Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (review)

Readers of this journal may wish to consult "A Note on Method," appended to Freeman's text, before dipping into the body of her book. The Note expands on the claim, made in her introduction, that exploring "the link between politics and culture ... reveals a new political world" (xxiv). She likens herself to "an ethno-historian, identifying andinterpreting patterns of thought and behavior" among the national political figures examined (289). She focuses on their emotions, largely recorded in private papers, because they provide "vital passageways to anintuitive level of thought" that lie behind the "shared understandings" of culture (290, 289). She looks especially for "outrage and shock" because they serve to flag "shared standards through their violation" (290). She claims that following "the path of outrage" enables one to uncover "the foundations of the national political process in the republic's early years" (292). The "new political world" that emerges is onewhere honor exerts an "overriding influence" (289). She concludes that this discovery provides "the key that unlocks the mysteries of the period ... recasting our understanding of the American founding" (286).

The bulk of her book is devoted to exploring the "grammar of political combat" pursued by the nation's gentry leaders as they adjusted to the "ambiguous egalitarian ethic of republicanism" and to a "burgeoning democracy" (xxii, xxi). The first chapter establishes the centrality of personal reputation in the conduct of politics, arguing that instead of taking place in a "bubble of ideology," "the national political game" focused on "[o]btaining, maintaining, and attacking reputations" (59). Subsequent chapters explore various forms of verbal dueling, including political gossip, its translation into a variety of print formats, including broadsides, newspapers, pamphlets, and even books—the "specialized weapons of paper war"—before turning to politicians' "extreme and ultimate" recourse, lethal personal combat (xxiii). In this case, Freeman focuses on the Burr-Hamilton duel to explain why, contrary to the outcome of most political affairs of honor, this duel cost one participant his reputation and the other his life.

The last chapter examines the election of 1800 in a way that challenges the notion that Federalism and Republicanism represented firm political alternatives at the time, either for the candidates or their followers. Instead, Freeman casts the contest as a duel in which the stakes were the personal reputations of the nominees and the personal loyalties of their supporters. An epilogue traces the reverberations of this personally oriented politics into the nineteenth century.

Freeman summarizes her findings about early Republican politics: "National ... politics was about friendship, not party; it involved honor as much as ideology; it relied on the bonds of personal loyalty, not partisanship; and it was fueled by concern for the public good, not by party spirit." She claims that her view, by diverting attention from "the onset of competitive self-interest" as the principal solvent of deference to the leadership of a partisan gentry, makes possible a new understanding of the transition from republicanism to democracy (260). But instead of describing the process, her account asserts its logic. She argues that "there was only one way out of this endless battle of reputations," which led to a "whirlpool of dissension," namely, "the anonymity of party" conflict in which "politics became a war between opposing armies rather than a personal contest of reputations" (261, 260, 261).

Freeman's approach points to a novel way of understanding the passions participants brought to the political conflicts of the early Republic, but her focus on personal honor excludes consideration of most of the issues over which these conflicts arose. This emphasis, in turn, begs an unanswered question: How could men for whom honor came first have managed to accomplish anything of note? In her penultimate paragraph, she claims that the central legacy of the founders is hope, because "these fallible, flawed people could accomplish great things" (288). Clearly...