Reviews of Books

Passing the Federalist Torch

Reviewed by Harlow W. Sheidley, University of Colorado at Colorado Springs

In the early nineteenth century Boston Federalists, who considered themselves the rightful leaders of society, faced impending political impotence, owing to the demise of their party nationally and the success of Republicans locally. That bleak prospect drove some Federalist statesmen to reactionary despair, partisan irrelevance, and the fiasco of the Hartford Convention. But not the younger generation just coming of age, Marshall Foletta argues in this richly nuanced study of the influential group of intellectuals who produced the Boston-based North American Review. With little chance of public office, these young Federalists assumed positions of power as literary critics and experts in such fields as education, medicine, and the law. They thereby revitalized Federalist culture, preserving their fathers' vision of a hierarchical society guided by a privileged class of educated men. Yet, in an irony Foletta emphasizes, "the more they succeeded, the more they failed" (p. 133). "Coming to terms with democracy," these Federalist intellectuals prepared the way for their future displacement. Nonetheless, their endeavors have exercised a lasting impact on American politics and culture.	1
Reassessing the intellectual labors of this second generation of Federalists along lines first suggested by David Hackett Fischer, Foletta argues that their cultural endeavors were not cripplingly parochial, backward-looking, and elitist, as others, such as James M. Banner, Jr., Linda K. Kerber, and this reviewer have maintained.1 Rather, reformulating republicanism while retaining its emphasis "on virtue and self-sacrifice, communal responsibility and the common good," all of which have been recurring themes "in movements as removed in time as Progressivism and the New Deal" (p. 13), they claimed for themselves and future intellectuals a significant role in American public life.	2
The North American Review served from its founding in 1815 to the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 as the young Federalists' collective voice. Its editors and contributors included such literary New Englanders as George Ticknor, William Tudor, the brothers Alexander and Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, Edward T. Channing, William H. Prescott, and George Bancroft. Although most were associated with Harvard College, they were not, Foletta maintains, provincial Yankees blinkered by Boston myopia. Having traveled and studied in Europe, they cast off the Anglophilia of their fathers, transcended regional prejudices, and developed a cosmopolitan American outlook. The North American Review was launched to foster a genuine cultural nationalism. In the face of condescension from such British critics as the Edinburgh Review's Sydney Smith—"In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book, or goes to an American play, or looks at an American picture or statue?" Smith famously queried in 1820—the Federalist intellectuals aspired to foster authentic native expression. A truly national literature, freed from British influence, they believed, would complete American independence.	. . .