Social media has dramatically changed the nature of contemporary presidential campaigns. In a way, that is nothing new. In the early republic, social media had its own crucial importance, although what the media employed was not the tweet, but little bits of pasteboard.

In 1830, it was sometimes called carding, and considered by one Washington diplomat to be a highly efficient invention. Gone, he wrote, was the “genuine old fashioned mode of visiting” in which one sent personal messages, knocked on doors with one’s own knuckles, or sat to tea with those one called upon. Now, with the convenience of calling card etiquette, those who wished “to inform their friends that they are still alive” or be on “visiting terms” with the others who composed capital society, needed only to circle the city by carriage, dropping off cards at the doors of people one often “did not care six pence about,” and without ever taking the trouble to inquire whether Mrs. A or Mr. B were at home.

The diplomat exaggerated when he implied that capital carding was either new or unique to Washington. Calling cards were in common usage by the nineteenth century, across America, throughout Europe, and into China. Men and women in communities large and small centered their social life on “little bits of pasteboard,” with women, particularly in America, taking on the brunt of the responsibility. But the diplomat’s focus on Washington came from a position of truth, for as he and anyone who had ever participated in capital society well knew, in no other city—anywhere in the world—was the making of calls and the dropping of cards taken more seriously or practiced more assertively than in the nation’s capital.

“Great importance is attached in Washington to the making and receiving of visits,” wrote one nineteenth-century social arbiter. “This does not arise simply from a love of punctilio or from the gregarious instinct of the human race. It has its root in the conviction that society is the handmaid of politics, especially in a capital city. A mighty game is being played there, which reaches out to all parts of the civilized world.” Washington’s women were in charge of that game. They played it well, having honed their craft in cities across the world before coming to the capital as the wives and daughters of diplomats, congressmen, and other federal officials, and they did so, there and elsewhere, wrote Britain’s Leonore Davidoff, “with the same spirit of competition which aggressive men display in business.” Davidoff, however, argued that nineteenth-century American society “did not intermesh with politics,” and so the women who ran that society had no “access to real power.” But Washington politics did not end on the congressional floor or behind office doors. Everything in the capital was (and still is) political, including its elite society. As late as 1923, one Washington newspaper was advising that the “astute” woman soon learned upon entering the capital that “if she would seek her husband’s political or official fortunes she must build her house of calling cards.”

Americans did not invent calling cards. British traveler John Barrow gave that honor to the Chinese. After an extended stay in Asia, he wrote in 1804 that “visiting by tickets which, with us, is a fashion of modern refinement, has been a common practice in China some thousand years.” By at least the eighteenth century, though, calling cards were not only prevalent in China, but a prerogative of the upper classes around Europe. In 1884, historian Horatio F. Brown discovered a cache of Venetian calling cards at a local museum, ranging in date from the end of the sixteenth century into the nineteenth century, and in the 1840s, workmen renovating a marble chimney-piece in Soho found the calling card of Sir Isaac Newton, dead since 1727.

Colonists brought the practice with them to the New World and by the Federalist period, elite American society was carding as if it had created the custom. Martha Washington used calling cards and kindly left a few for history, along with her calling card case, while New Englander Timothy Dwight found the topic prose-worthy. In 1794, the reverend penned his pity for those “dames of dignified renown” who with their “debt of social visiting to pay,” were “forc’d, abroad to roam . . . To stop at thirty doors, in half a day, Drop the gilt card, and proudly roll away.”

If gilt cards were the fashion in 1794 (Martha Washington’s visiting card was plain with her name handwritten across the middle), a century later they most definitely violated society’s strict rules of simplicity. The best cards, instructed one etiquette book, were “fine in texture, thin, white, unglazed and engraved in simple script without flourishes.” Trendy styles such as “gilt edges, rounded or clipped corners, tinted surfaces or any oddity of lettering” were to be avoided, and ornamentation or a photographic image on the card savored of “ill-breeding.”

Although the style of a card may have fluctuated over the course of the nineteenth century (at least among the ill-bred), its basic structure changed little. Women carried cards about three and a half by two and a half inches, often in a special case. Men carried smaller cards, which were better suited for a breast pocket. Younger women with shorter names sometimes used square cards. The street address, but not the city, was occasionally engraved on the lower right-hand side, although such an addition was rarely needed until the late 1800s. Those either new to the city or visiting wrote their temporary residence on the card.

A daughter of visiting age had no card of her own. Her name, instead, was printed on her mother’s card. Single women “of a certain age,” who were clearly independent and without need of a chaperone, carried their own cards. A married woman identified herself by her husband’s given name, “Mrs. George Smith,” but never by his professional title, “Mrs. Dr. George Smith.” In addition, those few women who had earned their own professional titles were discouraged from using them socially, including on their visiting cards.

A divorced woman used either her own first name with her former husband’s surname or reverted to her maiden name if no children were involved. Either way, the woman remained a “Mrs.” for life. A widow used her first name on her calling card only if not doing so caused confusion—for example, if her husband’s namesake son, John Phillips Jr., dropped the suffix after his father’s death, leaving both his wife and his mother “Mrs. John Phillips.” Otherwise, a widow clung tightly to her husband’s full name on her visiting card, partly to maintain her prestige and partly to identify herself as a widow and not a divorcée. Widows sometimes added a thin black border around their cards, although anything over a quarter of an inch tinged on “ostentation rather than affliction.”

In 1888, the Good Housekeeping Fortnightly Journal dared to question the logic of a social system that required women to function under their husbands’ names. “Why should a woman sink her personality, as in Mrs. Arthur Thorne?” wrote feminist writer Hester Poole. “She wears neither his coats, hats nor boots; why wear his name? Is not Mrs. Agnes Thorne, equally euphonious and more expressive? Does she cease to be Agnes because she has married Arthur?” It was a call for female equality that etiquette advisors ignored. A woman, they insisted, might be Mrs. Samuel Hunter Tarkington Smith or, to compromise, Mrs. S. H. Tarkington Smith, but she was never Mrs. Sarah Smith—at least not in good society. 

Timothy Dwight’s “thirty doors, in half a day” was not an exaggeration in nineteenth-century society, particularly at the start of each social season. The procedure went thusly. Armed with her well-stocked card case and her list of calls, the lady set out on her afternoon rounds (called by society “morning calls”). At each door, the visitor presented the answering servant with an exact number of cards—normally one of her own for the mistress and two of her husband’s for the master and the mistress. For many arbiters, leaving three cards was the maximum of good taste. To the servant, the lady might say, “For Mrs. B., please,” or “For Mrs. B., and I hope she is quite well,” with neither the expectation nor the wish of admittance, although one had to be careful in Washington. Except at the White House, where a card was left at the beginning of the season with no expectation of admittance, it was never quite proper, except among diplomats and those who “go out a great deal,” to leave a card without inquiring if the mistress was receiving.

Household servants were well trained to accept calling cards at the door, perhaps with a small tray in hand. Visitors placed their cards on the tray and departed, or if staying for a visit, were escorted into the sitting room. Ladies never handed their cards directly to the mistress. If a household received a card by post, an acceptable custom under certain conditions, it was removed from its envelope before being placed on a hall tray. The cards that gathered on the front table provided evidence of one’s social standing and visual reminders of reciprocal responsibilities.

It was sometimes the fashion to fold one’s card in order to indicate the purpose of a visit, particular folds indicating particular types of visits. A crease in the upper left indicated a social call; one in the upper right, a visit of congratulations; in the lower right, a visit of sympathy. If one were leaving town, he or she folded the lower left of the card. Mark Twain poked fun at the practice in The Gilded Age, warning his Washington protagonist that she had better take care “to get the corners right,” otherwise, she might “unintentionally condole with a friend on a wedding or congratulate her upon a funeral.”

Twain’s precaution was not far from the truth. Rules for card folding varied, particularly in Washington, where etiquette authorities writing during the last quarter of the nineteenth century gave their readers conflicting advice. Mary Logan subscribed to the method given above. Madeleine Dahlgren counseled those departing the capital to write P. P. C. (pour prendre congé, to take leave) on their cards instead of folding a corner and to turn down the upper right-hand corner (not the left one) to indicate a social call. DeB. Randolph Keim insisted that card folding was practical but not in general use.

