More than two hundred years ago, when the republic was young and republicanism itself was still an untried experiment, American political culture had yet to come to grips with the idea of a loyal opposition. Dissent was confused with conspiracy; disagreement with disloyalty; parties with subversion. Throughout the 1790s, as the republic groped its way toward an uncertain future, political battles had an almost breathtaking ferocity, an intensity grounded on a complete distrust of the motives and integrity of opponents. Otherwise reasonable men believed conservatives were plotting a return to monarchy, republicans to deliver the country to France. Today, with more than two centuries of representative government behind us, it is hard to recapture the fears and passions that led Virginians to toast “A speedy Death to General Washington” or the bitterness that led John Adams to maintain his grudge against Alexander Hamilton’s “infamous calumnies,” even if, as Adams wrote, “the author of them with a pistol bullet in his spinal marrow, died a penitent.”

Although American politics have never been a pastime for the faint of heart, their sheer physical and rhetorical violence in the 1790s is overwhelming. There were, of course, episodes of resistance within the several states to the authority of the central government, most notably in Pennsylvania, which, while hosting the nation’s capital (1790–1800), also gave rise to the Whiskey Rebellion (1794) and the revolt of John Fries (1799). But, faced with the unrest generated by the French Revolution and the Quasi-War with France, the governing Federalists themselves devised the Alien and Sedition Acts and the Provisional Army, both aimed largely at ridding themselves of a domestic fifth column. And, in response, armed bands of Jeffersonian militia openly drilled from Baltimore to Boston, preparing to withstand the Federalist army and the anticipated coup d’état by a newly promoted General Hamilton. During the critical days of 1798 and 1799, political mobs roamed the streets of Philadelphia, inspiring President John Adams secretly to smuggle arms into his home through the back streets.

It was also during the 1790s that the rigidly choreographed violence of the political duel became an accepted risk of American public life. Condemned by clergymen, outlawed by legislatures, duels were, nevertheless, endemic. The infamous 1804 encounter between Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr was not the aberration it seems today, but part of a widespread phenomenon. By one account, Hamilton himself was directly involved in no fewer than ten politically inspired affairs of honor before his fatal encounter with Burr; all the others ended short of gunfire. For example, in 1797, Hamilton and future president James Monroe came within a hair’s breadth of a duel over leaked documents—a rapidly escalating verbal confrontation beginning with Hamilton calling Monroe a liar, Monroe declaring Hamilton a “scoundrel,” Hamilton announcing that he would meet Monroe “like a Gentleman,” and Monroe demanding Hamilton get his pistols—until horrified seconds managed to smooth things over. Hamilton himself served as second in two duels. And, in 1801, Hamilton’s nineteen-year-old son Philip was killed in a duel with New York lawyer George Eacker—an encounter that took place on the same Weehawken site and with the very same brace of pistols that claimed Hamilton’s life three years later. Indeed, in 1799, in yet another duel, Hamilton’s brother-in-law, John Barker Church, shot a button off Aaron Burr’s coat with one of those well-used pistols.

While Hamilton, as leader of a political faction, may have attracted more than his share of combat, he was not that unusual among the public figures of the day. John Adams’s pugnacious son-in-law, William Smith, surveyor of customs for the port of New York, was notorious for issuing challenges. In 1802, New York Mayor DeWitt Clinton exchanged harmless fire five times with Burr ally John Swartout before calling it a day. Not all were so lucky. In 1798, Brockholst Livingston, a future judge of the New York Court of Appeals, killed the Federalist James Jones in a duel provoked when Jones tweaked Livingston’s nose over a skit satirizing the Federalists. After an aborted encounter with rival newspaperman James Cheetham, William Coleman, the editor of The New York Post, killed the city’s harbormaster in a related duel; Coleman himself ended his days paralyzed from the waist down as the result of a caning inflicted during another honor dispute.

