Book Review

Canada and the United States

Joanne B. Freeman's book tackles the subject of political culture in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. According to Freeman, for national politicians, politics "was about friendship, not party; it involved honor as much as ideology; it relied on bonds of personal loyalty, not partisanship; and it was fueled by a concern for the public good, not by party spirit" (p. 260). Freeman sees national politics in the early republic as an unwieldly mess, and the code of honor as "a remedy for the barely controlled chaos of national public life." This code "formed the very infrastructure of national politics, providing a governing logic and weapons of war" (p. xviii). It was the culture of honor, Freeman claims, that brought stability to a highly contested political landscape. Freeman uses the concept of honor as both a focal point and an explanatory device to understand the political culture of the new nation. This culture of honor served both to define and to promote the nation's political elite. Ultimately, the intimate linking of the personal with the political produced alliances between friends that became "almost institutional" (p. 261), thus paving the way for party politics and a new kind of "warfare" based on partisanship rather than on personal reputation. Although Freeman declines to put a specific date on the demise of this political culture, its very success seems to have led to its extinction.

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