The American Republic of Taste

      Henry Cheever, an academy student in Massachusetts, was determined to hone his prose, molding it to meet the standards laid out by Hugh Blair’s Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres and by Henry Home, Lord Kames’s Elements of Criticism. He filled his commonplace book with epigrams culled from the works of Milton, Goldsmith, Dryden, and Pope. Keen to demonstrate his mastery of the fine style prescribed by the rhetoricians and exemplified by the poets, he set out to describe the summer sunset he had just witnessed. In July 1829, after beseeching the “Omniscient Potentiate” for guidance, he wrote that the “borders of the western horizon” glowed “like a golden flame,” their light punctuated by “blue pyramidial mounts like [a] sudden flash of spirit in raging roaring flames.”¹ In crafting his tortured summer sunset, Cheever marked himself not just as a reader and writer but also as a looker, as an active and engaged spectator whose “golden flames” and “blue pyramidial mounts” derived not just from a particular way of reading and writing but also from a particular way of seeing.

      Lucy Sumner, newly married and intent on embodying the virtues that spelled republican womanhood, had fallen into the habit of visiting Daniel Bowen’s Columbian Museum. The paintings, taxidermied birds, wax figures, and curiosities provided her circle with “rational and refined amusement,” especially when compared to the risqué and “disgusting” circus that had been attracting far more patronage than she thought proper. But Sumner valued the Columbian for more than its admirable collection. The museum encouraged a distinct—and distinctly rewarding—sort of spectatorship. When one spent time at the Columbian, she explained to her friend Eliza Wharton, “the eye is gratified, the imagination charmed, and the understanding improved.” Far from “palling on the taste,” the interplay of familiar exhibits and novel additions had an animating effect on intellect and imagination. At the Columbian, she declared, “I am never a weary spectator.”²

      Sometime in the late 1780s, Samuel Powel, one of the wealthiest and most influential men in Philadelphia, paid tribute to his friend and fellow revolutionary, George Washington, by tracing his silhouette and inscribing “General Washington” on its back. We have no information about the circumstances under which Powel made the profile, although family lore held that he used a recently invented Argand lamp to project Washington’s profile on the wall. We know only that the Powel family took pains to save it, passing the memento from one generation to the next until it finally found a home upstairs in their elegant townhouse, now a museum. The impromptu likeness testifies to the so-called Patriot Mayor’s close personal and political relationship with the pater patriae. Its preservation testifies to his family’s lasting pride in that association. But behind this all-too-predictable story about prestige and personal connection is another set of stories, even if we cannot recover them. What impulses led one powerful and cosmopolitan man to amuse himself by drawing the rough silhouette of another? What impulses led a revolutionary hero known for his reserve to amuse himself and his friends in this way?³

      A teenaged academy student. A minor character in the United States’ first bestselling novel. One man of affairs nearing the end of his life and another already securing his place in history. At first glance, the individuals at the center of these three vignettes seem to have little in common with one another. But in describing a sunset, touting the moral benefits of museum attendance, or creating a profile, each claimed citizenship in the republic of taste. To situate Henry Cheever, Lucy Sumner, Samuel Powel, and George Washington in the republic of taste is to place them at the intersection of the early republic’s material, visual, literary, and political cultures. They knew that the exercise of their taste was caught up in the material world. It depended on taxidermied animals and Argand lamps. It demanded both beautiful vistas and books that contained a vocabulary capable of describing those vistas. Whether they believed that their distinguishing taste was inborn (and therefore a marker of breeding and station) or acquired (and thus the product of application and study), they understood that it was predicated upon, demonstrated through, and confirmed by reading, writing, and looking—processes that they believed to be inextricably bound together. Cheever, Sumner, Powel, and Washington also believed that their shared aesthetic sensibilities