“Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775–1840 (review)

Koschnik’s “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together” aims to use Philadelphia’s “rise and fall of partisan parties and militia companies” to trace “the development of association and partisanship,” as these forces shaped the emergence of “a new civic culture, from the American Revolution into the 1830s.” Koschnik argues that this new civic behavior developed out of a “generation of Federalists” who aimed to “divert their aspirations from partisan politics into the creation of high culture”(7). Through this lens, Koschnik promises to highlight what he views as an under-represented theme in the scholarly discourse about early American life.

By and large, Koschnik makes good on his promise. In five carefully crafted and sturdily documented chapters, he explores issues of class and influence, age and power, and emerging definitions of “public service,” gliding across personalities, civic institutions, and the interplay between these variables to create what he rightly calls a “broad definition of . . . partisan behavior in the early republic” (153). In the process, he asks such seemingly obvious—but seldom-probed—questions as, “Is there a role for public servants and government beyond proclaiming laws to keep public order?” (3).

Koschnik argues that Federalists and Republicans answered that question differently. The Federalists—an economically and socially conservative minority—increasingly saw public service as the province of “common interest” associations designed to create a high culture of art and letters that would distinguish “manly,” “useful” professionals from lesser people.

Building his case from a variety of evidence—newspapers, association membership lists, church records, city directories, legal documents, broadsides, and other graphic materials—Koschnik maintains that, in the decades following the War of 1812, a select few Philadelphians intertwined politics, culture, and personal biography to design a definition of public responsibility that resulted in such institutions as the Athenaeum, the Law Library Company, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, each intent on showing its members in their best light. On the basis of this evidence, he self-consciously does what he faults Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America (London, 1835) for not doing: He moves the story through time, instead of reporting a narrative based on the freeze-frame of a short visit. Unlike de Tocqueville, Koschnik examines the social and political dynamics that preceded, and followed, the realities of 1832, to reach a more nuanced and provocative conclusion than could the Frenchman during his short visit.

By delving into the development of modern print culture and exploring the changing landscape of public association from the Society of Political Inquiry and the Whig Society to the First City Cavalry Troop and the Washington Benevolent Society, Koschnik far outstrips de Tocqueville’s one-dimensional view of American social life, which has dominated the narrative for more than seventeen decades. Along the way, Koschnik offers a provocative view of the Whiskey Rebellion and its meaning to Philadelphians who, defining their loyalty to the republic, and to public order, described the rebels as “anarchists” (108).

This passing reference to anarchists, however, is one of only a few references to those outside the charmed circle of manly professionals. Except for a brief discussion of how men defined women from their role as “citizen-soldiers,” Koschnik’s narrative has little to say about women. It also ignores the variety of “others” against which those with “common bonds” defined themselves. There are no Jewish, Catholic, or African-American threads to Koschnik’s narrative, though each of these groups developed comparable institutions in this period. Even Quaker culture is given only cursory treatment, though Koschnik offers, in his concluding paragraph, a rationale for this perspective.

But no one scholar can be expected to do everything, and Kaschnik has succeeded admirably in grinding new lenses through which future researchers can view questions of etnnicity and race, culture, religion, and gender as they inform the building blocks...