Era of Experimentation

American Political Practices in the Early Republic

Daniel Peart

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780813935607
• eBook ISBN: 9780813935614
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early American History
• Index: History

In Era of Experimentation, Daniel Peart challenges the pervasive assumption that the present-day political system, organized around two competing parties, represents the logical fulfillment of participatory democracy. Recent accounts of "the rise of American democracy" between the Revolution and the Civil War applaud political parties for opening up public life to mass participation and making government responsive to the people. Yet this celebratory narrative tells only half of the story.

By exploring American political practices during the early 1820s, a period of particular flux in the young republic, Peart argues that while parties could serve as vehicles for mass participation, they could also be employed to channel, control, and even curb it. Far from equating democracy with the party system, Americans freely experimented with alternative forms of political organization and resisted efforts to confine their public presence to the polling place.

Era of Experimentation demonstrates the sheer variety of political practices that made up what subsequent scholars have labeled "democracy" in the early United States. Peart also highlights some overlooked consequences of the nationalization of competitive two-party politics during the antebellum period, particularly with regard to the closing of alternative avenues for popular participation.

1

“WE THE PEOPLE’ HAVE
NO POLITICAL EXISTENCE”

The Rise and Fall of the Middling
Interest in Boston, Massachusetts

The following satirical article, a parody on the fugitive slave advertisements that filled the southern press, appeared in a Boston newspaper four days after the congressional election of 1820:

DESERTED from the federal cause, on 23d inst. six hundred legal voters, principally merchants and mechanics. They have no other excuse for their conduct, than that the overseers, who have lately taken the management upon their shoulders, have threatened them with gagging, if they refused obedience. They may be known by their attachment to the good old federal politics of ’96, which they are fond of exhibiting on all occasions, and a certain obstinacy and perverseness, which they, agreeable to the obsolete nomenclature, denominate independence. Whoever will take up said runaways and return them to the overseers shall receive the thanks of the general (alias Central) committee, and the promise of an invitation to the next Primary Caucus, in case any vacancy should happen in the present Ward Delegations.¹

Historians, with few exceptions, have treated this period as one in which parties were weak or nonexistent. So why, in critiquing the relationship between local Federalist leaders and their constituents, did the New-England Galaxy choose as the most appropriate analogy that of overseers and slaves?

To the editor of the Galaxy and his readers, the notion that parties played an insignificant role in politics would have seemed absurd. For two decades at least, political life in Boston had been defined by a struggle between rival Federalist and Republican organizations. Modern scholars are apt to consider institutionalized two-party competition as proof of a flourishing democratic politics. Many Bostonians, however, did not share this faith. They believed that the existing political arrangements were designed to concentrate power in the hands of a few and to rob the many of their right both to choose those who would govern over them and to regulate their conduct once in office. For this reason, a large section of the town’s residents spent the early 1820s in open revolt against the established party system. The banner under which these protestors rallied was the Middling Interest.

The Middling Interest did not seek to do away with parties entirely. Instead, they proposed to transform them from impediments to popular rule into instruments for implementing the will of the people. Modeling their organization on that of their opponents, the insurgents enjoyed an initial spell of electoral success. Ultimately, though, the movement’s failure to overcome the obstacles of operating in a political environment so accustomed to two-party competition ensured that its career would be short-lived. Nonetheless, the rise and fall of the Middling Interest illustrates the extent to which the practical implications of popular sovereignty remained subject to dispute during this period and provides an opportunity to explore some of the many meanings attached to both partisanship and antipartisanship.

As President Monroe coasted toward almost unanimous election to a second term, party conflict raged unabated in Massachusetts.² The Federalists clung to control of both the executive and legislative branches of government, but statewide contests for the governor’s mansion were always closely fought affairs, and the Republicans consistently racked up healthy minorities in both the Massachusetts General Court and the state’s delegation to Congress. With each Federalist failure elsewhere in the Union, the situation became more fraught. To Republican partisans, every lost election represented another missed opportunity for Massachusetts to rejoin the national mainstream. For Federalists, just one slip could spell the end of their party’s very existence.

Nowhere did that existence seem less in peril, however, than in the town of Boston. The Republican ticket had not tasted success there since the heady days of Thomas Jefferson’s first tenure in the White House. Presiding over this bastion of Federalism was an exclusive group of party grandees fronted by Harrison Gray Otis, Thomas Handasyd Perkins, and William Sullivan. Although these three names had been rendered notorious throughout the nation by their association with the ill-fated Hartford Convention, at home they represented the pinnacle of social prestige and political power.³ Looking back sixty years later, Josiah Quincy Jr., whose father was also a sometime member of the Federalist inner circle and would play a principal role in the drama about to unfold, recalled that “in the third decade of the century Boston was a synonym for certain individuals and families, who ruled it with undisputed sway.”⁴

The role of party in sustaining this oligarchy has often been downplayed by historians. One typical account talks of “an elite accustomed to leading by nods and gestures” who “did not need an organized political party.”⁵ The reality was somewhat different, however, as this description of Federalist nominating practices from the Boston Commercial Gazette suggests:

The Federal party is thus organized—The Federal electors assemble in their respective wards, and choose a member of the general committee, and from seven to ten persons to constitute the ward committees. The general committee assemble some days before an election, and send a circular to the several ward committees, with twenty or thirty blank notifications and in all cases, the same number to each of the wards, to be filled up by the ward committees, and sent at their discretion to citizens in their wards, to meet with the general committee and the ward committees, in caucus, to nominate candidates.—At this caucus the mode of proceeding is, to nominate as many candidates as the assembly sees fit and then to mark against the names. The individual (or individuals, if more than one office is to be chosen) who has the highest number of marks is considered the candidate.⁶

