Part III: Practices
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Democratic Cultures and the First Century of US Literature
One of the cornerstones of the United States’ self-image is a triumphalist story of how its orderly political freedom matured over time into “the world’s leading democracy.” Most US citizens proudly (if incorrectly) define the nation’s political system as a “democracy” and consider our governmental model as well as our culture of individual freedoms worthy of the world’s emulation. Of course, careful students remember that the US governmental system is a representative republic and not, properly speaking, a democracy. But those who err can hardly be blamed, because the growth of democracy is one of the United States’ most central and carefully rehearsed stories about itself.
In the consensus story, democracy begins as a rhetorical glimmer in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, an inchoate if energizing ideal that fuels the new nation’s revolutionary bid for independence from England. This idealism is wisely seat-belted by the Framers, whose Constitution engineered a representative system to help citizens avoid the “democratic excess” of direct participation. Their model eschewed what they viewed as the impracticability, unpredictability, and even lawlessness of popular democracy. Democracy, properly delimited by official structures of political representation, was then launched by the election of President Thomas Jefferson, who released the “voice of the people” in his electoral triumph over the elitist Federalists. The political sway of the “common man” subsequently burgeoned under Andrew Jackson with the advent of the party system and with “universal suffrage,” when all white men, regardless of their access to wealth or property, won the vote. Of course, the phrase “universal” now ironically highlights the lingering injustices of citizenship: women of every race along with African-descended, Native American, and foreign-born men were excluded. And thus began a longer struggle for civil rights and access to the ballot box.
This narrative, a touchstone of civics education, depicts democracy as a boon from the Founders who created prudent constraints allowing ordinary people to take up democratic freedoms responsibly, ensuring that the nation’s common citizens and its political system would mature in tandem. Democracy, we learn, is about getting the vote, which marks political (i.e., law-abiding and self-disciplined) adulthood. This story narrates democracy from a bird’s-eye view that reveals to its grateful recipients a relatively orderly progress.
Interestingly, though, the first century of US literature does not corroborate this consensus narrative. Rather it offers a different, richer, more deeply democratic picture – if by “democracy” we refer to the contributions of the demos, the common or poorer classes of citizens. It explores the democratic ideas and traditions of these ordinary citizens, framing the conflicts that emerged as a result of competing ideas about democracy and different democratic cultures in the late colonies and early nation. It offers insights into how some ideas, cultures, and practices won out, becoming officially enshrined in the nation’s memory, and how others were squeezed into political irrelevance. It gives us tantalizing hints about diverging democratic histories, and different modes of democratic possibility that might be worth remembering, exploring, and even trying to deploy today. It shows how “representation” extends beyond politics to social interactions and aesthetic practices. The literature of the early nation confirms that democracy was not an adult-sized suit that childlike citizens grew into, but rather something messier and more contentious, where ordinary citizens had adult ideas from the start – not always in accord with the Constitution’s vision for political order. “Democracy” in this literature was not official government, but competing ideas, ideals, and practices that were fought over, gained, and also lost in the first century of “independence.”
The democratic conflicts that are explored, historicized, theorized, celebrated, and vilified in this literature offer a provocative, politically revisionist framework for understanding how democratic cultures were streamlined into a more officially singular democratic Culture in the early United States and also reveal that many early citizens did not see their fractious and vibrant local democratic practices as being in opposition to constitutional democracy or federal order but rather as a vital (if contestational) partner with it. The literature of the young nation corroborates and fleshes out the investigations of a new generation of historians into alternative democratic political cultures in the late colonies and early nation.
