Book Review

This is a highly readable account of the second generation of Federalist intellectuals. Older studies, Marshall Foletta notes, have not been wrong in noting Federalism's loss of political influence owing to the debacle of the Hartford Convention and the increasing democratization of American society. But if men of superior background and education were no longer accorded the deference they once received, that did not result in the wholesale withdrawal of disgruntled younger Federalists from the public world. On the contrary, the eclipse of the Federalist party freed those 'sons' to think more optimistically and creatively about their role in society. Hence Foletta's central thesis: that, by focusing almost exclusively on political developments, the older studies have slighted the continuing vitality of Federalism as a cultural phenomenon, above all the legacy of 'enduring significance' that Federalist intellectuals bequeathed to American letters through the Boston-based North American Review (established 1815). Contrary to the conventional view, the New England mind prior to the emergence of Ralph Waldo Emerson and his generation was hardly one of 'intellectual sterility.'

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Foletta highlights young Federalists' 'crusade' for a national literature, one that would be less Anglophilic and more patriotic, socially cohesive, and moral. Shaping such a literature became the young intellectuals' primary means of establishing their social relevance and connection to the venerable natural elite that founded the nation.

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