United States, the first state to consciously authorize its own existence on the basis of universal human nature and human rights. One of the paradoxes of the early national period is the apparent contradiction between that universalist humanist rhetoric and the material facts of life for those who were systematically denied the rights that were being defined as the most basic of human entitlements. How was the exclusion of particular humans from the national project made possible? In this dissertation, I consider how new essentialized identities were being constructed in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and the extent to which those identities were made possible by the same discourses that authorized American independence: the political philosophies of natural rights and civic humanism.; The public persona that was invented for Phillis Wheatley in the 1770s illuminates how earlier, premodern identities based on innate social rank lingered into the early modern period, but were themselves on the brink of transformation in the late eighteenth century by the new rhetoric of liberalism—a transformation that paved the way for the biologized racial identities of the nineteenth century. In Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson rewrites America's aboriginal inhabitants as avatars of democracy, and the New World as the home of man in the state of nature, to respond to, and ultimately discredit, Buffonian environmentalism. In so doing, Jefferson defines the parameters of membership in the American polity, based on a naturalized “political ethnicity.” In Royal Tyler's 1797 novel The Algerine Captive the factionalism of the '90s exposes the vaunted “human nature” of liberalism and republicanism as shallow, self-interested, and gullible. So chaotic is the stateside scene that the republican national character can only be rehabilitated and reconstructed overseas, in an Orientalist fantasy-cum-captivity narrative that permits the protagonist to reinvent both himself and his nation, and at the same time to erase slavery as a feature of the republican landscape.