Keim’s advice kept more with what was becoming the national trend by the late 1800s. In place of card folding, someone leaving town might print P. P. C. (as Dahlgren had suggested) in the lower left-hand corner of his or her card. For condolences, cards might be delivered with no folds, or if the family was on familiar terms, with a handwritten “deepest sympathy” added below the engraved name. Cards left in response to happier occasions, such as the birth of a child, might more routinely include a handwritten “hearty congratulations.” Questions, however, on what to fold or not to fold continued into the twentieth century. That century’s premier etiquette authority, Emily Post, warned her readers that the folded corner on a received visiting card might indicate that the one card was “meant for all of the ladies in the family” or it might mean that the card was left personally at the door, or she added, it might “mean nothing whatever.” Nevertheless, whatever the fold or the reason, Post commented, “more visiting cards are bent or dog-eared than are left flat.”

In any city, the leaving of cards was most hectic at the start of “the season,” when visits were made to the homes of everyone in one’s social circle. Outside of the capital, the winter social season might open with the opera, as it did in New York. In Washington, the season originally coincided with the opening and closing of Congress, most often from the beginning of December until the first week of March. By late century, DeB. Randolph Keim was describing three different seasons: one initiated in October by the families of the Supreme Court, resident officials, and local society as they returned from their summer retreats; a congressional season that began the first week of December; and an “official” or “fashionable” season that began with the presidential and cabinet receptions on New Year’s Day. Washington’s social season in any form ended, as it did elsewhere, with Lent, followed in the capital by a “little season” that lasted until “the first furnace blast” of summer drove even the most faithful to cooler climates.

One did not randomly knock on doors at the beginning of each season. Except in the capital, wealth and longevity determined the order of these initial visits. One called first on the most established, respected matriarchs, usually after a formal introduction or with a letter of introduction in hand. She then returned the call within a week or ten days. After that, no further visiting was required unless mutually agreeable; and, of course, all of this could be done through servants and cards. In Washington, official rank decided what doors were knocked on first and by whom. Prior introductions were unnecessary, and, given capital society’s constantly changing faces, impractical. A shorter turn-around time was expected, but as elsewhere, once cards were exchanged, further visits between the parties were optional.

In any city, one could drop off cards without asking to be received, although Washington was least prone to that custom. Nowhere was it proper to simply leave a card at the door if, at that hour, the mistress was conducting her weekly reception. Such days were a standard of the social season and often noted on a woman’s calling card. In many cities, women coordinated their reception days by neighborhood. In Washington, where political distinction determined at-home or “drawing room” days, vice-presidential wife Abigail Adams had struggled to figure out the best day for her drawing room, but by mid-century, a well-established rhythm had taken over. The wives of the Supreme Court and the residents of Capitol Hill opened their homes each Monday afternoon. Wives of the House reserved Tuesdays. Wednesday went to the wife of the vice president and the cabinet wives. Senatorial wives claimed Thursday, and Friday and Saturday went to Washington residents without a pre-scheduled day. The wives of the commandant and officers of the Navy Yard determined their own reception days.

The earlier first ladies varied their drawing room day according to their preference. Martha Washington and Abigail Adams gave theirs on Friday evenings for mixed company. Their husbands held separate Tuesday receptions, for gentlemen only, but attended the Friday gatherings as guests. Jefferson had no wife and no interest in a weekly reception of any type. Dolley Madison famously oversaw her Wednesday evening “squeezes” and her husband forewent a separate reception. Evening receptions soon gave way to afternoon events at which the first lady officiated without her husband, usually on Saturday afternoons. Unfortunately, as the century progressed, these events grew massive in attendance. Whereas Dolley Madison had admirably entertained between 200 and 300 guests a week, Frances Cleveland oversaw, on one such occasion, 4,000 men, women, and children, all there to shake the hand of the president’s wife. Her successor, Ida McKinley, did not have the good health needed for such a grueling routine, and her omission of a weekly “card reception” was the beginning of its demise at the White House.

Official rank ruled Washington and always determined who called on whom first. The president received first calls from everyone and did not return calls except to visiting sovereigns, a practice established by George Washington and continued undisturbed by every president after. Like their husbands, first ladies always received the first call, but unlike their husbands, the earlier ones made reciprocal visits to at least those in their immediate social circle. That ended with Elizabeth Monroe, who flatly refused to oblige. The task, she insisted, was too arduous for someone in her fragile health and, moreover, the city had grown too large in population for such an accommodation. Washington society begrudgingly accepted the inevitable, although it continued to bristle whenever other White House women, even those serving as surrogate first lady, refused to make return calls.

The vice president called first only on the president, but, unlike the president, he made return visits. The Supreme Court justices called first only on the president and the vice president. The Speaker of the House called first on the president, vice president, and justices; senators made first calls on those gentlemen and on the foreign ministers. Senators received first calls from the cabinet and the cabinet received first calls from foreign ministers. House members, other than the Speaker, eventually fell to the bottom rung of the hierarchy, ranking below senators, justices, the cabinet, and foreign ministers. They called first on everyone. Wives and daughters had the same social status as their husbands and fathers and kept to the same rules, except that the ladies of the cabinet called first on ministerial wives, and not the reverse.

Early in his presidency, George Washington established a written “Line of Conduct” for use during his administration. It explained his office hours, his intent not to return calls, and his entertainment schedule, which included the Tuesday and Friday receptions and a Thursday dinner for “as many as my table will hold.” The Adamses kept to the same protocol, but Jefferson initiated a more republican version, eliminating the weekly receptions and opening his door more widely to visits. Unlike with Washington’s “Line of Conduct,” Jefferson’s “Canons of Etiquette” established protocol not only for the president but also for those associated with his government, which in the young capital was almost everyone. The canons instructed the city on everything from the order in which to make official first calls to proper seating at dinners and public functions (first come, first served), and it aimed to eliminate what Jefferson considered monarchical protocol. “When brought together in society,” read one tenet, “all are perfectly equal, whether foreign or domestic, titled or untitled, in or out of office.”  

The city understood Jefferson’s rules as the political statement they were. They were barely followed while he was in office and mostly ignored after he left. The one tenet that Washington society did not ignore was Jefferson’s directive that “Members of the Legislature . . . have a right as strangers to receive the first visit,” meaning that cabinet wives needed to make first calls on all the wives of Congress. With the hospitable Dolley Madison as lead cabinet wife and a provincial capital that saw only a handful of congressional women each session—Jefferson counted nine such ladies in 1807—the president’s edict was not a problem, but fifteen years after the canons, Congress was 25 percent larger, the city was more inviting, and family housing was more available. With that came a major increase in the number of wives who joined their legislative husbands in Washington for the social season. So much so that Louisa Catherine Adams, wife of Monroe’s secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, refused to make first calls on the congressional wives, arguing that their number had grown too vast. The congressional wives retaliated by snubbing Mrs. Adams’s drawing room and dinners, and when John Quincy Adams followed his wife’s lead, he found himself chastised by an offended Senate.

What followed was months of public debate between the executive and legislative branches. The Senate invoked the spirit of Jefferson, telling John Quincy Adams that their insistence on first calls came not from pretension, but from their position “as strangers.” The congressional wives went to Elizabeth Monroe with their complaint and used the same logic. As strangers arriving to the capital, they were entitled to a first call from all of the cabinet wives, and Mrs. Adams had refused to oblige. In response, Elizabeth Monroe quite literally summoned the secretarial wife to her chambers. The congressional ladies “had taken offence,” she explained, and she hoped that the situation might be rectified. But Louisa Adams was unmoved. She held a weekly drawing room, gave dinners, and returned calls. To also make first visits on every lady arriving to town as a stranger, congressional or otherwise, was a massive undertaking to which she would not commit.

Unable to rely on the White House, the women of Congress dealt with Mrs. Adams by snubbing her entertainments. Even a year after the quarrel began, Louisa Catherine reported that at one of her drawing rooms, “only two Ladies attended and about sixty gentlemen.” At another entertainment, to which “Mrs. Adams invited a large party,” guest Sarah Seaton was surprised to find “not more than three ladies” in attendance. With time, though, the women forgave her, particularly after it appeared she might become the next first lady. In December 1822 she wrote that only one lady of the Congress still refused to make the first visit, senatorial wife Elizabeth Dowell Benton, whose husband was, according to Louisa Adams, the “inflexible enemy of Mr. A.”

