WAS THE FEDERALIST PRESS STAID AND APOLITICAL?
By Catherine O’Donnell Kaplan
Arizona State University

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.

A page from Joseph Dennie's "Port Folio" (click image for readable version)

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.

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.

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.

That’s what I plan be subjecting my “Age of Jefferson” class to in the morning, as a way of explaining the “celebratory politics” of the Early Republic and also keeping my Election Day emotions in check a little better than speaking too much will.  From the 1790s on, highly detailed political songs were a popular and important part of most campaigns and movements. They were published in newspapers and on their own, to be read for amusement and actually sung at banquets, meetings, parades, and taverns. The lyrics were usually written for a particular occasion, but most of the tunes were standards like “God Save the King,” “Yankee Doodle,” or that British drinking song they play at the start of baseball games. Less often but increasingly, original melodies were created and the songs published as sheet music. Paul Erickson at AAS passed on a link to a Library of Congress online collection of campaign sheet music that mostly comes from the middle and later 19th-century when the major parties were in the habit of commissioning official campaign songs. In the earlier Federalist/Democratic-Republican era, where most of my research interests reside, political songs were a considerably more local, informal, and quirky affair. As one example, here (at right) is a song from 1797 New Jersey that is an earlier example of the Republican complaints about female Federalist voting that Rosie Zagarri’s recent book and “Lost Atlantis” post described. There are many, many more political songs where that comes from, and perhaps I will throw a few more of them up here on the blog from time to time.

Interestingly, music has not been a big part of this election cycle, has it? There has been nothing like the outpouring of politically charged pop music that occurred in 2004, in the heydey of MoveOn. Remember The Future Soundtrack for America or the Eminem Internet video “Mosh” ? They seemed pretty powerful at the time, but electorally speaking, not so much, it turned out. I have to say the relative lack of musical activity this time seems like a good sign for Obama. Post-JFK, the entertainment industry’s occasional bursts of enthusiasm for moderately left-wing party politics have not generally coincided with Democratic presidential victories. Quite the opposite. I’m looking at you, McGovern campaign.

P.S. Just to fill out the post, I am also including a Federalist drinking song penned for the “Joe Six-Packs” of Vermont in 1799 by playwright/poet Royall Tyler.

P.P.S. These are from the original newspapers, but you can find these and many other wonderful political songs reprinted in the book Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Music for Patriots, Politicians, and Presidents: Harmonies and Discords of the First Hundred Years (New York: Macmillan, 1975).

WERE EARLY AMERICAN ELECTIONS FOR WHITE MEN ONLY?

On Voter Fraud and the Petticoat Electors of New Jersey

by Rosemarie Zagarri
George Mason University

Recent charges against the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for registering nonexistent voters have raised the specter that the 2008 election will be marred by voter fraud. But as anyone who has studied American history knows, voter fraud—and allegations of corruption—are as old as the republic itself. The more closely contested the race, the likelier the possibility of fraud and the accusations of fraud.

This was certainly true in early New Jersey, which had one of the most divisive, yet dynamic, political environments of the early national period. Like many other states in post-revolutionary America, New Jersey required that citizens, in order to vote, must possess a certain amount of property—50 pounds, to be precise. Yet unlike most other states, New Jersey also allowed free blacks who met the wealth requirement to vote. And alone among all the states at the time, New Jersey allowed qualified unmarried women (single women or widows) to cast ballots in local, state, and federal elections. Not surprisingly, such liberal voting provisions were highly controversial and subject to constant attack. Yet they remained in force in 1807 when the legislature limited voting to white males.

From a very early date, New Jersey, small though it was, was wracked by internal regional and religious divisions. These divisions translated into differing party loyalties, with Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans gaining strength in the northern counties and Federalists acquiring a firm base in the southern region. Even within each county, local animosities were often quite fierce. In such a volatile situation, each side constantly attempted to secure every last vote in order to gain an edge in a given election.

This was, of course, an era long before formal voter registration procedures had been put in place, or even considered. Individuals would present themselves at the polling place and swear they had met the state’s particular voting requirements. Other individuals, or the election registrar, could challenge the voter’s qualifications if they had reason to suspect malfeasance. Nonetheless, most who presented themselves were allowed to vote. In fact, then as now, getting out the electorate was the main issue of concern. Commenting on the “indifference” of the New Jersey population to voting, Polish visitor Julian Ursin Niemcewicz observed in 1797, “As long as their purse is respected, as long as one does not overwhelm them neither with taxes nor with onerous duties, it worries them little by whom and how they are governed.”

