Reviewed by Birte Pfleger | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4

You have not been recognized as a subscriber to the WMQ online. About 634 words from this article are provided below; about 772 words remain.

If you are a individual subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you may:: • login here if you have already registered for online access.; • Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
• Set up your online account for the first time.
If you are not a subscriber to the William and Mary Quarterly, you can:: • subscribe here.
• Purchase a research pass to gain two hour access to the entire History Cooperative web site. You will have full access to current issues of the William and Mary Quarterly (104.3-present). Note: the Research Pass does not provide access to JSTOR's holdings of the William and Mary Quarterly.
Instititutions can:: • Subscribe to this journal and receive print and electronic issues.
• Activate your existing subscription so that we recognize your IP number ranges.

Reviewed by Birte Pfleger | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, LXV.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

"Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together": Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840. By Albrecht Koschnik. Jeffersonian America. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007. 365 pages. $45.00 (cloth).
Reviewed by Birte Pfleger, California State University, Los Angeles
The Habermasian concept of the public sphere has been the subject of much research and debate for more than four decades; Albrecht Koschnik's examination of Philadelphia's voluntary associations, militia companies, and professional and civic organizations in the early Republic continues this scholarly engagement. Building on the work of David Hackett Fischer, David Waldstreicher, and others, Koschnik shows that the political public sphere was not only created and evident in print culture but also fashioned in a myriad of associations that constituted the center stage of the contest between Republicans and Federalists at a time when all condemned partisanship.¹ His work illustrates how the short-lived Democratic societies of the 1790s gave way to political associations and volunteer militia companies. Federalist members then eventually turned to literary as well as professional associations by the 1810s and 1820s. When Federalists lost ground as elected officeholders after 1815, their younger generation of mostly lawyers just starting out in their careers attempted to shape Philadelphia's civic culture, history, art, and legal profession as founding members of institutions such as the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Koschnik thus shows how "Federalists, the original opponents of organized partisanship, had become Philadelphia's leading associators and engineered the transformation of voluntary action from a controversial into an entrenched practice" (3).	1
Koschnik recounts the history of Philadelphia's Democratic societies, which built on the tradition of the Sons of Liberty and their use of printers to spread information about their partisan, patriotic positions. Federalists feared that these groups might usurp government functions, as the Sons of Liberty had done, and thus saw them as an extralegal threat to the new Republic. French Jacobin clubs and their fervor reinforced Federalist anxieties about the French Revolution. Federalist alarm increased when George Washington and others connected the Democratic societies with the 1794 Whiskey Rebellion.	2
At that moment volunteer militia companies became an attractive means for Pennsylvania Federalists to transform their own partisanship into patriotism. By the mid-1790s both Republicans and Federalists were forming new voluntary associations, including groups such as the Republican Tammany Society and the Federalist Washington Benevolent Society, which were clearly partisan but avoided the charge of competing with the government by claiming to speak only for their members instead of for "the people" at large. Koschnik explains how Washington emerged as a bipartisan, universal patriotic hero among all associations. Membership in partisan volunteer militia companies often overlapped with membership in these various associations. Here state and national defense could legitimately coexist with partisanship and thrive because Pennsylvania mandated militia service for all able-bodied men. Two of Philadelphia's volunteer militia companies were so engrossed in partisanship in 1799 that they organized two separate but simultaneous parades through the streets of Philadelphia in celebration of Independence Day. This spectacle illustrates the degree of partisanship so well that an illustrative map of the two parade routes would be useful for readers not familiar with Philadelphia's urban grid. Often better equipped and trained than state militia companies, Pennsylvania's volunteer militia companies did not cease to function as expressions of men's partisan attachments until the end of the War of 1812. Through his analysis of the role of partisan militia units in response to the Whiskey Rebellion and Fries's Rebellion, Koschnik shows how Federalists claimed to be defenders of the nation in the wake of the former uprising and Republicans asserted that title in the aftermath of the latter revolt, which ended when Federalist volunteer militiamen from Philadelphia savagely beat a Lancaster newspaperman.	. . .

There are about 772 more words in this article. Please log in (or, if you are not yet an authorized user, please go to the User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.