Hotlinks, sockpuppets, and the history of reading

I used to have a magazine habit. I subscribed to half a dozen periodicals and sometimes more. Their arrival in my mailbox was a welcome reminder of the flourishing of intelligent life outside of academia. I read magazines for pleasure, distraction, and provocation. The vividness and currency of the best periodical writing offered relief from the stodginess and slow pace of scholarship. The magazine writing I most admired bristled with the personality of the writer and drew on a wide range of dialects and argots. Unlike the literature I studied, these periodicals did not aim to withstand the test of time. They were far too busy with the pressing concerns of the day to bother with such tests. The ephemerality that went hand in hand with magazines’ responsiveness to the world made them the perfect antidote for academic self-importance. They offered a reliable source of excellent writing, which was, nevertheless, content to be discarded.

These days I find I’m turning more and more to Internet blogs for the kind of sustenance I used to derive from magazine writing. The magazines pile up unread as I spend my time hunched over my computer, checking in on my favorite academic, political, and cultural blogs, lost in a seemingly infinite sequence of Web pages as I click my way through link after link. For a while I tried to dismiss my blog habit as the latest in a series of procrastination techniques, one made alarmingly easy and seductive by media convergence. Rather than beckoning to me from the coffee table, these multimedia magazine-substitutes set up shop right here on my computer where my real work is supposed to reside.

Lately, however, I’ve begun to wonder if the time I spend lurking in the blogosphere might actually bring me back to my work, enriching rather than distracting me from my research on the expanding print media of the 1840s. Can living through a volatile period of media shift tell us something about comparable periods in the past? Will awareness of incipient changes in our own reading habits make us better students of the history of reading?

One lesson that can be drawn from the strange allure of blogs is that when new media seek to compete with established media, periodicity matters. Whether blogs focus on breaking news, a topic of concern to a particular community, or the minutiae of ordinary life, they share an architecture built on the promise of the new. Blogs are comprised of frequently updated entries presented in reverse chronological order; they give graphic priority to the most recent entry while allowing past writing to scroll slowly out of sight. While RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds now permit readers to “subscribe” to many of their favorite blogs, notifying them when these Websites have been updated, blogs have historically depended on the promise of new entries to encourage repeat visits to their sites. News-based blogs and those devoted to cultural commentary ordinarily piggyback on existing print and electronic media, excerpting items of interest for editorial reframing and reader response. In making their selections, individual bloggers and blogging collectives also reperiodize their source material, transforming the daily newspaper, weekly review—or even, thanks to “Youtube,” the regularly scheduled television show—into a sequence of smaller snippets delivered to readers at shorter intervals throughout the day or week.

The reperiodization of a medium thought to be too slow for the pace of modern life is precisely what Eliakim Littell (1789-1870) had in mind when he founded the weekly periodical Littell’s Living Age (1844-96). A veteran editor of “eclectic” monthly magazines that reprinted the best of the foreign press, Littell prided himself on repackaging selected articles from elite British quarterlies such as the Whig Edinburgh Review, the Tory Quarterly Review, and the reform-minded Westminster Review—along with essays from less prestigious monthly publications—into a moderately priced weekly magazine designed to appeal to the general reader.

The success of miscellanies such as Littell’s Living Age depended on the U.S. Congress’s repeated refusal to pass an international copyright law and on the cultural prestige of foreign periodicals. The stately publication pace of the British quarterlies helped to reinforce their authority, granting an air of thoughtful deliberation to their sectarian or partisan outlook on the world. Littell’s magazine aimed instead to be a fast-moving, broad-minded record of an always changing “living age.” From the perspective of a centralized, hierarchical periodical culture (such as London’s), the eclecticism of Littell’s verged on incoherence, but its editor saw miscellaneousness as the sign of a modern, scientific approach to general knowledge. Drawing its articles from a range of politically and culturally incompatible sources, Littell’s Living Age projected a cosmopolitan openness to the world beyond the boundaries of party, sect, and nation.

Littell’s publishing strategy also shifted authority from writers to editors, placing a premium on editorial judgment. Like many nineteenth-century British authors who achieved widespread popularity in the United States, Charles Dickens bitterly resented the free reprinting of his texts. Dickens was angered by the loss of potential revenue but also by his inability to control the mode of circulation of his writing. As he complained in a letter to Henry Brougham, the foreign author “not only gets nothing for his labors, though they are diffused all over this enormous Continent, but cannot even choose his company. Any wretched halfpenny newspaper can print him at its pleasure—place him side-by-side with productions which disgust his common sense.”

What appeared to Dickens as a fundamentally disorderly print culture was understood by American newspapermen and magazinists to signal a crucial shift in authority from authors to periodical editors and their readers. Magazines and newspapers that relied on reprinting for much of their contents courted readers through their principles of selection. They touted their ability to sift through mountains of print for the most important, valuable, or entertaining items. At one level, Littell’s attempt to appeal to (and produce) a general reader couldn’t be more different than the aggressively partisan, popular political blogs Dailykos and Instapundit. However, both 1840s reprint vehicles and twenty-first-century blogs amplify their own cultural authority through judicious acts of editorial selection. Both modes of publication manifestly rely on a more established press, but both seek to convert their dependency into a form of cultural power.

Much of this power resides in their ability to display the fact that the value of a text depends on the history of its reception. Take, for example, Littell’s 1845 reprint of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” which is, more precisely, a reprint of the London Critic’s reprint of the poem. Littell’s version comes complete with a head note that calls attention to the history of the poem’s reprinting, dubbing it “the most effective single example of fugitive poetry ever published in this country.” These nested, reiterated claims for the excellence of the poem reflect back on the reprinter’s judgment in selecting this text and also show the reader that he or she is part of a transatlantic community of discerning editors and readers. Modern literary critics and bibliographers have tended to regard unauthorized reprints as of marginal value, but blogs can help us to see the importance of these visual traces of a text’s place of origin in a literary culture keyed to the value of recirculation, not origination. Bloggers’ routine inclusion of “hotlinks” to the stories they excerpt and the prominence on most blogs of “blogrolls” indicating affiliated Websites make the awareness and cultivation of networks of citation part of the medium itself.

The prominence of these networks of citation and affiliation leaves both the blogosphere and 1840s periodicals acutely vulnerable to the charge that they have failed to deliver on the democratic promise of the new medium. Whether evidenced by the chains of citation that indicate a reprinted text’s travel between and among urban print centers or by the echo effect of firmly held opinions bounced between and among like-minded blogs, both 1840s print culture and contemporary electronic media are dogged by the suspicion that the range of voices represented in a seemingly wide-open medium is narrower than one might think.

Edgar Allan Poe spent much of his early career deriding the coteries who seemed to control the periodical press, author-editors who reprinted and “puffed” each other’s work behind the veil of gentlemanly anonymity. He then spent much of his later career attempting to manipulate this system, using pseudonyms when reprinting some of his own work as editor of the content-starved Broadway Journal, writing anonymous critical notices calling attention to the publication of his fiction in other periodicals, and playing the anonymity and formality of the editorial “we” off against individual authorship.

For instance, in his capacity as editor of the Broadway Journal’s critical notices, Poe distanced himself from a scathing, anonymous review of Longfellow published in The Aristidean, a review that he may or may not have written.

There is a long review or rather running commentary upon Longfellow’s poems. It is, perhaps, a little coarse, but we are not disposed to call it unjust; although there are in it some opinions which, by implication, are attributed to ourselves individually, and with which we cannot altogether coincide.

Literary critics who are interested in the limits of Poe’s oeuvre have argued about Poe’s authorship of this vituperative review, seeking to settle the question once and for all. Poe, by contrast, is clearly invested in preserving the distance between this anonymous text and his authorial name. Periodical culture made it possible for authors and editors to occupy a plurality of positions that could not be reduced to individual identity, to circulate opinions “with which we cannot altogether coincide.”

Blogs have similarly suffered from the accusation that their much-vaunted inclusion of diverse sources and of voices is a sham made possible by pseudonymity. In response, some blogs have instituted stringent rules against “sockpuppetry”—writing under one pseudonym to praise or call attention to writing done under another of one’s pseudonyms. Other outlawed stratagems include corporate attempts at virtual marketing through the use of proxies, or “shills,” and “astroturfing”—using multiple personae to create the appearance of popular consumer demand or grassroots political support. Bloggers’ willingness to risk the credibility of their medium in order to retain the pseudonymity that fuels the expansion of the blogosphere should tell us something about the importance of concealed identities to the history of authorship.

Literary critics have all too often viewed antebellum periodical culture through the prism of twentieth-century norms; they work hard to recover the authors of anonymous or pseudonymous writing and treat the mixed modes of attribution common to 1840s periodicals as a regrettable prologue to the triumphant emergence of the economically self-sufficient author. For instance, critics have been quick to identify a number of pseudonymous tales and sketches that appeared in antebellum gift books and magazines as the property of Nathaniel Hawthorne, rather than pausing to investigate the elaborate naming system that established networks of affinity between and among tales written “by the author of ‘The Gray Champion,’” “by the author of ‘Sights from a Steeple,’” and “by the author of ‘The Gentle Boy.’” And yet the radical expansion of blogging in the past few years, as well as the popularity of posting pseudonymous comments on other people’s blogs, should remind us of the complex pleasures of keeping writing at some distance from the self. The extraordinary amounts of time ordinary citizens spend cultivating on-line pseudonyms and avatars—including writing elaborate “GBCW” (“Goodbye Cruel World”) postings in which these personae dramatically exit the scene—suggest that authors desire to disavow their writing, not only to claim it. The popularity of blogging may well produce histories of authorship that are more attentive to authorial disavowals, histories that would respect rather than compensate for the proliferation of authorial personae.

The furious growth of the blogosphere, despite the difficulty of making a living from the practice, should also remind us of the rich range of motivations for writing that go beyond immediate financial reward. Following William Charvat, historians and critics have generally taken the professionalization of authorship to be the inevitable outcome of the nineteenth-century development of a mass-market for print. They have assumed that economic self-sufficiency was the engine that drove both authors and their publishers. But what if, in a time of media expansion, the certainty of economic reward is a minor consideration next to the thrill of participation in a new medium? What if writers (then and now) are motivated by the possibility of constituting an audience by virtue of addressing one or by the power of a more democratically distributed medium to confer new value on ordinary lives? (W. Caleb McDaniel makes this point in an earlier essay in Common-place.) Perhaps writers and readers are drawn to blogs—and were drawn to the popular print forms of the 1840s—because they offer a sense of belonging to a public, a self-organizing group of strangers without discernable boundaries, which can loosen the bonds of race, gender, status, class, age, or geographic locale. Experiencing firsthand the unsteady, uneven shift of some blogs from after-hours obsessions to full-time, profit-generating occupations may well give us new insights into the lag time between the expansion of print and its successful capitalization. It may also give us new respect for the range of aspirations that galvanize going-into-print long before publishers have standardized payments to authors.

What does it feel like to live in a time of media expansion and media shift? In proclaiming that “the whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward,” Edgar Allan Poe took aim at the “ponderosity” of the quarterly reviews, arguing that in both tone and content they were,

quite out of keeping with the rush of the age. We now demand the light artillery of the intellect; we need the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused—in place of the verbose, the detailed, the voluminous, the inaccessible.

Poe understood that new media require and promote different kinds of writing and can shift the balance of power among existing modes of publication.

I find it both disarming and exciting to watch how blogging has begun to erode the boundaries between media: while the New York Times has incorporated blogs into its electronic edition in order to prop up sales of the printed newspaper, amateur bloggers have in turn begun to seek out official press credentials, and academics such as Michael Bérubé and Juan Cole have turned to blogs to cultivate a wider audience for their expertise. While blogs haven’t yet replaced or displaced the mainstays of my daily reading—the newspaper, the books I teach, the secondary criticism, history, and theory I read for my research, the student writing I’ll turn to any minute now, the novels I read to escape all of this reading—blogging has changed the temporality and the location of my reading practices, tying me ever tighter to the laptop on which I write and, increasingly, read.

Blogging should remind us to ask of the past, not just who was reading or what was read by whom, but also when, how often, and where was reading done? In giving us the term “lurking”—with its connotations of idleness, fraud, and concealment, as well as the possibility that readerly latency might at any time be converted into discourse or action—blogging also prompts us to ask of the expanding print media of the nineteenth century: When are readers potential writers? How might the presumption that readers are potential writers have organized the world of print?

Finally, while in their timeliness and adaptability blogs appear to be ephemeral writing, they may very well surprise us by their durability. Unlike writing for antebellum periodicals, which could be both narrowly restricted in circulation and, due to reprinting, profoundly uncertain in its reach, blogs such as “Dailykos” are now centrally searchable. They have archived their contents and have indexed both postings and comments so that they can be retrieved according to pseudonym. They also offer minute calculations of daily readership based on visits to their sites. Caught up as they are in controversies over their relation to the mainstream media and the relations between individuals and their personae, blogs may end up whetting rather than satisfying my desire for writing that can be thrown away.

This article originally appeared in issue 7.2 (January, 2007).

Meredith L. McGill examines the relations between intellectual property law and literary publishing in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834-1853 (Philadelphia, 2003). She is associate professor of English at Rutgers University.

One of the most persistent myths in American history is the idea that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 marks the first “democratic” election in the history of the United States. The dawn of the so-called “Age of the Common Man” supposedly brought forth universal (i.e., white manhood) suffrage and a truly participatory democracy for the first time in the United States.

This mythology obscures the messiness of the actual history of voting in the years following the Revolution and preceding the Age of Jackson. It reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of American voting practice that too often ignores the ways in which American democracy ebbed and flowed — in fact, was redefined and restricted — in the years preceding the Civil War. Poor white men could and did vote in unprecedented numbers in the years following the election of 1800. Free men of color voted not only in New England and Pennsylvania, but also in some southern states, including Maryland and North Carolina. Women who held property in their own right — widows and spinsters — could vote in New Jersey from 1776 to 1808.

Rather than seeing the election of Old Hickory as a landmark event in American democratization, we should recognize that it was the preceding period, from 1800 to 1824, that marked the first efflorescence of American democracy, in all its messy inconsistency. Nowhere in the Age of Jackson could any woman vote; free blacks faced increasing race-based restrictions on their voting, and in most states voter turnout in the Jacksonian elections of 1828 and 1832 never equaled the peak turnout of the preceding quarter century.

Authorized by the Jacksonian mythology to ignore the elections of the period, historians of high politics have long portrayed the history of the United States from the Constitutional Convention in 1787 to the end of the Virginia Dynasty of presidents as a bright stage upon which great men enter, deliver memorable lines, and exit. This top-down approach is understandable, given the brilliance of the group that Jefferson called an “assembly of demi-gods” at Philadelphia. It diverts attention, however, from the fact that Jefferson and his contemporaries delivered their lines to an audience of ordinary men and women. In so doing, it obscures one of Jeffersonian America’s most enduring contributions to posterity: the emergence of the first truly democratic political culture in an extended republic anywhere in the world.

Contrary to the “Age of the Common Man” myth, my research suggests that the era of mass democratization began 28 years earlier, with Thomas Jefferson’s election to the presidency. The years from 1800 to 1816 saw the most dramatic surge in voting turnout in the nineteenth century, and the greatest expansion of the voting universe until woman suffrage a century later.

Suffrage Expansion and Electoral Competition, 1800-1820

In the first years of the nineteenth century, the United States was already a highly partisan, deeply polarized political culture. The Federalists and Republicans were fiercely and increasingly competitive in state elections from the middle of the 1790s to the end of the War of 1812. Thomas Jefferson’s election in the so-called “Revolution of 1800″ was not the culmination of these electoral battles, as he asserted, but it inaugurated a largely forgotten era of intense if uneven democratization.

