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

Waterman’s study explores the cultural-political dynamics of the Friendly Club, an important social and intellectual circle of young, elite professionals that flourished in New York City in the 1790s, and traces out some consequences of these dynamics in the wide-ranging publications and personal writings of the club’s male membership and female fellow-travellers. Discussions of key writings by Elihu Hubbard Smith, Charles Brockden Brown, William Dunlap, James Kent, and Samuel Miller develop nuanced arguments about the ways that each of these figures was shaped by the Friendly Club milieu and its debates. Readers familiar with scholarship on the U.S. 1790s are aware that the Friendly Club is commonly invoked in discussions of the period’s cultural transformations, but likewise that most mentions tend to oversimplify and often to mischaracterize in basic ways the club’s development, cultural politics, and even its membership. Waterman’s patient unfolding of the club’s development and of the debates, anxieties, and pressures that informed it, always based on careful and well-informed scholarship, provides a welcome corrective to earlier oversimplification and will constitute a valuable resource for students of the U.S. 1790s and the primary figures he discusses.

The study makes it clear that the club never embodied a unified front or unified positions in the multivalent culture wars of the 1790s. Waterman persuasively demonstrates that the club’s dynamics reflect an overall tension between the progressive aspirations of the club’s core members (who sought to embody enlightened ideals of conversation, intellectual inquiry, and companionship, primarily modeled on related groups such as the Godwin-Wollstonecraft circle in London) and countervailing pressures and limitations imposed by a variety of (primarily class and gender-bound) norms and expectations, and, far less subtly, by the reactionary militancy of the period’s counterrevolutionary elite. Waterman makes it clear that these struggles do not occur along simply partisan lines (as a Federalist versus Democratic-Republican struggle), but according to a more complex negotiation of revolutionary-era cultural and class politics, and in terms of ongoing transformations in what we now study as institutions of print culture and the public sphere.

The study is most productive when it combines close readings of key texts (e.g., Smith’s inexhaustible diary, Brown’s narratives, or Dunlap’s André) with a sound historical grasp of the context and cultural tensions that animate them. Waterman uses these tools to chart the group’s development and clarify the pressures and limits that its members negotiate in their writings. Moving beyond the history and dynamics of the club considered in itself, the study opens up new areas for scholarship in its second section on “industries of knowledge” by asking how the group’s writings intervene in new and changing professional and cultural formations, for example with Smith and Brown’s medical and literary interventions in yellow fever debates. The work begun here suggests that much more could be done in this area, for example by exploring the club members’ individual and collective investments in abolitionist organization, or by connecting the club’s dynamics more closely with new modes of class and cultural distinction.