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Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic

Amazon.com Price:  $16.16 (as of 06/05/2019 09:54 PST- Details)

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Description

In this unusual book, Joanne Freeman offers a major reassessment of political culture in the early years of the American republic. By exploring both the public actions and private papers of key figures such as Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr, and Alexander Hamilton, Freeman reveals an alien and profoundly unstable political world grounded on the code of honor. In the absence of a party system and with few examples to guide The united states’s experiment in republican governance, the rituals and rhetoric of honor provided ground rules for political combat. Gossip, print warfare, and dueling were tools used to jostle for status and form alliances in an another way unstructured political realm. These political weapons were all deployed in the tumultuous presidential election of 1800―an event that nearly toppled the new republic.

By illuminating this culture of honor, Freeman offers new understandings of one of the crucial most perplexing events of early American history, including the notorious duel between Burr and Hamilton. A major reconsideration of early American politics, Affairs of Honor offers a profoundly human look at the anxieties and political realities of leaders struggling to define themselves and their role in the new nation.

The more things change, the more they remain the same. Modern American politics may regularly resemble a demented circus, but thus it has at all times been. So writes historian Joanne Freeman in this vigorous account of The united states’s first national leaders, those entrusted with creating a nation unlike any other on Earth, one “egalitarian, democratic, representative, straightforward, and virtuous in spirit, public-minded in practice.” The reality used to be less noble than all that; as Freeman writes, the first postrevolutionary Congress, convened in the spring of 1789, used to be marked by regional and private rivalries, mudslinging, acrimony, favor-seeking, and backroom bargaining, all of which produced far more discord than unity. In that climate, as John Adams and George Washington would regularly complain, these early politicians were more interested in “their interests, careers, reputations, and pocketbooks” than in matters of the public good. Yet, Freeman suggests, it could scarcely have been another way; an “emotional logic” governed the governors, involving a shared code of honor that drew no lines between the personal with the political, so that any disagreement over policy used to be liable to grow to be a duel or campaign of slander; a day-to-day style of conduct in which panic, paranoia, and shrill accusations were the norm; a fortress mentality in which anyone who used to be not a sworn friend used to be a sworn enemy.

Amazingly, it every so often seems, they made a nation. Freeman’s well-crafted study makes a useful corrective to the view that latest politics represents a freefall from some golden age, and it adds much to our understanding of The united states’s past. –Gregory McNamee

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