The Boundaries of American Political Culture in the Civil War Era (review)

Three of the four essays in this volume are based on the Brose Lectures that the author delivered at Pennsylvania State University in 2002. They defend the importance of political history at a time when political history is often dismissed as unilluminating. Chapters 1 and 2 rebut the case presented by Glenn Altschuler and Stuart Blumin in Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (2000) that the American public was not interested in electoral politics (except, perhaps, for a few years at the height of the sectional conflict over extending slavery). Instead of taking the obvious line of argument based on high voter turn-out, Neely makes imaginative use of the popular consumer goods of the day, showing that, for example, Currier & Ives prints depicting politicians adorned the walls of many nineteenth-century American homes. Politics was not, he argues, relegated to a rigidly defined sphere separate from everyday life and only rarely engaged by the average free man.

Chapter 2 contains the most valuable of Neely's contributions in this volume. He explains why nineteenth-century politicians and parties worried so little about raising money in the form of campaign contributions. The answer is that they relied primarily on their party newspapers (virtually every little town had one for each major party), which were supported by the subscriptions of the faithful and advertising revenue from merchants who wanted to appeal to them. These same party loyalists were willing to buy other campaign paraphernalia (cartoons, photographs, medallions, etc.) as well, so these could be marketed commercially and not produced at the party's expense to be given away. Objects for the party's own use (such as banners for parades) were often produced inexpensively with donated labor. In sum, nineteenth-century American political parties rested firmly on a broad base of committed popular support, and did not need, as twenty-first-century parties do, to solicit big contributions from the wealthy to get their message across.

The other essays in this book deal with more specialized topics. Chapter 3 shows that the Union League was an association of middle- as well as upper-class New York City Republicans, contrary to its prevailing image among historians as a narrowly elite organization. Chapter 4 (the only one not based on a Brose Lecture) asks who comprised the audience for minstrel shows. The prevailing opinion of historians, based on work by Jean Baker and Alexander Saxton, has been that blackface minstrel shows, egregiously racist, appealed mainly to working-class white men who feared job competition from free African Americans. The minstrel show has been seen as a Democratic party form of popular culture just as the temperance and antislavery music of the Hutchinson Family Singers was Whig-Republican. Neely argues that popular culture, including minstrel shows, transcended party politics. Whig campaign song books sometimes made reference to minstrels, which seems to him to imply that minstrel show audiences were not so exclusively working-class and Democratic as hitherto supposed. I'm less ready to abandon the conventional wisdom in this case, however, at least with regard to class. In the first place, the word "minstrel" often means simply a traveling musician, as in Thomas Moore's song, "The Minstrel Boy," popular in antebellum America. A portable songbook called The Clay Minstrel primarily evokes this meaning rather than that of a blackface performance. A possibility that Neely does not consider is that those who attended blackface minstrel shows might have been mainly working-class males, even though American families of all classes enjoyed the songs and bought the sheet music to play if they owned pianos at home. The Whig party might have occasionally invoked associations with minstrel shows to appeal to...