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Chapter 5. A Democracy—For Whom?
- University of Pennsylvania Press
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Chapter 5 A Democracy—For Whom? In July 1829 Sarah Josepha Hale’s Ladies’ Magazine published ‘‘Political Parties,’’ a fictional story that revealed just how much had changed regarding attitudes toward women and politics since the time of the American Revolution. The story tells the tale of one Miss Pope, an elderly woman who looks back over her life and recounts her youthful follies to her two young nieces. In 1798, she tells them, she was engaged to a dashing young man named George Kendall. This, she reminds her nieces, was during the Quasi-War with France, a time ‘‘when party spirit raged so bitterly’’ and Thomas Jefferson gained many new supporters. Kendall soon set off for college. To Miss Pope’s dismay, he returned a changed man; he had become a Jeffersonian Republican. Recalling her reaction, she reports, ‘‘Strange as it may seem to you, strange indeed as it now seems to me, I did then believe that if the democratic party succeeded in electing their candidate, our liberty, laws and religion would all be sacrificed.’’ Horrified, she tried to change his mind. He resisted. She was appalled, telling her nieces, ‘‘I made the sentiments of my party the standard of rectitude, and had George committed a murder, I should hardly have been more shocked than when he declared himself a republican.’’ At one point Kendall accompanied Pope to her home, where he encountered her father, a died-in-the-wool Federalist. A heated argument ensued, ending when Mr. Pope banished the young man from his house forever. Miss Pope, however, believed that love would triumph over politics. She fully expected that Kendall would recant his erroneous views. He did not. He moved away and never came back, leaving his opinionated lady friend to live and die ‘‘an old maid.’’ Lest anyone miss the point, the woman warns her nieces, ‘‘I have told you this story that you may be warned against indulging the rancor of party feelings. I do not say ladies should abstain from all political reading or conversation. . . . But their influence should be exerted to allay, not to excite party animosities: their concern should be for their whole country, not for a party.’’1 During the period from the American Revolution until Andrew Jackson ’s election in 1828, the political landscape changed dramatically. A Democracy—For Whom? 149 Typically, this period is understood as a time of democratization, of increasing political opportunities and openness in the political system. Yet while political changes since the American Revolution had continued to create new possibilities for white men, there was a closing down of certain opportunities for white women. Some of these changes were deliberate; others were incidental by-products of larger structural or institutional changes in politics, culture, or society. Nonetheless, they all tended to produce the same unfortunate results: the marginalization of women in electoral politics and the more explicit exclusion of women from government. The Limits of Universal Suffrage At the same time that the ‘‘rights of woman’’ were gaining popularity, Americans were also debating the scope and meaning of men’s rights. Contemporaries understood this debate as part of a larger reconsideration of the rights question throughout the transatlantic world. This question had particular salience in the early republic, where both the Federalist and Democratic-Republican Parties claimed to be the true heirs and rightful protectors of the American revolutionary legacy. Struggling to establish their role in the new nation, each party also defined its own distinct understanding of the meaning of that legacy. Federalists viewed the Revolution primarily as a political struggle, fought in order to reject British rule and preserve the colonists’ traditional rights and liberties. After the war had ended, the contest was, in their minds, also over. Traditional elites should rule. Order, hierarchy, and deference should be restored. Horrified at events in France, they feared that their own country could easily disintegrate into licentiousness or anarchy. Although committed to representative government, they did not want to expand the popular basis of government. Voting should remain the privilege of the propertied classes. Their ideal was, as Federalist Samuel Stone put it, ‘‘a speaking aristocracy in the face of a silent democracy.’’2 In contrast, Republicans, following their leader Thomas Jefferson, regarded themselves as true ‘‘friends of the people.’’ They believed that the War for Independence represented the first step in a larger struggle to transform the social order. The French revolutionaries’ call to liberty, equality, and fraternity...