Revolution had emboldened common folk all over the new United States to involve themselves in the work of self-governance rather than leaving things to their representative “betters.” This growing understanding of what came to be enshrined in the Constitution as the sovereignty of the people started not as a theory, but in local, face-to-face practices. Common folk in the backcountry, towns, and cities believed they had a right to “regulate” existing government to ensure fairness. And they agitated for economic policies that, as historians Woody Holton and Terry Bouton each detail, would create a more enduring foundation for political democracy. As Bouton notes, historians have paid ample attention to the Revolution’s impetus toward political equality. But the push for economic equality has received much less attention. Bouton argues that in this pivotal moment, people – wealthy, middling, and poor – came to believe that “economic equality was what made political equality possible. … To them, concentrations of wealth led to corruption and tyrannical rulers, while widely dispersed political and economic power promoted good government” (32). For many, the flowering of democracy would depend on supportive economic policies, for instance, treating the land as a commonwealth, to be fairly distributed so as to assure the livelihood of the citizenry. These people were calling for a more muscular sovereignty than that bequeathed by the Constitution with its emphasis on the delegation of participation, and for access to a secure livelihood. In other words, they were demanding conditions that would maximize public happiness (an idea much discussed in the revolutionary era of the eighteenth century) – the ability to participate publicly in the project of self-government on equal standing – rather than a private happiness or individual good. In their demands, democracy was about communal wealth parity as the basis for political equality rather than the unimpeded right of individuals to wealth accumulation.
The ratification of the Constitution and its order-producing structures for delegated representation did not make these expectations disappear. Instead, demands for fairness and access grew across the United States in its first century, manifested in a variety of communities, informal practices, organized protests, and formal political organizations. Even though their detractors increasingly represented them as a disorderly threat to the nation, these actors, agitating for better political and economic access, did not see themselves as opponents to the Constitution: they aimed not at overthrow, but at reform, as historians like Ronald Formisano have detailed.
US literature, read with a critical eye toward democratic cultures, reflects these alternative understandings and practices of what “self-government” might be. From the start, an energetic, developing tradition of political novels and poems challenged (and continues challenging) readers to consider how important reading literature – and the critical capacities that such reading develops – can be to the practice of democratic self-government, representative and otherwise, in the early nation. And, intriguingly, some of this literature emphasizes that the very contention and disagreement disdained by the consensus narrative is itself the heart of democratic vitality in the United States – that contention, in fact, is absolutely fundamental to the vitality of community and the democratic commonweal, not its downfall.
Democratic Conflict and Early US Literature
In its earliest iterations, we can see diverging tendencies between what we might call “consensus” and “conflict” models for framing these democratic struggles. And we can see how literature participated in these conflicts, developing as an aesthetic corollary to official practices of political representation. An early political poem, The Anarchiad, framed fractious democratic debates in terms that were friendly to the nascent consensus narrative. As disagreement and protests over debt and paper money played out across the nation in the 1780s, a group of Yale-educated New Englanders known as the “Hartford Wits” or “Connecticut Wits” – David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins – weighed in. In the form of a fragmentary mock-epic, the authors published 12 installments of The Anarchiad between October 1786 and September 1787 (the Constitutional Convention sat from May to September 1787). Attempting to influence public opinion toward a stronger, federalized government, the authors proffered their work as a “rediscovered” epic poem, supposedly excavated from an ancient American fortress, which uncannily prophesies the current democratic battles. Warning of a “darkness” that threatens to overwhelm “the new-born state,” the poem describes the dangers posed by “mobs in myriads” who “blacken all the way … shade with rags the plain” and “discord spread” (6). The Wits summarize the actions of fellow citizens who lobby their states’ representatives, protest, and fight for fairer laws as “Chaos, Anarch old” (6). The poem names Daniel Shays and Job Shattuck, two of the leaders of the Massachusetts Regulation (or “Shay’s Rebellion”), without identifying their concerns. Rather, it dismisses their actions – legal and extralegal alike – as a fundamental threat to the nation’s existence. The poem personifies this political struggle in mythical terms by depicting a battle between Anarch, the force of lawlessness and darkness, and Hesper, a mythological figure that manifests Venus, the “bringer of light,” who convenes and counsels “sages” to assemble in Philadelphia to rescue the country.
