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Book Review
| Robert A. Ferguson, Reading the Early Republic, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 358. $45 (ISBN 0-674-01338-7).
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| Robert Ferguson, the author of Law and Letters in American Culture (1984) and American Enlightenment, 1750–1820 (1997) holds a chair in law, literature, and criticism at Columbia University. His new book admirably fulfills responsibilities to all three rubrics and is best described as a cohesive collection of discrete essays designed to show that very close reading of selected texts and episodes can shed new light on our understanding of the Revolutionary era broadly conceived. The book's title is oddly understated because Ferguson ranges from the mid-eighteenth century down to the famous Girard will case decided by Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story in 1844. His dramatis personae actually reach from Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln. Other chapters likely to be of special interest to readers of this journal concern the case of Benedict Arnold and Major André (an effort to explore the meaning of treason to the revolutionary generation) and the trial of Gabriel Prosser, leader of an abortive slave rebellion near Richmond in 1800. |
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The unifying theme of the book might well be described as anxiety felt by early republican leaders seeking to fulfill the standards and expectations of the founders accompanied by fear of national dissolution, a focus that is brilliantly developed in a long chapter devoted to James Fenimore Cooper's popular but misunderstood novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826), which Ferguson calls "The Last Early Republican Text." If the theme of anxiety, sometimes manifest as anger management, does not seem notably new, the author has a remarkable array of fresh insights derived from his meticulous reading of carefully contextualized works. |
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He is quite good on the meanings of liberty in that extended period (which has not exactly been a neglected subject) and particularly the meanings of "happiness" as a key component of liberty (chapter 2). In explaining the way civil liberty was dependent upon spiritual liberty on the eve of Revolution, Ferguson highlights another of his important emphases, the need to understand the use of religious terminology for purposes of social explanation, even with an exemplar of American Enlightenment like Jefferson. Nevertheless, this judicious scholar observes that "law took the place of religion in early republican civil discourse through structural equivalencies. A guiding providence could be found in Nature as 'Nature's God'" (56). The prominence of Virtue in revolutionary discourse is already quite familiar to us from the work of Bailyn, Wood, and Pocock, but Ferguson's focus on anxiety calls our attention to the ease with which a virtuous people could be duped, or was feared to be gullible. |
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Thomas Paine's Common Sense has not exactly been an ignored text either, but the author has thoughtful things to say about the strength that it derived from ambiguity, and why that astonishing piece of propaganda resists simplistic readings—owing to "the peculiar juxtaposition of aroused anger and lawgiving calm" (119). An interesting chapter devoted to John Jay does much to reassert his importance as part of the Publius team in writing the Federalist Papers. Jay contributed many fewer essays than Madison and Hamilton, but his mostly came at the outset and his role in winning ratification of the Constitution in New York was crucial. |
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A chapter devoted to the selective uses of classical antiquity in the early Republic is also highly original, although the focus of Ferguson's discussion is primarily Rome rather than Greece. Consequently he has nothing to say about James Madison's extensive scrutiny of ancient confederations, why they failed, and what implications the reading of antique history had in thinking through a new vision for the distribution of power in a federal nation. Given the seminal centrality of Madison's thinking and writing from the 1780s until his death in 1836, his sponsorship of the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty (1786) and the Virginia Resolutions (1798), his virtual absence from this volume seems quite curious. |
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Ferguson's approach to Jefferson is also highly selective, but his chapter on the architecture of Monticello and the prominence of clocks there is charming as well as illuminating. He boldly addresses the question of why this iconic building has a non-functional and inaccessible dome. It not only engages the reader but provides a delightful change of texture following Gabriel's Rebellion and preceding the Girard case. Given Jefferson's passion for the separation of church and state, perhaps a more concrete segue might have been made from his views to that contested episode (beginning with Girard's death in 1831) involving republican fear of the "dead hand" of self-perpetuating, ecclesiastical charitable trusts in the United States; but Ferguson is very likely assuming some basic familiarity with this period on the part of his readers. |
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If the book is occasionally marred by some overly broad generalizations, it is written with remarkable clarity and moves along at a varied pace that never fails to engage us. Reading the Early Republic is an innovative and distinguished contribution that enriches our understanding of the period. |
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| Michael Kammen
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| Cornell University |
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