The Political Culture of the American Whigs

Daniel Walker Howe. The Political Culture of the American Whigs. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Howe's study was a landmark in restoring the reputation of the American Whig Party; a project which in retrospect seems to have been long overdue. This is an intellectual history of a political party which several generations of historians had dismissed as being without intellectual substance. It was therefore both an examination of political culture as well as a restoration project.

Because this is a book concerned with abstract concepts and often unstated assumptions, it might have become bogged down in purely theoretical language, but Howe solved that problem by framing his themes in short biographies. As he puts it, "One of the postulates of this book is that social tensions mirror individual tensions. By examining the lives of individual Whigs, we can locate problems that the party as a whole confronted." Using the careers of notable Whigs such as Henry Clay, John Quincy Adams, Alexander Stephens, and others not only adds a narrative element to what otherwise might have been a mass of supposition and abstracted inquiry, it also emphasizes the degree to which Whig ideology was a product of intellectual and cultural factors along with the economic and social indicators which traditionally defined Whigs in the popular and scholarly imagination.

Howe's central argument is that the Whigs had a coherent and rational ideology which was grounded in a defense of a particular understanding of the relationship between society and the market economy. That balance became untenable by the 1850's, not only due to rising sectional tensions over slavery, but because the growth of the market economy and the industrial revolution undermined the authority and legitimacy of an older, paternal approach to entrepreneurial capitalism.

1877: America's Year of Living Violently

Michael A. Bellisiles. 1877: America's Year of Living Violently. New York: The New Press, 2010.

Ten years after the publication of his controversial Arming America, Michael A. Bellesiles returned to the public eye with a much less contentious account of what most historians would agree was indeed an exceptionally violent and unsettled year in American history. Eight years after its appearance, none of the controversy over sources and integrity which rightly plagued the reputation of his previous book have arisen. This is a solid, well-supported account of a very bad time in American history.

The book is organized thematically, framed by brief vignettes from the beginning and end of the year. Each chapter covers a particular issue or event--the aftermath of the contested 1876 Presidential election, which led to increased sectional and partisan tensions which many thought would lead to another civil war; the violent re-imposition of white supremacy in the former Confederacy; military actions against Western Indian tribes and Mexican-American citizens; the violent suppression of the labor movement and Women's suffrage; and the increase in homicide and the prevalence of guns in the civilian population.

Bellesiles, doesn't cover much new ground, but he does tie together many different events through extensive research of contemporary newspaper coverage, creating a convincing picture of an overarching national conversation about--and anxiety over--violence overtaking the nation and society. Each chapter is a well-written summary of an important facet of the story, but the book gathers its strength from the overall effect of a year which most Americans were happy to see the end of, but which also shaped much of the social, legal, political, and economic inequalities which marked the next several decades of American history.