Many of more conservative Federalists stoutly maintained they would never degrade themselves by pandering to the masses. Nevertheless, when faced with the grim reality of campaigning for votes or facing political extinction, they responded vigorously to the challenge of expanding the voting universe. In the midst of this free-for-all competition, free men of color and women in New Jersey initially had enhanced opportunities to vote, until the institution that allowed their participation, property-based suffrage, fell victim to same democratizing trends.

Beginning in the 1790s, Republicans in the North generally supported the end of property requirements for voting, since this augmented their natural electoral base among the lower orders. In many states, even before the restrictions on voting were lifted, unpropertied white men began voting, and state suffrage property restrictions were sometimes retroactively amended to reflect the reality of “boots on the ground” (or ballots in the box). In most cases the expansion of the unpropertied white male franchise was the result of strenuous Republican and Federalist competition for votes. What followed this extension of voting rights was remarkable: voter turnout rates in many states exceeded sixty or even seventy percent of the total adult male population.

Historians of the early republic have known about these high rates of turnout ever since the pioneering work of J. R. Pole and Richard P. McCormick nearly two generations ago. The peak figures for turnout are truly astonishing. In the highly competitive election of 1812, for example, New Hampshire and Vermont turnout in the gubernatorial elections amounted to 75 and 80 percent of adult male inhabitants, respectively. That same year Massachusetts gubernatorial turnout was 65 percent of all adult males, and Georgia’s congressional election turnout was 63 percent of all adult white men. In the year 1820, the so-called Era of Good Feeling, when party competition was supposedly at its nadir, Maryland registered turnout of 69 percent of its adult white male inhabitants in state legislative elections; in Kentucky’s election for governor that year, turnout measured 74 percent of all the adult white male inhabitants.

How do these turnout figures compare with participation in the Jacksonian era? One way to gauge the significance of this pre-Jacksonian democratization is to compare peak turnout before 1824 and again in the Jacksonian elections of 1828-1832.

Table 1: Turnout in Jefferson and Jackson Era Elections (click to see table in new window)

According to Table 1, only New York, Maryland, Virginia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Indiana showed higher turnout in Jacksonian-era elections than they had in the peak races earlier. The apparent voter “surge” in Jacksonian New York, Virginia, and Louisiana is partly explained by the fact that these states, along with South Carolina and Rhode Island, were the only ones that maintained restrictive voting requirements into the 1820s.

Climbing the Peaks: Presidential Election Turnout, 1808-1828

Of course, the turnout figures in Table 1 actually compare apples and oranges: state elections pre-1824 and presidential elections post-1828. Peak turnout in the Jeffersonian-era elections happened elsewhere: party competition was focused at the state level, so the highest turnout mostly occurred in state elections. Let us then actually compare apples and apples: turnout in presidential elections. Historians and political scientists who study elections argue that 1828 was a so-called “critical” election. As these scholars have shown, most critical elections generate a spike in turnout because these elections reorient the youngest cohort of voters to ally themselves to a different political party. The elections of Thomas Jefferson in 1800, Abraham Lincoln in 1860, and Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932 each saw a change in voting patterns that lasted a generation and also generated a sharp rise in turnout.

Table 2 shows that in the Northeast, the presidential elections of 1828 actually did not mark a dramatic upsurge in the levels of voter turnout recorded in the presidential elections of 1808 and 1812. Table 2 lists a sample of adult white male turnout (for consistency’s sake) in presidential elections in 1808, 1812, and 1828.

Table 2: Turnout In Presidential Elections, 1808-1832

The most striking thing about these figures is that in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, turnout in 1828 was not dramatically higher than it had been in 1808 and 1812. In the sample drawn for this table, at least, only Ohio voters surged in unprecedented numbers to the polls in 1828. Unlike other realigning elections, the presidential election of 1828 does not seem to have caused an unprecedented national surge in voter participation.

Voters did eventually surge to the polls but only after the retirement of Andrew Jackson. Table 3 compares peak turnout in the first party system and turnout in the presidential elections of 1828 and 1840.

Table 3: Turnout In Jefferson Era, 1828, and “Log Cabin” Elections (click to see table in new window)

The Age of the Lowest Common Denominator Man

It turns out that the presidential elections were democratized not by Old Hickory, but by his Whig knock-off William Henry Harrison, “Old Tippecanoe.” The Age of the Common Man was not introduced by the first “log cabin” president but by the spurious “Log Cabin Campaign,” in which Harrison, born on a James River plantation, masqueraded as the nineteenth-century equivalent of “Joe Six-Pack.” Though the country was still reeling from the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, Harrison and the Whigs never seriously addressed the critical state of the economy during the 1840 campaign. Four years earlier, when Harrison was first put forward as a candidate, Bank of the United States president and anti-Jacksonian leader Nicholas Biddle forbade “Old Tip” from saying anything at all during the campaign. Biddle issued this chilling directive about Harrison: “Let him not say one word about his principles or his creed — let him say nothing. . . .Let the use of pen and ink be wholly forbidden as if he were a mad poet in Bedlam.”

This marks the salient difference between voter mobilization in the so-called first and second party systems, as historians have designated the Federalist-Republican and Whig-Democrat eras, respectively. Ultimately, the “mature” second party system surpassed its predecessor in mobilizing sheer numbers of voters to the polls, but at what cost? The Federalists did their best to make Thomas Jefferson’s character and religious views the major issues of 1796, 1800, and 1804, but debates over foreign policy, trade policy, military spending, separation of church and state, and domestic repression clearly predominated, and almost did the Federalists in. As Philip Lampi will point out later in this series, it was Jeffersonian policy errors, especially the Embargo and the War of 1812, that eventually let the Federalists restore their electoral competitiveness.

Even in the popular political culture that was used in campaigns, the politics of the age of Jefferson seems mostly driven by the issues. The electioneering rhetoric, the rituals, and the songs associated with the Republican and Federalist parties centered on critical questions before the voters.

The Jacksonian era that began in 1828 marks a transitional phase from substantive to symbolic politics, with Jackson’s opponents smearing his staid but supposedly bigamous marriage and launching more justifiable character attacks against his record as a military commander. It was the later second party system, the Harrisonian era, that marked the nadir of serious public discussion. The high turnout in 1840 was not generated by a debate or even metaphorical battle over the issues, but by the first fully “symbolic” campaign in American history. The substantive partisan newspapers that had done much of the political heavy lifting in the Jeffersonian era were supplanted for the first time in 1840 by sloganeering campaign-only rags like the New York Log Cabin of Horace Greeley.

By examining two popular campaign songs from the elections of 1800 and 1840, we see the transformation clearly. The first election song, “Jefferson and Liberty,” was written as an attack on the repressive Alien and Sedition Acts, which the song calls the “Reign of Terror.” Here is the last stanza and chorus:

From Georgia up to Lake Champlain
From seas to Mississippi’s shore;
Ye sons of freedom loud proclaim,
The Reign of Terror is no more.
Rejoice-Columbia’s sons, rejoice!

To tyrants never bend the knee;
But join with heart, and soul and voice
For JEFFERSON and LIBERTY.

A very different form of “attack music” appeared in the election of 1840. One Democratic “hit” was a song called “Rock-A-Bye Baby, Daddy’s a Whig.” The entire song is an assault on Harrison’s personality. He is a “fake”: the song attacks his war record and his consumption patterns. Harrison exaggerated his war heroism; he would swallow the fancy liquor of his Tidewater forbears rather than drink the hard cider of western frontiersmen. In this song and others like it, the politics of identity, with references to class and consumption, have obliterated references to policy.

Rock-A-Bye Baby, when you awake,
You will discover Tip is a fake.
Far from the battle, war cry and drum,
He sits in his cabin, drinking that rum.

Our whole trajectory of American democratization has got it wrong by celebrating Andrew Jackson as the avatar of American democracy. In fact, all of the elements that we celebrate in our political culture — mass participation, popular deliberation, substantive discussion of policy alternatives — were launched and in place in the age of Jefferson. Electoral gimmickry and substanceless campaigns dominated by fake identity politics — elite men masquerading as commoners — all awaited the election of a doddering hero from a dubious battle.

American democracy has never entirely recovered from this fateful turn from issue-based to identity politics. Our form of democratic politics assumed its familiar idiosyncratic form, incomprehensible to the rest of the world, and has persisted as our other “peculiar” institution ever since.

FURTHER READING

Among the works most heavily informing the discussion above are: Walter Dean Burnham, Critical Elections and the Mainsprings of American Politics (New York: Norton, 1970); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Age of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper, 1965); Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, Basic, 2000); Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Andrew W. Robertson, “‘Look on This Picture! . . . And On This!!!’: Nationalism, Localism and Partisan Images of Otherness in the United States, 1787-1820,” American Historical Review106 (2001): 1263-1280; Byron E. Shafer, and Anthony J. Badger, eds., Contesting Democracy : Substance and Structure in American Political History, 1775-2000 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001); Chilton M. Williamson, American Suffrage : From Property to Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1960); and Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). For pioneering examinations of early American voter turnout statistics, see J. R. Pole, Political Representation in England and the Origins of the American Republic (London: St. Martin’s, 1966), pp. 543-64; and Richard P. McCormick, “New Perspectives on Jacksonian Politics,” American Historical Review 65 (1960): 292-301.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Andrew W. Robertson, City University of New York

Well, of course he was. American historical narratives have always told us so, and recent prize-winning tomes that agree on little else confirm it. Old Hickory’s fame as victor of New Orleans gave him widespread popularity, the story goes, especially with newly enfranchised voters. So when he ran for president in 1824, he came first in the Electoral College but, with four candidates in the race, did not quite win an absolute majority. When the House of Representatives broke the deadlock in favor of the second-placed man, John Quincy Adams, Jackson’s supporters screamed that the people had been cheated of their choice by “bargain and corruption” and avenged the old general with a massive victory in 1828.

But was Jackson’s “stolen” victory in 1824, the emotional heart of this tale, really quite so clear-cut? In 1884 Edward Stanwood pointed out the problem. In six states the choice of presidential electors was in the hands of the legislature and we have no direct indication of how a popular vote would have resulted. In the states where there was a popular vote, not all the candidates were on every ballot, and in some the overwhelming popularity of one candidate-not necessarily Jackson-resulted in very low turnout. All that can be reported with fair certainty is the vote in the fourteen states where there was a popular ballot, either on the district or the general-ticket system. According to Stanwood, those states gave Jackson 153,544 compared to 108,740 for his nearest rival, John Quincy Adams, who was far ahead of the other two, Henry Clay (47,136) and William Harris Crawford (46,618).

Even in these fourteen states, there is really little evidence of Jackson’s nationwide popularity in 1824. He may have won 43 percent of their popular vote, but, as Lee Benson pointed out in 1957, 42 percent of that vote came from winning four-fifths of the popular vote in just three states (Alabama, Tennessee, and Pennsylvania), which together cast 23 percent of the national vote. Local concerns explain his victories in those three states, while his success in the Carolinas followed John C. Calhoun’s decision to throw his support to Jackson in return for becoming vice-president. In other parts of the country-notably New England and New York-Jackson received negligible support in 1824, in the face of Adams’s evident popularity.

Even in some states where the electors were chosen by the people, Jackson was less popular than appears at first sight. In North Carolina, the popular contest was fought between the Caucus ticket (for Crawford) and the People’s ticket (for whoever had the best chance of beating Crawford in the Electoral College), which won by 20,145 to 15,621. The state’s electoral votes were duly cast for Jackson, and it is often assumed that they measure his popularity in that state. But in eleven counties voters followed the pre-election suggestion that they mark their ticket for electoral candidates with the name of their preferred presidential candidate. In those counties Adams men supplied about one-fourth of the People’s vote, which reconciles with contemporary estimates that about 5,000 of the 20,415 were given by friends of Adams. So we need to move 5,000 votes from the Jackson column to the Adams column.

In the case of Georgia, Philip Lampi’s research reveals a measurable popular vote on the presidential question although the decision was made by the assembly. In the election to choose the assembly, candidates were identified as friends of either Crawford or Jackson, and one ticket representing each side was run in each county. The Jackson men lost to the Georgia candidate, but still attracted (on my arithmetic) 15,478 votes, which need to be added to the Jackson column. That takes the calculation to 164,022 for Jackson to 113,740 for Adams.

But what of the other states that gave the choice of Electors to the legislature? In these cases we have to resort to informed guessing, but the number of votes involved in four of them will not greatly affect our overall calculation. In two states there was fair unanimity (in opposite directions), and that would have greatly reduced turnout. In Vermont, where Jackson was not considered a candidate, the Adams ticket was chosen “by nearly a unanimous vote.” In the case of South Carolina-inappropriate as it is to think of a popular vote for president there before the Civil War-it is clear that once Calhoun had thrown his support to Jackson, there was minimal opposition; in the legislature Jackson won 132 to 25. Contemporaneous congressional elections give some sense of the size of turnout in both cases, though we must reduce it since the presidential election was not contested. The effect is to increase Adams’s vote by about 11,000 votes, and Jackson’s by 18,000.

Delaware and Louisiana divided their Electoral College votes, reflecting an internal division of opinion that is difficult to put numerical values on. The number of voters involved is, however, very small. In the Delaware legislature there was almost no ticket voting, but the Adams candidates won 41 votes compared with 16 for Jackson, suggesting Adams was at least twice as popular. Given that only 6,550 men voted in that year’s congressional election, those results suggest Jackson would have won about 1,179 and Adams 2,947 votes. In Louisiana, Henry Clay was the most popular candidate in the legislature but could not produce an absolute majority, and so was outvoted by a Jackson-Adams coalition that managed to split the electoral votes between them, 3-2. If the original balance in the legislature reflected popular opinion and if as many folk had voted as did in the congressional election, then Jacksonians would have received about 1,693 popular votes, Adamsonians 774, and Clayites 2,371.

These penny-ante numbers make little difference to the picture of Jacksonian supremacy. They simply move Jackson to 184,894, compared with 128,461 for Adams. But we have yet to deal with the key state, New York, then the most populous in the nation, which saw a genuine uprising of the electorate, in the form of the People’s Party, in 1824. In the gubernatorial election, New York State alone cast 193,354 votes, enough to swamp the entire national vote of the leading candidates.

The presidential election of 1824 in New York has long been a by-word among political historians for Byzantine intrigue and legislative legerdemain. But what is clear is the commitment of Martin Van Buren and the leaders of the regular (Democratic-)Republicans to the Crawford presidential candidacy as representing the good old party, and the unwillingness of Republicans of New England origin-half the state’s population-to go along. Once and future governor DeWitt Clinton had his eyes on the prize at one time but his lack of support elsewhere ruled him out, leaving Adams as the only available northern candidate. When the People’s party charged to victory in the state elections, its favored presidential candidates were Adams and, to a lesser extent, Clay. The choice, however, remained in the hands of the old lame-duck legislature, which included a strong bloc of Van Buren-allied Crawford holdovers in the senate. Adams’s success in winning the lion’s share of New York’s electoral votes owed much to newspaper editor-political manager Thurlow Weed’s sly and skilful maneuvering, but Weed’s influence depended on the fact that he spoke for the largest political force in the lower house, namely the Adams supporters. In the end, the joint session of the legislature gave 25 electoral votes out of 36 to Adams.

By contrast, Andrew Jackson did not appear at all as a candidate in New York. Clinton was partial to him but could not find much outside support in the state. During the legislative maneuvering a Jackson ticket appeared one day as an attempt by some Crawford men to create a diversion, but he did not win a single electoral vote. At the meeting of New York’s Electoral College, Van Buren’s underhand machinations to reduce Clay’s final vote resulted in Jackson receiving one electoral vote, while 26 went to Adams (with five for Crawford and four for Clay). It seems not unreasonable to say that Adams probably had the support of about half the New York voters of 1824, while Jackson had far, far less than a tenth. In other words, Adams with over 96,000 votes probably outran Jackson, who at best would have had well under 10,000. Greater precision is unnecessary to make the point that the undeniable imbalance between the two candidates in New York, and the extent of voter involvement there in 1824, was probably enough to overwhelm Jackson’s advantage in the rest of the nation. We are left with a notional guess of about 195,000 votes nationwide for Jackson and at least 224,000 for Adams.

