Dueling Histories

Affairs of Honor
By Joanne B. Freeman ’84
Yale University Press, 2001,
384 pp., $29.95

For most Americans, history is the study of a parade of events, dates and personalities. This is especially true for the story of the founding of our own nation. In school we learned the path--from revolution through Confederation to the establishment of the Federal Republic--was more or less seamless. As the seal of the republic displaced a royal coat of arms, Americans avoided the excesses of the French and Russian revolutions by retaining continuity with a preexisting political culture that was profoundly conservative and stability-seeking.

In fact, the moves through these stages from independence to the new political order were, according to Joanne B. Freeman '84, more jarring and chaotic than popularly believed. In her lively and engrossing study of the first decade of politics in the United States, Freeman creates a compelling picture of our first generation of national leaders and the political landscape in which they operated. She rejects the familiar portrait of the founding generation of leaders as secular demigods or alternatively as people much like us arrayed in powdered wigs, long stockings and knee britches. Instead Freeman creates a compelling picture of men totally at sea struggling to navigate the uncertainties and challenges of an unfamiliar world. Nevertheless the issues confronted by "a national politician on a shaky and unstructured stage" were real and consequential.

Freeman pictures Alexander Hamilton--titanic figure in the writing and ratification of the Constitution and the first secretary of the treasury--speaking in defense of the Jay Treaty before a protest rally on July 18, 1795, in New York City. He is shouted down, hissed at and hit in the head with a rock. Later that day, Hamilton tries to prevent a public argument between a Republican and a Federalist from spilling over into a riot. His caution is spurned, and in the end he is provoked to issue a challenge to a duel.

According to Freeman the habit of deference to one's betters had been displaced by a more active and less deferential populace. "Hamilton was fighting a losing battle when he tried to rein in the masses at the Jay Treaty rally. However aggressively he asserted his authority, in a democratic republic the crowd had the ultimate say." Indeed, the old order had passed, and a new one had begun. The American political process was being hashed out on a New York City street. To men accustomed to power and leadership, this conflict had enormously personal implications.

In March and April of 1789 when General Washington, members of the administration and members of Congress descended on New York City, our first capital, the structure of government was in place. Institutions and procedures were forged at the Constitutional Convention and in the tumultuous ratification process. However, the paramount questions of what the new government was to do and how the leaders would interact were unsettled matters.

Most of us believed that the first federal government was populated with men with long experience in working together. They had toiled in the Continental Congresses to secure independence and in the Confederation Congresses to create workable policies to ensure the prosperity and security of the newly independent states. More importantly these men were present at the creation of the new American republic at the Constitutional Convention and in the ratification assemblies. Freeman rejects this narrative as wrong and misleading. Representatives selected for the first federal Congress were, on the whole, not chosen for their philosophical brilliance or for their "heroic" qualities. Instead, they were chosen as true representatives to guard and advocate the interests of their locales and their states. "Middle-aged merchants, lawyers, and leisured gentlemen, some with wigs, some without, they were practical men of sober manner (with the exception of a few hot-headed Southerners)." Freeman describes these early leaders as "men of fine oratory and impressive appearance, accustomed to power and leadership, though on a different stage. Their portraits reveal a gallery of well-fed and watchful faces, keenly alert to their interests and standing."

Some found the collection of the nation's representatives less than prepossessing. Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay was initially disappointed to find that members of the new government did not contain the "collected Wisdom and learning of the United States" that he had expected. Instead men of the new government were characterized by some as mediocre.

When the new government got under way there was no clear road map of what was to be done or how members of the new government were to behave, according to Freeman. The political alignments and associations developed during the ratification conflict--"Federalist and Anti-federalist"--no longer served as a reliable guide for the new national political landscape.

"The fledgling nation would sweep away Old World corruption, initiating a worldwide conversion to egalitarian, representative regime," Freeman writes. "But there was no precise model for this political experiment. There was no other such government in the modern world; the Constitution was little more than a skeletal infrastructure. There were few absolutes and many questions, almost every rule, standard, and practice left open to debate; the most trivial decision yanked fundamental principles into view."

Those who came to New York in the spring of 1789 found themselves disoriented in a land of strangers. "Surrounded by strangers of unknown politics from alien reaches of the republic, they did not know whom to trust. Cultural clashes were part of the problem, for men from different regions seemed to come from different countries with different customs, values, clothing and manners."

