In 1994 Allen Brinkley published an influential article in the Journal of American History that noted with surprise how little his fellow historians had written about the history of American conservatism. Brinkley worried that this glaring omission had left the profession unable to speak meaningfully to the political dynamics that had produced the Age of Goldwater and Reagan. In the years that followed, a new generation of historians took up Brinkley's charge, and they transformed the study of American conservatism into what is now one of the most active subfields in the discipline. That literature has been limited, however, by its almost exclusive focus on the twentieth century, with the post-WWII era understandably drawing the bulk of scholarly attention.Joshua Lynn's insightful history of antebellum conservatism joins Adam Smith's The Stormy Present (2017) in the ranks of the rare book-length study that extends the chronology of American conservatism back into the nineteenth century. Focusing on the political culture and ideology of the Democratic Party in the 1840s and 1850s, Lynn traces the evolution of a distinctively Jacksonian thread in the American conservative tradition that has proven remarkably durable ever since. Ironically, the ideas that made Jacksonianism seem so radical to contemporaries in the 1820s and 1830s—its emphasis on natural rights, popular democracy, radical egalitarianism, and individual freedom for all white men—became for the next generation of Democrats a fragile inheritance. Democrats sought to preserve their cherished “white man's republic” from the perceived threats of abolitionists, women's rights activists, and a host of other reforming “fanatics” who they feared would use the centralized power of the federal government to trample upon the God-given rights and freedoms of “the people,” a term that took on ever more explicitly racialized and gendered connotations in that era.By placing the Jacksonians rather than the Whigs at the center of his story about antebellum conservatism, the book's argument might at first feel counter-intuitive to many readers. But Lynn convincingly argues that the Jacksonian conservatives are key to understanding what makes American conservatism, especially its more populist variants, so distinctive. Lynn argues that “somewhere between John Locke and Barry Goldwater, ‘liberalism’ became ‘conservatism’ in the United States,” and he sees the Jacksonians of the 1840s and 1850s as the key turning point in that history. Where the staid and learned elitism of the antebellum Whigs linked them to figures like Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, or Edmund Burke, Jacksonian conservatives like Stephen Douglas innovated a populist rhetoric of reaction that put the revolutionary ideals of the Enlightenment to work in defense of the distinctively patriarchal and racist society of antebellum America, both North and South.Although Lynn discusses the ongoing influence of John Locke and the Enlightenment, this is not a work of intellectual history. Rather, Lynn offers a richly detailed history of a conservative American political culture that emerged to advocate for and defend an especially reactionary and aggressive form of white male identity politics. Lynn takes “conservatism” to mean what the self-defined “conservatives” of the time said it was, and he finds that it was as much an affair of the heart as the head. The public rhetoric of this conservative political culture rejected the Whigs’ more organicist understanding of politics and centered concepts like natural rights, democratic self-governance, and the primacy of individual freedom. But all of these rights, all of this governance, all of this freedom, Lynn argues, came to be explicitly understood as the sole property of the subset of Americans who were white men. Not only did this political culture encourage white men to feel uniquely entitled to this status, it also signaled to them that this perceived inheritance from the founding generation was under unprecedented assault in the antebellum era. The conservative Democrats of the 1850s felt deeply aggrieved by a range of “others,” especially restive slaves, abolitionists, women's rights activists, and other reformers who asserted their own rights, freedoms, and ability to govern. This will not come as news to those familiar with the politics of this era, but Lynn's contribution is to dig deeply into this apparent contradiction or hypocrisy in order to unpack the political and cultural logic that made the Jacksonians’ populist commitment to inequality and their deeply anti-democratic theory of democracy seem perfectly coherent and consistent to the political actors of that time.Lynn's argument pushes against a declensionist narrative that depicts a Jacksonian democracy that was slowly “sullied” by a rising tide of racism in the 1840s and 1850s as Southerners came to exert a more forceful role in the party. Lynn's argument suggests instead that the Jacksonians of the 1840s and 50s, responding to the intensifying sectional crisis and the growing abolitionist and women's rights movements in the North, merely made explicit what had been implicitly assumed in those earlier decades. The political culture of the antebellum Democratic Party thus functioned as a key mechanism that knit “together white men across the country to protect the racial and gender hierarchies upon which their identities as democratically self-governing white men were based” (6). These Democratic conservatives, North and South, regarded hierarchies of race and gender as natural, unchanging features of the social world that they perceived to be under unnatural assault in the 1840s and 1850s. Lynn's great achievement is to document how this more traditionally “conservative” social organicism co-existed with a recognizably Enlightenment, rationalist, and egalitarian vision of politics that scholars rarely associate with the conservative tradition. Lynn's conservative Democrats assumed a world in which their idealized polity of empowered white male citizens interacting rationally with one another as equals rested atop and depended upon a socioeconomic substratum comprised of everyone who was not an adult white male. This helps explain the distinctive hysteria of Democratic Party rhetoric in this era, for one small crack in the system—one concession to women's rights or the rights of Black people—threatened to send the entire edifice crashing down. It is such hysteria which led Chief Justice Taney to articulate, in the cold, legalistic language of a Supreme Court ruling, that “the black man has no rights that the white man need respect.”Lynn's book presents to us an antebellum culture that has clear contemporary resonances. It shows us white male conservatives who simultaneously staked a confident claim on the ideals of liberty and equality that informed the founding generation and also stoked apocalyptic fears that this great American inheritance was on the verge of imminent collapse unless those white men organized to defend it. Although it has always been contested, the reactionary white male identity politics that first emerged in the antebellum era has been a recurrent and powerful force in American political culture ever since.

