Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic

Preface

Preface HISTORIANS HAVE WRITTEN A GREAT DEAL about the political history of the revolutionary and early national periods of United States history. For two centuries the political beliefs and partisan conflicts of Americans in the late eighteenth century have fascinated us, and scholars have explored this field in far greater depth, perhaps, than have those working in any other era in the political history of the United States. Yet something is missing from this voluminous literature. Armed with an apparent assumption that government and polities were an elite affair , many of these historians have devoted themselves to the philosophies and policies of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, James Madison, AlexanderHamilton and other early national leaders. In the process , however, they have all but ignored those who were ruled, apparently regarding these Americans as essentially powerless spectators who were outside of and thus in some sense apart from the political process. As a result these political histories are dominated by the words and actions of the ruling elite, the great owners of land, material goods, and enslaved people.' A few historians, including Alfred Young, Jesse Lcmisch, Gary Nash, Rhys Isaac, and Linda Kerber, have sought to broaden this narrow conception of political history by exploring the political lives of ordinaryAmericans .2 Yet in their published work and in their classrooms many historians persist in privileging the words and actions of the ruling elite, and writing as if poor, lower, and even middling sort Americans had no political existence or none worthy of mention.3 Moreover, the myriad accounts of popular political belief and practice that filled early national newspapers have been all but ignored by most of those who study the political history of the early republic.4 The work of a generation of English historians underscores the folly of such an omission.5 E. P. Thompson is of seminal importance here, with his extraordinary sensitivityto the agency of common English folk within their political world.6 Arguing that they would take to the streets in defense of traditional rights and customs, Thompson argued that one can xii Preface trace in their rites, symbols, and language the formation of a homogeneous working class and working-class consciousness. John Brewer has explored the involvement of these ordinary folk in eighteenth-century partisan politics .7 George Rude has written extensively on popular movements and crowd actions in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, exploring their utility as a tool of disaffected members of the lower social orders. Focusing almost exclusively on such phenomena as strikes, riots, and rebellions , Rude paid scant attention to the numerous less violent forms of crowd activity, however political and partisan they may have been.8 Tim Harris, in contrast, included some of these more peaceable demonstrations and audiences,and has established how commonplace were the diverse and often highly politicized crowd activities of late seventeenth-century England .9 Mark Harrison has done much the same for the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.10 Perhaps the most comprehensive treatment of the evolution of popular political ritual per se has come from Nicholas Rogers. The heavily ritualized festive calendar of late seventeenth-century England was intended, he has argued, "to legitimize the political order, [and] to imbue it with drama and dignity." But the decades around the turn of eighteenth century "saw a significant broadening of the boundaries of the political nation ," and the emergence of "a dynamicand contentious political culture, centered around royal and national anniversaries,in which the populace itself was a vigorous participant." During these years early modern provincialism and a large measure of elite control faded away, and a significant rise in partisan strife encouraged the lower orders to take a greater role in politics in the public sphere.11 By the late eighteenth century the early modern festive calendar had been transformed by crowds who worked within the parameters of traditional rites and celebrations in order to make known their own opinions, beliefs, and demands; these crowds created and populated new, highly politicized festivals commemorating such events as the defeat of the Excise Bill and Admiral Edward Vernon's birthday. Often these new partisan celebrations proved more popular than royal anniversaries. Thompson and Brewer focused their attention on the oppositional politics of the lower orders, while Harris and Harrison encouraged us to consider the celebrations and ceremonies in support of the ruling elite. Rogers has combined these approaches by showing that festive culture was the site of battle between different partisan groups and...