Response to Nicole Eustace's Passion is the Gale

In Passion is the Gale author Nicole Eustace takes a decidedly different interpretation on Thomas Paine’s Commonsense. She asserts throughout her work that Paine’s passionate treatise empowered the political language used throughout the colonial period and revolution and was used to justify and unite Anglo-Americans in their discourse on liberty (p. 14). Her take, coupled with other evidence particularly that of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man challenges the current narrative of the American Revolution as the culmination of the Age of Reason. She claims that Pope’s ideas influenced discourse because passion was seen as a universal human phenomena and useful tool of human will (p.20). Perhaps somewhat paradoxically she asserts that emotion was used as a tool of subordination and division. She claims that cheerfulness and contentment were seen as evidence of social order (p.69). Similarly, with the advent of slavery in Pennsylvania the ruling elite went to great lengths to depict people held in bondage as “dispirited” and therefore less than human (p 71).  Eustace asserts that the revolution was as much a product of passion as reason. She goes so far as to assert that “the language of rebellion demonstrates that eighteenth-century Anglo-Americans regarded emotional capacities as the linchpin of liberty (p.385).”  While not completely antithetical Passion is the Gale complicates current intellectual history of colonial America.