Abstract:Gentlemen Revolutionaries: Power and Justice in the New American Republic. By Tom Cutterham.

This book portrays Revolutionary Era actors such as Benjamin Franklin, his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache, Mercy Otis Warren, Thomas Paine, and Philip Morin Freneau as propagandists in the best sense of the term. Whereas most scholars tend to dismiss propaganda as mere “deceit and dishonesty” (10), Russ Castronovo emphasizes the more horizontal and democratic dimensions of propaganda, the way it enabled often counter-hegemonic ideas to propagate and proliferate across the eighteenth-century “printscape.” The term “printscape” effectively conveys the complex web of personal, public, official, commercial, printed, and manuscript communications explored in this work. By centering propaganda, rather than a cognate term like persuasion or ideology, Castronovo draws our interpretive attention away from the static content or empirical veracity of the words on the eighteenth-century page, and toward the ways those words took on unexpected lives of their own as they coursed through various channels of communication. Where Bernard Bailyn immersed himself in the pamphlets of the Revolutionary Era to uncover the ideas that motivated the rebels and gave meaning to their cause, Castronovo is more interested in where texts of all sorts went, how they got there, how they crossed paths with and interpenetrated each other, and what readers did with them once they encountered them. While the answers offered in this book are more suggestive than definitive, the methodology employed provides a useful model for future studies of the cultural and intellectual history of the late eighteenth century.

Revolutions without Borders: The Call to Liberty in the Atlantic World. By Janet Polasky.

Before and during the American Revolution, ‘democracy’ was relatively rarely invoked in American political discourse, and when it was, usually had negative weight. By contrast, in 1800, candidates who called themselves Democrats won control of the Federal Government. This chapter charts the emergence of the first advocates of democracy in the United States. During the Constitution debates, attacks on aristocracy were much more common than positive accounts of democracy. After 1790, a group of radical newspaper editors sympathetic to the French Revolution promoted the term as a political slogan. Its entry into mainstream political discourse thereafter was however accompanied by the shearing away of some of its more radical associations.

