Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic.

By Joanne B. Freeman. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, c. 2001. Pp. xxiv, 376. $29.95, ISBN 0-300-08877-9.)

American historians still tend to describe the founding of the United States as a battle of ideas, in which quirks of individual character and feeling played little role. To this inclination Joanne B. Freeman's Affairs of Honor gives the lie.

As Freeman reminds us, far too much remained unsettled, unknown, and at stake at the founding for pure reason to be determinant. Not only were there almost as many visions of republicanism as republicans, but the absence of models for how a republic should conduct its political business and the extreme localism of most politicians' styles and allegiances threatened to inflict utter chaos on the national scene. Equally important, the "founders" themselves were not dispassionate intellectuals but emotive human beings, vulnerable to anxiety, vanity, and even vengeful pettiness. Those feelings were the furnace in which ideas were forged. Holding the center against anarchy, Freeman argues, was little more than a shared code of gentlemanly conduct. Gentlemen were restrained in their behavior, refined in their manners, and deliberately relaxed in their studied self-presentation. Above all, gentlemen honored their word. When everything else failed, gentlemen could count on gentlemen to act like gentlemen.

As Freeman demonstrates, however, the code of honor posed a number of troublesome ambiguities as a "grammar" for republican politics (pp. xxii-xxiii). Most seriously, honor resided not in one's own convictions and not even in one's actual behavior, but rather in the eye of the beholder; it was "entirely other-directed, determined before the eyes of the world; it did not exist unless bestowed by others" (p. xvi). Intended meaning mattered little. Audience was everything.

The extreme contingency of success in this political culture magnified the sway of emotion in the production of republican discourse. Freeman underscores this point in the individual case studies that organize her chapters, each of which explores a specific mode of performance through which anxious politicians attempted to enact "honor." Here is poor William Maclay, so desperate to be thought well of in his home district and so temperamentally unable to master the moves that would produce an appreciative response. Here is John Adams, wearing his vanity on his sleeve. And here is Aaron Burr, perhaps far more adept at the technicalities of honorable performance than his nemesis Alexander Hamilton, yet unable, finally, to control the response of posterity.

This carefully researched and delightfully written book not only makes its own case, but it also invites the reader to speculate beyond the early republic for the wider implications of the analysis. In the evolution of a party system in which each party viewed the other more as predator than loyal opposition, the aggressive insecurities and localism of the code of honor may have helped foster the belligerent regional politics of the antebellum years. The volatile subjectivity of the code may have persisted especially in the political culture of southern white society, where honor remained the idiom of public authority.

Two caveats. Because reception is at the heart of Freeman's argument, I wish that she had done more to distinguish the size and contours of the public that influenced political success. The "mass audience" (p. 185) that mattered so much to her actors was in fact quite small--a characteristic that deserves a more careful investigation. Also, I was not convinced that this was, finally, a masculine code. Freeman herself notes the participation of some women and underscores the importance of settings (dinners and receptions, for example) over which women exercised significant control. Women like Abigail Adams, Mercy Otis Warren, and Judith Sargent Murray also embraced the values of restraint, refinement, and reputation--and in ways not altogether dissimilar from their male counterparts.

Yet these demurrals serve only to underscore the range and intellectual heft of this wonderfully written and deeply engaging book. I suspect we will be grappling with its implications for a long time to come.

JEANNE BOYDSTON

University of Wisconsin at Madison