Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction by Mark G. Schmeller (review)

Mark Schmeller takes us deep into the shifting assumptions about what was going on in the public sphere in the early and antebellum republic. How would the collective will of the people be understood and manifested? What was the shape and nature of “public opinion”? Schmeller gives us a carefully crafted and long-overdue argument about how Americans imagined, and used, their sense of “what people think” as an actor in the public arena.

At the early stages of his research, we are told, Schmeller saw the light: having planned a project that would start in 1870 and run to 1940, he realized that the great drama in this story ran from the Revolution to the Civil War. The result of this insight is six major chapters on the Age of Revolution, the Federalists and the Bank of the United States, the rise of party, the critique of reform, the culture of dueling, and the sectional crisis, wrapped in a stage-setting introduction and a coda on post–Civil War America. It might be summarized, crudely, as an arc from republican unity to liberal segmentation to technological integration. In Schmeller’s own terms, however, the key is a modernizing transition from “political-constitutional” to “social-psychological” imperatives (4). Throughout lies a tension between positive and negative connotations: is the public—are the people in whole and in part—sound in judgment, or flighty and deluded?

Schmeller’s opening chapter on the “moral economy of opinion” takes us briefly back to the seventeenth century and ends with the ratification of the Constitution. This was an era in which the dominant trope was fear. The people at large did not have a collective opinion that amounted to much, with the exception of the threat of tyranny to liberties. The civility and sociability encouraged in the eighteenth century were intended to shape a public peace. But peace meant safety, and infringements on constitutions—implied and explicit—drove the “jealous” defense of rights. Thus jealous fear was the framework of public opinion from 1765 to the ratification debates of 1787–88.

The Federalists and Hamilton’s bank partially ruptured this early modern constitutionalism. Credit was a matter of public assessment; the state and its financial institutions would rise and fall—the Federalists thought—on the opinion of moneyed speculators. Jeffersonians saw continuing dangers. The debate over the Bank of the United States was, in Schmeller’s judgment, a watershed moment in the history of public opinion in the United States. It had a long reach into the nineteenth century, since the Jeffersonians and the Jacksonians would not abandon eighteenth-century constitutionalism; together they represented the collective opinion of the great body of the people against the illegitimate interests of the “money power.” Party would be about both “manufacturing public opinion” and claiming to represent the legitimate collective will. Thus both Democrats and Federalists/Whigs would be ambivalent about party; while they used press and organization to shape opinion and mobilize the voters, both assumed they represented the best way forward toward a dissent-free utopia.

If party organized opinion for control of the levers of power, reform organized it for alternative visions. Whatever their aspirations for unanimity, parties divided the country in half; the Second Great Awakening and the rise of reform in all its varieties sprang from “a new attention on the making of private opinions and character” (90). Here partisan division turned into liberal segmentation, grounded in the concern that party majorities comprised Tocquevillean tyranny. The reform vision was grounded, Schmeller argues, in the real break to liberal individualism, setting off its own dissenters, such as William Ellery Channing, who saw tyrannies in the reform societies themselves.

But this was obviously mostly a northern story, and in chapter 5 Schmeller turns to a southern-inflected one: the invocation of public opinion in dueling culture. Here opinion resolves down to honor—the public assessment of...