Reviewed by Brendan McConville | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4

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Reviewed by Brendan McConville | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.4 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Democracy, Revolution, and Monarchism in Early American Literature. By PAUL DOWNES. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii, 239. $55.00.) Reviewed by Brendan McConville , Binghamton University
A scholarly consensus has developed over the last twenty-five or so years about the general character of change in the revolutionary and early national periods. In the decades before the Revolution, modernizing tendencies in political thought (republicanism, the Enlightenment), economics (consumption, the "rise of capitalism") and religious life (plain folk evangelical Protestantism) eroded the vestiges of premodern society or European ways. The imperial crisis, Revolutionary War, and subsequent political turmoil accelerated these tendencies. In the following decades, American political culture became emphatically democratic and its political economy overtly and aggressively capitalist. It became a fully modern society, unlike any other, by (about) 1820. Scholars have thus described all sorts of things from that later period as consequently democratic. For example, the Mormon church and other sects that appeared in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century have been cited as evidence of the democratization of American Christianity. (Although one look at the theology and institutional structures of these sects should be enough to give pause.)	1
Paul Downes has taken a path separate from this teleological consensus. He asks some simple, provocative questions: Is the scholarly edifice we have constructed really the best, or only, way to understand the period? Did the Revolution sweep away as much as we imagine? Are monarchy and democracy really polar opposites? His study offers few answers, but the questions it poses make this a worthwhile effort.	2
Divided into five chapters, with an introduction and conclusion, Downes's book is designed to "deconstruct the revolutionary opposition between democracy and monarchism by considering some of the ways in which the democratic state and the democratic subject inherit the arcana imperii of the absolute monarch" (p. ix). In essence, he is trying to demystify the American Revolution and its claim to having cleansed the body politic of older beliefs and modes of reasoning. "To reject democracy's inheritance from monarchism" he states, "is to participate in the discourse of the revolution, not to analyze it, and it is to participate in ... monarchophobia" (p. 3).	3
Each chapter examines specific episodes or authors as they struggle with the inherent contradictions of the period. In the first, Downes details American society's monarchical nature and the royalist character of resistance to imperial taxation, the significance of the attacks on the king in 1776, and the emotionalism apparent in each. Although heavily dependent on secondary accounts, particularly those by the late Peter Shaw, this is a very effective, albeit short, treatment of these subjects.¹ As Downes observes, for example, the attack on the royal statue at New York was clearly indicative of a far deeper confrontation with the past and its meanings.	. . .

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