Calling card etiquette, capital-style, was beginning in earnest. The Adams incident showed carding to be a game that the women of Washington refused to take lightly, and rightly so. This was the nation’s capital, built for a single purpose. Everything there commingled with national politics, including its etiquette. When the congressional wives pressed for first visits, they did so knowing the importance of the city’s social-political hierarchy. Who called on whom first was a direct reflection on where they stood in that hierarchy. With the right social standing came status, respect, and beneficial alliances, not only for themselves but also for their husbands, for their children, for the family name, and, in many cases, for their communities back home. Moreover, thanks to the century’s well-defined gender roles, capital society’s social interaction, laced as it was with domesticity, virtue, and civility, was the one Washingtonian arena accepted as the domain of its women. It was a responsibility that they readily accepted because with it came autonomy and an informal power. Far into the next century, these women would yield to no man their right to run Washington society as they saw fit, and no one would prove that point better than the otherwise indomitable “Old Hickory.”

In the months before Andrew Jackson’s inauguration, Margaret O’Neale Timberlake Eaton, the bride of incoming secretary of war John Eaton, left her calling card at the home of Floride Calhoun, wife of the vice president. Peggy O’Neale was the attractive daughter of a respectable Washington City innkeeper, but she carried with her a reputation for being too “willing to dispense her favors wherever she took a fancy.” At seventeen, she had married navy purser John Timberlake. When Timberlake died at sea, rumors spread that he had committed suicide after learning of his wife’s indiscretions during his absence, including an affair with widower John Eaton, a close friend of Andrew Jackson.

Timberlake’s marriage to cabinet appointee Eaton placed her at the center of Washington society, at least on paper. In reality, the women of that society balked at admitting Peggy Eaton into their circle, none more so than Floride Calhoun, who pointedly ignored Mrs. Eaton’s calling card and refused to make the customary return visit. The other cabinet wives and elite women of Washington followed in kind. No harsh words were spoken. The calling cards, or lack of them, on Peggy Eaton’s front table did all the talking. Mrs. Eaton was not welcome in capital society.

Andrew Jackson was aware that Washington gentility disapproved of the new Mrs. Eaton, but he refused to heed the rumors. The president remembered Peggy O’Neale from his days as senator and had always liked her. Furthermore, Jackson linked the current public gossip to the previous defamation of his late wife during the 1828 presidential campaign, seeing in society’s reaction to Peggy Eaton the same backbiting and malice that had followed his wife. Determined that she should be both accepted and respected, Jackson intervened in her defense by ordering his cabinet members to tend to their wives. When the secretaries refused, he wiped his cabinet clean—accepting voluntary resignations from John Eaton and Secretary of State Martin Van Buren and forcing resignations from the rest, keeping only Postmaster General William Barry, whose wife, it should be noted, had accepted Peggy Eaton into her private social circle. With that, according to historian Catherine Allgor, the women of Washington retreated into their homes, horrified by the consequences of their actions.

The women of Washington, though, had not surrendered. They may have been bloodied by battle, but they had decidedly won the war. Peggy Eaton not only left the cabinet circle, she left town, moving first to Tennessee, where her husband made two failed attempts at a Senate seat, and then to the outposts of Florida when Jackson appointed Eaton territorial governor. And despite Jackson’s blustering, the men he appointed to his second cabinet all had wives of “the right stuff,” women who were established members of polite society and pillars of virtue.

The most repeated challenge to protocol, however, came not from outside the ranks of those in charge of official society, but from inside. It centered on the recurring argument between cabinet and Senate wives as to who should call on whom first. Although the 1820s saw the ladies of the House, like their husbands, move to the bottom of the social hierarchy, Senate wives still expected the honor of a first call from the women of the cabinet (Louisa Catherine Adams aside). The logic now, according to those women, was that their husbands represented “state sovereignty,” a dignity superior to that of any appointed officer.

Since there were only a handful of cabinet wives, but dozens of senatorial ones, the ladies of the cabinet never found that argument very persuasive and occasionally attempts were made to reverse the protocol. One who tried was Kate Hughes Williams who, immediately after her husband’s appointment as attorney general in 1871, announced that she would not be making first calls on the Senate wives. As historian Kathryn Jacob observed, “After four years as a Senate wife herself, Mrs. Williams should have known better.”

Kate Williams, though, had reigned in Washington during her husband’s Senate years and mistakenly believed herself to have influence over protocol. Unfortunately, she stood alone among the other cabinet wives, and the senatorial wives refused to make the first call on her. Two years later, when President Grant nominated her husband to the Supreme Court, those same Senate women refused to protect Williams against accusations made during the confirmation hearing of her various “peccadillos.” Indeed, at least one local matron attributed George Williams’s eventual failure to win the judgeship as the direct result of “Mrs. Williams’s arrogance toward the wives of the Senate who joined [one of the committee members] in his determination to humiliate Mrs. Williams” and defeat her husband.

The fight between cabinet and Senate wives erupted again after Congress passed the Presidential Succession Act of 1886, which placed the various cabinet secretaries in direct line for the presidency. Since the secretarial wives now considered themselves possible mistresses of the White House, they asserted a claim of precedence. Not so, retorted the Senate wives. “Until a cabinet officer becomes President he is still the creature of the Senate, and his wife must make the first calls, as heretofore.” The following social season began with the two sets of women deadlocked, but on January 17, the Jamestown Evening Journal proclaimed the Senate wives “triumphant.” Mary Manning, bride of the secretary of the treasury (and a key instigator according to one newspaper), had led the way to reconciliation by beginning her round of first calls only the day before. “It was an uneven fight at best,” the Journal decided, “for it must be remembered there are 76 senators and only 7 cabinet officers.”

The capital would continue to build its political and official fortunes on a house of cards long after the system had loosened its grip on other cities, and always with its women firmly in command. There is an adage that it is not what you know but who you know that matters. Nothing was truer in nineteenth-century Washington, where one’s sources of influence were limited to reputation, political stature, and personal interaction, and no one had more access to that last form of influence than the ladies of the city. The Senate wives who continued to demand first calls from the cabinet women, the cabinet wives who refused to allow even a president to tread on their domain, and the women who daily stepped into carriages to knock on thirty doors—and then thirty more—did so out of an understanding that carding as a form of social networking was also a form of power, not only for their husbands, but for themselves.

Further Reading

The best way to learn about Washington’s nineteenth-century calling card society is through the women who built it, beginning with the Diary and Autobiographical Writings of Louisa Catherine Adams, edited by Judith S. Graham (Cambridge, Mass., 2012). Other invaluable works include Margaret Bayard Smith, First Forty Years of Washington Society, edited by Gaillard Hunt (New York, 1906), Selected Letters of Dolley Payne Madison, edited by Holly C. Shulman and David B. Mattern (Charlottesville, Va., 2003), Josephine Seaton’s William Winston Seaton of the “National Intelligencer”: A Biographical Sketch, which contains many letters by his wife, Sarah (Boston, 1871), and Mary Simmerson Cunningham Logan, Reminiscences of a Soldier’s Wife (New York, 1916). Logan also wrote Home Manual: Everybody’s Guide in Social, Domestic, and Business Life with two chapters on Washingtonian protocol (Boston, 1889). Logan was a Washington insider, as was social arbiter Madeleine Vinton Dahlgren, Etiquette of Social Life in Washington (Philadelphia, 1881), and De Benneville Randolph Keim, Hand-Book of Official and Social Etiquette and Public Ceremonials at Washington (Washington, 1889). Two other excellent late-century etiquette books are Florence Howe Hall, Social Usages at Washington (New York, 1906) and Maud C. Cooke, Social Etiquette, or Manners and Customs of Polite Society, with a chapter on Washington (Buffalo, 1896). The earliest book of its kind comes from E. A. Cooley, Description of the Etiquette at Washington City (Philadelphia, 1829). Note that some of the above nineteenth-century titles have been shortened to manageable lengths.

George Washington’s “Queries on Conduct” (May 10, 1789), and Jefferson’s “Rules of Etiquette” and “Canons of Etiquette to be Observed by the Executive” (December 1803), can be found online at the Library of Congress and in several book editions of their respective papers; the Philadelphia Aurora General Advertiser published a third version of the canons on February 13, 1804. Kathryn Allamong Jacob, Capital Elites: High Society in Washington, D.C., After the Civil War (Washington, D.C., 1995), and Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, Va., 2000), offer additional insights into Washington’s nineteenth-century elite society, as does Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (Hartford, Conn., 1873). For a British perspective, see Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Society, Etiquette and the Season (London, 1973).

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

Merry Ellen (Melly) Scofield is an assistant editor with the Papers of Thomas Jefferson at Princeton University. Her research centers on nineteenth-century social Washington and includes work on Thomas Jefferson’s dinner parties, the reign of Dolley Madison, and the first ladies of the Cleveland and Benjamin Harrison administrations.

