The Republican Ideology of the Revolutionary Generation

Abstract

NOT SO LONG AGO, AS WE RECKON ACADEMIC STYLES, AMERICAN HISTORIANS used the ungainly term period to describe the years between the adoption of the Constitution and the inauguration of Andrew Jackson. The phrase was so vague as to be of little use except to underline a general sense that nationalism was central to American life. A new label has been devised in the last decade; the modest phrase is not much more descriptive, but it is richer in nuance. Aggressive nationalism has come to seem somewhat less important to an understanding of the early American political system than does the widely shared sense that Americans were engaged in a experiment. Substitution of republican for national in the historians' lexicon may have had some relationship to a growing distaste, among people writing in the midst of the Vietnam conflict, for nationalism as a nonpejorative explanatory device. But it also owes much to an enlarged sensitivity to and respect for words as carriers of culture, and to a respect for ideology as an authentic expression of political situation and cultural condition. It also represents historians' response to a growing body of work that seeks to place the concepts of republicanism in a practical political context, a context large enough, in the hands of Bernard Bailyn and his students: to include the opposition politics of eighteenth-century Britain; and stretching even further back, in the hands of J. G. A. Pocock, to the Florentine Renaissance. As more and more historians swelled the crowd who came to recognize the achievement of a republic as a legitimate goal of the Revolutionary generation, Robert Shalhope thoughtfully provided an umbrella for them in his essay, Toward a Republican Synthesis. Like Moliere's gentleman who was delighted to discover he was speaking prose, thanks to Shalhope a collection of rather disparate historians have discovered that they were part of a school.