Book Review

Canada and the United States

Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg have edited an important and interesting collection of essays by a group of well-known authors who are attempting to "reconsider" Federalism and the Federalist Party. This party, its leaders, and its ideology have been too frequently pigeonholed by historians as an institution, individuals, and ideas that attempted to foist aristocracy or even monarchy on the infant republic, that sought to protect the position, attitudes, and values of the colonial past or of revolutionary elites that feared immigrants and the French Revolution and that defended older ideals of republican virtue against the "liberal" ideals of the victorious Jeffersonians. Ben-Atar and Oberg in their introduction give the reader an overview of how historians have analyzed and evaluated the Federalists and their failure to grapple with the complexities of Federalism as a party, its influence on individuals, and its ideology.

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Contributors to the first section of the book analyze the "Age of Federalism" and examine the actions of the Federalists while in power. Rogers Smith notes that the Federalists upheld the primacy of national over state citizenship, became attracted to the ideal of a perpetual allegiance of American citizens to their nation, and made serious efforts to restrict the rights of recent immigrants. In this essay he seems much less involved in "reconsidering" the Federalists than in developing, thorough solid analysis, their position on nationalism and immigration. Ben-Atar's work on Alexander Hamilton as a pirate of English technology underlines the fact that Hamilton never became a total Anglophile. His interest in the development of American manufacturing (a traditional view) overcame his desire to supposed commitment to Britain. These efforts ended with the outbreak of the French Revolution, but Ben-Atar gives us a new view of Hamilton's foreign policy and willingness to admit some, admittedly British and technologically trained, immigrants to the United States. Herbert Sloan raises an interesting argument about Hamilton's concern over the public debt. He notes that, by early 1795, Hamilton realized that the inability of the new nation to secure credit in the Netherlands meant that taxation would be the only method of creating a sinking fund that would guarantee the debt. But with excise and direct taxes being unpopular the nation had to pay high interest rates to raise funds for the quasi-war. This first section ends with Andrew Cayton's essay showing the Federalists' ability to deal with and negotiate with Spain, Britain, and the Native Americans, which led to national control of the old Northwest and Southwest. But he also observes that, while they conquered trans-Appalachia for the nation, Federalists failed to hold it for their party. The first section fails to do much "reconsidering" of the Federalists, but it does give us a solid account of their political actions during the 1790s.

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