Howdy, friends! Some of you may already be familiar with the irreverent cowgirl I play at my blog, Historiann, which is my pseudonym as well as a blog devoted to “history and sexual politics, 1492-present.” If you read Historiann for a week or two, you know that she has a ranch somewhere out on the High Plains Desert in Colorado, where she keeps large animals, rides fences, and makes a lot of jokes about mucking out stalls and horses who have already left the barn. Historiann likes to tell you a little bit about her private life—but just a little. Readers know that she is a happily married heterosexualist, and that she likes to illustrate many of her posts with the sexy cowgirls drawn by midcentury artist Gil Elvgren, but that’s about all. Of course, Historiann is just a pseudonym for Ann Little, a mild-mannered History professor with a shockingly conventional life: I live in a one-story ranch house in Colorado—I don’t own a ranch, and both of my animals weigh in at less than 15 pounds. After nearly a decade in Colorado, I just bought my first pair of cowgirl boots!

Why do I bother to play cowgirl at nights and on weekends—shouldn’t I focus on something useful and productive, like writing my next book, learning to play the guitar and yodel cowboy-style, and/or training for the Slaughterhouse Derby Girls instead? (I’ve already got my Derby name picked out—Kitty Kitty Bang Bang. What do you think? Roller Derby is yet another world of pseudonymity!) I don’t get paid for blogging, my blog doesn’t accept advertisements, and I certainly don’t bother to put it on my curriculum vita, although Historiann is clearly linked to my professional identity and interests. My main interest in my blog is now the larger community of readers and commenters who connect me to a wider intellectual world and whom otherwise I’d never meet, work with, or encounter through any of the traditional networking strategies in academia. Forget what you’ve heard about supposedly cool Colorado college towns and so-called “liberal” academia—it’s lonely out here for a Marxist feminist early Americanist who writes eastern history. My (lightly) pseudonymous identity as a cowgirl probably plays a large part of my success in bringing folks together on the blog. I don’t want to burst your bubble, amigas, but Historiann is a lot more fun than I am—she doesn’t have any family or work responsibilities outside of writing about whatever she wants to write about, and acting as a welcoming host for guests who want to join online conversations about history, the academic workplace, feminism, contemporary politics, and the interesting intersections I find therein. Who knew that there would be 2,000-3,000 people a day interested in reading about my idiosyncratic and not necessarily interconnected interests? My playful pseudonymous identity helps pull it all together. (And, I think a lot of you eastern “Dudes” are pretty easy marks!)

In the crested buttes and slot canyons of the Internet that comprise the academic blogosphere, pseudonymity has been controversial. Every once in a while, a blogger who blogs under hir own name and professional identity writes a blog post about how pseudonymous bloggers are somehow dishonest or disreputable because they might engage in fabulism, or because they’re not living up to a (non-existent) shared ethic of blogging, which then erupts into what we in the biz call a “blog $hitstorm” when a bunch of pseudonymous bloggers write defensive posts about why they’ve chosen pseudonymity, or patiently explain yet again the differences between pseudonymity and anonymity. (For example, see “A Compendium of Posts about Blogging under a Pseudonym” by English professor and pseudonymous blogger Dr. Crazy.) Although I’m not truly pseudonymous, since my real life identity is clear on my blog on the “About Historiann” page, I want to speak up in defense of pseudonymity as a vital tradition in American letters, whether those letters are pixels on a screen or printed on a page. Being able to blog under my own name with only a playful pseudonym is a privilege of tenure as well as truer to my personal style—and since college and university faculty now work in a world in which fewer than half of us are even eligible for tenure, pseudonymity in the academic blogosphere is something that encourages and protects correspondence from graduate students, adjunct or temporary faculty, or untenured faculty. Pseudonymity might be a weapon of the weak, but it can play a strong role in building communities of likeminded scholars.

As many of the readers of this journal know, pseudonymity launched the career of Benjamin Franklin nearly 300 years ago. In an outrageous act of literary transvestism, the sixteen-year-old Franklin wrote in the voice of a middle-aged widow he called Silence Dogood, and under cover of night, slipped her letters under the door of his brother James’s newspaper, The New England Courant. For six months in 1722, the satirical dispatches attributed to Dogood appeared in the Courant and poked fun at Boston’s Puritan establishment. Franklin explains the elaborate ruse in his Autobiography:

But being still a Boy, and suspecting that my Brother would object to printing any Thing of mine in his Paper if he knew it to be mine, I contriv’d to disguise my Hand, and writing an anonymous Paper I put it in at Night under the Door of the Printing House. It was found in the Morning and communicated to his Writing Friends when they call’d in as usual. They read it, commented on it in my Hearing, and I had the exquisite pleasure, of finding it met with their Approbation, and that in their different Guesses at the Author none were named but Men of some Character among us for Learning and Ingenuity.

Franklin’s “young Genius. . . for Libelling and Satyr” was not the direct cause of his brother’s censure and month of imprisonment for offending Massachusetts authorities in the summer of 1722. Nevertheless, the Courant’s fame spread, and it continued to publish Silence Dogood’s missives as young Benjamin took over the day-to-day operations of the newspaper while his brother was jailed. Franklin credited the experiences of 1722 with introducing him to some of the most important work and many of the themes of his adult life—writing for an appreciative audience, courting the ire of both clerical and legal authorities, publishing a newspaper, and because of his brother James’s “harsh and tyrannical Treatment,” inculcating in him an “Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life.”

As many Franklin scholars have noted, his decision to write in the voice of Silence Dogood was clever and perceptive. By taking on the identity of a woman named “Silence,” he underscored the absence of authority he had as a social critic in a world where outspoken women were punished for their pride, and post-menopausal women in particular were either ignored, demonized, or praised for their piety in tedious funeral sermons published only when their silence was absolutely assured. But by choosing to write as an older widow, he appropriated the voice of an old Gossip whose opinions might nevertheless be credited by her neighbors and acquaintances because of her age and experience. Furthermore, his choice of surname was an obvious mockery of Cotton Mather’s Bonifacius: or Essays to Do Good (1706). The son and grandson of legendary puritan divines and so prolific a writer as to be a one-man full employment scheme for the printers of Boston, Mather was the face and relentless voice of the puritan establishment in early eighteenth-century Boston. But the teenaged Franklin knew that Mather was getting older—a living relic of the last century, he was pushing sixty in 1722 and had been badly bruised the previous year by a vicious public controversy over his advocacy for smallpox inoculation. Satirizing his worldview in the voice of an old widow made Silence Dogood the rough equal of Mather—a shocking inversion of Mather’s view of himself and patriarchal puritan society.

Franklin’s Silence Dogood essays are a tribute to a centuries-old teenage wit that remains fresh and perceptive. His first essay opened with a comment about the importance that the reading audience places on the station and reputation of writers:

The generality of people now a days, are unwilling either to commend or dispraise what they read, until they are in some measure informed who or what the Author of it is, whether he be poor or rich, old or young, a Schollar or a Leather Apron Man, &c. and give their Opinion of the Performance, according to the Knowledge which they have of the Author’s Circumstances.

Franklin recognized that choosing pseudonymity instead of anonymity and creating a colorful backstory for Silence Dogood made for more interesting and more colorful writing, besides satisfying a reader’s desire “to judge whether or no my Lucubrations are worth . . . reading.” Dogood tells us in this first essay that she was a poor, fatherless, seaborn child who, as it happens, shared Franklin’s zest for self-improvement and upward mobility. In the second Dogood essay, we learn that she entered service to a “Reverend Master” who had never married. Dogood turned his head and by and by, dear reader—he married her. Franklin’s portrait of Dogood’s sexually ambitious youth was a beam in the eye of the senior generation of puritan ministers. Could a sixteen-year-old apprentice get away with that in printer’s ink? Probably not—but an imaginary widow just might be able to pull it off.

Franklin is notable in American letters as a writer who more often than not published his work under pseudonyms. The great game of Franklin scholars for nearly 200 years has been attributing yet another pseudonymously published work to him—but as James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass note in Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer, “the danger of this enterprise is that it obscures the lengths to which Franklin went to erase authorship.” I would add that a brief survey of some of the pseudonyms attributed to Franklin show a real commitment to writing in women’s voices. Besides Dogood, he also wrote as “Ephraim Censorius, Margaret Aftercast, Martha Careful, Caelia Shortface, the Busy-Body . . . Patience, the Casuist, the Anti-Casuist, Anthony Afterwit, Celia Single,” and of course, Richard Saunders and Poor Richard, among many others. This mixture of feminine, masculine, and androgynous pseudonyms is typical of his choice of pseudonyms through his publishing career.

