Rather than a mere footnote to the American Revolution, the conflict with Great Britain that culminated in the war of “1812” was a national obsession for nearly three decades. It remains the least popular war in U.S. history, and the ideological tensions it generated correspond to a remarkable boom in the production of satire in the emerging partisan press.
This transatlantic Row accelerated the shift from a paternalistic “politics of assent” to a fraternalistic “politics of affiliation” in the domain of U.S. political theory and practice,1 and the shift from an exclusionary and dogmatic “satire” to a more communal and perspectival “humor” in the related domain of U.S. satiric theory and practice.
The standoff over U.S. neutral rights in the Napoleonic Wars presented a moment of crisis that the ousted Federalist ruling class could leverage toward a retraction of Jefferson’s ‘Revolution of 1800.’ But in a new rhetorical climate conditioned by changes in print culture and electoral demography, Federalism was hamstrung by its inability to conceptualize demotic political agency. Satire provided two very different solutions to this problem. One was regressive, as publications like Alexander Hanson’s Federal Republican revived the British ‘golden age’ archetype of the satirist as intellectual martyr. The other was progressive, as publications like George Helmbold’s Tickler developed alternatives to the discourse of aggressive liberal masculinity that framed much of the pro-war propaganda.
Both varieties of Federalist anti-war satire produced peculiar consequences that carry broader significance for the 19th-century United States. Hanson’s provocation of the Great Baltimore Riot of 1812 demonstrates the irony that the same men who had advocated the Sedition Act in the 1790s established a precedent that would allow later Americans to dissent from the federal government during periods of acute crisis, while Helmbold’s experiments with dialect humor suggest a surprising point of origin for the predominant satiric mode of the American Renaissance.
*** “The laws of the land must sleep” was the winking advice given to the mayor
of Baltimore by the men who attacked Hanson for his anti-war stand in 1812.
1 Schudson, Michael. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999.
