Honor and the Democratic Revolution

Joanne B. Freeman. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001. xxiv + 376 pp. Figures, notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95.

James Madison had many reasons for proposing the amendments that became the Bill of Rights. Properly prepared, they might provide additional protection for the dearest liberties without impinging on the necessary powers of the new regime. They might conciliate opponents of the Constitution, persuade the two remaining states to ratify the plan, and make it more secure. Moreover, he had told the voters of his district that he would support such changes, and, for Madison, a promise was a promise. His honor was at stake, as was the honor of a number of the gentlemen around him. Honor was at stake again, as he conceived it, in the early battles over sound construction of the Constitution. It was dishonest and dishonorable, he said, to have assured opponents of the Constitution that the "sweeping clauses" granted no additional authority to the new federal government, and then to use these clauses to legitimize such usurpations as a national bank.

Madison, like many other leaders of the new republic, never fought a duel and never even found it necessary to explain himself in terms that would avoid one. He was nonetheless a student and respecter of the code in which such "interviews" might be the ultimate recourse for gentlemen whose honor was challenged. In the 1790s, gentlemen believed that gentlemen should rule, as did most other people, and "character" was very much the measure of the man. Gentlemen kept their word. Gentlemen abided by a host of rules defining proper conduct and restraining personal collisions. Indeed, in times in which so very much was changing, honor and a gentlemanly ethic offered standards that could sometimes bring some certainty when nearly everything political was radically uncertain.

In the new republic, though, power and position were already grounded in the people (or, at least, in voters), and the people were becoming more assertive almost year by year. The audience before whom one displayed one's character and honor was not composed of other gentlemen alone, though other gentlemen's respect was vital. Instead, the gentlemen who led or who aspired to leadership had to accommodate their ethic to the rising tide of popular participation. Affairs of Honor brilliantly illuminates the multitude of ways in which the interplay of gentlemanly expectations and a new, popular politics shaped the distinctive political culture and conduct of the early national elite—and, in the process, leads us to a fresh appreciation of how different this culture was before the rise of full-fledged parties changed the landscape. Not long before, these men had pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to the revolutionary cause; honor "is a key," the author argues, "that unlocks countless mysteries of the period, rationalizing the seemingly irrational, justifying the seemingly petty and perverse, and recasting our understanding of America's founding" (p. 286).

Indeed, in such good hands, it does. Joanne B. Freeman has searched the archives with uncommon care, examining the letters, diaries, and public writings of about 300 men. She is a skillful writer. She puts this work and talent at the service of a carefully considered method, attempting, as she says, to put aside our ordinary expectations about what constitutes normal conduct and to probe the emotional patterns of a deeply different culture, searching out the shared disgusts, amusements, and approvals that reveal its underlying standards, employing what she calls an ethno-historical approach to a culture that may seem more familiar than it is and to behavior that has often been anachronistically described or judged.

The book develops as a close examination of the ways in which contemporaries wielded assorted weapons of political conflict: from gossip, slander, and lies through "paper wars" to duels. Each chapter centers on an incident or piece of writing generally familiar to the students of these years, but probes...