Moral Contagion

Abstract

The Atlantic's Dangerous UndercurrentsThis chapter explores the emergence and application of the theory that the revolutionary ideals of autonomy, liberty, and freedom that animated the age of revolution were not only a point of celebration for patriots and liberals across the Atlantic world, but also a cause for apprehension and vigilance. The powerful currents of radical individualism and personal autonomy that circulated during the fi nal quarter of the eighteenth century did not decelerate after the inauguration of republics in 1776 or 1789. They continued, and once the racial limits to the supposedly universal discourses of freedom and liberty became increasingly central to the practical implementation of new political arrangements in the North Atlantic -and superbly confi rmed by the nonrecognition of Haiti (politically and intellectually) -these currents, when appropriated by those increasingly outside history, became dangerous undercurrents. However, the circulation of these ideas, or rather the circulation of the notion that these ideas were truly universal, was not necessarily understood or conceptualized as occurring. The dangerous undercurrents of the revolutionary (black) Atlantic only became visible, only became defi nable and preventable, as the racial limits of autonomy and political modernity became inscribed in American political, social, and legal life. In other words, identifying the dangerous undercurrents of Atlantic history was a process, pieced together as various places wrestled with the highly variable application of the age of revolution's central tenets to nonwhite peoples.These processes were spatialized. Many nineteenth-century white Americans interpreted the push for liberty by American revolutionaries as an internal, naturally evolving process running along a general pathway towards, depending on the person, the Constitution, the millennium, or Jacksonian Democracy. But this process of internalization of revolutionary "success" on the American scene occurred with a simultaneous externalization of black revolutionary ideologies. For many white Americans, black revolutionaries came from terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.