William Tudor, Willard Phillips, and Richard Henry Dana were not their fathers' Federalists. When these young New England intellectuals and their contemporaries attempted to carve out a place for themselves in the rapidly changing and increasingly unfriendly culture of the early nineteenth century, the key to their efforts was the founding, in 1815, of the North American Review.

Raised as Federalists, and encouraged to believe that they had special responsibilities as -the wise and the good, - they came of age within a cultural and political climate that no longer deferred to men of...