Catherine Allgor. Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2000.
In 1801, Thomas Jefferson arrived in the still embryonic capital city of the nation he sought to lead away from what he saw as the anti-Republican tendencies of Federalist rule towards a purer, more perfect Republicanism. As the first President to reside in Washington City for his entire term, he also sought to use the social life of the small but growing new city as a means to set the tone of his administration but also to funnel the political life through channels he would mediate, oversee, and control. In the end, though, the growing social life of the city--managed by the elite women married to other political figures--would take on a life of its own. And those women would become an important component of the growing Republican society of Washington, and of the United States' ruling class.
Allgor's study begins with Jefferson and ends with Jackson. Jackson's conflict with the "ladies of Washington" over the Peggy Eaton affair is revealed here as a more substantive and fundamental conflict than many bemused (or amused) historians have allowed over the years. In the end, the ladies of Washington succeeded in banishing Eaton, but at the expense of some of their power, as the role of society in political life would recede in subsequent years and administrations.
By the end, the rise of Jacksonian democracy had undone earlier Republican qualms regarding personal ambition and the possibly corrupting role of government service on public virtue. The need for wives to serve as political proxies for their ostensibly disinterested husbands through Washington City's social life receded, as did the power those women had once held. As in many other ways, Jacksonian Democracy proved to be extremely riven by gender inequities.
Saturday, November 18, 2017
Friday, November 10, 2017
The Shaping of America, Volume 2
D.W. Meinig. The Shaping of America: A Geographic Perspective on 500 Years of History. Volume 2 Continental America, 1800-1867. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993.
This is the second of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 2 turns from the Atlantic focus of the first volume towards a more continental viewpoint, in line with the demographic and geographic shift in the early Republic towards westward development. A consistent theme develops--the United States expanded rapidly, at an almost feverish pace during this era. That growth outstripped whatever efforts there were to create a robust national infrastructure or even a comprehensive national plan, so that sectional divisions spread and further west even as the industrial economy of the North and the cotton economy of the Deep South created increasingly incongruent societies. Once those two societies began "running into each other" in Missouri, latent sectional divergences began to morph into increasingly strident sectional opposition.
Interestingly, Meinig closes his perioidization in 1867. With the Civil War already over and Reconstruction just beginning, he looks beyond the theater of war to the Western frontier and the broader North American region; Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. This is a appropriate for the transcontinental theme of Volume 3.
This is the second of four volumes of a massive geographic history of the United States of America. Meinig's achievement combines his own expertise in geography with an impressive synthesis of historical literature. His readings of the latter are calibrated to a wide scale--sometimes continental, sometimes hemispheric, oftentimes quite intimate and local.
Volume 2 turns from the Atlantic focus of the first volume towards a more continental viewpoint, in line with the demographic and geographic shift in the early Republic towards westward development. A consistent theme develops--the United States expanded rapidly, at an almost feverish pace during this era. That growth outstripped whatever efforts there were to create a robust national infrastructure or even a comprehensive national plan, so that sectional divisions spread and further west even as the industrial economy of the North and the cotton economy of the Deep South created increasingly incongruent societies. Once those two societies began "running into each other" in Missouri, latent sectional divergences began to morph into increasingly strident sectional opposition.
Interestingly, Meinig closes his perioidization in 1867. With the Civil War already over and Reconstruction just beginning, he looks beyond the theater of war to the Western frontier and the broader North American region; Mexico, Canada, and the Caribbean. This is a appropriate for the transcontinental theme of Volume 3.
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