The Fires of New England: A Story of Protest and Rebellion in Antebellum America by Eric J. Morser (review)

In The Fires of New England, Eric Morser offers a close examination of a "radical political manifesto" that had intrigued him since he found it over twenty years ago in the Wisconsin Historical Society archives while working on a graduate school paper (ix). He returned to it to reconstruct a moment in 1834 when a disenchanted group of men felt compelled to call lawyers and judges to task for endangering the founders' republican vision. The authors were alarmed that the elite were taking control of their state government and convinced that the only way to stop them and to preserve the work of the Revolution was for their neighbors to reclaim their civic power. As products of the reform spirit of their time, they embraced universal education as the solution. Though Morser admits that the document itself had little impact, he argues that its history can help readers understand the complexities of its time. It also resonates today, particularly with the current state of national politics and the strong anti-education climate of the national (and many state) governments in the United States.

The manifesto had been filed away at the Historical Society with assorted papers related to workingmen's parties, but the authors were not workingmen in the strictest sense. Most were what would now be considered middle class. Among the twenty men who helped write the address were artisans, physicians, business owners and managers, a teacher, and an editor. Four were farmers. These men were independent but low enough in social status to fear the social and political dangers of too much power being concentrated in the hands of the elite. After laying the groundwork through a series of meetings and conventions in 1833, the group met at the Eagle Hotel in Keene, New Hampshire, on New Year's Day 1834, in Morser's words, to "attack judges and lawyers and propose ways to reform their state's legal system" (1).

They traced most of the problems they identified to the state's constitution, which had not been revised like those of the neighboring states. To begin with, the New Hampshire constitution still included religious and property tests for office-holding, even in an era in which many states had removed property qualifications and in which more Americans, including a significant number of the men at the convention, were embracing nonconformist religions such as Methodism, Universalism, and Unitarianism. It also contained antiquated language, referring to the people of New Hampshire as "subjects" (2). Even worse, it set up a political system that provided for a state Executive Council of five elected officials who were supposed to advise the governor and keep his power in check but who, in reality, served as "little more than a privy council" (5). Finally, it allowed the governor to appoint judges who could serve until age seventy. This final royalist holdover of unelected judges upset the reformers most because they saw this as a threat to republican governance. As late as 1834, when other states had revised their constitutions, these men believed they lived under a charter that still "came perilously close to recreating a European-style aristocracy in everything but name" (5).

The result was a government by the wealthy for the wealthy. Lawyers benefited the most from the system, being allowed "nearly uncontrolled freedom to draft incomprehensible laws that favored their profession at the expense of the public good" (6). To make matters worse, they had managed to pass a state Judiciary Act that, the men argued, slowed the litigation process, and increased legal fees, costing citizens money that was then transferred to the pockets of the lawyers.

The petitioners blamed the English roots of their state constitution and the unwillingness of their neighbors to amend the document for this state of affairs, and they realized that the only way to correct...