Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson

William C. Dowling. Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and The Port Folio, 1801-1811. University of South Carolina Press, 1999.

This is a work of literary study rather than history; it is still an interesting investigation of Federalism as an intellectual movement, grounded in classical republicanism and the American experience.

According to Dowling, the magazine The Port Folio, under the editorship of Joseph Dennie (who died at the age of 44 in 1811) began as a mouthpiece for vigorous Federalist opposition to the rise of Jeffersonian Republicanism (or "American jacobinism") but eventually Dennie came to the conclusion that the rise of the demos (the people) driving Jefferson's triumph would be permanent and irreversible. Therefore, Federalism retreated from being a primarily political and public stance to being a literary mode of thought, one for those who chose to retreat into a transatlantic "republic of letters" in implicit rejection of the vulgar, market-oriented democratic culture which was now in power. This pose of studied resistance and studious withdrawal became the pose of a particular and important strain in American literature, passed along first through Washington Irving and then Thoreau, Melville, and finally culminating in Henry James and Santayana.

This is a short study which approaches the fate of Federalism in a novel way, as according to Dowling, Dennie and others were already resigned to the perpetual marginalization of Federalism even before the War of 1812 and the aftermath of the Hartford Convention.