Reviewed by Eric Slauter | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1

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Reviewed by Eric Slauter | Book Review | The William and Mary Quarterly, 63.1 | The History Cooperative

Reviews of Books

Eric Slauter, University of Chicago

Reading the Early Republic. By Robert A. Ferguson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. 374 pages. $46.50 (cloth).
Robert A. Ferguson introduces his new book as a brief against modern legal textualism and originalism. During the past decade, textualism and originalism have come to look like ideologically flexible (if not neutral) methods of interpretation, and so a critique of legal textualism or originalism is not necessarily, or at least not exclusively, an attack on conservative jurisprudence. But to Ferguson, a professor of law, literature, and criticism, legal textualists and originalists lack basic sensitivity to a text's formal features, do not appreciate the ways audiences found meaning, and tend to petrify the dynamic language of the early Republic. Though many of the chapters here have been previously published and spoke to different occasions and scholarly audiences, taken together they constitute a timely primer from one of the most acute readers of the literature of public documents working today. A major contribution to literary and intellectual history, Reading the Early Republic also serves as a brilliant and formidable rebuttal to those policy makers, judges, and lawyers who are currently raiding the early Republic in the hope of settling current debates by recovering the original meanings of founding texts.	1
Ferguson's early Republic is a period marked by manic depression, mystery, uncertainty, despair, precariousness, and volatility; by shifts in the locus of authority and meaning from religion to law; and by "quantum changes in thought ... in a very short period of time" (123). In short this is hardly the time or place to locate stability or stasis, in or out of language. For Ferguson the defining commitment of the period is to the dynamic power of language to shape society. It was the peculiar and exciting task of writers to try to hold this fragile society together by producing a "tonal assurance on the page" (152) that would mask the instabilities of everyday life. That modern readers locate self-confidence and stability in early republican texts is a measure of their authors' success, not an index of extratextural or social assurance.	2
Readers in legal circles will surely learn much from Ferguson's rigorous readings, yet the book should appeal to a wide readership in American cultural, intellectual, and literary history. Indeed, a Fergusonian reading of the book—one sensitive to the ways in which writers craft their remarks for specific audiences—would point out that only two of the ten essays were previously directed specifically toward readers in legal studies and that six first addressed readers in history and literature. It is wonderful to have these essays all together, for the resulting book not only demonstrates his ability to speak meaningfully and specifically to diverse audiences but also serves as an important document for understanding the place of literary methodologies in the study of history and law during the last decade.	3
The essays take up a wide range of topics and an equally diverse group of texts. One of Ferguson's central claims during the past twenty-five years has been that the meaning of legal and political texts is informed by cultural and literary texts, and he employs not only the political tracts and state papers, transcripts of trials, and judicial opinions that are comfortable ground for legal scholars but also novels, personal narratives, and diaries. The essays address tensions and transitions between religion and law, the origins of national identity in treasonable acts, the aesthetics of ratifying the Constitution, the roles of classicism and nostalgia in the early Republic, the place of narrative in legal proceedings, the relation of thought to the built environment in Thomas Jefferson's Monticello, the privatization of charity, and the relation between catastrophic events and the writing of history. Ranging from the Revolution to the 1840s, the book coheres around a nexus of prominent themes.	. . .

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