Tom Paine's America: The Rise and Fall of Transatlantic Radicalism in the Early Republic. By Seth Cotlar. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. [xiv], 269. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3100-5.) Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution. By Michal Jan Rozbicki. Jeffersonian America. (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 2011. Pp. [xii], 288. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-8139-3064-0.) Following the rise of new social history in the 1960s and the cultural turn of the late 1980s onward, fewer historians are undertaking serious studies on the history of ideas. As the two books under review demonstrate, however, there is still plenty to discover about the intellectual ferment during the American Revolutionary era. Michal Jan Rozbicki's Culture and Liberty in the Age of the American Revolution is an admirably ambitious attempt to recast the basic terms by which we understand the American Revolution. Rozbicki looks beyond the historiographical debate between those who consider the Revolution ideological and those who consider it more social revolution. He instead reflects on how contemporaries understood one of its central stated goals: liberty. For late-eighteenth-century Americans, was not an absolute, the way, he suggests, we use the concept today, extrapolating from Enlightenment thought. Rather, came from an English language of rights and was always relational: a single person living on desert island, Rozbicki writes, cannot be said to posses (p. 3). Liberties meant being able to do things others could not do themselves, and to have authority to do to them what they could not do to you. Furthermore, the language of freedoms was always an elite language, never intended to apply to the lower sort, much less women or slaves. For Rozbicki, then, the seeming contradiction between Revolutionaries' language of liberty and their practice of slavery is paradox only in the minds of historians: liberties meant both the right not to be enthralled and the right to hold other people in thrall. Because his argument is that the language of liberties was an elite language, his sources are elite sources: the published writings and letters of elite men of the founding generation. Rozbicki contends that his study is primarily about culture, but the book invokes culture more than analyzes it. Indeed, there is almost nothing in this book in terms of either sources or analysis that resembles the work of most cultural historians over the past two decades. Rather, more traditional historians of early American thought, like Gordon S. Wood, Edmund S. Morgan, and Bernard Bailyn, might find this work theoretically or methodologically akin to theirs, with one major exception: Rozbicki is very clear that the ideas that he analyzes are for the elite, rather than for all Americans. Rozbicki poses an elegant solution to the contradictions between the rhetorical use of and the many levels of unfreedom in Revolutionary America. But two parts of his claim gnaw at me little. The first is that this book, nominally cultural history, lacks one of the field's central insights, which would have richly complicated it: namely, that just because non-elites had less access to capital-intensive forms of communication (in this case, printing presses) does not mean that they lacked ideas, which historians can try to reconstruct through examining rituals, protests, creative expression, and so forth. Poor whites and African Americans (enslaved and free) and, indeed, many elite whites did in fact show in many ways that they had alternate definitions of liberty that Culture and Liberty seems not to acknowledge. Chief among those ways was through religion: Quakers, Moravians, and radical evangelical Baptists and Methodists all had very different conceptions of equality from the elite white version that Rozbicki so ably plumbs here. …

This book explores the rise of political pluralism, a perennial theme in American history, by focusing closely on the social and political history of the Irish in late eighteenth-century Philadelphia. The study's interpretive arc—tracing the shift from an ideally harmonious, single-interest polity to a more combative form of politics marked by ethnic and ideological diversity—squares with most other recent works on American political development, though some scholars may disagree with Maurice J. Bric's claim that genuine political pluralism did not emerge until the last half of the 1790s. Despite its fairly predictable central argument, this exquisitely detailed study offers many original observations about the evolving relationship between ethnicity and politics in early America. On a historiographical level, Bric's subtle grasp of the scholarship on Irish and British political development enables him creatively to resituate North American political history in a richly transatlantic context. New perspectives on familiar events such as the Paxton Boys episode of 1763–1764 and the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798 emerge when they are interpreted by someone intimately familiar with Ireland's long history of ethnic and political strife. The book's second major achievement is Bric's close and careful reconstruction of Irish American political life between the ratification of the Constitution and Thomas Jefferson's election in 1800. Historians of the early republic have long delighted in quoting from the many Federalists who complained about the disproportionate and dangerous influence of the “wild Irish” on Philadelphia politics, but now we have an extended and judicious examination of these political actors, the organizations they built, and the substantial political resistance they encountered. More effectively than any previous work on the topic, this book blends together a social history that depicts the emergence of Irish ethnicity and a political history that illustrates the dynamic relationship between emerging democratic politics, on one hand, and ethnic aspirations and divisions, on the other.

