Republic of Intellect: The Friendly Club of New York City and the Making of American Literature (review)

Bryan Waterman presents a meticulously researched, elegantly written study of the intellectual lives of a small circle of ambitious young New Yorkers at the end of the eighteenth century. While meeting for only a few years in the mid to late 1790s, the Friendly Club was nevertheless one of the most important of the many voluntary civic associations that proliferated in late eighteenth-century American cities. On the one hand, it is “a case study for understanding the relationships between literary and intellectual cultures in the late-eighteenth-century United States” (6), while on the other hand it also “stands apart from most forms of civic association in its privacy” (30). Waterman focuses on this “private” quality of Friendly Club activities, describing how, in their weekly meetings in personal dwellings, the members sought to rise above partisan conflicts while pursuing higher understanding through intimate conversation. Waterman attempts to use the Friendly Club to move our understanding of the American Enlightenment away from a primary concern with print culture and political debate and towards a view of early national Americans as concerned with the private pursuit of ethical and philosophical questions.

Republic of Intellect provides a fascinating account of the social networks and climate of ideas within which the Friendly Club developed. The first section of the book focuses especially on Elihu Hubbard Smith, a physician with poetic ambitions, whose move from Connecticut to New York in 1793 Waterman takes as exemplifying the best aspirations of young American men in the period. Smith’s diaries provide the most important source material for Waterman’s detailed account of how members of the club negotiated interpersonal relationships through the paradigm of “romantic friendship,” an idealized expression of elective affinity between like-minded individuals. Smith struggled to balance his enthusiasm for the new ideas he encountered in New York and through the books of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft with a desire to maintain previously existing friendships with more conservative Connecticut figures, such as Theodore and Timothy Dwight (who became president of Yale University in 1795) and U.S. senator Uriah Tracy and his wife, Susan Bull Tracy. Smith’s continual efforts to make his newfound views palatable to his old acquaintances provide Waterman with an opportunity to analyse the power of sincerity and intimacy as ideals for Friendly Club members. However, given that Smith was only 25 years old when he somewhat disastrously confessed his sceptical views of religion to his devout friends, one might attribute his behaviour as much to youthful foolishness and lack of discretion as to any deeply worked out social theory. Nevertheless, Waterman’s account of these episodes is lively and insightful, offering a window into the way that ideas circulated through complex interpersonal relationships in the 1790s.

These exchanges took place in private, either in conversation or in personal letters, and are revealed only because of the survival of most of the volumes of Smith’s diary. While Waterman provides a convincing gloss of such interlocutions, there is a certain amount of logical ambiguity in the fact that Waterman’s claims about American culture as a whole are best supported by the very quality of privacy that Waterman portrays as most unusual about the Friendly Club. He attempts to bridge this gap between private and public by illustrating how the ideas cultivated within the circle of Friendly Club discussion were disseminated through various publications, especially the novels of Charles Brockden Brown, a core club member. Waterman produces brilliant readings of works such as Wieland, Alcuin, Ormond, and Arthur Mervyn that, together, present a convincing portrait of Brown as a progressive thinker immersed in the kind of Enlightenment rationalism and Godwinian social theory to which most Friendly Club members subscribed. Water man’s other examples of writings influenced by the ideas circulating among Friendly Club members include a medical history...