These calculations are not mere idle musings. As the Jacksonians mounted their campaign on behalf of their wronged Hero in 1827-28, their opponents in the North insisted that the congressmen who voted for Adams in the House election of February 1825 had no moral obligation to vote for whoever headed the ballot in the Electoral College; otherwise, why did the Constitution refer the election to the House of Representatives? Furthermore, these northerners claimed, Jackson’s lead in electoral votes did not reflect the opinion of voters. After all, Jackson owed the size of his lead to the electoral votes he won through the three-fifths rule, which enhanced a state’s voting power if it held slaves, even though slaves could not vote. That reduced the moral force of the argument that the most popular candidate ought to win, as did the fact that he had won some electoral votes in states where he was not the most popular candidate. In Maryland, for example, Jackson ran behind Adams in the whole state, but the vagaries of the district system gave Jackson seven electoral votes to Adams’s three. There was, they claimed, every reason for thinking that Adams had enjoyed more popular support nationally than Jackson, and that therefore Adams’s election satisfied every democratic criterion.

If these arguments mattered to contemporaries, so they should influence historians. Our view of Andrew Jackson and his presidency is still too often influenced by the assumption that somehow his candidacy uniquely expressed and exploited the impact of a new democracy on American public life. In fact, elections had long been decided by a broad electorate, and public men had long lauded the moral force of the popular will. The opposition to Jackson did not represent an old elite, even if it enjoyed some elite support in the North, just as Jackson did in the South. To say Jackson won in 1828 because he was more popular is mere tautology. He won because of a range of political forces peculiar to the 1820s, which enabled him and his henchmen to put together a winning coalition. That process deserves the proper analysis that easy generalizations about democracy and popularity tend to inhibit and obscure.

[Click here for .pdf version, with footnotes]

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Donald J. Ratcliffe, Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford

Every recent presidential election cycle, about the time a campaign goes negative, newspapers run a story like the one in the Sunday New York Times, August 17, 2008 “Week in Review.”[1] These articles suggest that while we should deplore Swift-Boating and innuendoes about Barack Obama’s possible Al-Qaeda sympathies, modern political tactics are mild compared to those of the founding era. Such pieces will often mention the Matthew Lyon/Roger Griswold House floor brawl or the Thomas Jefferson-Sally Hemings scandal before proceeding to the ultimate proof: Jeffersonian accusations that George Washington, John Adams, and the Federalists planned to reimpose monarchy.

The charge sounds absurd to modern ears, and no serious historian credits the claim that any Federalist literally planned to reintroduce a hereditary executive. Thus how could the supporters of Jefferson have been doing anything other than indulging in the 18^th-century version of the attack ad when they claimed that John Adams wanted “the presidency [to] be made hereditary in the family of Lund Washington” (cousin of the childless President) and that his desire was part of Adams’s plot “to set up and establish hereditary government”? The scheme was not confined to Adams, insisted Jeffersonians, for his monarchism was symptomatic of the Federalists’ fundamental purpose. Virtually their every action since placing a military chieftain at the head of a republican government stood “in favor of the general cause of monarchy and of aristocracy; a cause in with these gentlemen in some degree partook, and too probably hope still more to partake.” The Federalists were, in short, power-mad aristocrats hostile to republican institutions and values. They abused the people’s rights and gathered together to plot the end of republican institutions with “the levee-room their place of rendezvous.” [2]

Such ripe language should at least leave us contemptuous of the unimaginative negative campaigning that assaults every swing state today. But the news articles precisely miss the point when they imply that nothing changes all that much over time and that modern negative campaigning, among other things, connects us with a venerable political past and with behavior that just might be the price we pay for free speech and democracy. Jeffersonian charges of monarchy, in fact, don’t reveal how connected recent campaigns are to the politics of the early national period. Rather, understanding and contextualizing the charge of monarchy shows just how far removed we are from the concerns of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

For there is nothing about the way we live now that allows us to experience the assumptions of people who were genuinely terrified by monarchy. By “monarchy,” Jeffersonians meant more than simply kings and queens. They feared a broad culture of monarchy, which comprised hereditary power of any sort and any concentration or manipulation of public power likely to grant a few privileges that were denied to most. Jeffersonians identified this culture of monarchy as the most significant threat faced by republican experiments. The conviction arose that a culture of monarchy existed in the United States because the republic emerged toward the end of what can usefully be understood as the late early modern period, coinciding with what British historians call the long eighteenth century, beginning with the Glorious Revolution and ending at the Battle of Waterloo.[3]

I call the period “late early modern” because in post-revolutionary America (as well as the wider western European and Atlantic world of which it was a part), many features of the early modern period flourished: a commitment to a definable, pursuable, and unitary public good; quasi-aristocratic attitudes ranging from contempt to ambivalence about labor and laborers; and the conviction that societies could be divided into orders shaped by social and economic position, orders that corresponded to prescribed responsibilities and duties. Yet these convictions coexisted anxiously with ideas that reflected the lateness of this late early modern period, ideas often associated with mainstream nineteenth-century (and later) American political and economic thought. The late early modern period produced paeans to majority rule, egalitarianism, and the dignity of labor, along with an individualism that stressed the legitimacy of self-interest and necessity of an authentic self. All of these compelling, but frequently conflicting, ideas were coeval in the same region, the same political party, even, at times, in the same person. But in general most Federalists of the 1790s were attracted towards the older, more conservative side of the late early modern period, while the Jeffersonian coalition embraced the era’s more transformative possibilities.[4]

This late early modern period was dominated by the triumph of taxing states and increasingly consolidated national governments, with Britain separating itself from its competitors and forging the world’s greatest empire by becoming the only truly successful fiscal state. The dominant state-building trends of the late early modern period were: embracing the financial revolution of public debt, constructing a nation-state bureaucracy that could manage overseas empires and the military forces such empires required, and, as much as possible, shifting decision-making power about nation-states and empires upward, to centralize political power and to subordinate localities to the center. Britain outdistanced its competitors in all of these goals; it was the model to emulate.[5]

American revolutionaries concluded that what they viewed as contempt for British liberty on the part of the new British state was systemically connected to the sort of state Britain had become. The Articles of Confederation government, with the most important locus of governance being the localities, was about as complete a rejection of the primary developments of the late early modern period that a people could construct and still claim to have a central government. During the 1790s all members of the emerging Jeffersonian coalition continued to agree that the locality should remain the principal place of governance.

The Federalists of the 1790s saw things rather differently. Federalists believed that disorderly citizens were creating conditions that would soon become unlivable. Popular support for the French Revolution produced self-created political organizations, the Democratic-Republican Societies. These groups challenged Federalist ideals of deference and hierarchy by inserting themselves into political debate and demanding changes in the nation’s policies. Federalists believed such behavior produced the climate that caused a New York crowd to hurl stones at Alexander Hamilton when he spoke in support of an anti-French treaty. In addition, during the 1790s citizens registered discontent with Federalist economic and financial policies with actions that ranged from furious newspaper articles to armed rebellion.Federalists interpreted this behavior through a prism of classical republican political theory that argued for an inexorable progression from unstructured liberty to license to anarchy. Once anarchy replaced liberty, the citizenry would welcome any despot who promised to restore order, no matter how.

The Federalists were not seeking to restore hereditary rule, but they did believe that the gravest threat to republican institutions and the people’s liberty was the people themselves. Their solutions: Hamilton’s financial program, the expansive interpretation of the Constitution, the defense of an energetic national state, and the court culture they developed in the Philadelphia capital. All of it was intended to merge a version of republicanism with the primary developments of the late early modern period. Hamilton’s financial program made the new national government solely responsible for all revolutionary war debt, a debt by 1791 owned by a small group of the wealthiest Americans, and called for the national government to charter a Bank of the United States, partially funded with the newly valuable public debt. The program was openly modeled on the British financial system that had begun in 1694 with Parliament’s passage of the million pound act and its creation of the Bank of England. Taxing to service public debt, critics of the Federalists insisted, was the quintessential act of modern monarchy. The Federalists sought to merge ownership of public debt with policies of economic development by making the debt a primary source of investment funds for manufacturing and banking projects.

This hierarchical arrangement fit neatly with an interpretation of the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution that vastly increased the nation-state’s implied powers to, among other things, charter corporations such as the Bank of the United States. These centralizing policies of finance and political economy appeared to their critics to flourish in the sumptuous, court-inspired culture of levees, balls, and assemblies that shaped Federalist Philadelphia. This so-called republican court centered on the President and Martha Washington and radiated outward to include office-holders, public creditors, and the administration’s wealthiest and most socially prestigious supporters. Federalists sought to consolidate cultural, social, political, and economic power in the hands of a national gentry that could preserve the people’s liberty by guiding them more virtuously and intelligently than the people could guide themselves. The Federalist solution provoked the fears of any who considered the key to preservation of republican institutions and liberty to be governance primarily by the locality, and the rejection of the main developments of the late early modern period.[6]

A diverse group of people could embrace local control. In doing so they were driven by a complex combination of principle and interest, a mix of high-minded, sordid, and most other sorts of motives in between. Gentleman slaveholders such as Thomas Jefferson, upwardly mobile strivers and professionals such as the lawyers Alexander James Dallas and Levi Lincoln, somewhat less than respectable autodidacts and immigrant radicals such as Philadelphia Aurora editor William Duane, hardscrabble laborers such as the former-weaver-turned-politician William Findley, the farmer-intellectual William Manning, and many others could make common cause in opposition. By joining together, they fashioned a political critique that simultaneously protected their material interests, allowed them to be far more significant to the republican experiment than they were likely to be in the frankly elitist world of the Federalists, and addressed what everybody from Mandeville to Hume to Rousseau agreed were the most compelling questions of the era.

By seeking the triumph of the localities over the center, the Jeffersonians opposed the dominant trends of that era. The only way the localities could triumph was to make them impregnable by parceling out power beyond the capacity of any effort to consolidate and direct it. Jeffersonian leaders, many of whom were slaveholders, defeated Federalist leaders, far fewer of whom were, because an ever-growing number of ordinary citizens associated their most cherished principles and their most intimate interests with the triumph of the localities. But localities deserved to govern themselves only if the mostly ordinary men in them were qualified to govern. In the early national period, defending the triumph of the localities required a language of democratization and egalitarianism, a language that promoters of the dominant trends of the late early modern period, such as the Federalists, could never be very comfortable using.[7]

Here was a purely Jeffersonian conundrum. Defending the supremacy of the localities gave local citizens the right and the power to do what they wanted, including own slaves. But championing the localities depended on claiming that all sorts of people who the Federalists considered incapable of reasoned judgment and self-government were capable of both. That claim was incendiary. When, for example, in 1800 Gabriel and other Richmond-area slaves revolted using the language and expecting the aid of the French and Jeffersonian friends of liberty, Federalists were quick to point out that gentlemen such as Jefferson should have known better than to incite their white inferiors, and so pave the way for this outburst from their black ones.[8]

This argument won few converts, partly because few slave revolts in the U.S. succeeded in the long run or drew the kind of cross-racial support Gabriel sought. And planters could lead a democratizing political coalition because a society of independent heads of household and local control were more appealing to most citizens north and south than anything the Federalists offered. Charges of monarchy resonated so powerfully because the political, social, cultural, and economic arrangements that sustained that institution during the late early modern period were essential to the goals of the Federalists, just as they were anathema to so many of their opponents.

The Jeffersonians succeeded in doing what they set out to do: organize the nation as the anti-Europe, as the refutation of the late early modern period. By glorifying the locality and making the nation the anti-Europe, the Jeffersonians rejected the centralizing trends of the late early modern period. By making the United States the anti-Europe, the Jeffersonians dissolved the institutions that the Federalists used to seek a consolidated and centralized nation state with direct connections to social and economic power. Such a state and ruling elite, Jeffersonians had no doubt, was evidence of an anti-republican culture of monarchy.

By building a 19^th century anti-Europe, the Jeffersonians created a democratized, fluid, rapidly changing society of mobility, opportunity, risk, and often anxiety and uncertainty. Mobility went both upward and downward in the 19^th century, and rapid and often frightening social and economic change could be successfully negotiated, or fail to be. Regardless of the outcome, citizens of the republican anti-Europe learned repeatedly that they were pretty much on their own. For those who qualified as citizens, such a world was at once liberating and terrifying. The early American republic democratized both opportunity and inequality. It often seemed that as the chances for the first condition expanded, so too did the advancement of the second.

This republican anti-Europe depended on the autonomy of the locality. This autonomy guaranteed the absence of national institutions that could potentially consolidate political and economic power.By placing local autonomy at the center of their vision, the Jeffersonians dismantled the Federalists’ consolidated nation-state, but they also guaranteed the safety of the slavery that sustained their primarily southern leadership. For local autonomy insulated and so allowed to expand the dominant institutions and practices within each locality. The same language that denounced the Federalists’ consolidated nation-state also defended the autonomy of slaveholding localities. Once again principle and interest merged. All Jeffersonians feared a culture of monarchy and the consolidation within a nation-state of political and economic power. But certain Jeffersonians, especially the most prominent, lived as they did because they owned slaves, and slavery benefited enormously from a belief system that demanded that localities be left alone to do as they wished. By defeating what they had no doubt was a culture of monarchy, the Jeffersonians created a democratized, locally-oriented, republic of opportunity for all citizens—opportunity to rise or fall. Yet the ideals that made the United States the anti-Europe—a nation dedicated to the rejection of the central trends of the late early modern period—protected as no other 19^th-century belief system could what Lincoln so movingly described as the embodiment of “the divine right of kings”: by 1860 for four million Americans “the same spirit that says you work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”[9] Jeffersonian ideology triumphantly smashed the late early modern period taxing state culture of monarchy. In doing so, Jeffersonians laid the foundation for a nation that enslaved four million souls and spread the divine right of kings across the land.

[1] Paul Vitello, “How to Erase that Smea…,” New York Times, August 17, 2008, WK3.

[2] Thomas Paine, “Letter to George Washington, President of the United States of America, on Affairs Public and Private,” (Philadelphia, 1796) 2-3, 7; No Author Listed, “Remarks Occasioned byt the Late Conduct of Mr. Washington As President of the United States,” (Philadelphia, 1797), 27.

[3] Lance Banning, The Jeffersonian Persuasion: Evolution of a Party Ideology (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978); James L. Huston, “The American Revolutionaries, the Political Economy of Aristocracy, and the American Concept of the Distribution of Wealth, 1765-1900, AHR 98 (1993):1079-1105; Huston, Securing the Fruits of Labor: The American Concept of Wealth Distribution, 1765-1900(Baton Rouge, LA: LSU Press, 1998); Andrew Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2004), chps. 1-2; Andrew Shankman “A New Thing on Earth: Alexander Hamilton, Pro-Manufacturing Republicans, and the Democratization of American Political Economy,” Journal of the Early Republic 23 (2003): 323-352.

[4] A sampling of works on these transformative possibilities and also on the Jeffersonian connection to them includes, Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s(New York, NYU Press, 1984); Appleby, “Thomas Jefferson and the Psychology of Democracy,” in James Horn, Jan Lewis, and Peter Onuf eds., The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic (Charlottesville, VA: UVA Press, 2002) 155172; Jay Fliegelman, Prodigals and Pilgrims: the American Revolution Against Patriarchal Authority, 1750-1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982); W.J. Rorabaugh “I Thought I Should Liberate Myself from the Thraldom of Others: Apprentices, Masters, and the Revolution,” in Alfred F. Young ed., Beyond the American Revolution: Explorations in the History of American Radicalism (De Kalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1993) 185-217; Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrenceville, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1997); Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997); Jeffrey L. Pasley, “1800 as a Revolution in Political Culture: Newspapers, Celebrations, Voting, and Democratization in the Early Republic,” in Horn ed., The Revolution of 1800.

