In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • The New Political History of Jeffersonian Pennsylvania
  • Doron S. Ben-Atar (bio)
Andrew Shankman. Crucible of American Democracy: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism and Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2004. xii + 298 pp. Notes and index. $34.95.

A revisionist political history is the hottest new genre in early republic historiography. While its scope, parameters, and innovative qualities are yet to be fully defined, the new school has rejuvenated the study of politics and ideology. Its leading proponents have recently published a volume of essays that claims to break new theoretical and empirical ground.1 And the new school has already generated heated discussions as to what kind of history is conceptually "new" and what newly written history, however valuable and original, follows traditional thinking about the political sphere.2

The new political historians extend their studies of politics beyond the usual clique of elite white male "founders." They broaden the definition of the political sphere by examining conversations and cultural expressions that hitherto were excluded from studies of early national politics. They reconstruct the politics of the early republic as an interconnected web of cultures and ideologies, where the forces of class, gender, race, mix with competition for the spoils of office.3 Unlike many of the neo-Whig political historians of the 1960s and '70s who approached their subjects with a critical psychoanalytically informed posture, current revisionists eschew psychology and equate rhetoric and symbols with meaning. Crucible of American Freedom: The Struggle to Fuse Egalitarianism & Capitalism in Jeffersonian Pennsylvania is one of the most recent salvos in the emerging new genre. In an ambitious and meticulously researched book Andrew Shankman examines a "broader world of actors" that—while battling over personalities and local policies—articulated the particularly American form of liberal democracy (p. 10).

During the imperial crisis, Pennsylvania forged ahead in radical politics. The local pre-revolutionary elite was almost wholly Tory, and when the Patriots took charge they enacted a radical new order featuring near universal white male suffrage, weak executive, yearly elected unicameral legislature, and direct involvement of the public in the legislative process. Pennsylvania [End Page 325] was, as Eric Foner wrote long ago, "the only state in which there was virtually no continuity between pre-independence and post-independence political leadership."4 And while a new constitution more in line with the rest of the nation replaced the radical system of government in 1787, the state remained a hotbed of participatory politics.

The forces unleashed by the Revolution radicalized the urban and rural populace and made the state the breeding ground of democratic innovation. Whereas revolutionaries in other states clung to notions of republican restraints, the rhetoric in Pennsylvania was openly egalitarian and democratic. William Findley declared as early as 1786 that he opposed the chartering of Robert Morris's bank because the economic polarization it would engender threatened to undermine the equality necessary for a healthy functioning democracy. By the early 1790s, even though Philadelphia was the seat of power of the Federalist administrations, such sentiments were shared by almost all of Pennsylvania's Jeffersonians.

The state's Federalists envisioned a stable organic order affirming political, economic, and cultural hierarchies. The first Washington administration tried to establish a court of polite society and an aristocracy of talent. But Federalist political culture never took root beyond the boundaries of Philadelphia's Society Hill. Perceptions of growing economic inequality and unresponsive government caused anxiety among rural and urban Jeffersonians. They worried about the rise of a new political and economic elite. They were alarmed by bankruptcies in towns and foreclosures in the countryside. They believed that the tax on whiskey threatened the livelihood of the farmers of western Pennsylvania; the fact that the whiskey tax originated with a distant impersonal government located in the "city that always denied them fair representation" further fired up their fantasies of a grand Federalist conspiracy to deprive the people of political and economic opportunities (p. 56). By the end of Washington's first term, most Pennsylvanians opposed Hamilton and his measures. Meanwhile, English and Irish radicals, who were disenchanted with England's military opposition to the French Revolution, migrated to Pennsylvania where they...

pdf

Share