Other writers for Common-place have noted in years past that the modern political and academic blogospheres resemble nothing so much as the world of journal writing and print culture in the antebellum era. W. Caleb McDaniel wrote in 2006 about how in reading the journals of reformer Henry Clarke Wright (1797-1870), he concluded that Wright “shared several traits with the prototypical blogger—his eccentric range of interests, his resolution ‘to write down what I see and hear and feel daily,’ his use of journals to ‘let off’ rants of ‘indignation,’ his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the ‘greater part of the day writing in his room,'” something that might sound familiar to a lot of bloggers. In 2007, Meredith L. McGill wrote optimistically about the spirited writing she finds on self-published blogs and of blogging’s potential to destabilize the authority of modern print culture. However, she also noted that the absence of any code of ethics or standards among bloggers can undermine the credibility of the enterprise. For example, McGill notes that blogs have “suffered from the accusation that their much-vaunted inclusion of diverse sources and of voices is a sham made possible by pseudonymity,” which may be employed by both bloggers and their commenters alike. She also quotes Charles Dickens’ complaint about the absence of redress when magazine and newspaper editors decided to reprint his stories. The author, he said, “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.”

Clearly, the roots of the boisterous and frequently libelous print culture in the Early Republic and antebellum eras were planted deep in the eighteenth century with the birth of newspapers and magazines. In eighteenth-century newspapers, there was no clear and stable distinction between fact and fiction in the varied articles that might be written afresh, ripped off from other newspapers, or reconfigured for a local audience. Eighteenth-century British and U.S. copyright laws covered only books—newspapers and magazines were exempt from copyright laws, which may explain the jumble of frequently borrowed news and refashioned entertainments found in early American newspapers. Publishers like James Franklin, like many proprietors of Websites and news aggregators today, were just looking for content. He felt no ethical obligation to verify the identity of Silence Dogood or any of the other anonymous or pseudonymous writers he published.

Many users of the Internet see a great deal of value in pseudonymity, and use it variously both in blogging and commenting on blogs. As McGill wrote in these pages four years ago, “[b]loggers’ 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.” The blog that probably makes the greatest use of pseudonymity in the great American literary tradition is Roxie’s World, a blog by University of Maryland English Professor Marilee Lindmann. Roxie’s World, like Historiann, is only lightly pseudonymous. “Roxie” is a dead dog—Lindmann’s late wire-haired retriever—and the blog is written in her voice via her “typist” named Moose (Lindemann.) Lindemann (as Moose channeling Roxie) blogs about nineteenth-century American literature while playing with different pseudonyms, voices, and literary conventions. Emily Dickinson and Willa Cather are regular subjects at Roxie’s World, and because this is a blog that channels the afterlife, that great pseudonymous American writer Mark Twain appears occasionally to have a few drinks at a fictitious local pub called “Ishmael’s” and talk things over with Roxie and her typist Moose.

So why do so many academic bloggers blog pseudonymously? Like Franklin, they adopt pseudonyms because they can publish things that they otherwise couldn’t publish under their own names. There are some bloggers for whom pseudonymity is not only preferable, it may have been the only prudent choice. For example, GayProf, who blogs at Center of Gravitas, has written extensively about being a gay academic and his painful breakup with a boyfriend, in addition to writing about American Studies and Latino history in the U.S. Other bloggers like Dr. Crazy and medieval European historian Squadratomagico have written about their professional lives in ways that would be awkward or indiscreet if they wrote frankly about departmental politics or problems with students under their real life identities. I’m sometimes envious of the range of issues pseudonymous bloggers can address, and the specific and personal ways they can address them precisely because of their pseudonymity. Because I’m not fully pseudonymous, I don’t write about students or problems in my department. As I wrote last year, for me to do so would seem “at the very least disloyal, if not predatory.” I’m sure there are academic blogs that use pseudonymity as a weapon—but I don’t read them. Bloggers who merely complain about something or someone don’t have very interesting blogs, nor do I think they acquire or sustain a wide readership. Contrary to Silence Dogood’s prankish observations, “the generality of people now a days”—at least those who read blogs—recognize thoughtful writing and interesting ideas whatever their provenance.

Pseudonymity can work in the service of community-building in the blogosphere. As I’ve noted earlier, although I often criticize public figures and many of the features of academic and American life, I’ve tried to build a community of readers and commenters who can share stories and information and perhaps use that knowledge to their own benefit. Although I’m not fully pseudonymous, my commenters are overwhelmingly pseudonymous. Nevertheless, regular readers and commenters probably recognize the commenters who appear most frequently because most of them have individual personality traits or interests that remain fairly stable. That is, they fully inhabit the names or roles they’ve chosen to play on my blog, and their pseudonymity, as well as the role I play as Historiann, is key to the kind of supportive community I wanted to build.

One example of a blogger and commenters working together in community-building is the occasional feature I run in which a reader asks for the advice of the community of readers at large. I’ve given lots of unsolicited advice in blog posts, and strangely unlike real life, that has led to more and more readers sending me e-mails asking for help with various academic career problems. (To be clear: they’re not usually asking for my personal advice, but rather for the advice of my other readers and commenters!) So, I occasionally run “Agony Aunt”-type letters that seek help from my readers on a variety of issues: applying to graduate school, the academic job market, strategies for winning tenure, two-body/family issues in academic careers, and ideas for protecting their careers in the face of unfair treatment or even harassment. In these cases, I make use of pseudonymity or anonymity in the service of helping these readers—for example, “Hotshot Harry from Tucumcari,” “Tenured Tammy,” “Busted Barry,” and “Demoralized Debby” have all made appearances on the blog—and sometimes they join in the discussion in the comments about their problems.

Only once has publishing pseudonymous or anonymous commentary on someone’s problems been even slightly controversial with my commenters. The one case I can think of provides an instructive example on a number of levels of both the uses and problems with pseudonymity and online conversations—and interestingly, includes allusions to eighteenth-century literature. Last spring, I ran a lengthy narrative by “Anonymous, an Assistant Professor in the Humanities” describing her frustrating attempts to get a maternity leave from her department. You’ll have to read the whole thing, but the long and short of it is her concluding line: “This experience can be safely filed under the heading ‘How to Alienate/Get Rid of Your Female Faculty.'” Anonymous was a reader who sent me an unsolicited e-mail about this—she was and is not known to me personally. I did not identify her university or department in any way, and before I published her story, I asked her to send me an e-mail from her institutional address so that I could verify as far as I could that her story was on the level. (At least, I could verify that she’s a real person in a real academic department.) A (presumably pseudonymous) commenter “clarissa” wrote that “something about this narrative . . . just doesn’t add up. . . The fact that her chair and dean are depicted as so clueless, malicious and out of touch adds just the right element of melodrama and, honestly, strains my credulity.” Ze commented later that Anonymous should read her faculty manual and take care of business rather than complaining anonymously on a blog: “[S]he uses the tropes of melodrama (poor young pregnant assistant professor being done wrong by villainous, likely mustachioed, administrators) and rather than acting, writes an anonymous blog post hoping that the sisterhood will save her.”

There’s a lot that we don’t know, and that even I don’t know about this exchange. “clarissa” might be entirely correct—after all, I don’t know Anonymous, and even if I did, I wasn’t privy to her conversations with her Chair or his exchanges with the Dean. Ze also makes a good point about the narrative conventions that Anonymous uses (wittingly or not) of an innocent young woman victimized by bad men. I presume that’s why the commenter chose the pseudonym “clarissa,” after Samuel Richardson’s 1748 novel about female virtue lost, Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady. (I didn’t see quite the same narrative conventions at work in Anonymous’s tale—I thought the department Chair looked inept and willfully clueless rather than evil, and I thought that Anonymous’s description of her assertive actions set her far apart from Clarissa Harlowe, but to each her own.) Here’s what I know, or think I know: the real life identity of Anonymous. I know where she teaches, and I know that lying about this kind of thing in a community of feminist academics is a really bad idea, especially when the blogger knows your name. I don’t know who “clarissa” is at all—the commenter left what appears to be an easily traceable academic e-mail address in the comment form that only I can see, but I can’t assume that the possessor of that e-mail address is “clarissa.” After all, the e-mail addresses of most faculty in the U.S. are easily located in a Google search and two or three clicks—so anyone can copy someone else’s e-mail address into the comments form on my blog.