A few years later, a participant in a different post-Constitution Regulation, the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, would depict these ongoing struggles, humorously celebrating democratic conflict while theorizing it as a problem of both aesthetic and political representation. The multivolume novel, Modern Chivalry, thoughtfully explored battles over democratic access and form with a sense of humor that matches the Wits’. Hugh Henry Brackenridge pokes fun at and takes seriously the questions about democratic self-governance raised in the political actions, protests, and rebellions of its time. Because of its length (over 800 pages) and episodic nature, Brackenridge’s novel (published 1792–1815) is not high on the list of must-reads for those who study the political and literary legacy of the early nation. It is worth reading, though, because its arguments are substantially different and less dystopic than those of more familiar novels from this period – for instance, Charles Brockden Brown’s dark ruminations on the politics of representation in Wieland (1798) and Arthur Mervyn (1799–1800). Modern Chivalry makes a significant contribution to the early Republic’s debates over what the people’s sovereignty might entail, over the tensions between direct democratic local traditions and the federal representative order, and over ambiguities that existed in developing practices of political representation. Brackenridge’s theory of democratic representation expands its scope beyond its formal governing function, proposing that literature itself is part of a continuum of representative practices that are necessary to the fundamental work of common citizens in a healthy democracy.
Modern Chivalry’s episodic structure is built around farcical political situations. For instance, in an early scene Captain John Farrago (the putative hero of the novel, whose patronym means “a confused mixture” or “hodgepodge”) is about to lose the services of his personal servant, Teague Oregan. They have ventured into a town election between an educated man and a weaver. Farrago, with a smug aristocratic “disinterest,” tries to persuade the “multitude” to reject the weaver as unqualified and, failing that, to dissuade the weaver from running. Meanwhile, the crowd tries persuading Teague to stand for office. Mortified at his failure to educate the crowd in the selection of suitable candidates, Farrago instead convinces Teague to refuse this new opportunity by offering a terrifying vision of its consequence:
It is the devil in hell to be exposed to the squibs and crackers of the gazette wits and publications. You know no more about these matters than a goose; and yet you would undertake rashly, without advice, to enter on the office; nay, contrary to advice. For I would not for a thousand guineas … that the breed of the Oregans should come to this; bringing on them a worse stain that stealing sheep; to which they are much addicted. You have nothing but your character, Teague, in a new country to depend upon. Let it never be said, that you quitted an honest livelihood, the taking care of my horse, to follow the new fangled whims of the times, and to be a statesman. (17)
Farrago’s method for “representation,” as the narrator will later note of a similar episode, “had the desired effect upon Teague and he thought no more of the matter” (40). Within pages, the narrator recaps the same episode a little differently, qualifying Farrago’s supposedly beneficent disinterest: “the selfishness of the captain prevailed, and obstructed [Teague’s] advancement” (42).
Much later in the novel, Captain – now Governor – Farrago is threatened with impeachment, because of rumors that he has been unfairly lenient with Teague, recently named an Indian war hero, but who is currently (and rightfully) suspected of misrepresenting his role in the taking of scalps. Farrago manages to persuade his constituents that he is no longer responsible for Teague’s actions, and the infuriated crowd begins calling for Teague’s blood. Happily, though, a cagey gardener presents a piece of panther hide, claiming it to be Teague’s scalp, which calms the crowd and brings it back to its (collective) senses. The narrator summarizes,
Hence the fury abated in a moment, and when it occurred to them that their remonstrance to the governor had been the occasion of the tragedy, they began to relent, and to blame themselves as having been too precipitate in their representations. (736)
In this long burlesque on the fledgling representative democracy, political “representation” becomes a more expansive practice than what the Constitution structures. In Brackenridge’s novel, representation is a collective practice of public happiness that can be informed by a variety of motives not always conducive to the commonweal. It can be selfish, too hasty, and poorly informed. It can be deliberated and reconsidered. And, the novel insists, representation is not just the result of democratic decision making (in the form of elections, political proxies, or legal decisions). It is also the basis for democratic decision making, the material from which people form the opinions that shape their decisions about their political will. As the narrator notes, “[H]ow can it be otherwise when the people cannot themselves be all present to see” the affairs under consideration? (597). Modern Chivalry, like the democratic cultures it pokes fun at, insists that democracy – usually beneficially and sometimes dangerously – exceeds the formal boundaries of representative government. It examines a range of locations and modes for political representation that cultivates the balanced and thoughtful democracy that this novel treasures, including individual self-discipline, dinner table conversation and random roadside encounters, coffeehouse discussion in the midst of mob actions, newspaper reports and editorials, popular elections, legislative deliberation, and, indeed, novels. Read as part of the nation’s democratic archive, it offers not only an alternative historical account of the development of democracy in the new nation but also a political tool kit for our own interest in democracy today.
