Federalist Criticism and the Fate of Genius

At the end of the eighteenth century, Fisher Ames retired from a distinguished career as an orator and statesman to shore up the failing Federalist cause by publishing essays of political criticism concerning the democratic excess he saw threatening America. Although subject to fainting spells and frail from the lingering tuberculosis that would finally kill him in 1808, he wrote tirelessly to warn of the unruly passions of the demos and to promote a republican vision of liberty and equality that was wholly distinct from a democratic one. But when Ames considered the matter of "literary genius" in American culture in an essay entitled "American Literature," he struck a rather odd pose for such a thoroughgoing advocate of conservative Federalism.¹ In the essay, Ames departs from more conventional critics who bemoan America's lack of aesthetic achievement, arguing instead that genius is an omnipresent and timeless force, and that the circumstances of American society have only rendered it inactive and invisible: "[Genius] is a spark of elemental fire that is unquenchable. . . . It is to the intellectual world what the electric fluid is to nature, diffused everywhere, yet almost everywhere hidden, capable by its own mysterious laws of action and by the very breath of applause . . . of producing effects that appear to transcend all power, except that of some supernatural agent riding in the whirlwind" ("AL," 26–27).

In locating genius both in the immediacy of intelligible experience and beyond the knowable world, Ames's vision betrays the influence of early romantic writers, such as William Hazlitt, who called genius a "pervading and elastic energy."² But the passage is most remarkable for its lack of restraint or qualification, an enthusiasm that far exceeds the more parochial aesthetic clarifications regularly meted out by Ames's republican peers. Indeed, rarely before had an American author written so freely and profoundly about the power of imagination. Certainly, no Federalist had ever defended the excitation of the passions so completely and without compunction. What is the impetus for this invocation of transcendent imagination in the context of conservative political critique? What does it mean that as Ames assails the irrationality of populist politics and the passionate excesses of the marketplace, he appears to be "indulging the propensity to enthusiasm" he fears might be the ruin of the nation ("AL," 26)?

At the opening of the nineteenth century, Federalism found itself increasingly dispossessed of its political leadership. In 1804, Jefferson improved on his relatively narrow 1800 presidential victory by carrying nearly every state; Madison easily succeeded him in 1808 and won again in 1812. The final grasp at political power was the failed 1814 Hartford Convention, where New England Federalists prepared to secede from the Union. But more than their actual political losses, Federalists mourned the demise of their ideological leadership and the traditional, civic-minded, rank-ordered society it implied. They saw that the demand for universal white male suffrage, unfettered expansion into the West, and a powerful belief in the social palliative of commerce had begun to alter the spirit, as well as the substance, of the nation.³ And they responded to these changes with dramatic, often reactionary, moral protests. In "American Literature," Ames laments that commerce was now the "passion of the multitude" and that "the rabble" of America's cities had become a "standing army of ambition" ("AL," 32, 37). Although for Federalists of the Hamiltonian mold, an expanding economy was a sign of national progress and strength, conservatives like Ames feared a connection between passion and commerce in large part because they believed that the health of the political state depended on regulated passion, what Edmund Burke calls "all the well-placed sympathies of the human breast."⁴ Ames admits that all "masses and societies of men are governed by their passions" ("AL," 27), but like Burke, he also assumes that when passion finds an object in wealth and trade, rather than honor and glory, the meaning of liberty...