Reviewed by Marie-Jeanne Rossignol | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.1

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Reviewed by Marie-Jeanne Rossignol | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 66.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture. By Todd Estes. Political Development of the American Nation: Studies in Politics and History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2006. 280 pages. $34.95 (cloth), $26.95 (paper).
Reviewed by Marie-Jeanne Rossignol, University of Paris-Diderot
The Jay Treaty and the debate around it are major moments in the political and foreign policy history of the early American Republic. Todd Estes's original contribution, The Jay Treaty Debate, Public Opinion, and the Evolution of Early American Political Culture, focuses on the treaty debate itself from July 1795 to the summer of 1796. In his view these debates marked the culmination of a series of political crises of the early 1790s that signaled an evolution in American political culture. Both Republicans and Federalists took an active part in those battles for public opinion, a new feature of American political life.	1
Estes's argument is a paradoxical one: though the Republicans' public-opinion campaign against the treaty originally appeared very successful, Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, led a brilliant counterattack, eventually making it possible for the treaty to go into effect on April 30, 1796. This was a "Pyrrhic" (212) victory for Federalists, as Republicans would afterward prove more adept at the ever-increasing "democratization" (3) of politics. Despite their Jay Treaty success, the Federalists embodied an "older, more deferential political culture" (3). Though they benefited from George Washington's prestige and protection at the time, the great leader was soon to retire, leaving them to fight political battles on the basis of their obsolete principles.	2
Theoretical and historiographical sources that informed Estes's work include Jürgen Habermas's theory of the public sphere as well as Simon P. Newman's and David Waldstreicher's analyses of the developing political culture in the new Republic; he also effectively relies on recent work on the role of oral transmission and print in this new political culture. Finally, the book is part of an emerging body of publications focusing on the Federalists in the early Republic and challenging earlier scholarship on the party of Hamilton in the 1790s.¹ Estes contends that the Federalists were willing to engage in popular politicking despite some misgivings.	3
More than thirty contemporary newspapers and the papers and correspondence of numerous 1790s politicians, including Hamilton and Fisher Ames but also less usual figures such as Edward Livingston, form the book's research base. Other key characters are newspaper editors such as Benjamin Franklin Bache (Philadelphia Aurora), John Fenno (New York Gazette of the United States), Noah Webster (New York American Minerva), and Benjamin Russell (Boston Columbian Centinel) who were directly involved in the shaping of public opinion. Through the numerous petitions they signed, which were reprinted in newspapers around the country, the American people are also present in the book, though Estes makes it clear that the "public sphere" was "still inhabited mostly by elites" (11).	. . .

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