Parlor Politics

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.

America's Jubilee

Andrew Burstein. America's Jubilee: How A Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence.
Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.

Burstein first follows the path taken by the Marquis de Lafayette during his extensive tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825. This famous trip found the aged French hero of the Revolution greeted by adoring crowds, former colleagues and soldiers who had served under him, visiting politicians and legislators, being feted and honored, and also being reunited with Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. The meaning of this trip to Americans--a chance to see the last living general of the Revolution, and an opportunity to witness one of the last living links to that founding struggle on the eve of their nation's 50th year anniversary--would be amplified and reinforced in the months to come as the country prepared to celebrate its "Jubilee".

Burstein then "travels" around the United States of 1826 in a similar roving fashion, but does so mostly to examine the lives and reflections of a diverse group of Americans, some of whom were obscure in their own time, others--such as William Wirt--who were important people, names of consequence, in their own era but have since largely been forgotten.

The result is a book which is more episodic than deeply thematic, and which truly seems to be more a work of portraiture than deep analysis--but that is not a complaint. Burnstein's research takes him from New Orleans to Cincinnati to rural Massachusetts and into Canada. His selection of Americans is eclectic, and he has done excellent work bringing them alive and finding broader meaning and resonance in their disparate stories.

The way in which the narrative returns to the "famous" by finishing with the infamous passings of Jefferson and Adams on the very day of the Jubilee--and an extended consideration of the ways in which the two approached aging and their reconciliation--is effective. This book won't challenge any existing historical arguments, because it isn't really making one. But it brings a particular moment in American history alive, in a way which allows the reader to grasp the texture of life, the mental world of the second generation of Americans, with impressive clarity.

Forcing the Issue

William Lee Miller. Arguing About Slavery: The Great Battle in the United States Congress. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996.

One problem with the history of the Antebellum period is that it is defined--both in terminology and in the public mind--by what came next; yet at the same time, in the public mind the Civil War is not so much the end product of decades of deliberate agitation in a context of an increasingly stark sectional division as a sudden event that negated everything that came before.

Miller's book is an account of the long campaign for free speech fought in Congress by John Quincy Adams and eventually some allies. Specifically, for the right of anti-slavery petitions from citizens to be heard in the House of Representatives. This entirely parliamentary battle preceded not only the Civil War by more than two decades, it also came before the increasingly heated and open political arguments which came in the decade just prior to the war.

This particular battle--bloodless, sometimes carried out in obtuse parliamentary jargon, and ostensibly concerned with issues of free speech about slavery rather than slavery itself--has understandably failed to register in the public consciousness, However, Miller makes an excellent argument that the debate, and particularly John Quincy Adams leading role in it, deserves to be more widely known.

The battles to come would be more intense, more explicitly about slavery, and ultimately much more deadly. But this extended legislative battle was an important step along the way, and Miller deserves credit both for bringing it to life and making a mostly-forgotten parliamentary battle into a fairly gripping narrative.

Ecstatic Nation

Brenda Wineapple. Ecstatic Nation: Confidence, Crisis, and Compromise, 1848-1877. New York: Harper Collins, 2013.

Wineapple's book is centered on 'ecstasy' but it begins in apprehension and ends in exhaustion. The United States of America she portrays is wracked throughout this period by extremes of ecstasy triggered by a tendency to appeal to a 'higher law' whether the subject is transcendence, religious revival, territorial expansion, or--and especially--slavery. When the book begins, in 1848, the debate over slavery had become so heated and so grounded in moral absolutes and righteous certainties that sectional conflict seemed inevitable. When the book closes in 1877, the nation's white majority are united in weariness and a desire to put the ecstatic energies of abolitionism, civil war, and a faltering civil rights movement behind them. 

The narrative is framed by two funerals, each of which brought the different sections of the nation together although in very different ways. The first, in 1848, was for John Quincy Adams, and the outpouring of respect for the divisive old foe of the Slave Power and its corrosive effect on the Union could not mask the lingering fear that his dire warnings could not be ignored even after he left the stage. The second, in 1877, was for for former US Senator Charles Sumner, one of the great Congressional abolitionists of the "ecstatic era" the country was coming out of. His eulogy, by former Confederate politician-turned US Senator from Mississippi Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, implicitly called for an end of the political and social divisions that forced whites in both the North and South to acknowledge that the African Americans the Civil War had helped to free were still around, making claims to citizenship and a place in the American polity and American society. But white America was tired, and wanted to believe that this work was done. The answer to that disconnect was burying an ongoing conflict in nostalgia-toned revisionism and acceding to a new racial hierarchy which would ultimately reframe the Civil War as an unfortunate tragedy and Reconstruction as an unmitigated disaster.

Wineapple is a Professor of Modern Literary and Historical Studies, and the book is deeply informed by the literary culture of the era. This is, in many ways, a study of the culture--the zeitgeist--of a tumultuous era that came to a close when the white elite, and much of the electorate, decided that more than enough blood and treasure had been expended on "the negro question" and the values of compromise and conciliation were lauded as fundamental to rebuilding the newly unified nation. American Indians were also victims of this new, determined quest for "order" and peace, even at the expense of justice. The America of the final chapters of Wineapple's book, more than anything, wanted strife and conflict off the front pages of their newspapers. It was time to solidify the economy behind the gold standard and clean up the civil service. A continent was unified, cleansed of both slavery and indigenous people (reservations were just as invisible as the disenfranchised freeman of the South). Further triumphs in the advancement of democracy, further expansions of suffrage, would have to wait for future generations.