Reviewed by Matthew Pethers | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3

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Reviewed by Matthew Pethers | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 65.3 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship. By Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 253 pages. $59.95 (cloth), $24.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Matthew Pethers, University of Nottingham
In his preface to American Poems, the pioneering anthology of contemporary verse he edited in 1793, Elihu Hubbard Smith suggests that "performances of this kind, falling from the pens of persons not intent on literary fame; or intent on reputation different from poetical reputation; or whose names have not yet been dignified by national applause; especially as so many of them are adapted to particular and local occasions ... are constantly liable to be forgotten and lost."¹ Indeed, despite Smith's valiant attempt at literary conservation, the writers who figure prominently in American Poems have generally suffered the latter fate, and often for the very reasons that Smith identifies. Schooled in an ideal of self-sacrificing public virtue derived from the classical republican tradition, late-eighteenth-century men of letters such as John Trumbull and Timothy Dwight tended to view literature as serving a primarily civic function. Their writings cultivate an air of genteel disdain for the mob and the market that chimes with the social elitism and political conservatism of the Federalist Party. The triumph of Jeffersonian democracy in 1800 and the ascendance of a Romantic aesthetic in the 1820s thus did writers such as Trumbull and Dwight few favors. Readers and critics alike largely abandoned those works whose coded satire, revolutionary subject matter, and studiedly impersonal tone had begun to seem resolutely alien. In fact, it is only over the last two decades that the scholarly community (if not the general public) has shown a renewed and sustained interest in the intellectual and cultural life of the Connecticut Wits and other similar groups. There are various and diverse reasons for this interpretive shift, of course, but not least among them we should include the recovery of the civic humanist worldview in the wake of the republican synthesis school, the recovery of the ideal of intellectual sociability in the wake of Jürgen Habermas's work on the public sphere, and the recovery of the communal nexus of eighteenthcentury writing in the wake of historians of the book.	1
Certainly, all three of these overlapping analytic trends underpin Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan's insightful new study of the cultural role played by those men "engaged in belletrism" (3) in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution. Pursuing into the 1790s and 1800s some of those issues first broached in regard to the colonial period by David S. Shields and in regard to the revolutionary era by Michael Warner, Kaplan's book focuses in particular on the challenges that were presented during the Federalist era to earlier understandings of literary culture and the public sphere.² During the first half of the eighteenth century, a Shaftesburian model of sympathetic sociability had taken root in the New World that "opposed the voluntary, horizontal ties of shared taste and pleasure to the vertical, inescapable bonds of a monarchical state and hierarchical society" (1). But with the successful repudiation of British authority, the oppositional function of the public sphere, which had been taking on an increasingly explicit political dimension from the middle of the century, was extensively assimilated into the state. Those who held fast to the Shaftesburian model and the forms of social critique it produced thus found themselves at odds with their fellow Americans. For although the emergence of a two-party system in the 1790s dramatically exposed the ideological divisions in the new nation, the majority of commentators on both sides still saw formal politics as the appropriate arena for civic action and national consensus building, rendering alternative definitions of citizenship and fraternity negligible. In this respect, poets, salonistes, and scholars were all faced with one stark question: "Could men of letters create a vantage point from which they could usefully think about, criticize, and affect the new Republic?" (3–4).	. . .

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