The violence even spilled onto the floor of Congress. In one notorious 1798 incident, Vermont Representative Matthew Lyon spat in the face of Connecticut’s Roger Griswold when Griswold called him to account for some insulting comments overheard in a private conversation. After the House refused to expel “Spitting Matt,” Griswold took matters into his own hands, bludgeoning Lyon with a hickory walking stick in the House chamber. Extricating himself from his chair, Lyon grabbed a set of fireplace tongs from behind the Speaker’s desk and the two continued to have at one another—almost literally, hammer and tongs—while Speaker Jonathan Dayton ignored shouts from members to call the House to order, intending to afford Griswold full opportunity to clear his name. Onlookers finally pried the pair apart. James Madison’s laconic reaction was that Griswold had forfeited his right to satisfaction as a man of honor by seeking recourse from the House rather than caning Lyon in the first place.

What are we to make of all this? How are we to understand the pervasive violence of the 1790s and, in particular, the hair-trigger tempers displayed by the nation’s leaders at every level of government? As Americans, we are accustomed to think of the founders as a generation of demi-gods, flawed perhaps, but nevertheless wiser, better, more statesmanlike than any group in public life since. And here they are, those larger-than-life figures, the fathers of our country, ready to take each other out at ten paces at the drop of a hat. It is as if a gulf has opened up between us, turning people we thought we knew well into strangers from another world.

In her excellent and thought-provoking new study, Joanne Freeman argues that this bewildering culture of honor filled a critical—even a constructive—role in the public life of the early republic. [1] Indeed, she contends that without exploring the importance of honor and its attendant rituals we cannot fully understand the conduct of the first generation of American politicians as they attempted to forge a national government. Notoriously, the American republic was founded without principles, without parties, and, most important, without precedent. Most citizens of the new country had never ventured beyond their home communities. In a world largely reliant on personal relationships, as Freeman points out, members of the first congresses rarely knew one another and were woefully unaccustomed to thinking in national terms, much less to acting on a national stage.

What is more, when they did meet one another, they didn’t like each other very much. Northerners complained about “southern blusterers” and southerners proclaimed themselves ready “to submit to all the hazards of war & risk the loss of every thing dear… in life, than to live under the rule of a fixed insolent northern majority.” The north-south antipathy may be expected; what is startling is what one Pennsylvania representative said about the delegation from a fellow middle Atlantic state: “The New Yorkers and I are on an equal footing. Mutual civility without a grain of good liking between us.”

In this radically new political world—before the formation of political parties—Freeman contends, it was all but impossible for fellow legislators to predict a colleague’s views or loyalties on any issue. Her thesis, persuasively argued, is that personal character and reputation filled the public void, reinforced by extra-institutional channels such as gossip networks, print warfare, and, as a last resort, dueling. The code of honor provided the participants in this early national free-for-all with a common set of rules; as Lord Chesterfield summed it up pithily, “There are but two alternatives for a gentleman; extreme politeness or the sword.”

This book is clearly scholarship of a very high order, sensitively deploying the latest ethnographic methodology and displaying a masterful command of a wide range of primary sources, from diaries and correspondence to broadsides and newspapers. At the same time, Freeman reaches out to a general audience with an admirable writing style and telling use of anecdotes. Each of the book’s chapters (three of which have appeared as independent essays in scholarly journals) revolves around a single incident or documentary source, some all but unknown outside of the scholarly community and others uncovered by the author in the course of her archival work. Each vignette is a window into the unwritten rules and informal institutions that governed politics before the development of the party system displaced them.

Thus, the first chapter concentrates on the diary of Pennsylvania Senator William Maclay as he painfully negotiated his way through the first congress, learning the political value of dinner parties while seeing threats to his austere version of republicanism everywhere he went. The second chapter focuses on the etiquette and function of political gossip using Thomas Jefferson’s “Anas” (Tabletalk), an anthology carefully selected by Jefferson from the notes he kept of all his private conversations. It was found among his papers and published posthumously, to the great consternation of all who appeared in its anecdotes. Gentlemen, of course, did no such thing; nothing in this book will serve to enhance the already much diminished reputation of our third president. Later chapters cover the hierarchy of the paper media in political disputes—exemplified by the bitter print dispute between Alexander Hamilton and John Adams—and present the Burr-Hamilton duel as an honor dispute that, given the character and history of both men, had a tragic inevitability.