[5] Richard Bonney ed., The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, 1200-1815 (London: Oxford University Press, 1999); Bonney ed., Economic Systems and State Finance (London: Oxford University Press, 1995); Mark Ormrod, Margaret Bonney, and Richard Bonney eds., Crises, Revolutions, and Self-Sustained Growth: Essays in European Fiscal History, 1130-1830 (Lincolnshire, UK: Alden Group, 1999); P.G.M. Dickson, The Financial Revolution in England: A Study in the Development of Public Credit, 1688-1756 (London, 1967); John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money, and the English State: 1688-1783 (New York, 1988); Patrick O’Brien, “The Political Economy of British Taxation, 1660-1815,” Economic History Review 41 (1988) 1-32; O’Brien, “Inseparable Connections: Trade, Economy, Fiscal State, and the Expansion of Empire, 1689-1815,” in P.J. Marshall ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire: The Eighteenth Century (London: Oxford University Press, 1998) 53-77; O’Brien, “Fiscal Exceptionalism: Great Britain and its European Rivals from Civil War to the Triumph at Trafalgar and Waterloo,” in Donald Winch and Patrick O’Brien, eds., The Political Economy of British Historical Experience, 1688-1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 2002) 245-265; Lawrence Stone, ed., An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689-1815 (London: Routledge, 1994).

[6] Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1789 (New York: W.W. Norton, 1969); Stanley Elkins and Eric McKitrick, The Age of Federalism: The Early American Republic, 1788-1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 1993); Donald R. Swanson, Origins of Hamilton’s Fiscal Policies (Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Social Science Monographs, 1963); James Roger Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993); Shankman, Crucible of American Democracy, chap. one; Shankman, “A New Thing on Earth”; Drew R. McCoy, The Elusive Republic: Political Economy in Jeffersonian America (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1980); David Hackett Fischer, The Revolution of American Conservatism: The Federalist Party in the Era of Jeffersonian Democracy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), chp one.

[7] Thomas Slaughter, The Whiskey Rebellion: Frontier Epilogue to the American Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1986); Paul Douglas Newman; Fries’s Rebellion: The Enduring Struggle for the American Revolution (Philadelphia, PA: Penn Press, 2004), Terry Bouton, “A Road Closed: Rural Insurgency in Post-Independence Pennsylvania,” Journal of American History 87 (2000) 855-887; Andrew Shankman, “Malcontents and Tertium Quids: The Battle to Define Democracy in Jeffersonian Philadelphia,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (1999) 43-72; Sharp, American Politics in the Early Republic; Richard K. Mathews, The Radical Politics of Thomas Jefferson: A Revisionist View (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 1984); Colleen A. Sheehan, “The Politics of Public Opinion: James Madison’s Notes on Government,” William and Mary Quarterly 49 (1992) 609-627; Sheehan, “Madison vs. Hamilton: The Battle over Republicanism and the Role of Public Opinion,” in Douglas Ambrose and W.T. Martin eds., The Many Faces of Alexander Hamilton: The Life and Legacy of America’s Most Elusive Founding Father (New York: NYU Press, 2006); John E. Ferling, Adams vs. Jefferson: The Tumultuous Election of 1800 (London: Oxford University Press, 2004).

[8] Douglas R. Egerton, “Gabriel’s Conspiracy and the Election of 1800,” Journal of Southern History 56 (1990) 191-214; Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800-1802 (Chapel Hill, NC: UNC Press, 1993).

[9] Abraham Lincoln, Lincoln Selected Speeches and Writings (New York, Verso Books, 1992), 193.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Andrew Shankman is the author of Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. His article “A New Thing on Earth: Alexander Hamilton, Pro-Manufacturing Republicans, and the Democratization of American Political Economy” received the Program in Early American Economy and Society (PEASE) best article prize and the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) Ralph D. Gray prize for best article published in the Journal of the Early Republic.

A blog series dedicated to Philip Lampi

Exploring early American politics one reality at a time.

We sail out
on orders from him
but we find,
the maps he sent to us
don’t mention lost coastlines,
where nothing we’ve actually seen
has been mapped or outlined
and we don’t recognize the names upon these signs.

Okkervil River, “Lost Coastlines“

When you first approach early American political history with the idea of seriously studying it, it can be hard to avoid the feeling that there is nothing you could possibly add. Everything that can be known about the Jay Treaty negotiations or the election of 1828 or the Webster-Hayne debates is already exhaustively covered in numerous books and articles and digested for public edification in textbooks and Wikipedia. If you’re lucky, this feeling dissipates once you get to know the details and nuances and realize that not everything really has been adequately covered. Even then, there are paths you just avoid as overly beaten or simply unmarked.

Voting in the Early Republic was one of those topics for me. Reading for comps, it seemed like vote-counting was just about all that a lot of political historians ever did, and you couldn’t even do that, I read, for the early period that most interested me. The data didn’t exist: few of the states voted in the same way or at the same time, especially for president, and almost none of them saved the appropriate records before the advent of what they used to call the Age of the Common Man in 1828. Political scientist Walter Dean Burnham called early 19th-century elections the “lost Atlantis” of American politics, and the seeming lack of data licensed electoral scholars to treat the Federalist-Republican era as a prologue to the real democratic action at best.* Other political historians were increasingly explicit about conceiving early American politics as essentially coterminous with the post-Revolutionary elite better known as the Founders. The philosophical debates and personal relationships of various well-known gentlemen were all that was worth knowing about. In short, there was nothing to see there in terms of popular politics, so I moved on, at least as far as the election results are concerned.

A King of New England

Philip Lampi’s work shocked me out of that attitude. His story has been written up many times by now — the AAS web site has a page of Phil’s press clips — but it never ceases the boggle the mind. Common-Place co-founder Jill Lepore, writing in The New Yorker, called it “one of the strangest and most heroic tales in the annals of American historical research”:

He began this work in 1960, when he was still in high school. Living in a home for boys, he wanted, most of all, to be left alone, so he settled on a hobby that nobody else would be interested in. He went to the library and, using old newspapers, started making tally sheets of every election in American history. His system was flawless. It occupied endless hours. Completeness became his obsession. For decades, at times supporting himself by working as a night watchman, Lampi made lists of election returns on notepads. He drove all over the country, scouring the archives by day, sleeping in his car by night. He eventually transcribed the returns of some sixty thousand elections.

Where professional historians and political scientists shrugged off a whole era because they could not send a graduate student to the library or call up a colleague in Michigan to get the proper data, Phil Lampi committed himself to filling in the blanks of the history books, as a hobby, to be pursued in the spare hours of a rather laborious, hardscrabble life.

In the process of his quest, Phil also made himself one of the country’s leading authorities on the early American press as well as its election returns. At some point, he got at a job at the American Antiquarian Society, the nation’s leading repository of early American newspapers, to be closer to his sources. After many years of photographing the old papers for microfilm and paging them for AAS patrons, making up his tally sheets and helping out interested scholars on the side, Andrew Robertson and John Hench secured National Science Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities grants that finally allowed Phil to spend some of the work day focusing on his grand project. The grants also launched the process of organization and preservation that has eventually resulted in the immense New Nation Votes database.

Phil is very much a man of the pre-blogospheric era, but in many ways he is a precursor of those self-taught experts who created some of the Internet’s most iconic sites, and the weblog itself, strictly by pursuing their personal interests. New Nation Votes realizes the dream of pioneer Internet history sites like the University of Virginia’s Valley of the Shadow — American history presented with a depth, transparency, and flexibility that no other medium can match. Certainly no other data source can. New Nation Votes users can not only find the once-missing election data, but drill all the way down to Phil’s sources and handwritten notes if they so desire.

All that said, it is in some ways a disservice to overemphasize Phil’s biography. If you talk to Phil at any length, you realize that he did not choose his hobby solely for its boringness. He was also an explorer who sensed the gaps in the available political cartography. He once told me that he enjoyed looking at the voting charts he found in some of the reference books at the public library and wondered why they had so little information on the early part of American history. A true “King of New England,” in the Cider House Rules sense, Phil wondered especially about the political “home team,” as he saw it, the Federalists. Why did the Federalists seem to just disappear from the charts and tables in reference books after John Adams lost? Very early in his data collection, Phil realized that this was not remotely accurate. In New England and selected other localities, Federalists competed in elections and held offices all the way into the Jacksonian era, when party names shifted. Phil was far ahead of his time in rediscovering the Federalists, whom historians now see as a tremendous influence on early 19^th-century developments in religion, culture, business, and social reform. The counter-Jacksonian America described in Daniel Walker Howe’s What Hath God Wrought?, for instance, has clear Federalist antecedents.

Explaining the Series

Time to move on to the series mentioned in the title of this post. Blogs being the somewhat confessional medium that they are, let me just admit that I decided to launch this series out of guilt. Here we have Common-Place throwing a special issue on politics, and no one invited electoral historians. Or at least that’s how it might seem. The truth is a bit more complicated, with the small number of people who actually work on early American elections and their lack of availability for the project being one set of reasons, and the greater speed with which other aspects of the issue came together being another. At a certain point, we just filled up, and the Common-Place staff screamed for mercy when I threatened to commission even more articles. The blogosphere seemed to be the answer to the question, how could we pay tribute to Phil — at a time when he is facing serious health issues — and also do some justice to his subject without doubling the size of our already very substantial special issue?

My hope is that this last-resort method of presentation will turn out to be a feature, rather than a bug, as they say in the software business. The series will extend the politics issue chronologically past its publication date, allowing people who weren’t available for the issue proper to get involved and giving repeat visitors to the site something new to look at. This format will also be much more directly interactive. Readers and other scholars will be able to comment or elaborate on the different articles as they see fit, even refute or question or correct them if need be. Should that need arise, we can update the posts to reflect the corrections and comments, using the magic of blogging software. With luck, this might become one of the first experiments in blog-based historical collaboration.

I have lined up a number of guest posters, including Rosemarie Zagarri, Donald Ratcliffe, Matthew Mason, and Andrew Shankman, plus Andrew Robertson and Philip Lampi themselves. A new post in the series will appear every 3-5 days for rest of October, and then continue on from there as needed, with the floor open for further comments and additional contributions for as long as people want to make them. (Writers interested in contributing should contact the management by private email.) The emphasis will be on little nuggets of political history, rather than political commentary, though rest assured that the larger blog will still be carrying my usual commentary as well. While I will admit to my own agenda items of the series, there is no requirement that all the posts agree with each other or fit together into one seamless interpretation. Let a hundred flowers bloom. Or six, as the case may be.

I have decided to set this series up in terms of myths, keying into the “lost Atlantis” motif suggested by Burnham and picked up by Robertson and Lampi. What this means in practice may require some explanation. Myths about early American politics certainly abound, but different ones operate in different quarters of the culture. Some of these myths even seem to cancel each other out. Some citizens and high school textbooks still carry the remains of the old “rise of democracy” narrative, in which the story of America is the story of ever-expanding freedom, or the even older one holding that freedom and democracy never needed to rise because the Founding Fathers gave them to us already whole. Somewhat more knowledgeable others follow the opposite line enshrined in left-leaning popular culture, with expanding freedom still the story but slave rebels and abolitionists and feminists and rural land rioters as the new heroes. Writers in this tradition tend to have little use for any party politician whose credentials can not be burnished in terms of race or gender. Most professional early American historians in recent years have tended to practice a sophisticated version of this latter tradition. All of this is a complicated way of saying that some of the “myths” we will be tackling are traditional cultural myths, others are from the world of textbooks and popular history, while still others come out of the recent historical literature. All are fair game, but we will try to be clear about what sort of myth is being engaged in each case.

One final note: while this series is dedicated to Phil Lampi and we will try to address his work and its subject directly whenever we can, the posts in this series will not be limited to voting and elections. Instead, our mission will be to broadly map some of the lost coastlines and interior features of the continent that Phil has been exploring all these years.

*Burnham seems to have used this line in different ways in different writings. Andrew Robertson explains:

Writing in an essay entitled “The Turnout Problem” (from A. James Reichley, ed., Elections American Style [Brookings Institution, 1987], MIT political scientist Walter Dean Burnham offered what may well be one the most evocative images of political history. “Once upon a time, in the lost Atlantis of nineteenth century politics, American participation rates in both presidential and midterm elections were very close to current participation rates abroad.” The “problem,” as Burnham saw it, was to explain how and why American voting behavior came to deviate from other countries’ practices.  Burnham knows a great deal about the history of American voter turnout.  He spent innumerable hours as a graduate student holed up in basement archives, poring over the official voting presidential records for elections from 1828 to 1960.  More than anyone else except Philip Lampi, Walter Dean Burnham understands that historical research into nineteenth century voting behavior often seems as strange as Captain Nemo’s voyage on the Nautilus.

In academia as everywhere else, imitation is the highest form of flattery.  The image of a lost, submerged civilization has been widely picked up by other scholars (in the interests of full disclosure, I am one of them).  Joel Silbey, in The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 [Stanford University Press, 1991] entitles his introduction to the book “The ‘Lost Atlantis.’” Following Burnham himself, in a somewhat different usage than I first encountered it, Silbey described all of nineteenth century politics as a “Lost Atlantis.”

If all nineteenth century politics seems strange and exotic, nowhere is the aqua more incognita than the early republic before 1828.  Many synthetic histories have taken pains to tell us so.  What historians and political scientists couldn’t know had to be dismissed.  In the words of one such historian, “the parties of Hamilton and Jefferson…stood as halfway houses on the road to the fully organized parties of the later Jacksonian era.” What these diehard quantifiers could not dismiss was one nagging difficulty: the “turnout problem.” If Jeffersonian politics were a mere prologue to Jackson, why were there more people (and a more diverse group of people) voting in the age of Jefferson than ever voted for Jackson?

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Jeffrey L. Pasley is associate professor of history at the University of Missouri and the author of “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (2001), along with numerous articles and book chapters, most recently the entry on Philip Freneau in Greil Marcus’s forthcoming New Literary History of America. He is currently completing a book on the presidential election of 1796 for the University Press of Kansas and also writes the blog Publick Occurrences 2.0 for some Website called Common-place.

The belief that Federalists sat grim-faced and hapless as their nimble Jeffersonian opponents developed ways to shape public opinion runs deep in American historical thought. The Federalist press has been portrayed as entirely lacking the agility and ambition of its Republican counterpart; Federalist politicians have been accused of failing to realize they needed to create a network of believers; and the party as a whole often appears in historical accounts as the horseshoe crab of the early republic: a living fossil that played no role in the nation’s ongoing evolution. I’ll leave it to others, including Andrew W. Robertson and Philip Lampi in this very space, to show that Federalists competed electorally — and fiercely — until the War of 1812. What I’d like to discuss is the Federalist press, and I’ll posit something that I hope honors the spirit of this contrarian blog, if not every historical interpretation ever advanced by its management: Federalist literati precociously developed politics as culture, politics as personal expression, politics as a community built through media, and politics as performance. These men and women of letters rejoiced over partisan divisions while other Americans (including more than a few Federalists) still lamented them. And they understood political media to be the art of getting read, discussed, and perhaps even paid, as much as the art of getting things done. Arianna Huffington? Meet Joseph Dennie.