There are 74 comments on that post—and a lot more ugly and annoying stories about U.S. academia’s continuing failure to acknowledge that there are now women on the faculty as well as on the staff. Overall that post was productive—a community of readers responded with their own struggles over their maternity leaves, and many (including Anonymous) commented about how helpful the resulting conversation was for them. That’s the best that blogs can do for their readers—make connections across geographies and time zones and create a community in which we can have conversations about things that aren’t covered in big media formats, and offer deeper conversations about issues that even academic publications like The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed can cover only glancingly. Pseudonymity is an important tool for helping those conversations happen, especially when it comes to opening up these conversations to those who don’t have their hands on the levers of power and who aren’t protected by tenure—probational regular faculty, contingent faculty, and students. (You know—the majority of people in the academic workplace, whose silence is coerced by their relative powerlessness.) Like Silence Dogood and her inventor, the young Franklin, they’re expected to perform their labors without complaint.

Silence Dogood did well for the Courant by her silence. In fact, it was Franklin who outed himself as the author, perhaps because he couldn’t stand to hear others praising the trenchant wit of Silence Dogood instead of Benjamin Franklin. He explained that “I kept my Secret till my small Fund of Sense for such Performances was pretty well exhausted, and then I discovered it.” (He was, after all, only sixteen—and couldn’t yet imagine fully everything Silence Dogood might have learned in her lifetime.) Franklin writes that his brother James “thought, probably with reason, that [praise for the essays] tended to make me too vain,” and suggests that James’s resentment of Franklin’s pseudonymous success precipitated Franklin’s decision to escape his brother’s thrall, and Boston too, to go on to become one of America’s great newspapermen, humorists, inventors, autobiographers, and statesmen.

As a blogger, I can identify with Franklin’s statement that he sustained the Silence Dogood letters only “till my small Fund of Sense for such Performances was pretty well exhausted.” I don’t want to think about blogging into the void after I have nothing of real value left to offer my readers. But I’m closer in age and stage in life to Silence Dogood now than to the young Franklin, and this ain’t my first time at the rodeo. So I’ll continue blogging so long as my “small Fund of Sense” holds out, the readers keep showing up, and the creek don’t rise and wash out my Internet connection, anyway.

Further reading:

On Franklin and his early career as a writer, see Benjamin Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, edited by Leonard W. Labaree (New Haven, Conn., 1964); David Waldstreicher, Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (New York, 2004); James N. Green and Peter Stallybrass, Benjamin Franklin: Writer and Printer (New Castle, Del., 2006); and J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, volume I: Journalist, 1706-1730 (Philadelphia, 2006). Albert Furtwangler addresses the “Silence Dogood” letters in detail as well in “Franklin’s Authorship and the Spectator,” New England Quarterly 52:3 (1979), 377-96. Meredith McGill’s essay “Copyright,” in A History of the Book in America, volume 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790-1840, eds. Robert A. Gross and Mary E. Kelley (Chapel Hill, 2010), 198-211, is invaluable for understanding early American copyright law.

For more context on the man Silence Dogood’s letters mocked, see Kenneth Silverman’s definitive biography, The Life and Times of Cotton Mather (New York, 1985). On the Boston smallpox epidemic and inoculation controversy, see Robert V. Wells, “A Tale of Two Cities: Epidemics and the Rituals of Death in Eighteenth-Century Boston and Philadelphia,” in Mortal Remains: Death in Early America, eds. Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein (Philadelphia, 2003), 56-67; and Margot Minardi, “The Boston Inoculation Controversy of 1721-1722: An Incident in the History of Race,” William and Mary Quarterly 61:1 (2004), 47-76.

On pseudonymity among bloggers and commenters, see Dr. Crazy, “A Compendium of Posts about Blogging under a Pseudonym,” Reassigned Time (http://reassignedtime.blogspot.com/2009/06/compendium-of-posts-about-blogging.html,) accessed November 16, 2010. I have written about gender, authority, and online personae in Ann M. Little, “We’re all Cowgirls Now,”Journal of Women’s History 22:4 (2010).

The author would like to thank T.J. Tomlin and Mark Peterson for their helpful comments and suggestions on an earlier draft of this essay.

This article originally appeared in issue 11.2 (January, 2011).

The Web Library for this issue of Common-place features insights by four early-career scholars who work at the intersection of early American studies and the digital humanities. All four are recent graduates of or current students at Northeastern University, which is home to the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. Benjamin Doyle (@dhscratch) is a PhD candidate in English at Northeastern University. He was a co-project manager and developer of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) and is currently the project manager of the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS). Elizabeth Hopwood (@LizzieHopwood) was a co-project manager and TEI director of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive and managing editor of Digital Humanities Quarterly; she is currently instructor in digital humanities and textual studies at the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. Jim McGrath (@JimMc_Grath) was project co-director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive and coordinator of the Northeastern University Library Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern; he is currently a postdoctoral fellow in digital public humanities at Brown University’s John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage. Abby Mullen (@abbymullen) is a PhD student in global history at Northeastern University, where she is also a research assistant for the Viral Texts project.

These scholars of early American literature, history, and culture were asked to respond to a series of questions about their experiences working in the digital humanities (DH), how those experiences have shaped both their research and their careers, and what faculty and administrators should understand about graduate students who work on digital projects.

What drew you to digital scholarship in the first place? What has kept you involved in DH since then?

Benjamin Doyle

I love the way the digital humanities situates me and my work in the generative space between possibility and problem. Over the past five years, I have seen time and again how the problem-posing objectives of the humanities have much to offer computational, data-driven studies. I remain anxious about rhetorically positioning DH as a “solution” to the future of the humanities. Yet, DH has also taught me that our skilled practices in identifying sites of trouble and tension can also be responsive as a matter of responsibility. In this way, I feel DH has helped me become a more mindful and effective reader, researcher, teacher, scholar, and partner. At times, DH has felt quite removed from my traditional humanities work. But it has also significantly helped me develop skills applicable to both my DH and non-DH goals. I’ve benefited greatly from the support and, in no small way, patience, provided me by faculty, staff, and colleagues at my institution as I’ve sought to restructure my relationship to English studies while “entering” DH. I probably wouldn’t or couldn’t have continued down this path without the financial, technical, and intellectual resources made available to me along the way. My program has allowed me to attend a range of workshops and institutes, in-house and elsewhere, to develop a foundation in digital work. Our faculty has actively sought funding lines to allow me to carry on in my positions as project manager and developer on two major digital projects: the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA); and the TEI Archiving, Publishing, and Access Service (TAPAS). And my colleagues continually demonstrate to me the value of building intellectual partnerships across areas of interest and specialty while doing DH.

Elizabeth Hopwood

In 2011, when I first heard the whisper of this thing called “digital humanities” in Northeastern’s English Department, I was still struggling to use PowerPoint in my classroom. I in no way considered myself a digital native—my digital literacy peaked around Y2K—and I certainly had no experience in coding or Web development. At that time, Northeastern was beginning to offer a couple of DH courses for graduate students. As I was done with my coursework and in the beginning stages of dissertation writing, I never imagined DH would be something I’d become involved in—it was a next-gen movement. However, when an e-mail circulated around our department looking for research assistants to help on the early stages of a digital project to build an early Caribbean archive, I enthusiastically applied. As a nineteenth-century Americanist who writes about and studies literature and foodways in the Atlantic world, I saw this more as an opportunity to expand my research than to learn about digital archive building. Early on in the planning stages of the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, however, I recognized just how important this project was going to be to my field and that I had a unique opportunity to learn a new set of skills and to make contributions that went beyond my initial research interests. It wasn’t long before I found myself working at various levels across several major projects through our newly established NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. A lot of my technical training has occurred through a combination of workshops, tinkering, and trial by fire. I was fortunate to be at an institution with an investment in not only hiring DH faculty, but also in getting grad students involved in project building and management.