The epilogue, really an extra chapter, chronicles the struggle to construct a history of the founding, in which the partisans of the 1790s battled to secure their reputations for posterity. It is largely told through the eyes of an obscure Federalist politician, Senator (and later Governor) William Plumer of New Hampshire. Although Plumer’s efforts were outstanding for their sheer obsessiveness, virtually every major participant in early national politics took steps to secure his place in the historical record—even the notoriously enigmatic Aaron Burr. Burr’s little-remembered memoir, actually written by his political lieutenant Matthew Livingston Davis, obviously did not achieve its goal of restoring Burr’s reputation; nevertheless, if Freeman’s reading is any indication, Burr’s version of the events of 1800 has a ring of truth lacking in the received Jeffersonion account.

The weakest element of the book is its account of the presidential election of 1800 as “An Honor Dispute of Grand Proportions.” Perhaps after almost two hundred pages of honor disputes, I was simply surfeited with honor and longed for a discussion of, say, the “three-fifths clause,” without which Adams would have won the election handily. But, more fundamentally, the account casts doubt on Freeman’s underlying claim that strong party structure did not develop until after the turn of the century. Put succinctly, the 1800 election yielded a tie in the electoral college between Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr, ostensibly the Republican presidential and vice-presidential candidates. As a result, the election was thrown into the House of Representatives, where, on the thirty-sixth ballot, Federalist Representative James Bayard—the sole member of the Delaware delegation and therefore the controlling vote—broke the tie, making Jefferson president and Burr vice president.

The scandal, if there was one, was that there was much behind-the-scenes politicking, some of it unseemly by the standards of the day. Federalists flirted with shifting their votes to Burr, although it seems that many were deterred by Alexander Hamilton’s statement that even Jefferson—who had some pretense to character—would make a better president than Burr, “the American Catiline.” Others, including Bayard, attempted to secure formal concessions from Jefferson; they believed themselves successful, though Jefferson’s promises were made on an informal basis.

The conventional interpretation of these events is that the Republicans had instilled sufficient party discipline in their followers to cause and hold the tie. Freeman argues to the contrary, that under stress there was little glue other than personal relationships and regional loyalties to cement Jeffersonian ranks. Yet Freeman admits that for thirty-six ballots no Republican dared shift a vote, a cohesion that suggests party was a fairly good indicator of voting behavior by 1800 and a claim that robs reputation of much of its significance in Freeman’s scheme. Her case is stronger when she suggests that honor required neither the candidates nor house members to engage in electoral horse trading—although, I believe, by 1800 the old term of “standing for office” was being replaced by the more modern “running for office,” a change with obvious political implications.

Indeed, as an historian I cannot help a raised eyebrow about some of the book’s wider claims. Although Freeman’s cultural observations are altogether compelling, it seems to me that she does not truly grapple with the peculiar violence of political culture in the 1790s nor does she persuasively account for the importance of reputation by the time party allegiances were relatively clear, say, after 1800. What is more, the persistence of stylized violence, however debased, in American politics—the best-known example being the 1856 caning of Massachusetts Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the senate by South Carolina’s Preston Brooks—seems to undercut Freeman’s intial thesis that reputation had what linguists call a signifier function in the early republic. Instead, it seems to me, she is far nearer the mark in her discussion of the founding generation’s effort to seize control of the history of the early republic. It may be old-fashioned to say it, but sometimes things are exactly what they seem. The founders universally understood reputation and honor to be ends in themselves; they acted and wrote not only for the moment but also for posterity, indeed, for us. It is this “decent regard for the opinions of mankind” that lifted them above the minor European nobility from whom they inherited the code duello and spurred them to the greatness they desired, creating in the process the longest-lived republic in the history of the world. But these are cavils regarding a book that is never less than enjoyable and informative and, even when it triggers skepticism, always thought-provoking.

Notes
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1. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic, by Joanne B. Freeman; Yale University Press, 384 pages, $29.95. Go back to the text.