Dennie was a 1790 Harvard graduate who had desultorily set up shop as a lawyer in New Hampshire, all the while trying to establish himself as an essayist and wit, a kind of American Addison. In the mid-1790s, Dennie learned to yoke together the goals and skills of literature and politics, and when he did so, he not only found his voice and livelihood, but also profoundly influenced the Federalist press. Dennie’s two widely read and extracted periodicals were New Hampshire’s Farmer’s Weekly Museum newspaper, which he edited throughout the second half of the 1790s, and Philadelphia’s Port Folio magazine, which he founded and edited from 1801 until his death in 1812.

Politics and Literature: Two Great Enterprises That Went Great Together

Here’s another myth-buster: literature was not a retreat from politics for alienated intellectuals. Literary techniques helped to build the human infrastructure party politics required, and politics offered intellectuals a way to be heard in a country sorely lacking in aristocratic patronage and metropolitan density. Over the course of the eighteenth century, a tradition of witty clubbing — lubricated sometimes by coffee, sometimes by alcohol — had become increasingly entwined with print culture. The educated men and women in England and the colonies who gathered to critique literature, society, and life began to seek publication of their manuscripts in newspapers and magazines. In both their face-to-face gatherings and in print, participants were driven by three desires. They delighted in the sense that their superior judgment and wit differentiated them from the world outside. They wanted to be known to that world outside even as they were convinced of its dull incomprehension. And they wanted to believe that their associations and writings could make that world a better place. These goals — and the tensions between them — readily merged with the intense partisanship of the 1790s. The political parties did indeed have competing understandings of the role of government and competing agendas. But they each also needed to become virtual communities of emotion as well as reason, communities that were simultaneously evangelical and exclusive. Literati, it turns out, were well suited to creating these communities through print. Thomas Jefferson turned to a poet, Philip Freneau, to edit the National Gazette. But it was a Federalist man of letters, Joseph Dennie, who truly excelled.

The literary marketplace in the early Republic had no metropolis, no London to which the aspiring could go and from which power, sales, and influence emerged. In the United States, to convince printers to bring works to press, and to make newspapers achieve anything like a national influence, small but interconnected networks of people worked together to drum up subscriptions. Many of those same people also wished to see their own writing pass through those networks, so they supplied manuscripts to printers and newspapers. Creating a national political party, even a loosely-knit one, required something similar: uniting the work of far-flung networks of amateurs with that of a few professionals, in order to create and circulate ideas and emotions, and to build a community — real as well as imagined — without direct contact.

In both the Farmer’s Weekly Museum and the Port Folio, Dennie larded national and international news with brief, mordant commentary, and he also penned longer essays, such as the “Lay Preacher” series, which combined Benjamin Franklin-style moral pronouncements, acerbic critiques of American politics, and an almost campy display of Dennie’s own melancholic unease. Dennie also printed poems, letters, and essays by readers both famous and obscure, many of whom used metaphors and pursued themes the editor himself had introduced.

Through his astute use of bylines, introductions, and even inside jokes, Dennie made visible the relationships and networks that produced and circulated literary and political content. Both the content and this revealing of the networks were important. The periodicals drew people into a partisan community in which they spread Federalist-inflected anecdotes and rumors, sent in their own political information, and, significantly, learned to see with Federalist eyes and speak in a Federalist tongue. Politicians such as Jeremiah Smith, Lewis Richard Morris, and Robert Goodloe Harper eagerly participated. More generally, Federalist newspapers — like Republican ones — reprinted each other’s work, “linking” to each other in a way that increased awareness of publications and editors and sped circulation of ideas, animosities, and tropes. Successful editors offered their distinctive worldviews and voices, but also offered a forum in which nonprofessionals — in either literature or politics — could find their comments posted, their battles joined, and their turns of phrase admired and emulated.

Federalist Dittoheads

This was participatory print culture, one that openly tried to create an impassioned, hostile interdependence with Republican newspapers, so that passions and readerships might rise. “Since the Editor has been splashed with the mud of Chronicle obloquy,” Dennie wrote gleefully in the midst of one newspaper war, “he has gained upwards of seven hundred subscribers. He therefore requests…the honour and the profit of their future abuse.” Such a print culture is reminiscent not of a hidebound aristocratic past but instead of today’s political/social/cultural websites such as DailyKos and Redstate. Federalists who participated in these newspapers, moreover, realized that jokes, caricatures, and a heightening of the divide between “us and them,” of the sort that flowed naturally from literary club culture, would gain both readers and political adherents. The point was to make participants feel part of an enclave, even as one justified that gated community by insisting one’s goal was to tear down the wall and reform the nation. Thus in Federalist newspapers, broad insults and scabrous doggerel (even John Quincy Adams indulged) drew laughs, while the creation of a private language of allusions, characters, and metaphors gave readers the thrill of being political participants and members, not simply consumers.

A reader of the Museum or the Port Folio brought forward in time would require little explanation of Rush Limbaugh and his 24/7 Club. There was startlingly virulent mockery of political enemies: Thomas Jefferson’s prose, one Port Folio column declared, not surprisingly resembled that of a certain maid named Betty, “for Betty is a long-sided, raw-boned, red-haired slut, and, like Mr. Jefferson, always hankering to have a mob of dirty fellows around her.” There were constant reminders of the difference between Dennie’s faithful readers and the moral and intellectual dullards around them: “When they cast their blinking optics to heaven,” Dennie wrote of the latter in 1805, “[they] can discern nothing there but stones, hard as their callous hearts, cold and heavy, like their calculating heads, and rugged and senseless, like their republican system.” And there were urgent calls to cultural and political arms: “At this moment, my friend,” wrote a 1798 correspondent Dennie identified as “Member of Congress,” “we should have our lamps trimmed and burning, for we know not the day nor the hour, when the Sans Culottes will come upon us.” More likely to keep their inkwells wet than their powder dry, Dennie’s readers nonetheless thrilled to the constant, convivial alarm.

The fact that this Federalist use of the media did not gain the party electoral dominance should not blind us to what it did do. Federalists may have spouted a rhetoric of disdain for the common public — the “swinish multitude” (see how fun that is?) — but Federalist literati wove a net of talkers, writers, readers, and circulators, and strove to shape information, opinion, and allegiance through it. Such sardonic Federalists precociously accepted the fact that democratic politics would never create a univocal public; they embraced partisanship when most Americans still deplored it. They also quickly realized that American political parties needed to create and market identities, not simply agendas.

Responding to the fact that politics is America’s lingua franca, Dennie dressed musings and rants about character, life, and society in partisan garb, and dressed partisan rhetoric in musings and rants about character, life, and society. He offered himself up as analyst, entertainer, and — not least — martyr; seeking a broader audience by selling a feeling of exclusivity, Dennie implicitly told readers that only they could understand him and, therefore, only they could understand what was best for the nation. By such means, this Federalist editor drew readers, contributors, and politicians into a community that foreshadowed the community of listeners, callers, and politicians Rush Limbaugh would build two centuries later. Savvy Federalists saw in Dennie’s periodicals a vehicle that wrapped their proffered bits of information and argument in its air of au courant intimacy, as well as a way to reach a potentially sympathetic and dynamic — but dispersed — audience, an audience who would then pass on the information and the thrill of belonging to others. Dennie’s readers and contributors, in turn, felt included in a highly personal political world. The Constitution made them citizens; Dennie made them members. That their membership in the polity was built on criticism of their countrymen only makes the Port Folio feel more modern. In political communities from DailyKos to Rush 24/7, patriotism burns as an angry love. And so, you heard it here first. Federalists? They were ahead of their time.

FURTHER READING

For other scholarly accounts of Federalist literary journalism, see Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 1989); Marcus Daniel, Scandal and Civility: Journalism and the Birth of American Democracy (Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2008); William C. Dowling, Literary Federalism in the Age of Jefferson: Joseph Dennie and the Port Folio, 1801-1812 (University of South Carolina Press, 1999); Linda K. Kerber, Federalists in Dissent: Imagery and Ideology in Jeffersonian America (Cornell University Press, 1970); and David S. Shields, Civil Tongues and Polite Letters in British America (University of North Carolina Press, 1997). Google Books has much Dennie-ana available for full-text download, including an 1817 collection of the Lay Preacher essays, 26 issues of the Port Folio‘s “new series” from 1806, and a 19th-century biography that reprints a number of Dennie’s letters.

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan is an Associate Professor of History at Arizona State University and the author of Men of Letters in the Early Republic: Cultivating Forums of Citizenship (University of North Carolina Press, 2008). She is currently working on a study of Catholicism in the new nation.

The title of Michael Drexler and Ed White’s recent collaboration, The Traumatic Colonel: The Founding Fathers, Slavery, and the Phantasmatic Aaron Burr, begins with a brilliant pun on psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan’s concept of the traumatic kernel of the real—an irreducible presence that initiates desire and continually eludes all our efforts to understand or symbolize it. According to Lacan’s Seminar XI, the goal of psychoanalysis is to bring out or draw awareness to the irreducible kernels to which subjects are subjected. For Drexler and White, Burr functions as a traumatic kernel, an enigmatic placeholder whose representational history “in relation to the [Founding Fathers] clarifies the complex processing of the great crime of slavery” (9). Theirs is a complex argument incorporating a semiotic reading of the symbolic functions of various Founding Fathers, especially the racial dimensions of the founders; interpretations of racial fantasy structures in Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Ormond (1799) and Tabitha Tenney’s novel Female Quixotism (1801); and two chapters drawing on nonfiction accounts of Aaron Burr’s rise to the vice presidency, duel with Alexander Hamilton, and subsequent fall in the aftermath of treason allegations that situate Burr in relation to the history of United States and Caribbean slavery.

Drexler and White’s innovative methodology blurs established disciplinary boundaries between early American historiography and literary studies. Taking aim at the Founding Fathers, especially fallen founder Aaron Burr, they argue: “Rather than treating the Founders as actual agents who need to be more aggressively historicized with empirical data . . . our starting point is that they are primarily imaginative, phantasmatic phenomena best explored from a broadly literary perspective—as a broad characterological drama whose plot often remains obscure” (6). In this way, The Traumatic Colonel outlines a new method of reading both the discourse surrounding the founders and the discourse structures of literary texts as intersecting parts of a larger and continuously evolving early U.S. political fantasy structure.

Overall, this study focuses less on the biographical life of Burr or on the historical contexts of novels and more on the similarity of desires and structuring principles undergirding typically discrete sets of representational discourse. Although historical and literary primary sources are usually read through distinct methodological lenses, Drexler and White glean significant insights by applying the literary method of characterological study to fiction as well as a wider range of nonliterary texts such as contemporary biographies, private letters, and periodical accounts of the founders.

The compilation makes apparent how impossible it is to create a seamless, coherent character of Burr from the mass of contemporary and recent writings about him.

Based on critical theorist Slavoj Zizek’s formulation of the “parallax”—a “gap in perceptions of the same thing from different vantage points”—their “parallactic” methodology is made concrete in a series of extracts about Burr that precede the book’s introduction entitled “Burrology” (a move echoing Melville’s “Etymology” that opens Moby Dick). Spanning fourteen pages, the compilation makes apparent how impossible it is to create a seamless, coherent character of Burr from the mass of contemporary and recent writings about him. Arranged chronologically, these extracts show Burr as an enigma for those who knew him and for those who attempt to know him now. However, Drexler and White are not primarily interested in Burr himself, but in the fantasy structures of early United States republicanism winding through the “thing” called Burr. Rather than separate out or disregard the mythos surrounding Burr and the founders, Drexler and White engage the mythic structure built up around them as worthy of study in and of itself. Thus, a parallactic reading does not discount the factual details of historical figures or early national sociopolitical life, but juxtaposes them with and against the discursively constructed mythos readily available in compilations of quotes such as “Burrology.”

Chapter one uses Algirdas Greimas’s structure of the semiotic square to describe how “a given cultural situation” such as the mythic building up of the founders’ reputations “will be structured around a fundamental opposition that expresses a logical understanding of that moment” (22). According to Drexler and White, attending to the formal mechanics, that is, the literary and symbolic structuring of the founders, shows how historical figures such as Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin assumed discrete symbolic positions in the public imagination as well as how those positions evolved over time and in relation to one another. They concentrate especially on the various forms and oppositions of racial desire and fantasy in the post-revolutionary United States. For instance, Drexler and White argue that George Washington initially occupies an imaginary position as “the benevolent slaveholder” against Benjamin Franklin, “the abolitionist”; later discourse surrounding Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton combines and refigures Washington and Franklin’s previously established positions. Jefferson is the “Slave owner who … knows slavery is evil, but sleeps with slaves,” and Hamilton is the “Creole, who pursues an alternative to slavery” (38). The payoff of this line of thinking is not only a clearer understanding of the formation of the “founders constellation,” but also how and why a dynamic figure such as Burr is excluded.

Chapters two and three offer significant and exciting new interpretations of the racial underpinnings of republican fantasy in Brown’s Ormond and Tenney’s Female Quixotism respectively. While this pairing might seem unexpected, Drexler and White convincingly argue that both Brown and Tenney “propose an Africanist presence” (43) as their unspeakable traumatic kernel. In Brown’s novel, a “secret witness” motif culminates in Ormond’s posturing as a black chimney sweep, whereas in Tenney’s, the failed match between the northern heroine Dorcasina and her southern suitor symbolizes unresolvable regional tensions that are finally suppressed as comedy, when Dorcasina ends her days under the care of her black servant, Scipio. These readings push beyond the “familiar mode of analysis focusing on cultural discourses mapped through ostensibly realist plot development” (70) by carefully drawing out these novels’ formal structuring of racial fantasy alongside the previously established patterns located in representations of the founders. Drexler and White observe a similarity of racial fantasy in both nonfiction accounts of the founders and in period fiction where both genres reveal how “black slavery is the fundamentally repressed problem of republicanism” (70).

This insight carries into chapters four and five by taking up the significance of the Haitian Revolution and Burr’s complicated political legacy, exploring contemporary discursive accounts of his rise to prominence in the presidential election tie of 1800 as well as accusations of conspiracy and treason that symbolically mark him as a racially coded fallen founder located permanently outside the founders constellation.

Whether or not readers are ultimately convinced by Drexler and White’s interpretation of the symbolic functioning of “the Burr,” the exciting possibilities of their innovative parallactic method should make The Traumatic Colonel required reading for advanced students and practitioners of both literary and historical studies. Their intervention promises a stimulating, expanded purview for those working within early American studies.

This article originally appeared in issue 15.4 (Summer, 2015).

Melissa Adams-Campbell is assistant professor of English at Northern Illinois University. Her areas of research include race and gender in the Atlantic world, early American fiction, and Native American oral and print traditions. She is the author of New World Courtships: Transatlantic Alternatives to Companionate Marriage (forthcoming fall 2015 from Dartmouth College Press).

“I now hold, as I have ever done, that the original intent and meaning of the Constitution (the one given to it by the men who framed it, those who adopted it, and the one given to it by the Supreme Court of the United States) makes it a pro-slavery instrument which I cannot bring myself to vote under, or swear to support.” (Frederick Douglass, 1849) 

“I hold that the Federal Government was never, in its essence, anything but an anti-slavery government. Abolish slavery tomorrow, and not a sentence or syllable of the Constitution needs to be altered. It was purposely so framed as to give no claim, no sanction to the claim, of property in man.” (Frederick Douglass, 1863)

Those who live long lives in turbulent times may change their ideas without changing their principles, and Frederick Douglass—constantly studied as an exemplar of enslavement and escape, too seldom studied as a thinker—was no exception. In the 1840s, Douglass, one of the nation’s most prominent abolitionists, told audiences all across the northern states and in Europe that there was a deep and abiding connection between slavery and the 1787 Constitution. As Douglass noted in New York City in May 1845, in a speech that my U.S. History class at the Lawrenceville School read after reading portions of Douglass’s first autobiography, “all the states were united in one constitution and that constitution protected and supported slavery.” The “twenty six States that blaze forth” on the “flag, proclaim a compact to return me to bondage if I run away, and keep me in bondage if I submit,” maintained Douglass. After the publication of his best-selling Narrative in the spring of 1845, Douglass, who was still legally a slave, was in considerable danger and had to flee to England for safety. He returned a year later, a free man after British sympathizers purchased his freedom, and started an abolitionist newspaper in Rochester, New York. By the early 1850s, Douglass had shifted in his thinking about the Constitution. In 1852, in his famous Fourth of July Address, he maintained that the “principles” of the Constitution were “entirely hostile to slavery.”