Here, then, was a party with an established organizational framework and formalized procedures for choosing candidates for public office. The pyramidal structure of multiple local committees reporting to a single central body, all of which were ostensibly elected by the membership, closely resembles that of today’s parties. The same is true of the nominating method itself, which involved party leaders meeting with delegates chosen from each ward of the town to select candidates on the principle of majority rule. Boston’s prolonged electoral calendar required that this process be repeated several times a year, with municipal offices to be filled every March, the governor and state senators chosen in April, state representatives in May, and then the biennial contest for a seat in the United States Congress held in the fall.⁷ Yet this punishing schedule did not prevent the party from exerting its control over all levels of electoral activity. According to the Galaxy, “In Massachusetts, and more especially in Boston, all the candidates for office, from the chief magistrate of the state down to the keeper of the town bell, are selected by the ‘Central Committee.’”⁸

The Republican Party in Boston was organized in a similar manner. The Republican Institution served as a counterpart to the Federalists’ General Committee and likewise sat atop a pyramidal structure reaching down into the wards. To the public eye, the Republicans’ nominating process appeared somewhat less regular than that of their adversaries, with electoral tickets put forward by assemblages variously described as “a convention of the Republican Electors” or “a very full meeting of Republican Citizens” or simply appearing as if from thin air for endorsement in the Republican press.⁹ As far as critics of party rule were concerned, however, the differences were negligible. “The ‘Republican Institution’ of Boston” and “the federal ‘primary caucus,’” declared the Galaxy, “are the same in purpose, the same in effect, equal in power and glory, and are of no use but to perpetuate an ill-gotten ascendancy, by distributing patronage and rewards to their respective tools and pandars.”¹⁰

Equal in importance to nominating machinery was the political newspaper, which provided a continuing institutional presence outside electoral campaigns for these early parties. In Boston the Federalists enjoyed the favor of the Columbian Centinel, the Commercial Gazette, and the Boston Daily Advertiser, while their Republican opponents could count on the Boston Patriot and the American Statesman. Friendly editors might hope to receive a direct reward for their service, perhaps an appointment to public office or a lucrative printing contract, or they might simply expect a boost in subscription and advertising revenue from fellow partisans. In return, newspapers advertised party activities for those who wished to attend and reported the proceedings for the benefit of those who could not. They informed the faithful of nominations and other party decisions and provided a forum for the discussion of public issues. And as each polling day approached, partisan editors endeavored to whip the electorate into a state of fervor, exhorting each and every voter to turn out and back the party ticket. These men were “full-time, year-round politicians, running businesses devoted to politics” and serving as “principal spokesman, supplier of ideology, and enforcer of discipline” for their parties.¹¹

In the absence of recruiting arms of their own, both the Federalists and the Republicans also looked to fraternal societies and volunteer militia companies to attract new members and sustain their interest between elections. A classic example is the Washington Benevolent Societies, more than two hundred of which were established throughout the nation during the first two decades of the nineteenth century.¹² The stated purpose of these ostensibly nonpartisan societies was to “alleviate the sufferings of unfortunate individuals” through charitable assistance, but their true object was to broaden the base of the Federalist Party.¹³ The Boston branch was founded in 1812, and within a year it boasted a membership of fifteen hundred. “The ‘Washington Benevolent Societies,’ so called, were established to answer the purpose of a political party, and … are in direct opposition both to Washington and Benevolence,” complained one Republican newspaper. “The fund, said to be raised for benevolent purposes, is … expended in paying for banners, votes, ribbands, and other vapid trumpery to make up a show.”¹⁴

As this source suggests, putting on a show was another way for Federalist and Republican leaders to connect with their constituents. “Both nascent parties invented new rites that expressed their different views: the Federalists’ tributes to Washington, the Democratic-Republicans’ fetes in honor of the French Revolution, [and] both parties’ competing July Fourth celebrations,” explains the historian David Waldstreicher.¹⁵ This was certainly the case in Boston, where the Republicans, observing “with much regret, that the Fourth of July anniversary orations in this town were pronounced exclusively by orators of an opposite party” and “finding, as they did, that this influence was spreading its baneful effects over the minds of the rising generation,” took to holding their own separate commemorations in the early nineteenth century.¹⁶ Public occasions such as these provided politicians with a platform for addressing prospective voters and also allowed the parties to display their strength in numbers, in full knowledge that the proceedings would be published far and wide in the next day’s newspapers.

When polling day arrived, both Boston parties worked hard to ensure the greatest possible support for their candidates. The Federalist ward committees were directed to “ascertain and make a list of all the Federal Voters in their respective Wards” and to “see that the names of all these voters are put upon the Lists of Voters, required by law… and the names of aliens, (if any) stricken off.”¹⁷ Requiring eligible voters to register in advance and prove their place of residency was one of the many ways in which parties sought to regulate the electoral process during the nineteenth century, and Massachusetts was a pioneer in this respect.¹⁸ Volunteer activists were also encouraged “to patrole the Wards on the Day of election, remind our busy, and forgetful brethren, that they are voters, and that it is their duty, in honor, and conscience, to exercise their elective rights.”¹⁹ Tickets were prepared in advance and agents appointed to distribute them as citizens approached the ballot box. Taken in totality, these arrangements are a far cry from the now-familiar portrait of “an elite accustomed to leading by nods and gestures.”

This is not to say, however...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 “We the People’ Have No Political Existence”: The Rise and Fall of the Middling Interest inBoston, Massachusetts
• 2 “Let Us Unite Like One Man”: Organizing the Opposition to Slavery in Illinois
• 3 “Associate Yourselves throughout the Nation”: The Struggle to Shape Federal Tariff Policy in Pennsylvania and Virginia
• 4 “You Must Organize against Organization”: The Presidential Election of 1824
• Conclusion
• Appendixes
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index