Sectional nationalism: Massachusetts conservative leaders and the transformation of America, 1815-1836

Abstract

Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America, 1815-1836. By Harlow W. Sheidley. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999. Pp. xvii, 283. $50.00.) The Federalists, long the pariahs of early republic historiography, have received some better press in recent years. Stanley Elkins's and Eric McKittrick's monumental The Age of Federalism (1997) helped to launch reevaluation of the Federalists' legacy, an impulse pursued by Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara Oberg in their volume of essays Federalists Reconsidered (1998). Rehabilitation is not exactly Harlow Sheidley's project in Sectional Nationalism, however, although she fully assimilates the conclusions of earlier studies by James Banner, Linda Kerber, and David Hackett Fischer that found the Federalists to be authentic republicans. Instead, Sheidley's interest is in the dilemma of [r]epublican aristocrats in world of revolutionary change. Ironically, Massachusetts conservative leaders struggled desperately to maintain a hierarchical, organic, and deferential social ideology, while at the same time, as pioneers in commerce and manufacturing, they were key engineers of an economic transformation of American society that ultimately fractured the social order and their conservative value . (x-- xi). This glaring internal contradiction, though it has its poignant aspects, is also one of the features that makes the Massachusetts elite of the early nineteenth century so irritating. Sheidley is fully aware that her subjects-smug, self--righteous, sanctimonious, and parochial--are problematic and often disagreeable set. Few groups in American history have had more outsized conception of their own importance. There are still Bostonians who cherish visceral hatred for Harrison Gray Otis, more than century and half after his death. And yet, as this book makes clear, Massachusetts conservatives had much to offer the nation, almost in spite of themselves. If Andrew Jackson's victory at New Orleans and the new, more democratic world it heralded rang the death-knell of Federalists elsewhere, the Massachusetts variety proved to be of sterner stuff. Over most of the next two decades, the state's conservative elite managed to maintain remarkable internal cohesion in the face of growing challenges to its authority. They retained substantial control of the state government, coopting or amalgamating moderate Republican politicians when out of office themselves. They exercised powerful influence over the state's culture, at the cost of imposing stifling uniformity that drove some of their brightest lights, such as George Bancroft, from their ranks. Ultimately, through the talents of their chief agent and representative, Daniel Webster, they achieved measure of national redemption from the debacle of the Hartford Convention, and made the Massachusetts brand of nationalism normative for much of the nation. Sheidley's book is an excellent case study of the political power that can be wielded by confident, well-disciplined elite. In their masterful orchestration of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1820-21, the conservatives, though numerical minority, managed to preserve for generation such key provisions as property basis for Senate apportionment and the established religion, by exploiting divisions within Republican ranks. (Even in Connecticut, the land of steady habits, democratic forces triumphed over conservatives in the constitutional convention of 1818.) Through their literary mouthpiece, the North American Review, the elite kept Boston the cultural center of the nation. …