Frontier Democracy
Brackenridge’s optimism about the ability of ordinary citizens to engage in the democratic process was not always shared. The frontier literature that became so popular after the 1820s often supported the developing consensus narrative, consigning the equalitarian demands, practices, and beliefs of common citizens to the outlands or the nation’s prehistory. Frontier novelists represented muscular notions of equality not as a real political possibility, but rather (at best) as a naïve ideal that should be abandoned, or (more typically) as a form of savagery or organized crime that needed to repudiated in order for settlers to “mature” and earn their admission to the civilized nation. Such plots repudiate the equalitarian goals of political solidarity forwarded by rural farmers and urban workers in the early nation, as they track the enduring challenge that such ideals and practices posed during the tumultuous political and economic changes of the Jacksonian era. In the 1830s, white men across the nation, regardless of property status, got the vote; at the same time, the political power of the common folk – whom Jackson invited into the White House at his first inaugural – was vilified and feared by elites across the political spectrum. As lands opened up in the South and West, thanks to Jackson’s creation of Indian territory in what is now Oklahoma, and his policy of Indian removal, land speculation became rampant and banks proliferated, launching a cycle of economic boom and bust that didn’t abate until well into the twentieth century, and igniting a range of populist movements as well as belligerent political majoritarianism. Citizenship, increasingly dissevered from notions of equalitarian fraternalism (and decisively excluding women en route, as historian Rosemary Zagarri details in Revolutionary Backlash), became more and more attached to ideals of competitive, independent manhood. And during this time, populist actions became more destructive against property (mainly in the North) and violent against lives (largely in the South), as David Grimsted details in American Mobbing, 1828–1861.
Two famous frontier novelists, William Gilmore Simms and Robert Montgomery Bird, developed stories that bolster the consensus narrative’s suspicion of local democracy and its more insistent equalitarianism by emphasizing the unreliability of fraternity for the construction of familial or political bonds. Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1838) sets its action in 1782, when the nation was still a political confederacy and Kentucky was still a district. Its plot repudiates the brotherhood that undergirded the Articles of Confederation, advocating for a hierarchical political order, more like that imagined by the federal Constitution that would be ratified in 1789, governing the entry of Kentucky into statehood. Its young, orphaned Virginian hero, Roland, is descended from “one of the most ancient and affluent families on the James River,” but his uncle Roland, the eldest, inherits all the family wealth, while the younger two brothers, including Roland’s father, “were left … to shift for themselves” (59). During the Revolution, Uncle Roland remains loyal to the Crown, as the younger two brothers cast their lot for Independence. Uncle Roland never forgives his younger brothers, who soon die in battle, though he seemingly forgives their offspring, Roland and his cousin Edith. But when the uncle dies shortly after the British defeat at Yorktown, he apparently leaves them penniless and unprotected. Roland and Edith must light out for the frontier to make their living.
The novel idealizes fraternity in the twins’ patriotism, and plots its “real-world” fate. Uneven distribution of property – whether enforced by law or produced by what Madison in Federalist Paper No. 10 calls that “diversity in the faculties of men” – combines with the vicissitudes of war to transform revolutionary brotherhood into a postrevolutionary fall. The message is clear, if regrettable: brotherhood can’t be trusted. The perspective of the novel, and the symbolic citizenship it conveys, shifts decisively from brothers to an anxious, isolated, orphaned son, emphasizing that men struggle alone in a competitive and brutish world.
