July 1817 contains a few updates on the progress of Aunt Scott’s financial affairs. As a reminder, she was in the process of scaling back her estate, the enormous fortune inherited from her first husband having been put into distress by cronies of her second.
More significantly, Gallison chronicled the famous visit of President James Monroe to Boston, part of an extensive tour of the nation that led to the coining of the “Era of Good Feelings.” Gallison’s analysis reminds us that, however literally future generations might have taken that phrase, good feelings toward the new president and his supporters were not held by everyone. Federalists may have been silenced at the national level, but that did not mean they were all inclined to support the new administration.
When the President attended a service at the Federal Street Church as part of his charm offensive, William Ellery Channing’s sermon made clear his disdain for those who sought unnecessary military glory– including the Democratic-Republican sitting before him– by leading the United States into war against Britain just five years before. Channing began on the virtue of charity, but quickly pivoted into a very Unitarian/Protestant view of church history. From there, it was easy to trace recent anti-British military fervor to the earlier corruption of the church by Greek and Roman philosophy.
Gallison borrowed from this framework to underpin his 1819 address to the Federalist-dominated Massachusetts Peace Society. In that speech, he not only excoriated those who would mis-use patriotism, but also broadened his argument to reject the “Platonic” (we might today call it Machiavellian or republican) willingness to accept different standards for public and private morality.
While Jefferson, Madison, and their followers may not have adopted a “republican” (with small “r”) philosophy as uncritically as some historians would later maintain, there is no question that Federalists were quite willing to accuse them of doing so. By raising the specter of classical political philosophy, Federalists were effectively linking Republicans’ policies and attitudes to a lack of Christian virtue, exemplified by Jeffersonians’ sympathy for (revolutionary/atheist) France.