Profiles in Moderation

Political moderates of all stripes apparently abounded in America’s first two centuries: historic moderates, customary moderates, moderate revolutionaries, revolutionary moderates, principled moderates, prudential moderates, in-your-face moderates, immoderate moderates, even moderating moderates. Given this moderately confusing multitude, readers might expect a more than moderately precise definition of “moderation.” Robert McCluer Calhoon knows this, and thus he begins his introductory chapter with a five-part definition of political moderation: it is “an ideology in the making” (p. 9), “a refuge” for those caught “between extremes” (p. 10), “a cluster of ethical insights” (p. 11), “a series of improvised structural conceptions” (p. 11), and “the negotiation between prudence and principle” (p. 15). Ultimately, however, as Calhoon acknowledges, even these different ways of gaining a handle on political moderation cannot resolve the problem of definition, because the very concept itself “resists rigorous definition” (p. 9). Moderation was not a “precise place on a spectrum of belief”; it was a “middle range of political choices between manifestly antagonistic polarities” (p. 268).

How, then, does Calhoon proceed with his examination of this unavoidably elusive phenomenon? Because “there was no typical moderate” (p. 15), at the heart of Political Moderation he uses a series of biographical sketches, thirty-nine of which are a page or longer, that together limn an operational definition of political moderation. This can be an effective strategy, especially in the hands of a skilled practitioner, and it is one that Calhoon first employed in his fine study of Loyalists in Revolutionary America, 1760–1781.¹ Indeed more than a few of his earlier portrayals—Thomas Hutchinson, Jonathan Sewall, Daniel Dulany, William Smith Jr., the Reverend William Smith, and William Bull—would fit nicely into Political Moderation, and three of them do. Reverend Smith appears as a “prudential” moderate in this later iteration, while Bull and Smith Jr., emerge as “principled” moderates. And it seems quite reasonable to conclude that if the acerbic South Carolina merchant William Wragg—whose “inner certainty” that he was the “embodiment of conscientious virtue” led him to rebuke nearly everyone else—qualifies as a principled, albeit “in-your-face moderate” (p. 54), then surely the Reverend Samuel Seabury, who was similarly disposed, and therefore readily combined personal insults with appeals to reason in addressing his supposedly deluded neighbors in New York, must stand as a principled moderate as well.² Similarly, if John Jacob [Joachim] Zubly, in spite of his uncompromising denunciation of rebellion, “came close to representing the ideal type of a political moderate” (p. 71), then shouldn’t Peter Oliver?³

This exercise in the transpositioning of scholarship suggests two problems. First and more immediately apparent, what were the determinative criteria for the thirty-nine individuals selected for extended treatment? James and Dolley Madison, we are told, had a “moderate marriage” because they “lived with poise and grace at the epicenter of social and cultural tensions” and because “James extended . . . a kind of political equality” to Dolley (pp. 139, 140). William and Elizabeth Wirt’s marriage was likewise a “marriage of political moderates” because of the “symmetry, reciprocity, and mutuality of their emotional partnership” (pp. 140, 141). But why not John and Abigail Adams? Calhoon’s description of Elizabeth Wirt’s duties as “office manager, political adviser, and hostess . . . as well as mother and tutor to a growing brood of children” (p. 142) would seem to apply equally well to Abigail Adams and to all other “republican mothers.”⁴ Were these all moderate marriages?

Second, and perhaps more significant, as Calhoon judiciously concedes at the outset of his text, no one was a moderate all of the time. Those who “mediated, conciliated, or reached across political divides all of the time” were, in fact, “radicals”; conversely, “almost every sane person is in some respects a moderate.” Moderation, therefore, is a situational “phenomenon of the moment” (p. 6, Calhoon’s emphasis). To be sure, that moment may be drawn out, as in John Dickinson’s “one...