The novel’s Indians, for their part, confirm their political backwardness in their very extension of fraternal welcome. “Boozhoo, brudder,” may be the most clearly intelligible thing Indian characters get to say in the course of the novel. Their brotherly greetings underscore their savagery. Not only do the Shawnees play at politics in war camp speeches that seem like childish imitations of adult speeches, but also they make a habit of eating their so-called brothers. Early on, the frontier leader, Colonel Bruce, describes a Delaware defeat of a Pennsylvania military expedition: “Beaten! … say that the savages made dinner of ’em and you’ll be nearer the true history of the matter” (56). Thus the novel not only negates the political possibility of equalitarian democracy but also rules out the possibility of effective Native and Anglo-American alliances by revealing Indians as cannibals.
The novel is nevertheless haunted by the possibility of such alliances. Deriding potential equality as nothing more than grotesque polyglot gibberish (“Boozhoo, brudder”), it gestures toward the real-world option that emerged on the frontier for people to form cross-cultural political alliances by invoking then-famous Indian captive and “renegade” Simon Girty as background for the character Abel Doe, who, like Girty, “turns Injun.” With the specific invocation of the cross-racial and cross cultural fraternity that the Girty “threat” represents, Nick of the Woods invokes the peril of an equalitarian ethos spreading like infection from the Indians to even apparently good frontiersmen by again evoking the horror of cannibalism. For instance, Colonel Bruce exhorts his men into battle with a sinister hint: “If thar’s a thousand Injuns, or the half of ‘em, thar’s meat for all of you” (92). The novel shows frontier equality as developmental regression; in its plot, the nation must aim to end the fraternal idealism that trains frontiersmen as renegades and not citizens. The project of citizenship is to bring men away from “savagery” into representative order, to tame self-determining political desire with a representative order that demands citizen submission.
Simms’s Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama (1838) is even more direct than Nick of the Woods in repudiating brotherhood. Set in the early 1830s of Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, the novel is loosely based on a legend then circulating about a real-life outlaw, John Murrell, whose alleged activities (including slave running and/or stealing) inspired fears of an interracially orchestrated slave rebellion and actual recriminatory lynching sprees in Mississippi in 1835 (a summer when the entire nation, as Grimsted summarizes, witnessed “maximum mob mayhem, in numbers and variety of riots never before or since surpassed in the United States” [ix]). Richard Hurdis mostly ignores the racial aspects of the Murrell legend, and instead plays up the threat of an underclass counternation being consolidated on the frontiers among poor whites. This “nation,” a “mystic brotherhood” composed of squatters (people too poor to purchase land outright), rejects US laws privileging the wealthy elite. It has its own laws and rules for citizenship, and members are committed – among other things – to an absolutely fair division of all spoils. Its threat (members brag repeatedly that its membership has topped 1,500) forms the dramatic backdrop to the story’s central tale of a fratricidal struggle between Richard Hurdis and his oldest brother, John.
Richard Hurdis, the narrator, characterizes himself as “stout of limb, bold of heart, prompt in the use of my weapon, a fearless rider and a fatal shot” (2). The most “decisive” (4) of his brothers, Richard is not the most favored by his father; rather, that preference falls to John, whom Richard characterizes as fat, conniving, and lazy. When Richard realizes he is in love with the proverbial girl next door, Mary Easterby, and begins to suspect that she might prefer to give the favor of her hand in marriage to John, he becomes enraged. Proudly refusing to ask either Mary or John, and relying rather on rumors of his Alabama neighbors, Richard provokes a fight with John by insulting him, and then leaves home with his dear friend William Carrington to strike out into the territory of the Creek nation – William to purchase some land to live on when he is able to marry his fiancé, and Richard ostensibly to make a life independent from his despised father and brother.
