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The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobinism to Antislavery. By Rachel Hope Cleves. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. xvi, 296 pp. $80.00, ISBN 978-0-521-88435-8.)
In this brilliant book, Rachel Hope Cleves demonstrates the prominence and long-term significance of anti-Jacobinism in the early United States. Too often dismissed as simply an overblown, elitist reaction to popular political activity, the Federalist assault on the French Revolution also represented a coherent ideology with a compelling ethical core. In particular, New England ministers and politicians responded with alarm to international revolution because they viewed it in terms of violence, as one of the "uncivilizing" effects that human aggression had on Western culture (p. 86). The irony of this archetypal conservative assessment was that it laid the foundation for a series of archetypal progressive movements...