Commons Democracy

Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States

Dana D. Nelson

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780823268399, 9780823268382
• eBook ISBN: 9780823268405
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

Commons Democracy highlights a poorly understood dimension of democracy in the early United States. It tells a story that, like the familiar one, begins in the Revolutionary era. But instead of the tale of the Founders' high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the safe framework for democracy—a representative republican government—Commons Democracy examines the power of the democratic spirit, the ideals and practices of everyday people in the early nation. As Dana D. Nelson reveals in this illuminating work, the sensibility of participatory democratic activity fueled the involvement of ordinary folk in resistance, revolution, state constitution-making, and early national civic dissent. The rich variety of commoning customs and practices in the late colonies offered non-elite actors a tangible and durable relationship to democratic power, one significantly different from the representative democracy that would be institutionalized by the Framers in 1787. This democracy understood political power and liberties as communal, not individual.Ordinary folk practiced a democracy that was robustly participatory and insistently local. To help tell this story, Nelson turns to early American authors—Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, and Caroline Kirkland—who were engaged with conflicts that emerged from competing ideals of democracy in the early republic, such as the Whiskey Rebellion and the Anti-Rent War as well as the enclosure of the legal commons, anxieties about popular suffrage, and practices of frontier equalitarianism. While Commons Democracy is about the capture of "democracy" for the official purposes of state consolidation and expansion, it is also a story about the ongoing (if occluded) vitality of commons democracy, of its power as part of our shared democratic history and its usefulness in the contemporary toolkit of citizenship.

1 / Telling Stories: Vernacular versus Formal Democracy

One of the cornerstones of the United States’ self-image is a triumphalist story of how its orderly political freedom matured over time into “the world’s leading democracy.” Most U.S. citizens proudly define the nation’s political system as a democracy and consider our governmental model as well as our culture of individual freedoms worthy of the world’s emulation. Of course, the most careful students remember that the U.S. governmental system is a representative republic, and not, properly speaking, a democracy. But those who err can hardly be blamed, because the growth of democracy is one of the United States’ most central and carefully rehearsed stories about itself.

In this familiar story, democracy begins as a rhetorical glimmer in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, an inchoate if energizing ideal that fuels the new nation’s Revolutionary bid for independence from England. The Founders’ idealism is wisely seat-belted by the Framers, whose Constitution engineered a representative system to help citizens avoid the “democratic excess” of direct participation. Their model eschewed what they wisely understood to be the impracticability, unpredictability, and even lawlessness of historical expressions of popular democracy. Democracy, properly delimited by official structures of political representation, was then launched by the election of President Jefferson, who released the “voice of the people” in his electoral triumph over the elitist Federalists. The political sway of the common man subsequently burgeoned under Jackson with the advent of the party system and with universal suffrage, when all white men, regardless of their access to wealth or property, won the vote. Of course, the term “universal” now ironically highlights the injustices of citizenship in the early nation: women of every race along with African-descended, Native American, and foreign-born men were excluded. Thus began a longer struggle for progress, fueled by the Founders’ ideals and waged almost throughout the twentieth century, for voting rights and access to the ballot box for the remaining majority of the United States’ populations.

This narrative, a touchstone of civics education, has long depicted democracy as a boon from the Framers, the generation of political leaders who created prudent constraints allowing ordinary people to take up democratic freedoms responsibly, ensuring that the nation’s common citizens and its political system would mature in tandem. Democracy, we learn, is about getting the vote, which marks political (i.e., law-abiding and self-disciplined) adulthood. This story—we can call it the consensus narrative—describes “democracy” from a bird’s-eye view that reveals to its grateful recipients a relatively orderly progress.

Interestingly, though, the first half century of U.S. political fiction contends against this consensus narrative. Early novels offer a different, richer, more historically nuanced, and more deeply democratic picture—if by democracy we refer to the contributions of the demos, the common or poorer classes of citizens. It explores the democratic ideas and traditions of ordinary citizens, framing the conflicts that emerged as a result of competing ideas about democracy and different democratic cultures in the late colonies and early nation. It offers insights into how some ideas, cultures, and practices won out, becoming officially enshrined in the nation’s memory, and how others were squeezed into political irrelevance. It gives us tantalizing hints about diverging democratic histories, and different modes of democratic possibility that might be worth remembering, exploring, and even trying to deploy today. It shows how “representation” in the early nation is more than simply governmental: its politics extend through aesthetic and social practices. The political fiction of the early United States shows that democracy was not an adult-sized suit that childlike citizens grew into, but rather something messier and more contentious, where ordinary citizens had adult ideas from the start—but not always ideas that were in accord with the Constitution’s vision for formal, state-based political order. “Democracy” in these stories was not official government, but vernacular practices: a set of competing ideas, ideals, and customs, fought over, gained, and also lost in the first century of Independence.

