Book Review

Canada and the United States

The oxymoronic title of this monograph contains an important insight: that Massachusetts's conservative elite after the War of 1812, out of national power and increasingly maginalized by a new popular participatory political culture, expressed their nationalism by waging a political and cultural crusade to regain influence and to have their section's values define the national character. Harlow W. Sheidley's critical analysis of the Federalist-National Republican-Whig leadership exposes in neo-Progressive style the sectional, partisan, and class interests underlying their advocacy of constitutional, unionist, and national principles during this transitional period. Sheidley finds that the elite's effort to regain national power floundered, hampered by a mentality and style of politics rooted in a deferential and patriarchal political culture that was out of step with the increasingly egalitarian and participatory politics organized by mass political parties. Their cultural campaign, however, succeeded to a great extent in putting a New England imprint on the nation's revolutionary heritage and on American identity itself.

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The "central focus" of this book is on how the elite "strove to reconcile the opposite impulses of their economic activity and their social ideology" (p. x), because the elite's economic activities after 1815 "were in the forefront of the market revolution that would ultimately undermine traditional values" (p. x-xi). Clearly, the elite struggled as it adapted to the new political landscape, but Sheidley is not as convincing with regard to the economic part of her argument. Of course, economic change helped shape the new political culture, but after a brief description of the market revolution in the first chapter, it largely drops from sight. To argue that the many, often contradictory effects of the transportation, communications, and commercial revolutions simply undermined the elite seems to ignore all the ways in which the elite benefited from these changes.

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