The entries from July 1817 contain a few updates on the financial affairs of Aunt Scott. As a reminder, she was in the process of liquidating her estate, the enormous fortune inherited from her first husband having been put into distress by cronies of her second.
Of more general interest, 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, not everyone held good feelings for the new president and his supporters. 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 the afternoon 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. This he managed to do without directly accusing the Democratic-Republican sitting before him, who just five years before had helped lead the United States into war against Britain. Channing began on the virtue of charity, but quickly pivoted into a very Unitarian/Protestant summary of church history. Newspapers of the day made no comment, but it is not difficult to make a connection between Channing’s reference to ancient Jewish and Roman beliefs and recent anti-British military fervor.
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, with its toleration of separate moral spheres for public and private life, Federalists were effectively linking Republicans’ policies to a willingness to abandon Christian virtue. Jeffersonians’ sympathy for (revolutionary/atheist) France and preference for separating church from state made their sinfulness all the more apparent in this framework.