Craig Bruce Smith. American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era.

Abstract

Honor, virtue, and ethics are the driving forces behind this fresh look at the American Revolution. Such a focus may strike some scholars as quizzical or even downright dangerous; Craig Bruce Smith anticipates these objections as he introduces his careful and colorful study American Honor: The Creation of the Nation’s Ideals during the Revolutionary Era. Smith analyzes “American variants of honor that are in several ways unique to a nonaristocratic Western nation” (251 n. 4). He highlights several distinct features of American honor, particularly Benjamin Franklin’s notion of “ascending honor”: Franklin believed that an ethics-based meritocracy ought to supersede older notions of hereditary honor (12). And so Smith’s book revives the republican synthesis. Its narrative structure echoes Gordon S. Wood’s The Radicalism of the American Revolution (1991) by tracing the triumph of a natural aristocracy (ethocracy?) over the monarchical Leviathan, followed by a Jacksonian-style fall from grace. For a brief moment, Americans put their best selves in the service of national virtue and the public good, until the ascendance of individualism led to atomization and archaic assertions of personal honor. Republican honor, with its persistent inequalities and loose guardrails against selfishness, gave way in fairly short order. As Jan Lewis wrote in “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” “Republican advocacy of virtue was powerless before persons who had no conscience” (William and Mary Quarterly 44, no. 4 [October 1987]: 689–721, here 715).