The democratic conflicts that are explored, historicized, theorized, celebrated, and vilified in the early U.S. novels offer provocative alternative historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding how democratic cultures were streamlined into a more officially singular democratic culture in the early United States. These fictionalized treatments of conflicting democratic practices and cultures also underscore how many early citizens did not see their fractious and vibrant local democratic practices as being in opposition to Constitutional or Federal order but rather a vital (if contestational) partner with it. Importantly, the political fiction of the early United States actually corroborates and fleshes out the recent investigations of historians into alternative democratic political cultures in the late colonies and early nation. Before turning to literary accounts in the remainder of this book, then, this chapter explores what a recent generation of historians and political theorists have uncovered about contending understandings and practices of democracy in the late colonies and early nation.

Toward a More Complex History of U.S. Democracy

The struggles over the extent to which local democratic cultures and ordinary citizens could contribute to formal political decision- and policymaking—struggles that sometimes culminated in armed conflict—have long been studied by historians for how they illustrated the “lessons” ordinary actors “learned” about democratic political order in the early nation, or how they reflected the growing pangs of capitalism. Earlier historians did not consider these so-called rebellions as movements undergirded by any consistent political theory. But recently historians have begun analyzing the political demands and claims forwarded in these rebellions and property protests, documenting important consistencies in the appeals made by people living across several different regions—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas.¹

Beginning in the 1760s, rural citizens from South Carolina and North Carolina, in separate movements, began insisting on the right of citizens to enforce fair laws, a right they termed “regulation.” This sense of the people’s self-governing right both to demand and to make fair government burgeoned as the colonies moved toward the Revolution. And soon after, in the face of a severe recession in the 1780s, the spirit of regulation informed a range of actions across the new nation, when citizens began organizing against what they viewed as laws and policies that benefited the few (the wealthy and/or political elite) at the direct expense of the many. The most prominent among such political moves was a Regulator action in Massachusetts, known by the regulation’s opponents as “Shays’ Rebellion,” which began in 1786 as a protest against unfair debt policies and onerous taxes. Mounted in the spirit and rhetoric of the Revolution, the protesters took up arms as a last resort to keep officials from carrying out legal proceedings that would foreclose on their farms and possessions.

The consensus story of national founding—the story that grew out of the Constitutional moment—framed the Massachusetts protest as an anarchic mob action that catalyzed the Framers into action. Concluding that the nation needed a stronger and more centralized government to prevent such lawlessness and to enforce the collection of taxes, the Framers’ careful deliberations in Philadelphia resulted in the nation’s Constitution. This familiar story frames the concerns that drove the Massachusetts Regulators as irrelevant and even damaging to the course of nation—Shays’ Rebellion—rather than a contribution to it. But the Shay-sites’ concerns and demands were not anomalous or simply local. People beyond Massachusetts shared them: the oppositional actions of the Massachusetts citizens emblematized the alternative democratic ideals and strategies of commons or vernacular democracy being practiced and refined across the late colonies and early nation.

We can begin to comprehend the significance of these alternative democratic principles and practices present if we study the Massachusetts event in its economic contexts. In the 1780s, as historian Woody Holton has carefully detailed in Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Americans in western Massachusetts—and across the newly confederated states—were facing tax burdens three to five times higher than those that had propelled them into Revolution just a decade before. The Continental Congress’s demand that these taxes be paid in hard money exacerbated a cash shortage that inflated debt as it deflated the value of land, livestock, and personal belongings. The cash shortage hit poorer citizens especially hard. A lively trade in war bonds arose among those with the means to speculate as debt-plagued veterans were driven to redeem their wartime promissory notes at fractions of their face value. Poorer veterans traded in their bonds to pay war-related state taxes, only to lose their property and wind up in jail for debt they still couldn’t pay. Their plight spurred many—and not just the poor—to a variety of actions, legal and extralegal, in Massachusetts and in other states. Citizens wrote editorials, lobbied representatives, and agitated for fairer policies about how war bonds should yield interest and eventually be retired, how banks should operate and debt should be collected, and how to use paper money to ease the crisis. When their advocacy was turned aside or ignored by legislative representatives, these citizens invoked the constituent power of the people—a power, as we’ll soon see, they had helped ensure in early state constitutions was constant and non-delegable—and acted to block foreclosure hearings and auctions of neighbors’ properties and possessions.