As each party vied for dominance in the state, every vote counted. Getting voters to turn out required a major effort. Supporters would go from house to house to rally potential voters and give them carriage rides to the polls, which often might be located miles away over dusty roads. Because of the high property qualification and the exclusion of married women, the number of eligible female voters was always relatively small, probably in the hundreds in any given election. Nevertheless, they loomed large in the minds of the opposition. In the heat of party conflicts, members charged that their opponents had taken sexual advantage of the women whom they accompanied to the polls. Others suggested that the women had been coached about their choice of candidates. Still others maintained that the women had been physically coerced into voting. In 1803, New Brunswick Federalists were accused of “rallying the petticoat electors and hurrying them and others to the polls.” In 1802, “whole wagon loads of the ‘privileged fair’” were said to have been brought to the places where ballots were cast.

The issue of women voting came to a head in 1807 during a hotly contested battle over the location of the new Essex County courthouse. Local voters were asked to choose between Newark and Elizabeth as the site for the new building. Heated propaganda spewed forth from both locales prior to the election. The election itself witnessed unprecedented voter turnout. Newark prevailed. However, supporters of the other site quickly challenged the result, pointing out that the number of ballots cast was three times larger than the eligible voter population. A legislative inquiry eventually uncovered massive voter fraud and voided the election.

The most important result, however, was to provide opponents of female suffrage with ammunition. In the next session of the assembly, legislators hurled charges and countercharges about corruption and fraudulent behavior at state elections. Much of the misbehavior, it was clear, came from white men who voted even though they were not qualified or who voted at different polling places more than once. The solution, however, focused on marginal populations: women, foreigners, and free blacks. Because women’s dress “favoured disguise,” it was said, some women “have repeated the vote without detection.” More generally, women, blacks, and foreigners had “no interest in the welfare of the state” and were “mere instruments of parties in the state, or the agents of executive designs, formed out of it.” Perhaps most frightening of all, if women, free blacks, or aliens could vote, they might also be able to serve in public office. Legislator John Condict saw this as a disaster in the making. “It cannot for a moment be supposed,” he said, “that the authors of the constitution meant to entrust the command of our army, and the direction of our state, either to women, to negroes, or to aliens.” Soon thereafter, the legislature passed a law confining the franchise to free, white males.

So voter fraud, or charges of voter fraud, have always been with us. What is most important, however, is to ensure that when fraud is suspected, only actual perpetrators of it are identified and punished, rather than symbolic representatives or voters whose suffrage rights happen to be vulnerable. In 1807 New Jersey, there was a real voter fraud problem that was seized on by Democratic-Republicans to suppress female Federalist votes. In 2008, there is little evidence that charges of voter fraud are anything but a modern GOP tactic to suppress Democratic votes. ACORN has only been found to have overstated the number of people it has registered to vote. Yet problems in voter registration do not necessarily translate into fraudulent votes. Election officials presumably have the ability to prevent ineligible voters from casting ballots.

Unlike the McCain campaign and other present-day Republicans, who are gearing up their voter suppression measures even as I write, the politicians of the Early Republic sometimes considered excessive voting totals only an index of popular interest in our elective government. As one commentator observed shortly after the courthouse debacle, “I believe [our electors] yet profess an ardent zeal for the cause of liberty, which neither artifice, menace or fraud, can remove.”

FURTHER READING

On women’s political participation in the early American republic, see Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000); Catherine Allgor, A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); Paula Baker, “The Domestication of American Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920,” American Historical Review 89 (1984): 620-647; Susan Branson, These Fiery Frenchified Dames: Women and Political Culture in Early National Philadelphia (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (New York: Norton, 1986); Judith Apter Klinghoffer and Lois Elkis, “”The Petticoat Electors”: Women’s Suffrage In New Jersey, 1776-1807,” Journal of the Early Republic 12 (1992): 159-93; 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); Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Elizabeth R. Varon, We Mean to Be Counted: White Women and Politics in Antebellum Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Rosemarie Zagarri, “Gender and the First Party System,” in Doron Ben-Atar and Barbara B. Oberg, eds., Federalists Reconsidered (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), 118-134; Rosemarie Zagarri, Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Political News and Female Readership in Antebellum Boston and Its Region,” Journalism History 22 (1996): 2-14; Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, “Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign Of 1840: Three Perspectives From Massachusetts.,” Journal of the Early Republic 17 (1997): 277-315. For the larger political context of the New Jersey situation, still helpful is Carl E. Prince, New Jersey’s Jeffersonian Republicans: The Genesis of an Early Party Machine, 1789-1817 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1967).

See the introduction for an explanation of the “Lost Atlantis” series. Click the logo below to see all of the posts.

WAS SLAVERY REALLY NOT A MAJOR ISSUE IN AMERICAN POLITICS BEFORE THE MISSOURI CRISIS?

