Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture, 1800–1828

7. History

chapter 7 history 0In the years between 1815 and 1828, the contributors to the North American Review elaborated a vision that promised both their continued influence and the preservation of social order. In implementing the vision , they met considerable resistance. And within the vision itself there were troubling undercurrents and a continuing disagreement with the more general directions of American thought and society that, in retrospect , should not have been ignored. Yet overall, this vision represented an impressive rethinking of their fathers’ conservative ideology. Moreover , despite its flaws, it seems to have effectively reconciled these young Federalists to the changing social and political landscape. Whereas their fathers had reviled the republican town hall filled with the ‘‘breath of fat and greasy citizens,’’ William Tudor spoke prosaically of the annual public school ceremonies.1 Here education was honored, merit was rewarded, and young boys were introduced ‘‘into the public forum, where they are hereafter to discharge their duty as citizen.’’ Far from unsettling, Tudor found it ‘‘the most pleasing, and certainly the most republican festival, I ever witnessed.’’2 Whereas the last generation had identified Jefferson as a hapless dreamer, the dupe of the French and the subverter of the Constitution , members of the younger generation labeled him a true patriot, overrated perhaps as a thinker but a vital member of the founding generation nonetheless.3 And whereas the Louisiana Purchase and the resulting expansion westward had portended for their elders the decline of New England’s influence and the subversion of the American polity and culture, Edward Everett was able to see in the movement west the advance of both civilization and culture. America’s frontier population was not crude, its advance was remarkably rapid, and despite the shifting of population and political power, New England ‘‘continued to advance in population, wealth, and arts with no perceptible diminution in the ratio of progress.’’4 For these young Federalists the articulation of a viable conservative vision for life in democratic society left them reassured amid the political and social changes that surrounded them. In addition, it brought them more confidently to terms with what they perceived as the overall course of history. No single feature of their thought stands out more sharply in contrast to the ideology of their parents than their confidence in the general progressive path of history. No feature of their thought reveals more fully their coming to terms with democracy than their willingness to share in the age’s historical optimism and faith. A certain historical optimism can be discerned in the earliest periods of New England culture. Framed within the terms of Christian millennialism and encouraged by the Puritans’ sense of their errand of reform and regeneration, New Englanders’ confidence in the direction of history and their place within it was voiced from the start. Although on occasion members of the clergy bewailed the state of immorality or spiritual declension using the language of the Apocalypse, the stridency of their rhetoric suggests their pessimism was more the exception than the rule. The regressive view of temporal history that defined premillennialism was never very well suited to New England’s sense of itself, and thus by the time of the Great Awakening postmillennialism and a belief in America’s central place within history’s progressive course were central features within New England’s religious and cultural identity. For most of the eighteenth century, certainly through the Revolutionary period, this millennial-based view of historical progress was a critical component of American ideology. Not only did it reenforce the American sense of self, but it offered an interpretive framework for analyzing historical events. During the imperial crisis it helped Americans identify the forces at play, and during the war itself it provided what Ruth Bloch has called the ‘‘visionary dimension of American Revolutionary ideology .’’5 But in the years following the Revolution, as political and social conditions changed, premillennialism and its inherent historical pessimism rose to the surface of orthodox New England Congregationalism and New England Federalist thought. Well suited to the siege mentality of religious and political orthodoxy, premillennialism helped to explain history - 183 the infidelity that threatened America from abroad, the materialism and decay of civic virtue that plagued the body politic in New England, and the usurpation of Federalist power from Boston to Washington, D.C. For Federalists like Fisher Ames, the theological and historical...