| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

A Speaking Aristocracy: Transforming Public Discourse in Eighteenth-Century Connecticut. By Christopher Grasso. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. xiv, 511 pp. Cloth, $59.95, isbn 0-8078-2471-2. Paper, $24.95, isbn 0-8078-4772-0.)

In his outstanding new book, A Speaking Aristocracy, Christopher Grasso explores the transformation of public discourse in eighteenth-century Connecticut. Focusing on the public careers of several learned men who graduated from Yale College—Jonathan Edwards, Thomas Clap, Jared Eliot, Ezra Stiles, John Trumbull, and Timothy Dwight—Grasso traces the profound changes that reshaped civic culture between 1700 and the creation of the new republic. In the early eighteenth century, as he illustrates, Protestant clergy dominated public life. In the words of one minister, clergymen were "a speaking Aristocracy in the face of a silent Democracy." By the end of the eighteenth century, however, ministers found it increasingly difficult to compete with a new breed of learned men—especially lawyers—who dominated public debate. Elite men battled with one another for control, creating a "dynamic public sphere" that shattered the old Puritan consensus. Although Connecticut had not yet become a "Yankee democracy," it was no longer a "Puritan aristocracy." . . .

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