Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States by Dana D. Nelson (review)

From the viewpoint of political economy and environmental studies, Commons Democracy offers one more critique of Hardin’s famed “tragedy of the commons” thesis.¹ From the perspective of political science, it contributes to debates about American democracy and poses “new questions about democratic possibilities not just in history but also in our own time (23).” For historians, it traces the prolonged contest between the “vernacular democracy” and popular “regulation” that helped to animate the Revolution, and the formal, representative democracy that emerged under the Constitution. Nelson bases her argument on key literary works published between the 1780s and the 1840s. Conventional, “consensus” accounts, she suggests, have insufficiently acknowledged the friction entailed in the imposition of democratic liberalism on the informal, self-organized practices of early Americans, and readings of period literature have obscured the memory and significance of a robust, if sometimes unruly, popular politics.

Liberalism, capitalism, and the law, Nelson argues, proceeded from the Founders’ determination to establish legal norms that would uphold private property and curb the collective activities that they saw as threatening the survival of the republic. These norms were not responses to political exigency or geographical necessity so much as to elite efforts to secure political and economic advantages—as in the Washington administration’s overreaction to the whiskey excise protests of 1794, called a “regulation” by protesters but labeled a “rebellion” by government and now enshrined as such in memory. Nelson demonstrates how readings of literary works have similarly obscured our vision of a politics rooted in “customs of commoning” (49). J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782) and Eighteenth-Century Sketches: More “Letters from an American Farmer” (New Haven, 1925), for example, expressed not individualism but recognition of a collective culture based on neighborhood and shared obligation. Subsequently, Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s epic Modern Chivalry (Philadelphia, 1792–1816) mapped out a “middle way” between the turbulent democracy of revolutionary-era popular politics and the orderly, top-down governance of representative republicanism. Brackenridge celebrated “local practice” and the diversity that arose from political divisions that he saw as an essential characteristic of freedom (83).

At first, Nelson’s account seems to imply the rapid demise of a “commons” tradition. Her next text, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Pioneers (New York, 1823) tracks the privatization of land and of resources once open to all, culminating in the westward exile of Natty Bumppo, exponent of the old ways, in the face of modernization. Similarly, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (Philadelphia, 1837) and William Gilmore Simms’ Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama (Philadelphia, 1838) confirm that advocacy of the commons became associated not only with the frontier margins of society but with “savagery” and criminality, in opposition to the rational prescriptions of “civilized” law and private property.

Yet as her argument builds to its conclusion, Nelson offers a message subtler than she initially signals. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (Boston, 1839), rather than a haughty condemnation of frontier ways presaging her family’s return to the East in 1843, inscribed its author’s embrace of collaborative practices that had at first repelled her. Even Cooper, whose series of novels known as the “Leatherstocking Tales” (1827–1841) had dissected the “commons” tradition in order to condemn it, found more sympathy for the claims of New York Anti-Renters depicted in his Littlepage novels of the 1840s. In these late works, now little read or understood, Nelson finds evidence of the continuing validity of a popular democratic perspective that the Founders and their liberal successors never managed to suppress.

From Brackenridge’s advocacy of a “middle way” and Kirkland’s emerging sympathy with the vernacular, Commons Democracy draws out a robust reassessment of early American politics and political economy that has validity both for historiography and contemporary...