| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Federalists Reconsidered. Ed. by Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998. x, 310 pp. Cloth, $47.50, isbn 0-8139-1819-7. Paper, $17.50, isbn 0-8139-1863-4.)

A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic. Ed. by Donald R. Kennon. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1999. xiv, 583 pp. $55.00, isbn 0-8139-1795-6.)

Andrew Siegel begins one of the more worthwhile essays in Federalists Reconsidered with an epigraph from a Connecticut "democratic republican," William Charles White, written in 1813. For all his own staunchly Jeffersonian sympathies, White saw that Jeffersonian ideology had about it something dangerously monological, a blind or automatic tendency to demonize as "aristocrats"—or, as writers in this volume variously say, elitists, or reactionaries, or demophobes—anyone judged to be insufficiently republican. "That the Republicans are all angels," protested White, "and the federalists are all devils are notions as false as they are criminal, and as stupid as they are false; and such prejudices are as dishonourable to our nature as they are degrading to our nation." Such protests were in vain. In modern scholarship, written almost exclusively from a Jeffersonian or Jacksonian perspective—including, with very few exceptions, the essays presented here—the republicans are all angels, the Federalists all devils. . . .

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