ABSTRACT
The Paper War is a useful indicator of the complexity of the Anglo-American relationship. At the same time, it is an expression of nationalistic American cultural growth, where the strength and confidence of a nation emerges to resist the intellectual warfare of the most powerful country in Europe. The Paper War is a broad-based episode in transatlantic intellectual life yet one that historians and critics interpret too simply as the rejection of English literary opinion. The first major American response to accumulated English opinion appeared in 1810. Philadelphian lawyer Charles Jared Ingersoll published Inchiquin, the Jesuit's Letters and set in motion a systematic volley of retaliatory comment in journals and books. Eldridge's isolation of the 'Inchiquin episode' is, in a sense, a somewhat misleading interpretation of the wider American response although the Quarterly Review did mark itself the major protagonist in the Paper War.