These initiatives, legal and extralegal, were not (as the consensus narrative usually describes them) shortsighted and anarchic efforts of scofflaw mobs to evade taxes and debt. Quite differently, recent historians have emphasized how before acting extralegally, ordinary actors deliberated, followed political channels, and proposed policies that were responsive to the state and national interests.² These historians emphasize that the citizen–Regulators who assembled militias and took up arms in western Massachusetts did not object to being taxed, or to being responsible for their debts. Rather, they were concerned about fairness: about how burdens of the new nation’s wartime debts were distributed in ways that disproportionately penalized people of lesser means. As historian Leonard Richards summarizes, those involved in the Shays’ Regulation were concerned about Massachusetts’ new state government, and the policies it enacted that enriched “the few at the expense of the many” (63).

As poor and middling actors mounted political actions against the economic policies that were strangling livelihoods, the political and economic elite across the states became concerned at the apparent evaporation of deference that had long characterized the relations between the “many” and the “few.” The experiences of the Revolution had emboldened non-elite people all over the new United States to involve themselves even more publicly in the work of self-governing rather than leaving things to their representative “betters.” This growing understanding of what came to be enshrined in the Constitution as the sovereignty of the people started not as an abstraction but in local, face-to-face practices. Common people in the backcountry, towns, and cities believed they had a right both before and after the Revolution to “regulate” the governments they framed to ensure fairness—this was what they considered their “sovereign” power. And in exercising their power to self-govern, they agitated for economic policies that they believed, as both Holton and Bouton detail, would create a strong basis for political democracy.

Historians have long celebrated the Revolution’s advancement of political equality. But Terry Bouton notes that the period’s revolutionary push for economic equality has received far less attention. It’s impossible to comprehend the political alternative presented by these vernacular democratic practices without heeding this essential dimension of their claims. Bouton documents that in the run-up to Revolution, Pennsylvanians—poor, middling, and wealthy—came to believe that “economic equality was what made political equality possible . . . To them, concentrations of wealth led to corruption and tyrannical rulers, while widely dispersed political and economic power promoted good government” (Taming Democracy, 32). This trans-class alliance of Patriots insisted that the flowering of political democracy would depend on supportive economic policies.³ Advancing this argument, some argued that democracy should include treating the land as a commonwealth, not to be monopolized by those who had the ability to win out in economic competition, but fairly allocated for ownership to assure the livelihood and equality of the citizenry.⁴ These arguments, which informed the early state constitutions, made two interlocking claims for the people’s democracy, claims echoed locally and across the country well into the nineteenth century and that show up across the political novels of the early nation: first, for a more muscular citizen power, a self-governing agency that was, importantly, non-delegable to state and local governments formed by the people; and second, for access to a secure livelihood in the form of productive lands and/or meaningful employment.

Patriots widely debated the conditions that would make equal political participation meaningful. Citizens across the late colonies and early states demanded conditions that would maximize public happiness (an idea much discussed in the Revolutionary era of the eighteenth century)—the ability to participate publicly on equal standing and as communities in the project of self-government—rather than a private happiness or individual good. In these demands, democracy was about access, a claim qualitatively different from the civic promise that would soon be enshrined in its place, the promise of “equal opportunity.” In this early Revolutionary-era understanding of democracy, “liberty” was understood to be funded by political equality anchored in economic fairness—as a collective, and not simply an individual, right.

