Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic

Joanne Freeman portrays the "culture of honor" as a "source of stability" in the "contested political landscape" of the early American political sphere (xv), and she does so in a witty and bright way. Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic is by no means the first study to demonstrate the importance of honor to America's founding generation. This book builds on a scholarship which might be traced at least to 1967 when Douglass Adair's seminal investigation, "Fame and the Founding Fathers," was first published. More recent contributions of value include the essays in Peter McNamara's The Noblest Minds: Fame, Honor, and the American Founding (1999). But Freeman covers much new territory, and often in new ways. Affairs of Honor is concerned, for instance, to identify and describe the "weapons" of "political combat." In the end, Freeman's attempt to understand the "grammar" of honor in the early national period, allows her to make better sense of the American political duel. Along the way it provides a meaningful context for important political events, such as the Sedition Act. It is also an approach that casts well-known political figures in a new light. Chapters center on William Maclay, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and William Plumer. Perhaps most importantly of all, Freeman's book suggests, as we shall see, that historians require a new framework for understanding the political culture of the New Republic.

Chapter one is based on the diary of William Maclay, a prominent Pennsylvania Senator. In his diary Maclay recorded, in much detail, the proceedings of the first Senate. Freeman argues that while historians have dipped into Maclay's pages for miscellaneous anecdotes, "his diary in its entirety receives no attention at all" (18). That neglect is unfortunate. Maclay's pages show him to be earnestly republican; they also support Freeman's contention that "National politicians were attempting to devise a style of national leadership amid conflicting and ambiguous standards, a cultural battle with profound personal and political implications" (48).

Chapter two looks to Thomas Jefferson's "Anas" in order to describe and illustrate some of the rules of "gossiping." Tracing "gossip" from whispers behind closed doors to words in print, Freeman argues that "Broadsides, newspaper essays, pamphlets, and public-minded personal letters had different tones and readerships, forming an arsenal of paper weapons that were each adapted to a different purpose" (99). Much of the text of Affairs of Honor aims to flesh out that thesis. For instance, Freeman argues convincingly that Jefferson's "Anas" is best read as a "defense pamphlet" aimed at John Marshall's Life of Washington, a book Jefferson described as "five volumed libel" (100).

John Adams's letters published in the Boston Patriot of 1809, in which he attacked the reputation of Alexander Hamilton, and the responses these newspaper missives occasioned, are another example of the grammar of honor and provide the focus for chapter three. Freeman's book reminds us that newspapers played an important role in early American political culture. "By linking regions together with bonds of political consciousness, inter-connected partisan newspapers were a nationalizing influence, a literal arm of government connecting the extended republic through chains of information" (123).

Hamilton's famous duel with Aaron Burr is the subject of chapter four. Co-editor of Hamilton's Writings for the Library of America, Freeman knows Hamilton well, as is evidenced further the book under review. Here she argues that the Hamilton-Burr duel was most telling, not of Hamilton's own character as many historians have argued, but of the complex nature of the code of honor. It was that code, which included not only dueling but equally mysterious activities such as caning and "nose-tweaking," that informed the process whereby Hamilton and Burr met at the Weehawken heights with pistols in hand on 11 July 1804.

One of the most stimulating chapters of Affairs of Honor, the fifth, is concerned with the political tensions in the so-called "revolution of 1800" and the long-term consequences that flowed from those pressures. Particular attention is given to Aaron Burr, a man despised by many of his contemporaries and, until very recent years, most historians of the period. Freeman argues, however, that "to understand Burr one must understand the subtleties of honor; only then does he become more than a villainous archetype" (213). The context of the contested Presidential election between Jefferson and Burr in 1800 was also one "without sharply defined permanent parties;" it was "a war without uniforms" in which "it was difficult to distinguish friends from foes" (223). That uncertainty, the "ambiguities of a politics of friendship that blurred the public, the private, the political, and the personal" (252), led contemporaries to accuse both Burr and Jefferson of scheming in dishonorable ways to win the election.

The closing book-end of Affairs of Honor is the "Epilogue," which discusses the historical writings of William Plumer. Here one finds hints at interesting developments in the writing of history in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century America. It would have been even more interesting to have seen that theme developed more fully with an eye to broader historiographical trends in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world.

In Freeman's endnotes one might follow some interesting historiographical debates and trends. For instance, Freeman draws a number of fascinating parallels between Revolutionary America and France. Another striking parallel to the argument of Affairs of Honor, and one that goes unnoticed in the book, is found in the work of Lewis Namier. Namier claimed that it was inaccurate to describe the British political system at the mid-eighteenth century as one divided neatly into Whig and Tory parties. Freeman makes a similar claim for the American political scene of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Like Namier, Freeman sees a political system that was individualized. Freeman's claim that the political environment of the United States in the 1790s was not one divided into Federalists and Republicans is a revisionary interpretation likely to lead to as much debate as has Namier.

Freeman's style is easy and her prose crisp, similar to the Galliard type in which Affairs of Honor is set. The text is adorned with 37 figures. These include well-known portraits of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Hamilton and also lesser-known prints and photo reproductions of items such as a page from Plumer's "Repository" and a linen handkerchief from 1804 intended to memorialize Alexander Hamilton.