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From Anglophile to Nationalist: Robert Walsh's An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain
| Posterity has not been kind to Robert Walsh Jr. Walsh (1784–1859), a leading Philadelphia scholar, journalist, editor, and diplomat, did not survive the process of historical sifting and his accomplishments have faded from memory. By the second quarter of the twentieth century, Walsh's reputation had sunk into "utter oblivion." Respected by Thomas Jefferson as "one of the two best writers in America" and designated by John Quincy Adams as "the first internationally recognized American author," Walsh does not even have an entry in the recent twenty-four-volume American National Biography.1 |
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This historical amnesia blinds us to Walsh's role in the broadening of American nationalism. Born in Baltimore, of Irish Catholic and Pennsylvania Quaker descent, Walsh was the focus of an important episode of Anglo-American cultural history in the wake of the War of 1812. An Anglophile and Federalist, Walsh earned the praise of prominent Federalists and Republicans alike with his book defending the United States, An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (1819). His adoption of a critical bent towards Great Britain reflected an important shift within the worldview of the "young Federalists" who were grasping for relevance in the aftermath of the War of 1812 and Hartford Convention. During the Hartford Convention of December 1814–January 1815, New England Federalists' anger at war with Britain had led them to propose severe changes in the Constitution aimed at curtailing the power of ruling Republicans. Whether or not their intentions were actually treasonous, many Americans who lived west of the Hudson River perceived them as such. Walsh's influential Appeal provides further confirmation that Federalists responded to political decline with "energy, flexibility and effect."2 An unprecedented convergence of outside factors—transatlantic economic disaster, political crisis in Britain, commercial rivalry, and harsh British commentary regarding America—made an American response to British criticism timely. It was, however, Walsh's skill at producing a carefully crafted work of cohesive nationalism that made the Appeal the most widely acclaimed nonfiction nationalistic work to appear in the years after the War of 1812. Walsh deftly navigated through the problematic features of American identity, most notably slavery, sectionalism, and cultural deficiency. |
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Walsh's previous career and oeuvre did not make him a likely candidate to write an Anglophobic defense of America. By the age of nineteen, Walsh had become a widely regarded essayist for Joseph Dennie's Philadelphia-based Port Folio, a bastion of pessimistic literary Federalism. Scholars have noted that Dennie's weekly magazine, which he promised to direct to "men of affluence, men of liberality, and men of letters" might, at that time, more easily have been meant for "British gentlemen than American merchants, tradesmen, and landholders."3 Walsh contributed several essays to the Port Folio, the most noteworthy example of his Anglophobic, elitist High Federalism being a February 11, 1804, piece documenting the ill effects of democracy: "The annals of all democratical institutions uniformly record the triumph of vice, and the depression of virtue; that they are invariably the archives of licentious disorder, and tumultuary violence, of iniquitous intrigue, and shameless corruption, of bloodshed and massacre." Walsh warned that the progress of recent centuries might be undone by the influence of the "voice of the people." He lamented the Federalists' loss of power to the Jeffersonians, "who know no reverential awe, or puerile scruple."4 |
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