Practicing Democracy: Popular Politics in the United States from the Constitution to the Civil War ed. by Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith (review)

The ten (all male) authors in this volume met at a conference at University College London in 2011 to reexamine well-worn questions of political engagement, party development, and democratization in the first seventy-two years of U.S. history. Taken together, the essays they produced show early American political history to be a vibrant field, capable of providing fresh insights.

Editors Daniel Peart and Adam I. P. Smith set an ambitious agenda for the volume, to chart the “relationship among citizens, parties, and governance” in the period by building on insights from political science, from the “new” political history of the 1960s and 1970s, and from the “new, new” political history of the 1990s and early 2000s (p. 11). The essays revise ideas about foundational issues: the relationship between Jeffersonian and Jacksonian politics; the push-pull relationship between political parties and voter turnout; and the interaction between parties, those in government power, and a broader public.

The essays in Part 1 focus on political party development, even while sometimes resisting a stable model of developing party systems. Douglas Bradburn uses the concept of path dependence to examine the origins of two-party conflict in the early republic. Reeve Huston reexamines Ronald P. Formisano’s The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983) in light of more recent work that shows high party activity in the 1790s to argue that the true origin of parties should be located in that decade, rather than in the Jacksonian period, even as state and local politics reveal an uneven pattern of democratization. Huston contends that Martin Van Buren may have invented party discipline, but he did not innovate in most other party functions. John L. Brooke’s excellent essay follows up on his widely influential work on the “public sphere” by examining the early 1850s as “a liminal, revolutionary rupture” that hurried the onset of the Civil War as “transformative event-clusters . . . [reshaped] foundational myths” and challenged social, political, and cultural structures (pp. 74, 75). He argues, in part, that the Civil War was hastened when “party managers lost their power to control events” because of cultural factors such as the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) (p. 77).

The essays in Part 2 add nuance to the wearing-thin battle over whether voter turnout was high or low in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Andrew W. Robertson uses newly available state-level voting data from A New Nation Votes: Early American Election Returns, 1787-1825 (http://elections.lib.tufts.edu) to argue that the election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 was not a watershed in democratization, since voter turnout “waxed and waned from the 1790s to the 1850s,” sometimes driven more by state and local events than by national party contests (p. 100). Daniel Peart’s essay also uses A New Nation Votes data to argue that, contrary to previous opinion, voter turnout between 1815 and 1825 did not sag everywhere. He also argues that local and state issues often exceeded partisan considerations in motivating voters who sometimes viewed parties in contrasting ways. Graham A. Peck’s case study of antebellum Illinois concludes that the “party system” was unstable by the 1850s to a degree that the term itself ought to be questioned.

In Part 3 Kenneth Owen argues that Pennsylvania gubernatorial campaigns in the 1790s demonstrated how “popular activism had a significant impact on national politics” through the mobilization even of men and women who could not vote (p. 177). Tyler Anbinder compares political activity and leadership among Irish and German immigrants in 1850s New York and concludes that local issues were far more important than national issues like abolition to both groups, who shared a...