Jim McGrath

The first piece of “digital scholarship” I created was a fake Robert Frost Twitter account (@Robert_Frost) in the spring of 2009; I was a teaching assistant for a Special Topics course on Frost at Northeastern (where I was completing a doctorate in English), and I mainly created it to playfully tweak the poet’s canonical standing. I was an early adopter of Twitter, so I frequently found ways to work it and other social media platforms into my teaching. I thought of these sorts of exercises as diversions from my academic studies until the summer of 2012, when I met a number of “DH people” at the Futures of American Studies Institute (held annually at Dartmouth). These young, hip scholars convinced me that my interests in digital media and aesthetics were more than recreational. In the spring of 2013, I presented a paper on image macros and contemporary “Internet poetry” at a Northeastern University graduate conference, and I was (pleasantly) surprised to hear words of encouragement after my talk from Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, who supported my interests in digital media and would eventually go on to become my dissertation advisor. The most significant moment in my still-developing career as a digital humanist was being named project co-director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive, a crowd-sourced digital archive of stories, photos, and other media related to the 2013 Marathon bombings and their aftermath, in the fall of 2013. My work on this project (which began as a research assistant) led to an immersion in all things related to digital archives and digital humanities, and my current position as a postdoctoral fellow in digital public humanities at Brown feels like a natural progression from these scholarly investments.   

Abby Mullen

I was not particularly interested in digital scholarship when I first started graduate school, but I did have familiarity with some aspects of digital work, such as Omeka, through other scholars. During my first semester at Northeastern, a faculty member, Ryan Cordell, who knew about my very clunky and amateur experiments, invited me to lunch with him and the dean, as well as a visiting scholar, to talk about digital things. That was my first realization that maybe I really could do digital work if I wanted to. The following semester, I was assigned to be part of the NULab fellows’ cohort as part of my fellowship in the history department. During the first NULab fellows’ meeting, when the faculty members were describing the various projects in the NULab, I first heard of the Viral Texts project, a project to detect reprinted texts across the corpus of Chronicling America. When it came time to select a project to work on, I jumped at the chance to work with Viral Texts (which happened to be headed up by Ryan Cordell and David Smith). And honestly, I’ve never looked back. I’ve begun to incorporate digital tools and techniques into my own work, but Viral Texts has been what kept me involved. I did a mix of programming, research, and writing for that project, and it moved me into areas (like programming) that I never thought I’d be able to do.

How has your involvement in digital scholarship affected your experience as a graduate student? How has it affected your coursework? Qualifying exams? Dissertation topic? Sources of funding? Relationship with faculty and fellow graduate students? Networking and other pre-professional activities?

Benjamin Doyle

The digital humanities has definitely helped ground me as a scholar and as a student, even if at times it has been a challenge to align my digital work with my academic responsibilities. It was toward the end of my coursework, as I entered exams, that I took up DH in earnest. I acquired very valuable foundations in DH through a couple of courses, practicums, and workshops. The bulk of my learning, however, has occurred across my role as project manager on two digital projects. These projects provided me with a renewed sense of purpose and have given me perspective about what I can and should be doing both professionally and intellectually. They have also provided me with added funding opportunities and have allowed me to build lasting partnerships with some really wonderful people. Working on TAPAS introduced me to new professional communities and taught me how to think and work more carefully and cooperatively on large-scale projects. I have been able to build relationships with faculty and staff across disciplines and departments at NU as well as at several other institutions. In my work on the ECDA, I’ve been able to develop my skills as a researcher and my familiarity with scholarly publication while learning to design digital environments that facilitate digital modes of literary practice. Being able to travel to conferences and participate in workshops in and outside the U.S. has introduced me to new scholarly networks and has afforded me access to a diversity of academic, technical, and cultural fields.

Elizabeth Hopwood

My involvement with digital scholarship has certainly enriched my graduate student training. It allowed me to take on leadership and managerial positions that I might not otherwise have had as a student. And it led to employment opportunities that otherwise would not have been possible. Moreover, it allowed me to find my niche within my own research and scholarly interests. That said, it took some maneuvering and strict time management to balance my DH project roles and responsibilities with my dissertation-writing self. My last year of graduate school was funded in part because of grants related to my DH work, so I felt a keen sense of responsibility to those projects which, in many ways, can start to feel more “real” or at least more time-sensitive than one’s own dissertation work. That is to say, I often felt the pull of imminent deadlines (for beta launches and development in ECDA, for instance, or to authors I owed e-mails to in my work as managing editor at Digital Humanities Quarterly), and had to routinely carve out time to write in order to successfully complete my dissertation. Working as project manager of DH projects also means wearing many hats: you’re both a student and a colleague to your own advisors. As a project manager, I became the expert of certain aspects of our site: meeting with faculty PIs felt collegial rather than the typical grad-student/professor relationship. I sometimes caught myself in a funny habit of addressing the PI of my project by first name when we were in correspondence about the project, and by honorific “Doctor” or “Professor” when requesting a meeting to review my latest dissertation chapter!

Jim McGrath

I would have given up on graduate school without the digital scholarly work that preoccupied my last few years at Northeastern. In earlier iterations of my dissertation work, I struggled to articulate my interest in material sites where American poetry is read, collected, anthologized, and at times digitized; with the aid of Ryan Cordell and Julia Flanders (among others), I found project models, critical frameworks, and new avenues of inquiry that shifted my dissertation project’s focus more explicitly to digital terrains. “DH faculty” at Northeastern were tremendously supportive of my work: “stupid” questions about digital humanities were answered patiently, e-mails were replied to in fewer than six months, and visits to their offices didn’t feel like trips to the principal’s office. I was encouraged (financially as well as intellectually) to attend digital humanities summer institutes and to submit work to major conferences in the field: for example, The NULab funded a trip to DH 2014 in Lausanne, Switzerland, so several graduate students could present posters there. I was also being financially supported by opportunities to work on digital projects (though in some instances, faculty members had to justify to admins why a student whose funding timeline had ended deserved these opportunities). In addition to faculty support, I was fortunate to be among a number of supportive graduate students who were similarly finding their footing in digital humanities work: We weren’t afraid to ask each other for help, we were all excited about our various projects and research, and we were all decent human beings. Library staff were also constant supporters before and after the creation of the library’s Digital Scholarship Group (I was fortunate enough to become the DSG’s coordinator in early 2016): in addition to the guidances of Julia Flanders (who is as amazing as the legends suggest), metadata specialists Sarah Sweeney and Dan Jergovic gave me a crash course in Dublin Core during my Our Marathon work, digital scholarship librarian Amanda Rust was always up-to-date on the newest digital projects and tools, and associate dean Patrick Yott taught me a ton about digital repositories. I essentially relocated from the English Department’s offices to the library for my last three years at Northeastern. I even had my dissertation defense in the library to honor the role it and its staff played in shaping my work.

Abby Mullen

Digital scholarship was probably the single most influential factor in my graduate school experience. Because I saw the power of digital tools while working for Viral Texts, I wanted to incorporate some of those same tools into my own work. Thus, I took all the digital history courses available to me, and I was the first graduate student in the history department to have digital history as a minor field. For my own work, the digital tool I’ll be using the most is mapping. My dissertation is structured so that each chapter incorporates a very comprehensive map that I’m building to give a spatial history of the First Tripolitan War (1801-1805). Being involved in digital history has also given me huge and important networking opportunities. For example, as a graduate student, I ran an NEH-funded workshop to introduce military historians to digital tools. I brought in experts in the field of digital history to teach about network analysis and mapping. Interestingly, this workshop would never have happened except that I attended a THATCamp at George Mason University, where I met Brett Bobley—the head of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities—and the seed of the idea for the workshop was planted.

How has digital scholarship shaped your practice/identity as a scholar and teacher?

Benjamin Doyle

One of the most valuable outcomes for me of working in DH has been how it’s reshaped my understanding of what it means to be a scholar and the meaningfulness of scholarly contribution. I have been able to identify new and exciting areas of participation in literary studies by seeing contribution occurring not just through traditional scholarly publishing but also through bibliographic and metadata research, digitization of historical content, and other alternative modes of scholarly composition. As a result of my digital work, I have also found new focus in areas of textual media studies and book history that now complement my approaches to Atlantic world literary studies. I’m in the early stages of developing my dissertation, but what started as a general interest in human rights and narrative has been reshaped into a closer study of interface, technology, writing communities, and something I’m referring to as the personality of text. My role on the ECDA has helped me to think more carefully about problematics of language, archive, textuality, and history. And I’ve been able to bring my study of North American and British literature into closer relation to early Caribbean studies as I’ve worked at various levels in the preservation, digitization, and curation of early Caribbean materials and in my role in responding to the research and analysis needs of this scholarly community. This work has also allowed me to contribute to co-authored publications about the development of the archive and about how DH work affects our teaching in the context of the nineteenth-century American literature classroom.