Leading a student project that analyzed Douglass’s 1859-60 lecture tour of Great Britain prompted me to revisit how I was teaching the time period and to look closely at Douglass’s evolving understanding of the Constitution. Douglass’s speeches provided a window into the ways in which abolitionists thought about what the Constitution meant in 1859-60 and, most importantly, what it could or should become in the future. As Henry David Thoreau noted in an essay on slavery, the “law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free.” Ultimately, my students and I had to consider how to make sense of the Douglass of the 1840s, who viewed the Constitution as a “covenant with death,” and the Douglass of the 1850s, who adhered to an antislavery reading of the Constitution. Most abolitionists lost hope that they would ever see the end of slavery after the passage of the draconian 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, but Douglass’s faith in the Constitution and in the political process only grew.

Most U.S. history texts, such as The American Pageant and Alan Brinkley’s American History, focus on the prominent Boston abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison and his close followers, who believed that the Constitution was a “covenant with death,” but generally do not discuss those radical abolitionists who believed that the Constitution not only provided a way to end slavery immediately everywhere in the United States but also enshrined the natural law principles of the Declaration of Independence into law. As historian James Colaiaco has argued, Douglass disregarded the “extrinsic intentions of the framers” in order to promote a constitutional “framework” that could serve to “implement the natural rights proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence.” Douglass’s positions sparked an interesting debate in my classroom about the various ways to interpret the Constitution.

Douglass in Exile

Douglass’s ship arrived in Liverpool in late November 1859. Douglass stayed with the Methodist minister H.O. Crofts, the husband of Julia Griffiths, a close friend and former editorial assistant with whom he worked closely in Rochester. A few weeks into his stay he received word that John Brown had been sent to the gallows. My students and I were initially surprised that Douglass commenced his lecture series in Halifax in December 1859 not with talks on Brown and Harpers Ferry or calls for “arms” and “materials of war” to be used to “rescue slaves by force,” but rather on the dangers of the Garrisonian doctrine of non-intervention and how to curb what he saw as the “nationalisation” of the institution after the infamous Supreme Court decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). Within days of the capture of the abolitionist John Brown at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859, Douglass fled the United States. This was the second time that Douglass had to flee the country of his birth in order to save his life. The discovery by the authorities of a brief but incriminating note he wrote to Brown led Douglass to fear that he too would be put on trial in Virginia. Even “if the Courts of that slave state should acquit me, as they would not have been very likely to do, I could never hope to get out of that state alive,” wrote Douglass in a telling letter to the Irish abolitionist Maria Webb. “If they did not kill me for being concerned with Dear Old Brown,” they would have done so “for my being Frederick Douglass.”

Even though he was on the run, Douglass remained hopeful that the political foundations of the nation would lead to a peaceful end to human bondage. At the center of this optimism was his understanding of the antislavery nature of the Constitution, the very document his old friend and mentor Garrison had publicly burned in a large Fourth of July celebration in Framingham, Massachusetts, six years before. Even though he was on the run with a bounty on his head, Douglass never lost faith in the ability of the American political system to crush what abolitionists called the “Slave Power.” Douglass did not promote John Brown’s constitution while in Great Britain; instead, he railed against Garrisonian attacks on the federal Constitution, for if the document condoned slavery, then Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott was legitimate. In his opinion for the court, Taney declared that the property rights of slave owners were absolute and that the federal government could not interfere with slavery. Douglass called for more antislavery politicians in the vein of Republicans William Henry Seward, Charles Sumner, and John Parker Hale, who advocated for the use of federal power to stop the expansion of slavery and end slavery in the territories. Douglass believed that the election of an antislavery president was close at hand. Douglass urged abolitionists in England and Scotland to hold fast to the antislavery principles that had been thrown aside by Taney and to work with their American counterparts in putting antislavery men into office.

Douglass and mainstream Republicans were in complete agreement that there was “not a word” in the Constitution that favored the idea of “holding property in man.” Douglass, however, believed that the Constitution could be used to eradicate slavery everywhere and not just in the federal territories or the District of Columbia. In making his textual arguments, Douglass drew from a small and varied, but nonetheless powerful, body of legal scholarship that dated back to the 1830s. Radical antislavery constitutionalists agreed that the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, along with the privileges and immunities clause in Article IV, Section 2, and the guarantee of republican government in Article IV, Section 4, all undermined the slave system. Douglass was influenced in his thinking by Gerrit Smith, Alvan Stewart, Lysander Spooner, the somewhat unhinged George Washington Mellen (he spent time in a padded room for professing that he was the real George Washington), and, most importantly, William Goodell, author of the 1844 Views of American Constitutional Law. Goodell was a forceful proponent of the use of the guarantee of republican government clause in the Constitution to destroy the slave system.

In his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass declared that he “became convinced” after reading the works of Goodell and Spooner, and conversing with his close friend and mentor Gerrit Smith, that “the constitution of the United States not only contained no guarantees in favor of slavery, but, on the contrary, it is, in its letter and spirit, an anti-slavery instrument, demanding the abolition of slavery as a condition of its own existence, as the supreme law of the land.” In January 1851, he told Smith, a wealthy New York abolitionist, that he had “decided to let Slaveholders and their Northern abettors have the Laboring oar in putting a proslavery interpretation upon the Constitution.” Douglass believed that an antislavery reading of the Constitution could assist abolitionists in their quest to destroy the Slave Power. In 1855, Douglass helped to form the Radical Political Abolitionist Party, which affirmed the antislavery nature of the Constitution and the necessity of protecting human rights.

Douglass vs. Thompson

Douglass’s frequent attacks on a proslavery reading of the Constitution in his lectures in England and Scotland brought him into conflict with the prominent abolitionist George Thompson (1804-1878) who, like Garrison, advocated for disavowal from politics and for disunion. Thompson criticized Douglass for going back on positions he had articulated while on a lecture tour of Great Britain in the mid-1840s and urged him to return to his old view that slavery was, to borrow a phrase from historian William Wiecek, “the witch” at the nation’s “christening.” In his lecture at Glasgow City Hall on February 28, Thompson argued that Douglass’s views fifteen years earlier supported the Garrisonian notion that the Union needed to be dissolved “as the first effectual step towards the overthrow of slavery.” After offering the audience a brief history of Bloody Kansas and John Brown, along with the Dred Scott case, Thompson turned to the constitutional arguments of the Republicans, a party he despised but one that he believed was indeed acting in accordance with the limited powers granted under the Constitution. Antislavery men from the free states were duty bound to “support the Constitution. They could not, without adding perjury to treason, assail the rights of the Southern States in the matter of slavery within their borders,” declared Thompson.

On March 26, 1860, in the Queen’s Rooms, an ornate building near the medieval University of Glasgow, Douglass took on Thompson’s arguments and presented a learned analysis of the antislavery nature of the Constitution. Before reading the essay, my students and I read the opening of a lengthy article by the eminent legal scholars Jack Balkin and Sanford Levinson on the “canons of constitutional law.” Balkin and Levinson ask the all-important question of why textbooks devote so much attention to Taney’s opinion in Dred Scott, a ruling that leading constitutional scholars then and now believed to be fundamentally wrong, and hardly any attention at all to Douglass’s speech.

Douglass did not deny that abolitionists and slaveholders had given the Constitution a proslavery reading—“But it does not follow that the Constitution is in favour of these wrongs because the slaveholders have given it that interpretation.” Douglass believed that the text of the Constitution “authorized nothing inconsistent with natural justice, and men’s natural rights.” Dubbing George Thompson an “assailant,” Douglass sought to separate issues that Thompson had joined together. In Douglass’s analysis, neither the existence of a Slave Power, nor slaveholders’ participation in the framing process, meant that the Constitution was a proslavery compact. Rather, the real question for Douglass was simple: “Does the United States Constitution guarantee to any class or description of people in that country the right to enslave or hold as property any other class or description of people in that country?”

Douglass chastised those who looked for hidden motives of the Framers. “It was not what they tried, nor what they concealed; it was what they wrote down, not what they kept back, that the people adopted” in 1787. It was the “paper itself, with its own plainly written purposes” that citizens had to turn to understand the “purpose and object.” He took Thompson to task for adjusting the language of clauses that Garrisonians had been arguing for decades were supportive of slavery.

Antislavery Constitutionalism

As my students knew from reading an informative two-part essay on slavery and the Constitution by historian Paul Finkelman, there were four clauses that Garrison and his close ally Wendell Phillips frequently cited in order to highlight the proslavery nature of the Constitution: Article I, Section 2 (three-fifths clause); Article I, Section 8 (insurrection clause); Article I, Section 9 (slave trade clause); Article IV, Section 2 (fugitive slave clause). Douglass was not convinced. “I deny utterly that these provisions of the constitution guarantee, or were intended to guarantee, in any shape or form, the right of property in man in the United States” (emphasis in original). Article I, Section 9, for example, provided for the continuance of the “migration or importation” of persons. In his speech, Thompson simply said “continuance of the African slave-trade.” However, “slave” or “slave trade” are not in the original text, and for Douglass this was significant. “I repeat, the paper itself, and only the paper itself with its own plainly written purposes is the constitution of the United States,” said Douglass. The document must “stand or fall, flourish or fade, on its own individual and self-declared purpose and object.” Whatever “we may owe to the framers of the Constitution, we certainly owe this to ourselves, and to mankind, and to God: that we maintain the truth of our own language, and do not allow villainy, not even villainy of slaveholding … to clothe itself in the garb of virtuous language.”

Presenting a nuanced and creative reading of the three-fifths clause in Article I, Section 2, Douglass argued that in reality the clause laid a “disability on the slaveholding states; one which deprives those states of two-fifths of their natural basis of representation.” Douglass maintained that the clause created an incentive for slave states to liberate their slaves to increase their representation. As for the insurrection clause in Article I, Douglass put forth the argument that the institution of slavery itself actually constituted an insurrection and, therefore, the executive was required to use any means necessary to stop it. Douglass in this sense offered a preview of Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

As Wiecek has argued, Douglass urged abolitionists to “discern what the Constitution might be” and not view it from the long perspective of the past. Douglass asked the audience in Glasgow to think about the meaning of the Preamble when contemplating the relationship between slavery and the Constitution:

Here are its own objects as set forth by itself:—“We, the people of these United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United States of America.” The objects here set forth are six in number: union, defense, welfare, tranquility, justice, and liberty. These are all good objects, and slavery, so far from being among them, is a foe of them all. But it has been said that Negroes are not included within the benefits sought under this declaration. This is said by the slaveholders in America—it is said by the City Hall orator—but it is not said by the Constitution itself. Its language is “we the people;” not we the white people, not even we the citizens, not we the privileged class, not we the high, not we the low, but we the people; not we the horses, sheep, and swine, and wheel-barrows, but we the people, we the human inhabitants; and, if Negroes are people, they are included in the benefits for which the Constitution of America was ordained and established. But how dare any man who pretends to be a friend to the Negro thus gratuitously concede away what the Negro has a right to claim under the Constitution?

Even though the full implication of his positions were ones that mainstream antislavery politicians did not readily accept, Douglass joined prominent figures such as Salmon Chase and Gamaliel Bailey in espousing a powerful antislavery constitutionalism that confronted claims by slaveholders that the framers of the Constitution had enshrined slavery in national law. While the Douglass of the 1850s was not the same Douglass of the 1840s when it came to understanding the Constitution, there is one element that connects the two periods: in each decade Douglass sought a way to destroy the Slave Power. Once he deemed the tactics of moral suasion espoused by the Garrisonians as unworkable, he opened his mind to a powerful body of literature on the Constitution and eventually came around to the idea that the founding document was the best weapon he had at his disposal to attack the Slave Power.

As my students and I realized, Douglass certainly saw the complexity of American politics before the Civil War. In line with Abraham Lincoln or William Seward, Douglass declared, “I, on the other hand, deny that the Constitution guarantees the right to hold property in men, and believe that the way, the true way, to abolish slavery in America is to vote such men into power as will exert their moral and political influence for the abolition of slavery.” The “American people have gone quite too far in this slaveholding business now to sum up their whole business of slavery by singing out the cant phrase, ‘No union with slaveholders,’” declared Douglass at the close of his speech in Glasgow, taking one more shot at the Garrisonians. “To desert the family hearth may place the recreant husband out of the presence of his starving children, but this does not free him from responsibility.”

Douglass and Republicans were more in line with each other than perhaps historians give credit for. Yet, in the end, my students also pointed out where Douglass and the Republicans departed. Unlike Lincoln, Douglass believed that blacks were fully equal to whites and deserved the privileges and immunities of citizenship. He had, of course, been making this point on the lecture circuit for nearly twenty years, but now he linked his call for equality with an antislavery reading of the Constitution. Douglass believed in Lincoln’s argument that the Union and the Constitution were the “last best hope” for democracy in the modern world, but they differed in their understanding of how expansive the democracy should be. For Douglass, the privileges and immunities of citizenship were assured by the Constitution. Both Douglass and members of the Republican Party asserted that the Constitution regarded slaves as persons and not property. However, Douglass was also compelled to attack the part of Taney’s ruling in Dred Scott that declared that blacks were never and could never be citizens of the United States. Racial discrimination was a deprivation of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. While abroad, Douglass consistently reminded his audiences that he still believed that white Americans were “false to their institutions.”

American political leaders, according to Douglass, all too frequently declared that “all men were created equal, except negroes; all men were entitled to life, liberty and to pursue happiness, except negroes; all men were protected in life, liberty, and property, except negroes.” In the aftermath of the brutal civil war that claimed the lives of over 700,000 Americans, Douglass’s expansive understanding of the meaning of citizenship would finally become a part of our constitutional discourse. Douglass’s speeches in England and Scotland in early 1860 serve as a bridge connecting the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. Equal protection of laws and the privileges and immunities of national citizenship—the hallmarks of the Fourteenth Amendment—originated in the writings of those abolitionists who saw the Constitution as an antislavery vehicle.

Acknowledgments

The author dedicates this article to the History Department at the Lawrenceville School.

Further Reading

David Blight’s Frederick Douglass’ Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Amherst, 1991), John Stauffer’s Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, Mass., 2004), and John Colaiaco’s thoroughly engaging Frederick Douglass and the Fourth of July (New York, 2007) helped me to understand Douglass’s transformation to a proponent of an antislavery reading of the Constitution. I also benefited from reading Peter Myers, Frederick Douglass: Race and the Rebirth of American Liberalism (Lawrence, Kan., 2008). On the role of slavery at the Constitutional Convention see David Waldstreicher, Slavery’s Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification (New York, 2009). Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, Conn., 2016) devotes considerable attention to radical abolitionists in the 1840s and 1850s, along with the contributions of British Garrisonians. W. Caleb McDaniel’s The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery (Baton Rouge, 2013) is also a must-read for anyone looking to understand the Garrisonians. The place to start on abolitionist readings of the Constitution is William M. Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America, 1760-1848 (Ithaca, N.Y., 1977) and his earlier work, The Guarantee Clause of the United States Constitution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1972). On the role of abolitionist theory in the creation of the Fourteenth Amendment see Jacobus tenBroek, The Antislavery Origins of the Fourteenth Amendment (New York, 1951) and James McPherson’s classic, The Struggle for Equality (Princeton, N.J., 1967). James Oakes’ The Radical and the Republican: Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln and the Triumph of Antislavery Politics (New York, 2008), along with his newer book, The Scorpion’s Sting: Antislavery and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2014), are absolutely essential for understanding the political world that Douglass discusses in the speeches mentioned in this essay. See also Douglas R. Egerton’s informative discussion of the politics of the 1850s in Year of Meteors: Stephen Douglas, Abraham Lincoln and the Election that Brought on the Civil War (New York, 2010) and Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005). I relied on editor John Blassingame’s third volume of Douglass’s speeches (1855-1863), published in 1985 by Yale University Press, for this essay.

