This book poses a question of great importance about the War of 1812: why did so many Americans not only support but also celebrate it as an affirmation of national greatness, especially when so few took part in the military campaigns that so often exposed the republic's weaknesses? Put another way, how was the war waged in the hearts and minds of the vast majority who never served in battle? Eustace builds an intricate and compelling argument around what she calls “a new language of romantic patriotism” (xiii), one that fused the private yearnings of ordinary Americans for love, sex, and safety with a national project of expansion.

One might summarize the cultural transformation that Eustace uncovers by reference to the moral philosophy of the age. Enlightenment thinkers had generally argued that feelings and sentiments should follow from careful reflection as made possible through God's great gift, reason. Morality in this vein was very much a matter of counting to ten, of containing one's passions while exercising one's discernment. Such ideas dovetailed quite easily with mainline Christian theology and generally supported a Republican and then Federalist politics that valorized the disinterested hero whose steady character and long service revealed moral excellence. Eustace identifies several claimants to this kind of morality in the era of 1812. Among them was General William Hull, the disgraced commander at Detroit who bemoaned the lack of discipline among democratic militias, and a host of New England divines who wagged their fingers at hotheaded Republicans and their lust for glory, vengeance, and conquest.

But they were overwhelmed by Jeffersonians, who celebrated the fecundity of the American population and the romantic feelings that kept it growing. Whereas the dismal scientist Thomas Malthus had recently argued that such impulses left too many mouths to feed, American thinkers began to see romantic passions as the very basis of national morale. So long as they were contained by marriage, itself a signifier of democratic consent, romantic passions aligned to create a larger, encompassing love of the national community. To combat the British Empire and its cruel, unnatural efforts to restrict this empire of procreation, American men had to take up arms (or at least support those who did), while American women had to marry and bear children. This connection between heterosexual love and national duty rendered the ubiquitous tales of Indian violence against households all the more horrifying. Captivity and atrocity stories, Eustace writes, “worked an incantation, casting such a spell of disgust on Indians that all moral claims they might make to their own lands were extinguished in the minds of U.S. readers” (150–51).

As in her first book, Passion Is the Gale, Eustace examines a wide range of texts within the multiple and overlapping publics of preindustrial America. She thereby broadens the range of intellectual history without compromising its depth. In addition to major works by Malthus and Edmund Burke, 1812 explores novels, plays, poems, and songs. Eustace shows how stories of sailors torn from their sweethearts or of frontier women forced to watch their children's murders built a semiofficial culture of unrestrained love and unbridled hate. She does this by considering both the fashioning and the reception of these texts and by showing how they reinforced particular policies and narratives by pro-war Republicans. The result is surely the most important cultural history of the War of 1812 that we now have.

While exploring the coded terms and regional nuances of the pro-war argument, Eustace frequently notes its comfortable distance from unpleasant reality. Warhawks “sold” the war to the populace, enabling people “to deceive themselves that ardent feelings … represented the full experience of war and defined its true moral meaning” (75). When Eustace writes that “legalist arguments about liberty” mattered little next to “the culture of patriotic ribaldry,” though, I wonder if she misses a chance to add another layer to her portrait of romantic nationalism (209). Especially among state and federal representatives and senators, nothing was more common in pro-war rhetoric than the “unexampled forbearance” of the United States during the decade before 1812. This referred not to thwarted love but to particular violations by the European powers of American neutral rights and territorial sovereignty. Based explicitly on the law of nations, this argument ultimately fed a powerful and popular case for retribution – a concept rich in religious as well as political significance. Here was another dimension of a nationalism built on emotional exuberance and private desires.