Zeroing in on the inchoate nature of American politics in the last decade of the 18th century, Freeman makes an important contribution to our understanding of the history and politics of the new republic. She reminds us, "Cultural habits could shape the soul of the republic as pervasively as its constitutional framework did, an assumption that politicized the trappings of everyday life." In her tightly argued and engaging study, Freeman reintroduces the leadership of the early republic and presents a compelling account of the strategies they pursued as they forged the nation's political culture. "Beneath the political superstructure created by the Constitution, a subterranean politics of intrigue flourished, fueled by political gossip. The process of government was unfolding in secret negotiations hidden from public view. ..." This process of hidden bargain was particularly evident in vote-trading between many in the Pennsylvania delegation willing to sacrifice Philadelphia's claim to the national capital in exchange for Southern votes to assume the war debt of the states.

Freeman's work stresses the role of ceremony, correspondence, levees and official dinners in the politics of the early republic. At these events and in these writings, reputations were built and power and influence exercised. These venues were also occasions for shaming one's enemies. Establishing and protecting one's honor was, according to Freeman, key to political effectiveness. Anxiety over honor necessitated willingness to take extreme measures to preserve one's reputation and political effectiveness, and the duel was an important part of political ritual.

In this study, Freeman continues her earlier work as a consultant to the PBS American Experience documentary,"The Duel," depicting the ill-fated confrontation between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr in 1804. In this work she demonstrates that the duel was not a senseless or psychotic act. Rather, duels were part of the ritual culture of honor on which political power and influence were built.

History--as written by participants in long-past struggles or written later by their partisans--reveals how truly contestable history can be. Significantly, Freeman identifies the struggle to dominate the "historical record" as vitally important to the founding generation, as was the struggle to preserve their reputation among their colleagues during the epic struggle. This was particularly true for Thomas Jefferson, who was determined to counteract the "biased" interpretation of the founding period devised by John Marshall in his Life of Washington. Freeman notes "Jefferson had long known that history unfolded in the spaces between official transactions." Jefferson, in his later years, collected, edited and rearranged many times the records and personal notes and memoranda of the seminal period of the republic. For two centuries, Jefferson's Ana was dismissed as "nothing more than a collection of conversations..." and generally ignored by historians. Freeman regards the Ana as Jefferson's calculated campaign for setting the record straight.

"Taken as a whole, Jefferson's recorded conversations speak with one voice. The group of men engaged in private discussion all tell the same story--Jefferson's story--of a hidden Federalist plot of monarchical aspirations and corruption." Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay, "an extreme republican," documented the events and personalities of the first two years of the new government. Like Jefferson and Maclay, others "saw important political plans unfolding beneath the surface of official transactions," writes Freeman. Jefferson's determination to assure that the historical record supported his version of events and motives at the outset of the republic seems a shared obsession with other participants in what would be later regarded as a heroic age.

"As both Republicans and Federalists realized," Freeman writes, "the party that won this literary debate would claim the soul of the republic; by shaping popular conceptions of the nation's founding, they would have a long-reaching influence on later events. History was personal, immediate and politically significant; in fact, history was politics."

Freeman's work is an invaluable and provocative interpretation of the political dynamics and the personal fears and ambitions of selected elite. Her study suggests how these leaders faced the uncertainties and the uncharted political landscape at the end of the 18th century. Freeman's interpretation is grounded in the analysis of motives, feelings and calculations underlying the behavior of national leaders. These men intentionally justified themselves and their causes in journals, pamphlets, histories and autobiographies. Freeman's conclusions are certain to be controversial. Some will condemn her approach as overly interpretive and for relying too much on intuition--not real history. Her interpretation of the founding era through the eyes of national leaders will no doubt be condemned as elitist. Certainly her work will set off other socio-psychological interpretations of the political events of the founding period.

Whatever controversy Freeman's "ethno-historical" approach provokes, her analysis is important, bold and provocative. I believe that Freeman's work is invaluable in understanding how the politics of the end of the 18th century shaped American constitutional development and how it was critical to the formation of the American political party system--the most enduring political rivalry in history.

--Leo Flynn,
George Erving Thompson Memorial Professor of Government and
Professor of Politics