The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi, 296 pp. $80.00, ISBN 978-0-521-88435-8.)

Abstract

In this brilliant book, Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates the prominence and long-term significance of anti-Jacobinism in the early United States. Too often dismissed as simply an overblown, elitist reaction to popular political activity, the Federalist assault on the French Revolution also represented a coherent ideology with a compelling ethical core. In particular, New England ministers and politicians responded with alarm to international revolution because they viewed it in terms of violence, as one of the “uncivilizing” effects that human aggression had on Western culture (p. 86). The irony of this archetypal conservative assessment was that it laid the foundation for a series of archetypal progressive movements in the nineteenth century. At the core of Federalists' moral and political sensibilities, Cleves shows, was a long-standing belief in human depravity and the tenuousness of civil society. In the 1790s and early 1800s, that belief blossomed into an activist commitment to portray and avert French revolutionary bloodshed. “Anti-Jacobins labored,” the author writes, “to persuade their audiences that the violence in France was not incidental to the Revolution… but rather its very essence” (p. 75). The logic of that type of thinking in turn pushed conservatives to initiate a variety of reformist movements. For one thing, Federalists not only attacked the War of 1812 as a partisan conflict, they also pushed the boundaries of antiwar activity: they characterized hawkish politicians and soldiers as bloodthirsty murderers, defended nonviolent criticism of the war as constitutionally protected free speech, and eventually “joined together to found the first two American nonsectarian peace societies” (p. 183). Conservatives also broke new ground in their efforts to educate the American populace. Convinced that lack of education helped cause French revolutionary violence, antebellum anti-Jacobins advocated government support of schooling as a way to restrain disorderly passions.