At my dissertation prospectus defense, one of the committee members posed a question that vexed me even more than the others faced that day. “What,” he inquired, “is the method to your madness here?” He noted that I had listed a whole series of sources but proposed no research method other than to “just read these newspapers and sermons and congressional debates.” I stammered out some half-baked reply, he urged me to find a method, and we moved on.  At some point after this defense, I surely became a more efficient researcher.  But I’m not sure I’ve found a better method than “just reading” the sources with an eye to the research question at hand.

If I had actually obeyed the injunction to find some more selective or systematic approach to the sources, I may not have written this particular dissertation and book, Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic, in the first place. This because I quite literally began this research by just sitting down and reading the newspaper: Niles’ Weekly Register, one of the very few truly national publications of the early nineteenth century.

My question was whether slavery really disappeared from national politics between the abolition of the slave trade in 1808 and the Missouri Crisis beginning in 1819.  The common wisdom was that the partisan and international fury surrounding Jefferson’s Embargo on foreign trade and the War of 1812 took slavery off the table in national politics.  I thought this national newspaper in particular would be a good place to inquire as to the truth of that historiographical consensus.

Hezekiah Niles published his Weekly Register in volumes and bound them with an index, but fortunately I did not discover that right away.  The lack of index entries for such terms as “slavery” or “negroes” would have confirmed the traditional take on this era, as would a glance at the headlines and topic headings on each page.  But here’s where just reading the thing paid off: I found slavery everywhere in Niles’s coverage of those headline events and issues, even though none of them had anything overtly to do with slavery.  Here was a prowar (Democratic-)Republican comparing the Royal Navy’s impressment of American sailors to Algerian or West Indian or even southern slavery.  There was a Federalist campaign to abolish the Constitution’s three-fifths clause – which they commonly branded “slave representation” – in response to a wicked war the “Virginia dynasty” ruling in Washington had brought on the country.  There in turn was Niles and other Republican editors casting about for good replies to this Federalist attack on the power of slaveholders.  Yet none of these tactics in the larger partisan struggle showed up in the index, which was quite naturally devoted to the main subjects at hand, like the war.

I found the same thing whether I sat down to “just read” fiery sermons from New England Congregationalist divines, antiwar or prowar pamphlets, or the Annals of Congress.  Indeed, ignoring the inadequate index and page headings to the congressional debates paid the same dividends as doing the same for Niles’ Weekly Register.  In the course of their diatribes against the war, for instance, various congressmen warned the southern warmongers that slave insurrection would be a natural and just consequence of their leaving their plantations to invade Canada.  One of the great moments came as I waded through an 1813 debate over expanding the army – yes, there was a bitter partisan dispute over such a radical notion in time of war – when I encountered Josiah Quincy of Massachusetts charging that the expanded army would march north to drag the administration’s political enemies into slavery, yoking them in with the black slaves over which the Virginia despots ruled.  And on and on it went in much this same fashion, as I encountered slavery everywhere in debates that should have borne no direct relationship with slavery whatsoever.  It became clear that the subject of slavery was never truly absent from American public life.

It also became quite clear why so many previous scholars had argued that slavery had subsided as an issue in these years.  The 1810s were manifestly not the 1850s, when slavery was the headline issue around which everything else revolved.  The whole exercise showed that unearthing new documents is not always the Holy Grail of historical scholarship.  In this case, as with so many others, examining old familiar sources with a new question in mind generated surprising conclusions.

While a blog post may be a strange place to air this particular moral to the story, the whole experience makes me tremble just a little for my profession as I see the proliferation of online databases make such sources as early American newspapers more widely available.  This development has undeniable payoffs, which even my (strong) inner Luddite is not inclined to dispute.  But researchers doing only word searches will miss not only context, but also what might lurk just beneath the headlines.

Matthew Mason
Brigham Young University

As to the blog itself, I will be posting my own comments, but I must say that I am feeling pretty inhibited about commenting on the presidential election right now because of my strict no-gloating and no pre-hatched-chicken-counting rules.

As to Alan Greenspan, in his case, I think we early American historians are entitled to gloat, given that he went up to Capitol Hill and admitted that his and most other economists’ ideology of the market and “private enterprise” as infallible, self-policing mechanisms is wrong, wrong, wrong:

Greenspan called this “a flaw in the model that I perceived is the critical functioning structure that defines how the world works.”

We did tell him so, most recently in the current issue of Common-Place.

WERE JEFFERSONIAN CHARGES OF MONARCHISM REALLY JUST SLEAZY, HYSTERICAL SMEARS?

by Andrew Shankman
Rutgers University, Camden Campus

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.

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.

WAS ANDREW JACKSON REALLY THE PEOPLE’S CHOICE IN 1824?

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

[Click here for .pdf version, with footnotes]

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.

DID THE ELECTION OF ANDREW JACKSON USHER IN THE “AGE OF THE COMMON MAN”?

by Andrew W. Robertson
City University of New York

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 Review 106 (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.