The field of early American political history has undergone major revisions in the last several decades. More specifically, two major schools of thought have emerged. The first is the “Founders Chic” school of thought. These historians have resuscitated the leading roles of the founders in early American politics, who were marginalized by previous social and cultural historians’ interest in the “common American.” Studies such as Robert Wiebe´s The Opening of American Society (1984), Joanne Freeman’s Affairs of Honor (2001), and Joseph Ellis´ Founding Brothers (2000) have focused exclusively on the lives of the founding framers and their agency in shaping early American politics. For these historians, especially Ellis, social-cultural history holds no place in the mainstream political narrative of the early Republic, and does little more than shift attention away from the true actors of this period.
In response to this revitalized emphasis on the founding fathers, another school of thought has appeared: “New New Political History, the “Newest Political History,” or simply put “New Political History.” This school of historians claimed that both elites and ordinary Americans shaped early American politics. Works such as Jeffrey Pasley, Andrew Robertson, and David Waldstreicher’s Beyond the Founders (2004), Daniel Walker Howe´s What Hath God Wrought (2007), and Gordon Wood’s Empire of Liberty (2009) have reintegrated social and cultural history into the political history of the early Republic. More specifically, these historians have expanded our understanding of early American political history through engaging subjects that have been previously limited to social and cultural historians (history of material culture, the working classes, women, African Americans, and so forth). Unlike the social and cultural historians of the 1960s and 1970s, these historians do not disregard the framers completely, but they do move beyond the founders to provide a more nuanced and sophisticated understanding of politics in the early Republic (hence the title of Waldstreicher, Robertson, and Pasley´s study).
Taking up the call in Beyond the Founders to find an “alternative rubric for organizing the history of the early Republic and its politics” (5), Rachel Cleves’ The Reign of Terror In America (2009) explores the development of early American political culture during the debates over violence and the French Revolution. More specifically, Cleves investigates how Federalist’s anti-Jacobin and nonviolence rhetoric not only influenced American politics, but also, over two generations, gave rise to antislavery, antiwar, and public-education reform movements. She supports her argument with an exhaustive exploration of published sources from sermons and pamphlets to orations and broadsides.
One of the more significant historiographical contributions Cleves makes in this work deals with recasting our understanding of the Federalist Party’s resistance to democracy. Before the 1990s, historians viewed Federalist politicians’ antidemocratic sensibilities as being out of touch with reality. Cleves, however, corrects this assumption by showing that the Federalist Party’s distrust of democracy spurred from a moral and ethical ideological center. More specifically, she focuses on how Federalists denounced the French Revolution and its democratic underpinnings because of their Calvinistic beliefs in the dangers of human depravity. Democracy, in the minds of conservative Federalists, fostered violence and savagery and led to events such as the French Revolution’s September Massacres. Excessive democracy, in other words, led to the destabilization of civil society.
Jeffersonian Republicans, however, unwaveringly supported the French Revolution and its democratic ideologies. They supported such revolutionary actions and the belief that man should be self-governing. In an effort to counter the Jeffersonians, therefore, Federalists engaged with Gothic rhetoric to instill fear into the American public by graphically illustrating the bloody and violent consequences of the French Revolution, which resulted from human passion being unchecked. In an ironic turn of events, however, Jeffersonian Republicans used the Federalists “violent language” to attack them, especially after the enactment of the Alien and Sedition Acts, which Jeffersonians argued was a new “Reign of Terror.” Soon such graphic and violent language became common political weapons for both parties, which left the American public caught in the middle of a political tug-of-war.
Another important aspect of Cleves works is how she deftly shows Federalists’ nonviolent and anti-Jacobin positions gave rise to their support in antislavery, antiwar (War of 1812), and public education reform movements. One criticism of Cleves work is that she largely ignores “free black” abolitionists and their views on the French Revolution and Jacobins. Quibbles aside, Federalists’ belief in human depravity led them to charge southern Jeffersonian slaveholders with falling victim to human passion, left unrestricted by democracy. When southerners threatened disunion, however, these Federalists abandoned their antislavery crusade, which was later picked up by their descendants in the mid-nineteenth century. The danger of human passion, Cleves argues, is one reason why conservative Federalists were initially willing to abolish slavery, and why so many leading abolitionists—Theodore Weld, William Lloyd Garrison, Josiah Quincy, and Lydia Maria Child—came from conservative Federalists families. Moreover, universal public education was also important for Federalists because they believed that education would teach the youth of America to repress their human passions, which they believed would lead to violence.
Cleves work also attempts to engage with a transnational approach. From the beginning, she asserts that the French Revolution was not a European event, but a transatlantic affair. In turn, the political debates between the Federalists and Jeffersonians were just one part of the larger Atlantic World reaction to the French Revolution. Although Cleves continues to highlight the Atlantic World connections throughout her work, many of her connections are limited to the British. In fact, outside of the United States, she only engages with British politicians and abolitionists’ perspectives of the French Revolution, which leaves me wondering how other groups in the Atlantic World reacted to this event and its aftermath.
Overall, Rachel Cleves’ The Reign of Terror provides a provocative study of how the French Revolution influenced early American politics, and more specifically how questions over violence, democracy, and human depravity shaped the development of not only the American body politic, but also gave rise to antislavery, antiwar, and public education movements. Her work also provides another possible blueprint to synthesize the history of the early Republic. Synthesizing the political history of the early Republic, however, is not an easy task, especially when we add cultural and social history to mix. Cultural and social historians prize nuance and often complicate over-simplistic narratives. It will be interesting to see how historians in the “New New Political History” school negotiate the larger master narratives with detailed specific case studies. This problem does not just plague political history, but all historiographical fields that attempt to comprehend large historical narratives, while maintaining the sophisticated history of specific events, groups, and people.