The Old World and the Young Republic

Imagine a United States caught between the machinations of three hostile foreign powers and their proxies, too militarily weak and politically disunited to fight any one of them directly, much less all three together. Image a two-party system with one side theoretically favoring greater overseas projection of force and free trade, with the other more reticent and isolationist. Then the music changes; now the erstwhile militarists are accusing the putative doves of warmongering and threatening at least passive resistance to national defense policy. Partisan rhetoric habitually conflates political opposition with disloyal sedition. In states where they are unpopular, duly ratified treaties and related acts of Congress inspire open talk of nullification and whispers of secession. A sitting president spends lavishly from public funds to acquire foreign documents from a private broker solely in hopes of catching political rivals in disloyal acts. Congressmen and their press mouthpieces hysterically denounce even a sitting US president as the secret puppet of a hostile foreign state (an “asset,” in contemporary parlance). If this all sounds painfully familiar, Tyson Reeder’s neatly crafted Serpent in Eden: Foreign Meddling and Partisan Politics in James Madison’s America—an account of how Atlantic geopolitics shaped the early American republic’s “first party system”—will feel poignant and timely.