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Chapter Seven Constitutional Limits—and “Liberalism” We have now finished our contemplated review of the American Register, and we confess, we entertain some prejudice against the affected sensibility and croaking of our author, and indeed against many of his peculiarities of style; but we are much pleased with the publication on the whole. We consider it highly useful in its nature; it seems unexampled in this country, for industry and general accuracy of information, and though we recommend to our author not to show so evidently the democratic impulses of his feelings, in the historical narrative; yet we cannot but consider that his book may be rendered an important acquisition to the literature as well as politics of the country. —From the Boston Ordeal, April 29, 1809 Daniel Edwards Kennedy observes that Benjamin Pollard’s review in the Boston Ordeal, was a “puzzling mixture of censure and praise probably due to the political rancour” of the day.1 The review was of a Federalist or conservative orientation and “praised the intentions of Brown but found that when he departed from being a chronicler he drew conclusions that were not only dangerous but ‘lapses of correctness and deviations from authority,’ especially in the study of the affair of the ship Chesapeake that embroiled the United States with Great Britain.”2 Kennedy goes on to remark that the review was typical of its day in terms of “political bias” and that despite the presence of editorial shortcomings in Brown’s project, such as “clumsy” pagination, Brown’s publication found a favorable reception in other quarters.3 Complaints in the Federal Gazette and elsewhere about “the affected impartiality of democratic scribblers” in regard to foreign affairs were indeed not uncommon—and readily speak to Brown’s “democratic,” not Federalist, sympathies , his willingness to question, both privately and publicly, the political motivations of individuals as well as official accounts of events. 225 226 the politics of history Brown, as I have argued thus far, tried to be historically self-conscious, resist a filiopietistic tradition of history writing, avoid participation in partisan party politics, and, increasingly, distance himself from a nationalist rhetoric of manifest destiny. In doing so, he also gravitated toward the use of ironic discourse in his history writing, offering a critique not only of European imperialism and its related “evils” but also of the imperialist dimensions of American exceptionalism. His historical thinking and practice, in other words, testify to an evolution of sorts, where his periodical essays and reviews, novels, political pamphlets, historical sketches, and annals all enabled him to develop increasingly sophisticated ideas about historical impartiality and subjectivity as well as the degree and ways he was willing to employ history for the national good. While I have suggested ways Brown’s historical writing in the American Register is original—or, as the Boston Ordeal asserted in 1809, “unexampled”—and influenced by his earlier novelistic techniques, I have not said as much about how Brown’s historicism is “novel” in a Bakhtinian sense or, as a consequence, uniquely relates to more modern, and even postmodern, historiographical principles and practices. In this chapter, I examine how in the last volume of the annals Brown’s historicism moves beyond an ironic tradition of historiography, and even documentary editing, departing significantly not only in content but also in form from traditional hierarchical or monological models of history. Contrary to Pamela Clemit’s claim that Brown’s history writing was a “conservative defence of perceivable reality,” I argue that his historicism continues to move beyond a teleological tradition toward a mode of representation that is more accurately described as imaginative or dialogical in form and, importantly, “democratic” or liberal in principle.4 More specifically , Brown’s refusal to embrace traditional historical and teleological assumptions, and part of what makes his historical writing “novel,” is not only the degree of his historical self-consciousness but also his willingness to integrate other discourses as part of his own historical narrative and alert readers to the lessons of history. For these reasons, I argue it is no coincidence that Brown’s prefaces to the American Register are methodologically self-conscious and also relate why he increasingly used primary or public documents in lieu of traditional historical narrative as part of his inquiry into, and representation of, historical events. In his last volume of the annals, Brown analyzed congressional proposals to amend the Constitution, the debate over relocating the nation’s capital to Philadelphia, and, finally, Stephen Bradley’s...

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