This article originally appeared in issue 16.4 (September, 2016).

Erik J. Chaput, Ph.D., is a History Master at the Lawrenceville School, a college preparatory boarding school in New Jersey, and a member of the teaching faculty in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013) and the co-editor with Russell J. DeSimone of the Letters of Thomas Wilson Dorr and the Letters of John Brown Francis, which can be found on the Dorr Rebellion project site hosted by Providence College.

Almost one million people flock to the National Archives on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., each year to see, among other things, the United States Constitution. The National Constitution Center (NCC), set to open in Philadelphia on July 4, 2003, expects one million annually to troop through its doors as well. But reverence does not imply knowledge. Despite the high interest in the document that these attendance numbers might suggest, public opinion research and visitor studies conducted over the last two decades demonstrate that the Constitution remains, as Michael Kammen once wrote, “swathed in pride yet obscured by indifference.” Many National Archives visitors whom I interviewed last summer saw their trip to D.C. as a pilgrimage to a sacred shrine. Yet when queried about the particulars of the Constitution, many people cannot accurately quote the document or determine its function.

Despite the Constitution’s famed Preamble establishing “the people” as the sovereign power from which all governmental authority derives, the American public came rather late to a first-hand knowledge of the document. Delegates at the 1787 Constitutional Convention maintained strict secrecy during the proceedings. Windows were shuttered; a ban was imposed upon speaking of the proceedings outside of the room. Local papers gave little hint of momentous happenings in the city as they continued to be fascinated with the “Male child of the most extraordinary size ever known,” which they labeled “the greatest phenenomom [sic] of the present age.”

After the proceedings, beginning with the Pennsylvania Packet on September 19, 1787, newspapers did print the Constitution and the public debate that ensued over the next two years of the ratification process. In 1796, a school text entitled A Plain Political Catechism also was published. Few other books or pamphlets, however, were published for the general public to explain the Constitution in the early years of the nation. By the 1850s, statesmen were lamenting the lack of common knowledge about the document’s contents.

But while public familiarity with the Constitution languished, reverence for the document as the foundation of the American system grew. Beginning in 1916, a movement to allow the public greater access to the Constitution–both the document itself and its contents–began with a suggestion to mark September 17 as Constitution Day. The movement gained momentum during the next decade as a way to fight socialism and communism. By the 1920s, the Constitution had become as sacred a text as the Declaration of Independence, if not more so.

This interest eventually led to a more public presentation of the Constitution as physical artifact. The general public had not seen the document much during its first hundred years. Moved from one storage facility to another, it was the property of the State Department. In 1920, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution finally were put on display together. In 1921 President Harding had the documents transferred from the State Department to the Library of Congress where a “shrine” was dedicated in 1924 in a second floor display area. With the advent of film, educational materials helped to spread images of the Constitution’s likeness–if not knowledge of the document’s contents–to students and adults.

Despite these measures, by the last half of the twentieth century, popular knowledge of the Constitution, its history and its principles, was poor. A 1943 National Opinion Research Center study showed that only 23 percent of respondents could correctly name some of the rights protected by the Bill of Rights. In 1947, the Gallup Poll noted that 41 percent had no knowledge of the contents of the Bill of Rights. On the bicentennial of the Constitution in 1987, a study by the College of Education at the University of Houston reported that 46 percent of those queried did not know that the Constitution created a system of government.

In the most recent NCC poll, conducted by Minda Borun in November 2001, two-thirds of respondents could not identify the Constitution as the outline for U.S. government, while less than one-fourth could correctly pick three items in the Constitution from a list of six choices. People seemed to recognize their ignorance. In another NCC study, only 12 percent of respondents claimed to know “a great deal” about the Constitution, with others avoiding taking the survey out of self-professed shame.

Two core areas of confusion reign. The first one is that many people mix the elements of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. According to the 2001 NCC study, 71 percent of those surveyed thought the Constitution, rather than the Declaration, guaranteed citizens “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” And, in a similar poll in 1997, over a third of respondents also identified “all men are created equal” as a quote from the Bill of Rights.

The second area of confusion concerns the relationship between the Bill of Rights and the Constitution itself. One curriculum writer under contract for the NCC stated, before corrected, that the Constitution had a preamble and a bill of rights, leaving out the central articles that create the foundation of the system. No wonder that students, therefore, are especially confused.

Teachers at the Delaware Council of Social Studies 2001 Conference identified the Bill of Rights as the one part of the Constitution that students knew. At the fifth grade level, students simply knew the Bill of Rights existed. By middle school, the students knew one part of the First Amendment–the freedom of speech. By high school, they were familiar with almost all ten of the amendments, but they still were not highly cognizant of the rest of the document. Teachers attributed this phenomenon to the fact that the Bill of Rights was the only part of the Constitution that seemed relevant to the students in their daily lives.

Lack of obvious relevance of the document to the daily life of ordinary people is one reason we seem to retain so little factual knowledge about the Constitution. In The Presence of the Past, authors Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen conclude that people’s sense of history is personal. “Most Americans simply do not recognize themselves and their families in a distant narrative that . . . equates our national past with the history of the nation state,” they write. Broad national movements matter most when they touch the life of a family member or close friend. Participants in an NCC program where people were asked to sign the Constitution echoed this conclusion, finding little connection between the document and their personal lives. Eighteen percent, even after learning about the document in the program, said that it held no relevance for them. Instead, respect was the emotion they expressed.

In fact, reverence for the document is key to how people today think of the Constitution. As a sacred text in the United States, the Constitution is something most adults believe that children should learn about in school. About one-third of the visitors to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., on July 2, 2001, came to the Archives with at least one child under twelve, many having made the trip in order to show the documents on display to their child or even because the child, having studied the Constitution in school, wanted to see it. As one woman from California said, her “children wanted to come to D.C.” and she decided they should “see the document.” Indeed, many deemed the visit important enough to wait with their children nearly an hour on a hot, steamy afternoon. As a parent of a sixth grader put it, seeing the Constitution “reinforces a feeling of being American.”

Once people cleared the metal detectors into the Archives, they entered the dark and very cold interior only to encounter more lines. A security guard informed them that they could go around the perimeter of the rotunda and see other documents like the Magna Carta on their way, or “fast-track” to see only the Declaration and Constitution. About half chose the straight and narrow route to the American scriptures, while a quarter of the visitors waiting in line to enter the building had said they came specifically to see the Constitution. It is a “national treasure,” “the foundation of the country,” as some waiting to see it commented. No one other document received as many mentions as the motivating factor for the visit.

Thirteen percent of those exiting the Archives also said they had come specifically to see that document. The discrepancy in numbers suggests that the Constitution has good name recall. When asked to name something housed in the National Archives, visitors could remember the Constitution. The discrepancy also may suggest that when visitors have seen all of the exhibits, it is harder to recall one specific reason for the visit. After leaving the Archives, as many people said their visit was to see the Declaration as the Constitution.

The item that people noted as most interesting about the Constitution also differed between pre- and postvisit. Before seeing the Constitution, over one-third of the people I talked to said they were most interested in the history behind the document and its significance to American history. Fewer than one in five expressed interest in the physical nature of the object itself. After viewing the Constitution, however, half of the visitors commented on the physical nature of the document: its preservation and legibility.

The signatures at the end of the document (fig. 2) fascinated visitors. One elderly man was excited to see that one signer had his last name. Others were frustrated by the darkness of the room and the illegibility of the writing, commenting that the text “was hard to see.” Yet others focused on the act of signing itself and the meaning of such an act. “What must it have been like to be a founder?” one visitor wondered.

The act of signing one’s name indicated a commitment. In the “signing” program mentioned above, almost half of the respondents indicated that signing was “a public endorsement of a set of beliefs.” One participant indicated his signature meant, “I agree with what it says.” Others went beyond content to personal affirmation, reenacting the role of Founder. “It’s a pledge–reminds us of where we stand.” “I felt like, when I was signing it, I was making a decision.”

The legibility of the framers’ signatures also made viewers think about the preservation of the document. Perhaps because the National Archives survey was done the weekend before the building closed for two years of renovations, visitors were quite observant of the lighting conditions, the quality of the paper, and overall state of preservation of the Constitution. Most felt the document was in poor condition, but a few commented on how thrilled they were that something of its age still existed, though the Constitution was far from the oldest document on view.

The experience of seeing the “real thing” was the most common postvisit response I heard during the Archives survey. “It’s cool to see the original document,” offered one viewer. “It fills me with a great sense of meaning.” In other museums in which I have worked, I also have heard again and again people comment on the “real-ness” of the artifact or the environment. Merely to be in the presence of what is considered an authentic relic of the past is a personal connection, a way to engage with history, even if the engagement consists only of viewing.

As I observed visitors in front of the Constitution in the Archives’ exhibit, I noted that half in fact did nothing but look–and then for an average of thirteen seconds. Out of that quick looking, however, came strong responses, from a cryptic “you don’t want to know,” to an excited “amazing!” When asked the most interesting thing about the Constitution, one person replied reverently that “just being in its presence” was awe inspiring.

Reverence incorporates honor, respect, deference, and veneration. But also distance. The object of reverence is a faraway thing, part of the then and there, rather than the here and now. Perhaps this is why some 91 percent of those surveyed by the NCC in 1997 said the Constitution is important, while just over 10 percent claimed to know much about it.

If reverence equals distance, must it also equate with inaction? Report after report documents an alarming lack of civic involvement by many American adults. For instance, in the last presidential election, only 53 percent of those eligible voted. Despite the perceived importance of the Constitution and the emotional impact that viewing the “real thing” made on those I spoke with last July, an understanding of the connection of the document to daily life and of the personal responsibility to uphold the Constitution is lacking. One signing program participant summed up the task ahead for institutions like the National Archives and NCC: “People need to know about this . . . it’s part of being American.”

Further reading: Background on the writing of the Constitution can be found in Catherine Drinker Bowen, Miracle in Philadelphia (Boston, 1966) and Gordon S. Wood, The American Revolution: A History (New York, 2002). For a more detailed history, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (Chapel Hill, 1969). The following books discuss Americans’ understanding of history in general as well as the Constitution specifically: Michael Kammen, A Machine That Would Go Of Itself: The Constitution in American Culture (New York, 1986) and Roy Rosenzweig and David Thelen, The Presence of the Past: Popular Uses of History in American Life (New York, 1998). In addition, the following works explore visitors’ desire for “real” objects and their definitions of and abilities for interactivity: Amber Combs, “Why Do They Come? Listening to Visitors at a Decorative Arts Museum,” Curator 42/3 (July 1999): 186-97, Lisa C. Roberts, From Knowledge to Narrative: Educators and the Changing Museum (Washington, D.C., 1997), Beth A. Twiss-Garrity, “Children as Museum Visitors,” Current Trends in Audience Research and Evaluation 13 (May 2000): 71-81, and Stephen Pinker, How the Mind Works (New York, 1977). The visitor statistics come from “What Americans Don’t Know about the Constitution,” The College of Education/Collaboration for Learning and Leading, University of Houston; Suzanne Soule, “We the People . . . The Citizen and the Constitution: Knowledge of and Support for Democratic Institutions and Processes by Participating Students,” Center for Civic Education; “Startling Lack of Constitutional Knowledge Revealed in First-Ever National Poll,” The National Constitution Center Applied Research and Consulting LLC, NCC, “I Signed the Constitution Report,” National Constitution Center (1999); Minda Borun, “National Constitution Center Survey,” National Constitution Center, 2001, and data generated by the author and intern Jennifer Phillips while surveying visitors on July 2, 2001, at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. A review of 1787 Philadelphia newspapers is found in Martha Crary Halpern, “Laurel Hall and the Year 1787” for the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia, 1987).

This article originally appeared in issue 2.4 (July, 2002).

Beth A. Twiss-Garrity is vice president, Interpretation for the National Constitution Center, opening July 4, 2003, on Philadelphia’s Independence Mall. Her publications include “Material Culture as Text: Review and Reform of the Literacy Model for Interpretation” in American Material Culture: The Shape of the Field (Winterthur, Del., 1997); and “Listening to Our Visitors’ Voices” in Old Collections, New Audiences: Decorative Arts and Visitor Experience for the 21st Century (Dearborn, Mich., 2000).

“We the People” once had many ways of exercising their sovereignty besides those ordained and established in the Federal Constitution.

Citizen Protests

Indebted farmers in Western Massachusetts had little to show after years of petitioning the legislature for relief from the state’s post-revolution fiscal policies. With their appeals unanswered and their economic plight deepening, they began organizing countywide meetings as they had during the Revolution. This time those efforts produced little relief. Finally, on August 29, 1786, some 1,500 farmers crowded the Court of Common Pleas at Northampton, preventing the court from meeting. They did not challenge the court’s legitimacy. Rather, the farmers sought a temporary suspension of debt collections to give the legislature time to redress “their grievances.”

The Northampton court closing, along with later actions of the farmers, raised the specter of revolution not just in Massachusetts, but across America. The Massachusetts events acquired the name “Shays’ Rebellion.” They have been cited ever since as one reason for replacing the Articles of Confederation with a new federal Constitution that supposedly saved the country from spiraling into rebellion and discord. Most historical accounts have followed suit, depicting the farmers as the losers in their confrontation with state government and in a larger struggle to determine if “tumultuous meetings” and armed resistance could be legitimate ways for the sovereign people to express their will.

Yet at the time, the political leaders we now call the Founders differed sharply over what the Massachusetts incidents really signified.

John Adams considered the farmers’ actions “seditious,” even their peaceful conventions and petitions, and referred to the Massachusetts events as an “insurrection.” Others, like James Madison, were clearly worried about the “turbulent scenes” in Massachusetts, but did not see them as rising to the level of revolution. Madison came to wonder if the government’s reaction to the farmers—including their violent suppression by a state-sanctioned private army—was a harmful overreaction. A few leaders, like Thomas Jefferson, considered the Massachusetts “commotions” a minor inconvenience of rule by a people who had won the Revolution. The Massachusetts incidents reflected the “liberty” Americans now possessed to rock the boat of government on occasion, and a little “turbulence” would not sink it.

In essence, historical and popular understandings of the American constitutional tradition have adopted the contentions of only one side of this debate and its role in bringing about the 1787 constitution. In doing so, these accounts miss much of that tradition’s actual history. The Massachusetts farmers were largely vindicated in the aftermath of their so-called rebellion. In the next state election following the “suppression” of the alleged rebels, those supporting forceful measures against the farmers lost control of the governorship and the lower house of the legislature. In this respect, the views of “defeated rebels” turned out to more closely mirror the attitudes of the populace and eventually exercised a strong influence on the direction of policy. That the farmers were as comfortable about expressing the will of the people through direct action as they were in going to the polls was a source of considerable consternation to their opponents.

Understanding why the meaning of the Massachusetts events divided Americans at the time, as well as its significance to America’s constitutional development today, requires understanding the constitutional mindset of the Massachusetts farmers and their opponents. It was not only what the Massachusetts farmers were doing, but how they defended themselves that alarmed their opponents. The fact that the farmers justified their actions in constitutional terms galvanized the Americans who framed and later supported the federal Constitution to move in a very different direction. Despite their different views of constitutionalism, the two sides in the 1787 debate both reflected ideas unleashed by the American Revolution.