The People, Sovereignty, and the Framers’ “Democracy”

However, during the 1780s the elites across the states began to separate themselves from the revolutionary consensus conjoining political with economic equality that had formed during the 1770s. Instead, they began pushing for policies that advocated for a “strong” government that would advantage the wealth of the affluent—men who used capital to accumulate capital—toward the building of national prosperity and might. Alan Taylor has described this layer of conflict as a “new, internal, and attenuated stage in the continuing American Revolution” (Liberty Men, 5). Historian Barbara Smith observes that the restoration of Tory property assured by the Treaty of Paris, and the subsequent entry of restored Tories into citizenship and the U.S. political scene in the 1780s, ushered in new political alliances and “a profound change in the Patriot movement.” As she summarizes, “In the 1770s, the central experience of many Americans had been one of association. The 1780s, by contrast, was an era of dissociation” (184; see also 190–91). In this period, the new elite “relied on the consent of the few and uncommon” to redefine “money as private and not public” (186–87). And they worked to redefine key words of the Revolution, “liberty” and “democracy” and “sovereignty,” in ways that would tame and redirect civic energies away from Patriot ideals that anchored democratic constituent power to mutual commitment and common good.

We can see this struggle for redefinition at work in the Constitution itself. The notion of the people’s sovereignty is commonly understood today as an innovation of the Framers’ modern statecraft, an ideal that forms the democratic basis on which our representative government was built. The U.S. Constitution offers a mechanism that makes possible what Hamilton, Madison, and Jay described in The Federalist Papers as a democracy that was otherwise impossible. As they argued to their New York audience, democracy, directly practiced, is a form of government that inevitably collapses into tyranny or anarchy. The Constitution’s genius, then, is to make democracy durable through safeguarding, enabling representative structures. These representative institutions, Publius argued, legitimate state power and protect the people’s sovereignty through the rule of law.

Edmund Morgan’s magisterial history Inventing the People corroborates the Federalists’ account of Constitutional innovation. He notes that the people’s sovereignty was not, in its original articulation, invented to promote democracy. Rather, it was a way for members of British Parliament to gain strategic power over the king’s appointments and policy choices. When seventeenth-century members of Parliament invented the notion of a sovereign people, their goal, Morgan summarizes, was “to magnify the power not of the people themselves, but of the people’s representatives. It did not originate in popular demonstrations against the king but in the contest between king and Parliament . . . Accordingly, the first formulations of popular sovereignty in England, from which it never quite escaped, elevated the people to supreme power by elevating their elected representatives” (58). The Framers followed that tradition, and we would thus be wrong, Morgan insists, to understand the U.S. Constitution’s invocation of the people’s sovereignty as inventing an actual political power for ordinary citizens. The power of the people, in Morgan’s account, is rather an effect of Constitutional government. And this theoretical power, in Morgan’s assessment, does not exist until the Framers propose, name, and codify it in the Federal Constitution of 1789. The problems only come, in Morgan’s view, when misinformed citizens take the fiction of the sovereign people literally, attributing to themselves capacities that the fictive ideal cannot properly entail. And of course the people will make such mistakes. For Morgan, nationally oriented patriotism provides the antidote for disorderly citizens’ tendency to misinterpret the Constitution’s touted sovereign power of the people as their own—mistakes that wind up as mobs and rebellions. Nationalist patriotism helps orient such confused citizens toward a more mature understanding of democratic government.

Our consensus narrative, along with much history and theory from every political camp, has proceeded from assumptions compatible with Morgan’s arguments. But a more careful historical analysis allows us to see that the Constitution’s resonant opening phrase, “we the people,” is the site not just of a creative or theoretical deployment of an impossible fiction (what recent political theorists like Claude Lefort elegantly theorized as the “empty space” of democracy or what Jacques Derrida more recently characterized, following Tocqueville, as its problematically borderless sphericity). From a more attentive historical angle, “we the people” is better ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Commons Democracy: An Introduction
• 1. Telling Stories: Vernacular versus Formal Democracy
• 2. Between Savagery and Civilization: The Whiskey Rebellion and a Democratic Middle Way
• 3. The Privatizing State: The Pioneers and the Closing of the Legal Commons
• 4. Settler Self-Governance: Democratic Politics on the Frontier
• 5. From Nothing to Start, into Being: The Anti-Rent Wars, the Indian Question, and the Triumph of Liberalism
• Conclusion: “Those Wayward, Multitudinous People”
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index