Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations by David Brion DavisReview by: James Brewer StewartJournal of the Early Republic, Vol. 11, No. 2 (Summer, 1991), pp. 258-259Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the EarlyAmerican RepublicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3123246 .

Accessed: 15/06/2014 04:57

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

University of Pennsylvania Press and Society for Historians of the Early American Republic are collaboratingwith JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the Early Republic.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.88 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 04:57:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

258 JOURNAL OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC

Revolutions: Reflections on American Equality and Foreign Liberations.. By David Brion Davis. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. Pp. iv, 123. $19.95.)

From the storming of the Bastille to the destruction of the Berlin Wall, revolutions abroad have inspired Americans to apocalyptic responses-ecstasy at the vision of peoples the world over embracing American forms of democracy; terror at the prospect of tyrannical foreign ideologists subverting the nation's most precious and vulnerable liberties. Whichever the reaction, argues David B. Davis, foreign revolutions have often provided occasions for Americans to reveal their continuing ambivalence regarding the values that underlay their own revolution, particularly the (presumably) enduring proposition that "all men are created equal." These ambivalences arose from still deeper tensions that Americans have always endured between their belief in moral progress and their fear of the power of evil to plunge the world into catastrophe. In three beautifully crafted essays, Davis elaborates on these contentions by linking the intractable domestic legacy of Jefferson's Declaration to American attempts to assign meaning to the revolutions that overspread Europe and Latin America after 1789.

For students of the early republic, this is a particularly rich and thought-provoking inquiry. It is international in perspective and bold in developing religious and intellectual history to illuminate the content of politics. For example, Davis transforms the familiar narrative of the French Revolution's impact on partisan politics into a much deeper meditation on the roots of American anti-catholicism, the problematic relationship of chattel slavery to America's egalitarian ideology, and the contrary efforts of the privileged to mesh ideals of personal liberty and national progress with the inescapable facts of social inequality. In so rich an analysis, easy characterizations of "jacobin" Jeffersonians and "paranoid" Federalists give way to far more complex and fruitful understandings. In similarly bold strokes, Davis suggests how black rebellion in Haiti, slave emancipation in revolutionary Latin America, and republican revolt in post-Napoleonic Europe all supplied prisms through which

thoughtful Americans looked when measuring the validity of their own republican experiments. The examples of foreign revolution could, for instance, fire the millennial visions of feminists and abolitionists, undermine the confidence of statesmen in the future of the republic, and confirm to African-Americans that liberty and social equality must be synonyms. If ever there were reasons to explode

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.88 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 04:57:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK REVIEWS 259

false distinctions between "national" history and "international relations," Davis has clearly supplied them in this wide-ranging reflection on the meaning of revolution. At a time when foreign liberation movements have prompted some to proclaim "the end of

history," this meditation on the pursuit of equality and the

inevitability of evil is both humbling and timely.

Macalester College James Brewer Stewart

The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution, Vol. IX: Ratification of the Constitution by the States: Virginia [2]. Edited

by John P. Kaminski, Gaspare J. Saladino, et al. (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1990. Pp. xxix, 561-1176. $50.00.)

This second of three projected volumes on the history of Virginia's ratification of the federal Constitution covers "The Election of Convention Delegates, 3-27 March 1788"; "The Debate over the Constitution in Virginia, 1 April-31 May 1788"; and the first week of "The Virginia Convention, 2-27 June 1788."

Of all the valuable materials compiled in this volume, those

concerning the local elections of delegates may prove to be the most useful to scholars, as the county elections remain relatively unexplored. Along with a useful table of election dates (each county held the polling on its March "court day"), the editors have gathered documents ranging from one- or two-line comments in letters and diaries or succinct summaries of surviving poll lists to full-blown newspaper accounts and in-depth analyses of results by federal or antifederal leaders.

Election-related documents appear to survive for only thirty-six of the eighty-six counties and towns that sent delegates to the convention. Most come, not surprisingly, from the eastern portion of the state, with only one brief mention of a southwestern county (Washington), and nothing from the transmontane (although the valley counties are well represented). The records that do survive, however, prove to be tremendously informative, not only in regard to local voting trends, but also to eighteenth-century Virginia electioneering in general and to the social and cultural environment of post-revolutionary politics.

The debate over the Constitution in the Old Dominion continued after the voting to center on questions of powers granted to the federal government at the expense of the states, the absence of a declaration of rights, and the need for amendments to the plan

This content downloaded from 188.72.126.88 on Sun, 15 Jun 2014 04:57:25 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions