John Henry, the British spy, seemed to understand what it took to move the powerful to action, using secret letters to his handlers in British colonial administration as an incitement to Constitutionally declared war. My discussion here relies on that metanarrative of “abstraction” to produce a conversation between its historical actors. Though Henry wrote his letters on Federalist activities to Sir James Craig, Governor-General of the Canadas, he saved copies for his own use. Ultimately, he found the means to sell them to James Madison in February of 1812, at a moment when the president was equally keen to know of the activities of his political opponents. Madison published the letters almost as soon as he received them. In some sense then, the Henry letters, though addressed to Craig, were written for Madison. And Madison’s own subsequent rhetorical and legal moves towards war came in “conversation” with Henry. Henry abstracts authority and the public so as not to risk the ruin of the fictive and novelistic, but to harness it and its mediational effects. It redefines the relationship between the people and the Constitution, from the irrationally voiced nation, which diffuses authority, to a proper realignment with Presidential power. The move is a containment of the role of individual self-hood in the process of naming national interests and declaring war. In the process, that republican devotion to bottom-up persuasive transparency, idealized in the contemporaneous media of letters, print, and opinion, is critically diminished. He invites us to consider how late eighteenth century networks of information—letters, secret communiqués, war messages to Congress--abstract the self (its “absurd” opinions, its “inconsistent” rationales) to the benefit of a new (masculinized) executive. The executive model of authority will replace the irregular multitude of republican political culture.
America's Machiavellian: Gouverneur Morris at the Constitutional Convention