American Constitutionalism’s Revolutionary Heritage

After declaring independence, Americans saw themselves as revolutionaries, but not as rebels. They maintained this distinction because they had exercised a people’s collective right to cast off an arbitrary king, as they had George III.  Both natural law and English constitutional doctrine gave the colonists a right to revolt against a monarch’s oppression. But in rejecting George III, Americans had no ready replacement with a traditional claim on their loyalty.  Few American revolutionaries worried about this. They assumed that the people themselves were the new and rightful sovereign, rather than a monarch. They established new state governments based on written constitutions. In thus implementing the theory of the people as the sovereign, Americans created a new and distinct revolutionary constitutionalism that would prove extraordinarily powerful and difficult to control.

While the theory of the people exercising power as the sovereign was not original to Americans, actually building governments on that foundation was new to world history. Most governments at the time were monarchies or expressions of raw power. Few examples existed of a people deliberately creating their own government. Thus, Americans found themselves in a unique position. As a South Carolina pamphleteer observed, Americans could fashion their own governments because they had freed themselves from “the control of hereditary rulers and arbitrary force.”

Written state constitutions adopted in the 1770s expressed Americans’ belief that they could, as Thomas Paine explained in Common Sense, exercise their “power to begin the world over again.” A congressional delegate from Connecticut, Oliver Wolcott, described America’s constitution-making in 1776 as a “Real” and not a theoretical expression of the people’s will. In a Fourth of July oration in 1778, historian David Ramsay captured the novelty of America’s constitutions: “We are the first people in the world who have had it in their power to choose their own form of government.” Before the American Revolution, constitutions were “forced on all other nations” or “formed by accident, caprice,” or “prevailing practices.”

In the setting of the Old World, constitutions often represented a grant of specific rights or liberties to the people by the sovereign. In contrast, as Madison described, the American constitutions were “charters” by the people as the sovereign, granting to government specific powers. Achieving independence confirmed for most Americans the truth of their revolutionary aspirations. The deficiencies that hampered their war effort were overshadowed by the vindication that victory gave to their idealism. Their revolution ushered in governments that made it possible for the people to be the sovereign.

As Colonel Benjamin Hichborn, a Boston lawyer, expressed it in 1777, this sovereignty was expansive. It entailed “a power existing in the people at large, at any time, for any cause, or for no cause, but their own sovereign pleasure, to alter or annihilate . . . any former government and adopt a new one in its stead.” There were doubters, of course. In that same year Pennsylvania revolutionary Dr. Benjamin Rush qualified claims “that ‘all power is derived from the People.’” This was undoubtedly true, believed Rush, but it did not mean “that all power is seated in the people.” They might be the source of power, but the actual exertion of that power on a day-to-day basis should be vested in the government and office-holders the people selected.

Independence intensified the struggle over what it meant that the people were the sovereign. Americans grappled with how they as the collective sovereign could, like a king, speak clearly in one voice on local as well as on national concerns in their large and diverse country. For some, a natural solution to discerning the voice of the sovereign was found in what we might call “proceduralism.” One would know the true will of the people only with their use of specified procedures established by the constitution.

But even this commitment to formal legal procedures by its most emphatic advocates was not absolute. The belief that a constitution’s requirements for changing the constitution should be observed gave way to the recognition that the government was still the servant of the people as the sovereign. Thus, as the sovereign, a majority of the people could dispense with the procedures required by the constitution for change. As a practical matter, to those believing in this proceduralism, the principle worked in two ways. If the servant of the people—the government—recognized a change the people made without using the established procedures, the legitimacy of the change went unquestioned. But if government refused to validate an alleged change made outside the constitutionally established procedures, the use of those procedures was necessary to legitimize the change and validate the fact that the sovereign had spoken.

One instance of the supple utility of the authority of the people to overcome supposedly mandatory procedures came with the revision of Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution. Critics of that “radical” constitution were stymied in their efforts for constitutional change. They had been unable to muster the constitutional requirement of a two-thirds vote by a Council of Censors that only met every seven years to consider whether or not to hold a new constitutional convention. By 1790 those critics controlled the legislature and they bypassed the 1776 constitution’s requirements for constitutional change by initiating a convention themselves. They argued that “the people” as the sovereign could replace the existing constitution without following its procedures, and called for elections of delegates to a constitutional convention that created a new constitution for the state. This was the same tactic used to replace the Articles of Confederation with the federal Constitution.

The Proceduralist Vision of Rule by the People

Today the idea that we know the will of the sovereign only through the exclusive use of specific formal procedures—such as elections and constitutional amendment—seems self-evident. For the revolutionary generation this was not immediately apparent. The recent experience of their successful revolution clearly taught them that proceduralism was not the only way to recognize when the sovereign had spoken. Often during the Revolution there was no way that traditionally accepted procedures could lend legitimacy to their struggle. Proceduralism provided one way, but not the only way, to confirm that the people had expressed their will. But with military victory, applying the principle of the collective sovereign’s ability to act directly, without the aid of procedural verification, became a growing source of dispute among America’s leaders, and between those leaders and some of their constituents.

To understand this dispute, the modern reader must resist assuming that our ordered world was anticipated by members of the revolutionary generation. Many of their ideas about rule through a constitution—ideas they seriously discussed, considered, and acted upon—are foreign to our present constitutional understandings and near-absolute commitment to proceduralism. Yet, the historical record offers abundant evidence that our constitutional tradition has evolved from many different and earlier constitutional understandings. Appreciating how these ideas gave rise to our present constitutional world requires that we take the past on its own terms to recover a constitutional world that once existed in America.

Today, it is widely assumed that following established procedures and processes is the only basis for legitimate change. From this perspective it seems as if the farmers who closed Northampton’s court lacked any legal or constitutional justification. This conclusion erroneously assumes that the proceduralism we take for granted now was the touchstone of constitutional legitimacy in America then. As my book American Sovereigns suggests, the exclusive use of specific procedures was not so obvious to earlier generations of Americans.

Proceduralism in the Context of Revolutionary Constitutionalism

Americans of the revolutionary generation had a concept of proceduralism, but one significantly different from the one we accept today. Americans then and for quite some time after the Revolution often followed procedures, such as those specifying how a constitution could be changed. But even when those procedural steps were followed, many Americans regarded them as simply useful, not indispensable. The people might well follow specifically mandated procedures to effect change, but utilizing those procedures was not the only way a collective sovereign could legitimately articulate its will.

Indeed, the farmers participating in court-closings during the summer of 1786 saw themselves as the “body of the people” entitled to exercise their sovereignty. They followed the well-known and widely accepted practice employed during the Revolution when crowds, committees of correspondence, and legally unsanctioned gatherings expressed the will of the people. That such a view was vigorously disputed by Massachusetts authorities and their allies underscores the growing difficulty of recognizing when “the people” acted as the collective sovereign. Colonel Hichborn’s 1777 celebration of the power of “the people at large” was consistent with the views of the Massachusetts farmers engaged in the court-closings. Untroubled by his earlier statement, however, Hichborn took a leading role in suppressing the farmers’ movement.

Since the time of the Revolution, ideas drawing upon the authority of the people—frequently reiterated in the constitutions of the 1770s (and in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780)—were used in increasingly expansive ways. The events in Massachusetts frightened many leaders in post-revolutionary America. For those scandalized by citizens presuming to act as the people in closing courts, the “rebellion” in Massachusetts showed how important it was to rein in misguided constitutional understandings and constrain the meaning of American constitutionalism. The legitimacy of direct action was particularly serious because the events in Massachusetts formed part of a broader pattern of popular protests experienced in post-revolutionary America.

The Federal Framers and the People

Not surprisingly, those events influenced the federal Framers in 1787. Among the principles not expressed in the federal Constitution when it was drafted were statements of the rights of the collective sovereign—their primacy over government, their right to scrutinize governors and their government, and their right to alter or abolish government at will. A general concession that governors were the servants of the people and that the collective sovereign had the right to abolish government was one thing, but it was quite another to place words to that effect in the Constitution where it might be invoked willy-nilly. During the convention, James Madison acknowledged that the collective sovereign could “alter constitutions as they pleased.” It was, after all, “a principle in the [state] Bills of rights,” he noted. Still, popular attempts to exercise that right under state constitutions caused difficulties, as the events in Massachusetts demonstrated. Why tempt fate by including similar language in the federal Constitution?

In fact, while “the people” appeared prominently in the Preamble to “ordain and establish” the federal Constitution and later surfaced to elect members of the House of Representatives, they then disappeared from the text of the Constitution. Their absence formed a striking contrast to their presence in many state constitutions in which the people and their collective existence as the sovereign was repeatedly acknowledged. “The people” reappeared in the federal Bill of Rights added by the first Congress, but without any statements comparable to the wide-ranging expressions of the authority and rights of the collective sovereign that were found in the state constitutions. Instead, James Madison drafted the amendments as narrowly worded prohibitions on certain types of legislation. This focus had the effect of deemphasizing the people’s collective rights.

This silence about the people in the federal Constitution did not mean that the federal Framers disputed the idea that the people were the sovereign. In fact, they explicitly invoked the people’s authority in submitting the new federal Constitution for an up-or-down vote even though their convention had only been authorized to revise the Articles of Confederation. The Framers brought about a new federal Constitution in defiance of the procedures that the Articles stipulated for altering its structure by citing the legitimacy that came with the people acting as the sovereign. As Madison put it, the people could “breathe life” into the proposed new Constitution, overcoming any procedural irregularities in its creation.

In this respect, the framing of the federal Constitution was not a singular constitutional event. It was another example of the doctrine of rule by the people. Yet despite their willingness to deploy this doctrine as a political tactic, the Constitution’s supporters were reluctant to acknowledge, much less encourage, the direct authority of the people. The Federalist position simply underscored the tension inherent in the American commitment to the sovereignty of the people. That tension would resurface repeatedly over the next half-century.

The Persistence of Revolutionary Constitutionalism

Many federal Framers—including George Washington—expected the people to assume only a passive role as the sovereign after the adoption of the federal Constitution. These expectations were soon disappointed. Stiff resistance met the attempt to collect the national government’s first tax on a domestic product: an excise on whiskey. Those tax protests illustrate a wider and persistent debate over the people’s relationship to government that the Revolution had not resolved.

That relationship had been at the center of emerging understandings of constitutionalism from the moment Americans acted as the collective sovereign to declare independence and create new governments. Under that conception, government in America was subordinate to the people, and representatives were the people’s agents. As with any principal-agent relationship, the people retained the right to monitor their agents through the constitutional order established under their authority as the collective sovereign. For example, the practice of drafting instructions to guide the actions of legislators—familiar to Americans long before the Revolution—developed a particularly important constitutional significance after independence.

The western farmers who protested the excise tax in the early 1790s embraced a constitutionalism that considered the people entitled—as individual citizens and groups of citizens—to scrutinize the conduct of government. They believed that citizens had the right to petition, instruct, and assemble to criticize government officials as well as to establish groups to question government policies. Yet all these steps—unexceptional from today’s perspective—were at the time branded by supporters of Washington’s administration as “seditious” and constitutionally illegitimate. These later Federalists neutered the collective sovereign to point of flirting with a transfer of sovereignty from the people to government— and came close to turning America’s revolutionary constitutionalism on its head. These constitutional arguments by opponents of the excise tax protestors are usually overlooked because of a tendency to focus on the later, violent stage of the farmers’ protests and their supposed intent to foment a “Whiskey Rebellion.” In fact, the controversy illustrates a disputed constitutionalism even after the federal Constitution supposedly “settled” the proper relationship of the people to their government.

This disputed constitutionalism persisted at both the state and national level well into the 1840s. For example, in 1842, Rhode Island witnessed another so-called rebellion involving whether a constitution enacted under the people’s authority—but without the consent of the existing state government—had constitutional legitimacy. This “Dorr Rebellion” crystallized America’s competing perceptions of the implications of written constitutions. That struggle pitted those who acknowledged the practical manifestation of the people’s sovereignty against those who increasingly located sovereignty in government itself. Proponents of government sovereignty insisted that the people needed to act with the consent of the existing government and only according to constitutional provisions for change. Anything different would be a revolution based on raw power. Their opponents, on the other hand, insisted that the people’s sovereignty gave constitutional legitimacy to revisions that bypassed existing provisions for constitutional revision and that occurred without the government’s consent.

Contrasting our constitutionalism with that of earlier generations of Americans suggests our current theory of what makes government legitimate was not inevitable. It did not develop in a straight-line from the Revolution to today, as is often depicted in constitutional histories. Controversies over the people as the sovereign and how they would rule were not resolved in 1776, or in 1787, or in the 1790s, or for that matter in the 1840s.

America’s Post-Civil War Constitutional Framework

The Civil War clearly influenced the development of ideas about the authority of the collective sovereign to act independent of government. It seems that many of those earlier constitutional ideas—described in American Sovereigns—survived the Civil War. This demonstrates that American constitutionalism—of both the federal and state variety—did not emerge from one defining moment or event. Rather, it grew incrementally over the course of political controversies within the states and at the national level. The constitutionalism that holds sway today is not a natural inheritance but the product of choices Americans made between shifting understandings about the people as a collective sovereign.

As a preliminary study of the post–Civil War period suggests, the legitimacy of direct action by the people eventually came to be displaced. Ironically, those ideas were rendered beyond the constitutional pale only during the Progressive Era—the period of progressive reform associated with Theodore Roosevelt and persisting into the early 20th century. The Progressives suggested that direct action by the people could be achieved through the device of the initiative and referendum. The image of “the people” making law directly for themselves suggests—at first glance—the exercise of their sovereign authority. Yet, such law-making by the people required strict compliance with legal procedures. This effectively reversed the position taken by farmers closing courts in Massachusetts in 1786 that the sovereign could act independent of legal procedures.

Our adherence to proceduralism today often makes it difficult to understand our forebears’ constitutionalism. Yet we both ground the legitimacy of American government on the consent of the people and their sovereign authority. And we—just as they—continue to struggle with the vitally important question: what does it mean that in America “the people” rule?

Note: The author wishes to thank Joe Franaszek, Ben Ortega, and Jeff Pasley for their helpful comments on this piece.

Further Reading:

A highly influential study of early American constitution-making is Gordon S. Wood’s The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (1969).  In extending Wood’s findings beyond the time frame of his work, scholars have assumed that today’s constitionalism is directly linked to the Federal constitution. For a critique of that assumption by historians, political scientists, and lawyers, see Christian G. Fritz, “Fallacies of American Constitutionalism,” 35 Rutgers Law Journal (2004), 1327-69.  Fritz, American Sovereigns, examines how Americans struggled over the idea that a collectivity—the people—would rule as the sovereign. Terry Bouton, Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders, and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution (2007) and Ronald P. Formisano, For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s (2008) demonstrate how Americans both before and after the federal Constitution continued to invoke the sovereignty of the people. Larry Kramer, The People Themselves: Popular Constitutionalism and Judicial Review (2004), advances a theory of “popular constitutionalism” that gives the people the responsibility “for interpreting and enforcing their constitution.” The classic study tracing the emergence of the concept of the sovereignty of the people is Edmund S. Morgan, Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988).

BLOGITORIAL NOTE: Presenting an article that I commissioned a little too late to go through the full Common-Place production process, but still wanted to be part of the extended Politics Issue here on the blog. I think readers will find it one of the most original and illuminating pieces in the whole issue, and I am grateful to Prof. Chris Fritz for turning this out in record time and in such fine fashion. For another aspect of “popular constitutionalism,” see Ray Raphael’s article on the doctrine of instruction elsewhere in the issue and my essay on freedom of the press posted here a few weeks ago, a longer variant of one published in Pennsylvania Legacies. — JLP

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

Christian G. Fritz is Dickason Professor of Law at the University of New Mexico and author of American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition Before the Civil War (2008).