Volume 41, Number 9 · May 12, 1994
The Triumph of the Country
By David Brion Davis
The Age of Federalism
by Stanley Elkins, by Eric McKitrick
Oxford University Press, 925 pp., $39.95
Except for the 1860s, no decade in American history has been as dangerous, as divisive, and as formative as the 1790s, which Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick have aptly termed 'The Age of Federalism.' Beginning in 1789, American leaders implemented and began to interpret the new Constitution. They enacted most of Alexander Hamilton's financial program, which shored up the nation's credit and helped inaugurate an era of breathtaking prosperity. They agreed to build a new capital city 'on a stretch of uninhabited wasteland on the Potomac.' They preserved a precarious neutrality during a global war that provoked serious hostilities with England and then an undeclared naval war with France. They suppressed the Whiskey and Fries rebellions in Pennsylvania. They passed the notorious Alien and Sedition Acts. They concluded treaties with England, Spain, and France which removed British forts and troops from American territory, opened the Mississippi to American navigation, and freed American merchant ships from the constant peril of capture by French privateers.
Review, 4377 words
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