Reviewed by: Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy Seth Cotlar (bio) Reclaiming the American Revolution: The Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions and Their Legacy. By William J. Watkins. (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004. Pp. xxiv, 236. Cloth, $39.95.) In a short 1999 article, William Watkins proposed that "secession is the quintessence of Americanism" (http://www.mises.org/story/223). He has now written a book-length treatise developing this fairly unconventional take on the nation's political tradition. In doing so, Watkins has chosen his evidence selectively, overlooking a wide range of scholarship that may have forced him to qualify his claims. Rather than a careful and balanced assessment of the resolutions and their place in the nation's political history, this book is a briskly argued brief on behalf of a version of American federalism in which state nullification has been retrieved from the dustbin of southern history, stripped of its association with slavery (according to Watkins "recent scholarship has shown that there was no nexus between . . . nullification and the preserv[ation] of slavery" [117]), and repositioned at the center of the nation's constitutional tradition. The last half of the book traces how a small band of virtuous Americans have reclaimed the legacy of 1798 in their efforts to protect the "original purity" of "our constitutional compact" (154) against forces such as "the Lincoln dictatorship" (148), the "War on the Republic" (120, more commonly known as the Civil War), the regulatory apparatus that emerged in the Progressive Era and the New Deal, and the "chains" Americans have "forge[d] . . . for themselves" with programs such as Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (159). Watkins is strongest when he outlines the thinking behind the 1798 resolutions, particularly Jefferson's. While he is not the first to note that Jefferson advocated Virginia and Kentucky's secession from the union in 1798, he goes further than most historians in suggesting that this strong emphasis on state sovereignty, rooted in the compact theory of the Constitution, lay at the core of Jefferson's and perhaps even Madison's vision of federalism. When Watkins extends this claim to assert that nullification was one of "the first principles of the American Revolution" (1) and a central component of the broader political thought of the founding era, he is on much shakier ground. After all, the Kentucky legislature, led by [End Page 167] John Breckinridge, significantly muted the language that Jefferson had sent them. They removed the term "nullification" from the resolution and excised Jefferson's suggestion that they correspond with other states in order to encourage coordinated resistance across the nation. Watkins does not trace out the political machinations within the Kentucky legislature, so we have no idea whether Breckinridge was representative of his fellow legislators or was imposing moderation upon an otherwise radical assembly. Watkins also acknowledges that no other state in the union responded positively to Kentucky's watered-down resolution, and indeed, most rejected the argument even after the radical language of nullification had been excised. Meanwhile, the Virginia resolution authored by Madison never broached the doctrine of state nullification. That should not come as much of a surprise, since in 1787 Madison had advocated a federal veto over state laws. But since Watkins has already decided that the principles of nullification lay at the core of the American political tradition, he quickly passes over such inconvenient details. When Watkins extends his investigation into the nineteenth century, his account suffers from a similar paucity of concrete evidence and an overreliance on one figure, in this case John C. Calhoun. Considering the current historical interest around questions of memory and the invention of tradition, one might expect that a chapter on the "legacy of the resolutions" would provide an examination of how a range of political actors in the nineteenth century created that legacy by deploying and reconfiguring the memory of 1798 in new contexts. Unfortunately, the only evidence Watkins provides of such action is in 1828 when Calhoun made explicit reference to the Virginia and Kentucky resolutions in a piece critical of the tariff. The reader is left to wonder whether anyone else had either attacked or...