Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and "The Port Folio," 1801-1811

Abstract

Port Folio magazine, America's first major journal of literary and political opinion, was edited by Joseph Dennie between 1801 and 1811. This new study argues that as Port Folio mounted a last spirited defense of classical republican values against jacobinism, the struggle between its Federalist writers and the forces of Jeffersonian ideology gave rise to an important tradition in American writing. The triumphing of Jefferson's part will be but short, Dennie optimistically predicted i 1801. Men will wake from the dreams of apathy, and the darkness of delusion. By the end of 1807, however, Dennie and the Port Folio writers had come to realize that they were on the losing side of history and that the triumph of Jeffersonian ideology would be total and permanent. Literary Federalism then originates as a tradition, argues William C. Dowling, in the attempt of Dennie and Port Folio to provide a sanctuary for classical republican values within a separate world of the literary imagination, a mode of writing that might serve as a permanent refuge from the degraded conditions of American social existence.