Reviews of Books

Gossips with Guns

Reviewed by Ronald P. Formisano, University of Kentucky

A generation ago the concept of deference captured the attention of many historians of the early republic. If Joanne Freeman has her way, the notion of honor will gain equal prominence. Affairs of Honor starts from a familiar premise: while democratizing forces were at work in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the political culture of the Federalists and Jeffersonian Republicans can best be understood as hybrid and transitional. Building on the work of such scholars as Bertram Wyatt-Brown, who have called attention to the role of honor during the entire pre-Civil War era, Freeman extends this understanding of the early national period. The traditional code of honor, to which the Founding Fathers and their peers still strongly adhered, Freeman argues, powerfully shaped (alongside deference and influence) a new national politics still in the process of discovering and defining itself.	1
Affairs of Honor is not so much about the content of political conflict as the means by which political combat was fought. Freeman explores in turn several modes of political jousting, including gossip, letter writing, and "the art of paper war" (p. 105) or publication of pamphlets, newspaper essays, and broadsides. She portrays dueling ("the political duel") as another weapon in the arsenal of political warfare. At the heart of all modes and self-consciously governing early republican gentlemen in their employment of these weapons was the code of honor ("the very infrastructure of national politics" [p. xviii]). Distancing herself from interpretations of this era as patterned by ideology, parties, or sectionalism, though the latter sometimes figures in her account, Freeman argues that "national politics was personal, alliances were unpredictable, and victory went to those who trusted the right people at the right time in the right way" (p. xviii). Thus, as with residues of deference, influence, and other habits of traditional society (factors implied but not stressed in Freeman's interpretation), honor and personal loyalty made early republican political culture distinctive from the mass party politics that developed later.	2
After an opening chapter considering the newness of the "national stage" (p. 15), each of Freeman's chapters focuses on a particular form of political combat and features a single leader. Each essay also brings into view other members of that generation and scrutinizes the relationships, especially the rivalries, among national politicians. None of the individual elements Freeman discusses—gossip, broadsides, duels—is new to historians (though no one likely has discussed gossip at such length) and may be encountered in numerous biographies and other accounts of the early republic. But Freeman has pulled together all the various strands linking behind-the-scenes politicking with public contests and describes them in detail resting on impressive research. Affairs of Honor provides a remarkably full account of what the founders thought about the political weapons they used, and her doorway to their self-consciousness is their honor code (with republicanism as the second point of access).	. . .