Elizabeth Hopwood

As a scholar, DH has helped me think more creatively about the life of a project and the life of my own research. My dissertation is a traditional one without a digital component, but my work in DH has trained me to imagine possibilities for its eventual second life: as a book but also as its own digital project (something I’m in the beginning stages of developing). My training and research in the digital humanities has taught me to think differently, more expansively, more carefully about the possibilities of the digital in humanistic inquiry, the form and function of literary studies, and the role that it can play within and beyond the classroom.  I love the problem-solving and building aspects of DH work: project management, planning, conceptualizing, figuring out how all the parts fit together. I also greatly value the community that DH seems to engender: over Twitter, listservs, institutes, cities—the network of librarians, scholars, researchers, faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students is immensely valuable to me. Developing a digital archive has been among the most challenging and rewarding parts of my scholarship during my graduate training. It is work that requires me to think simultaneously as a humanities scholar, developer, and user, and to think at the level of the macro and the micro. DH also has attuned me to issues of access and accessibility in thinking about how knowledge is produced and disseminated. This is particularly important for me as a teacher, in thinking about everything from paywalls and open-access texts to how I might best provide appropriate scaffolding to students who might not have access to hardware and software, let alone technical know-how.

Jim McGrath

While I’ve heard that the phrase “public humanities” makes some people want to set their hair on fire, I’ve found that the investments many digital humanities practitioners place in public-facing work have been particularly important, and I try to explore the various implications and challenges of doing public humanities work in my courses and in my own projects. My work in Brown’s Public Humanities program at times might begin (and sometimes end) with digital initiatives aimed entirely at non-academic audiences (i.e. audiences who might not be looking to use materials or data for their own academic projects or publications). Or it might entail working with a range of collaborators—librarians, community organizations, undergraduates, archivists—with various ideas about the kinds of intellectual labor they’re invested in, interests that don’t always privilege scholarly monographs or the critical lenses privileged by my graduate training in, say, an English department. These digital projects require skill in project management and development, attention to design choices and interfaces and their impact on user experiences, knowledge of long-term preservation issues, and discussions about various forms of public engagement, among other factors. My interest in digital scholarship has also led me to focus more on a career in alt-ac, with positions in archives, libraries, and museums now more compelling to me as employment avenues than they were when I first began graduate school (I sometimes regret not going to library school; I’m considering a CLIR postdoc after my time at Brown is up, though it’s also been fun and challenging to do DH work outside the confines of a library). I’ve enjoyed the ways in which highly collaborative, public-facing digital work has forced me to question the value of many kinds of academic labor in various ways, and I appreciate the tremendous work that goes into defining the value of DH work to public audiences, students, faculty, and institutional higher-ups. I’ve also been fortunate to have been mentored by faculty members and librarians who are invested in the ethical dimensions of digital scholarship, as well as the idea that, at the end of the day, we’re all entitled to have lives that extend beyond our academic pursuits.

Abby Mullen

My association with digital scholarship has had two effects on my identity and practice. First, while I was doing coursework and was around my department more often, I was known as the “digital person,” so I was often asked to come and speak to classes about digital tools, or help others with their digital projects. In courses for which I was a TA, I frequently spearheaded digital projects as part of the course’s requirements. Second, it seems that my association with digital scholarship has actually pushed me down the alt-ac path. I recently started a new job at George Mason University in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, where I’m working as a project manager on a new digital tool to help researchers manage their archival photos. It’s a really important new project, and I anticipate working on it for a long time to come.

What advice would you give to current or future graduate students who are thinking about getting involved in digital scholarship? What advice would you give to faculty who are mentoring those students? To administrators who fund DH centers? To federal and private funding agencies (NEH, Mellon, ACLS)? To professional organizations, whether DH-focused or period-specific (C19, SEA, ADHO, etc.)?

Benjamin Doyle

My advice to graduate students entering into DH is to start small and aim big. As a first step, develop ties to the community by reaching out to both new and established practitioners through social platforms or in-person at your institution and nearby institutions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions or to introduce yourself to these new communities—you never know what friends and partners await you. Contact projects and scholars that work in areas that interest you, but do as much research as you can beforehand to show you are as invested as you are curious. Also, don’t be afraid to seek out financial support from your program and institution to attend institutes and workshops, and to fund your individual research. Graduate student labor is often invaluable to the success of digital projects, so feel confident negotiating fair compensation for your labor on others’ projects. It’s highly likely you will fall in love with DH and your digital work, but it’s important to keep a level head about how much time and energy you invest in such work to ensure you don’t lose sight of the equal value of your academic/dissertation goals. Plan early and often, and take time to re-plan just as often. My advice to faculty and administrators: don’t just seek to inspire your students in DH work, but model effective and sensible approaches to doing DH so they can develop strategies for becoming independent and confident scholars of the field and one day make the transition to becoming mentors themselves.

Elizabeth Hopwood

To graduate students: Get involved, but keep an eye on your own research! Don’t be daunted by a lack of experience or technical know-how. I’ve found that on-ramps exist at many levels, particularly in the form of enthusiastic mentors within and outside your own institution. That means: get on Twitter, play around with a Website, join a listserv, go to a THATCamp (or plan your own). You will probably need to devote some of your own time outside your institution learning the tools of the trade (tinkering with Python on the weekends or the command line between classes), so be OK with that. You won’t break the Internet, so try to build or design something just to see what happens. To faculty and administrators: Think carefully about how you see the role of graduate student labor fitting into the lifespan of a project. Talk openly about project management and various ways of doing it (managing projects, I’ve found firsthand, is not an innate skill to humanists). One of the toughest lessons I had to learn when I first became the project manager on the ECDA was that it was impossible to think about, discuss, or manage a digital project in a linear way, so plan for the unexpected and think both short-term and long-term. Ongoing training and check-ins are crucial to a project’s longevity, so the importance of building a strong and communicative core team of students, faculty, and library support cannot be overstated.

Jim McGrath

Graduate students: Take your time to learn about the long history of DH (and “humanities computing,” and whatever else it’s been called), think about how collaborative work challenges the lies you’ve been sold about how academic work gets done and why people should care about it, ask stupid questions, create a professional Twitter account but don’t overdo it (we all overdo it at first), find DH models (who do you want to be when you grow up?), talk to people doing cool DH work online and at conferences, do cool stuff, talk about the cool stuff you’re doing. Faculty: Offer intellectual support as well as advice on the professional state of things in DH; if you don’t know where people are getting jobs (or if you don’t know what “alt-ac” is), try to find someone on campus who does. Listen to students when they discuss the place of their labor on your project, at your institution, and beyond. Listen to librarians and archivists: many of them know a lot about this stuff, and they’ll be able to help your students if you acknowledge their expertise. Provide students with opportunities to define the value of their contributions to digital scholarship (and encourage them to practice these attempts at definition in more public contexts when relevant). Introduce them to your cool DH friends. Admins should create spaces where graduate students can collaborate in various ways on digital projects, be ethically compensated for their labor, and be supported by an established network of colleagues and training mechanisms. Funding agencies and professional organizations should help younger scholars navigate professional terrain (specifically, the expectations that digital scholars know everything about digital scholarship). In general, don’t be a jerk.

Abby Mullen

To students, I would say: You never know what might happen until you try. If you want to try something different from your prescribed path, just ask—you might be surprised what’s possible. To faculty, I’d say: Your students need sustained support from you. If they want to start a digital project, you have to give them support for more than just a semester or even a year. Digital projects take time, human resources, and money—even dissertation-based projects. Don’t let the glamour of the digital idea obscure the very real needs your graduate student still has. To administrators: Digital scholarship can be transformative. Fund projects that give graduate students the chance to do real work, make real contributions, and gain real competencies. To funding agencies: Sometimes graduate students’ skills go unnoticed or obscured when they have to work underneath a person with a PhD all the time on grant-funded projects. As one who has been the principal investigator in all but name on a grant, I know firsthand that graduate students are capable of doing the work of a PI. Therefore, I suggest that you consider relaxing your rules concerning the need for PIs to have PhDs, perhaps not in every grant category, but in some. To professional organizations: Supporting digital scholarship is a long-term commitment. One-off workshops or projects will not have nearly the same effect as a sustained commitment to scholars who are working digitally. At your conferences, make room for digital work in all your panels (not just the “digital” ones); offer THATCamps or workshops; offer presentation formats that are conducive to digital projects, such as posters or lightning talks. Offer micro-grants or fellowships to graduate students or early faculty for digitization or travel to workshops that will enhance their skills.

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

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).