America's Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence

Abstract

America's Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence. By Andrew Burstein. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Pp. xiv, 361. Illustrations, maps. $30.00.) Following closely on the author's previous book on romantic nationalism, and written (and perhaps conceived) in the fulsome tide of re-remembrances and re-presentations on the fiftieth anniversary of World War II, America's Jubilee is an ambitious book. Because its ambitions are not made entirely clear to readers, however, many may well find it frustrating. Burstein's introduction addresses the book to both scholars and lay readers and sets out several related purposes. The central one is to portray Americans and their state of mind at the half-century anniversary of Independence, to uncover the soul of the successor generation (5). That expansive and quarrelsome cohort, he writes, sought to create the unity of a shared past even as its members' futures diverged. Another concern is to correct a professional historian's error arising from too neat periodization by showing that the rhetoric of the common man flourished in the mid1820s. In addressing these goals, Burstein intends to provide a palpable sense of emotional as well as political while maintaining historical distance. He defines the book as a study of memories, of nineteenth-- century ontologies (6-7). Eleven chapters and an epilogue address these concerns, but readers should not anticipate an explanatory or analytical narrative. Rather, chapters take the form of explicative essays around events and individuals. The first, an introit, tracks Lafayette's return to America in 1824 and 1825; ending with a key phrase from the book's epigraph (a stanza published by Byron in 1816), it introduces many of the figures who appear in later chapters and allows a survey of the whole Union. Successive chapters take as points of departure William Wirt, Elizabeth Foster of Massachusetts (author of two romantic novels on the Revolution), Ruth Bascom (a diarist and wife of a Massachusetts minister), and the political figures Ethan Allen Brown of Ohio, John Quincy Adams, George McDuffie of South Carolina, Henry Clay, and Andrew Jackson. Two final chapters converge on the jubilee Fourth of July. One recounts the day's observances and celebrations, while the second explicates the Adams-Jefferson relationship, so poignantly finalized by their coincidental deaths that day. The epilogue fills readers in on subsequent events and picks up on a number of themes or cultural currents that previous chapters alluded to. The result is a sort of guided immersion experience of those aspects of American life and culture that Burstein sees as central to the mid-1820s, portrayed in America's Jubilee as a distinct period. Painting Wirt as a driven career man and sentimental letter-writer and biographer, for example, Burstein gives himself a chance to summarize masculine roles available to ambitious men of the period. The book lays out several other subjects in this way, from very specific ones like Freemasonry, the conduct of newspapers, the election of 1824 and its aftermath, black-white and Indian-white relations, the newly nascent political parties, and dueling, to grander cultural themes like a pervasive romantic sensibility and a desire for economic democratization. Some of these cultural themes are experientially dramatized in the book's narrative style, a key element of which is a highly omniscient, at times almost Vidalian, narrator; John Quincy Adams, Burstein writes, admired a speech he witnessed, though, being an Adams-demanding as well as self-demanding-the president could not let the orator get away without the same kind of criticism he had once leveled at the actors in a performance of Hamlet he had witnessed in London in 1783 (233). Both reactions are documented and quoted, and Burstein's reading in contemporary sources is wide, but the effect of repeated highlighting of such parallels and coincidences is to immerse readers in a dense sense of inevitability, which must be presumed to be intentional. …