Reading the Early Republic (review)

Abstract

Reading Early Republic. By Robert A. Ferguson. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. 358. Cloth, $45.00.)Robert Ferguson's new book sets out to recover particular meanings that circulated through a host of texts produced in America from Revolutionary War through mid-184Os. Ferguson starts with idea that meaning of language is bound by time and by context, so that when today we read or use words written two centuries ago, we are liable to misunderstand them, both by missing intended meanings and by ascribing to those words meanings more relevant to our own time and context. When modern wielders of early republican phraseology think they are using same language, they do so only in a literal sense, he writes. words themselves often held different meanings when first expressed, and every original expression came in a context now lost to easy comprehension (9-10). Ferguson's hope is to recapture original meanings of these words by considering how people who produced them and those who first received them operated with certain events, traditions of learning, literary forms, or rhetorical strategies in mind.The book's ten chapters are arranged in rough chronological order arid take up a wide range of texts. Chapter 1 explores contextual nuances of words by reading Hannah Foster's The Coquette (1797) alongside Venture Smith's 1798 narrative, an 1802 entry from diary of Nathaniel Ames, and Thomas Jefferson's first inaugural address. Chapter 2 considers a variety of texts, including John Dickinson's Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania (1768), to trace competing religious and secular ideas about that for Ferguson joins together in a distinctive dialectic of liberty (as chapter is titled) during second half of eighteenth century. In Chapter 3 focus turns to a single pamphlet, Common Sense, and to a consideration of how Thomas Paine managed to capture and propel a nation by telling a dark and brooding story in a particular way. Chapter 4, Becoming American, examines treachery of Benedict Arnold and trial of Major John Andre as a way into questions about loyalty and national identity in a time of rebellion. Chapter 5 moves to constitutional period by taking up John Jay's essays in The Federalist, arguing that Jay articulated a distinct aesthetics of ratification (157) that had him contributing far more to Federalist cause than has been recognized. Chapter 6 contends that many ways in which members of founding generation appealed to classical antiquity-in their Latin mottos, their historical paintings, their oratory, and their architecture-were not simply efforts to bind their own attempt at republican self-government to a noble tradition but were expressions of a reflective nostalgia that looked to past in order to find familiarity in bewildering present (195). In Chapter 7, Ferguson turns to Gabriel's Rebellion to examine both limits of republican and specter of failure in midst of revolutionary success. Chapter 8 considers Jefferson's lifelong obsession (218) with design and construction of Monticello as an avenue into distinctly Enlightenment symbolic universe he inhabited. Chapter 9 studies 1844 Girard case, which focused on questions about uses of charity, as a telling example of how the competitions of event and interpretation . …