Not an entirely reliable narrator, Richard admits that he is easy to anger, impatient, and deeply suspicious, traits for which he is chided by both Mary and William, the latter advising him, “To look for rascals is to find rascals; and to believe in wrong, is not only to suffer, but to do wrong” (33). But Richard defensively castigates William for his trustfulness and optimism, countering that William’s faith in mankind “will be rewarded by faithlessness.” The novel confirms Richard’s gloomy view. As soon as he lights out for the territories, John hires a poor squatter, Pickett, to track and kill Richard. But Pickett mistakenly kills William instead as he flees from a gang of bandits that have entrapped the two young men. The bandits, members of the “mystic brotherhood,” quickly recruit Pickett and John Hurdis to their cause. Meanwhile, without knowing his brother has been inducted into the “brotherhood,” Richard disguises himself in order to infiltrate the outlaw gang and extract revenge for the death of William. As luck would have it, when the showdown comes, John is among the bandits. Richard, who by now has untangled the chain of events that led to William’s murder and understands that John had meant for Richard to die, aims explicitly to kill his brother: “I could no longer resist the conviction that the fates had brought me to my victim” (351). As he takes aim, though, he is obstructed by Pickett’s daughter, and while he struggles with her, one of his compatriots kills John. Happy that his brother is finally dead, Richard nevertheless pauses to “thank God, and the stout fellow who rode beside me, that my hand had not stricken the cruel blow that was yet demanded by justice” (353). He rides on to finish the work of defeating the gang, and the novel apparently concludes with the felicitous defeat of both familial and political brotherhood, a victory rewarded by Richard’s happy marriage to Mary.
Not all frontier novelists, though, rejected the practices and principles of equalitarianism that still circulated on the frontiers. Another narrative published in 1839 offers a more favorable view of these ongoing ideals and practices. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? loosely fictionalizes her family’s experiences on the 1830s Michigan frontier. More than just the document of women’s drudgery in the West, Kirkland’s narrative details its fictional heroine Mary Clavers’s pleasure in her frontier learning curve.
One aspect of that learning comes in the social economy of the frontier town Montacute. The Clavers arrive with trunks loaded with fineries, only to discover their uselessness in the rough conditions they encounter. Aided – and also irritated – by neighbors who spurn her idea of civilized comforts and who borrow butter only to return margarine, Mary’s sketches often build humor at the expense of her “less refined” neighbors (earning Kirkland serious contempt from her real-world Michigan neighbors). But throughout her sketches and most explicitly in her closing words, Mary Clavers embraces what she has learned, claiming a common cause:
This simplification of life, this bringing down the transactions of daily intercourse to the original principles of society, is neither very eagerly adopted, nor very keenly relished, by those who have been accustomed to the politer atmospheres. They rebel most determinedly, at first … yet … after the barriers of pride and prejudice are once broken, we discover a certain satisfaction in this homely fellowship with our kind, which goes far toward repaying whatever sacrifices or concessions we may have been induced to make. (184–5)
Kirkland’s depiction of the homely (but not savage) social and political equality that develops on the frontier between more and less “civilized” denizens embraces, with admitted ambivalence, the rough equalitarianism she discovers there.
A New Home insists on the productive exchange of federal, or “civilized,” democracy with the “primitive” equalitarianism still practiced in frontier territories. Here Kirkland’s argument differs notably from Bird’s and Simms’s. In Nick of the Woods, the citified adventurers learn that they can’t hack it on the frontier, and must wait for the transition to be completed before they reenter Kentucky; in Richard Hurdis, the narrative teaches that the savagery of the frontier must be eliminated by the hardiest of adventurers among the elite classes. Quite differently, Clavers imagines a political reciprocity between the more democratic frontier and the more civilized nation. In the story of her own transformation, Clavers proposes an infusion model, suggesting that frontier equalitarianism can redirect the more jaded and class-divided practice of representative democracy in the East. She closes her narrative not by returning to “civilization” as both Roland and Richard do, but by placing herself “beyond the pale” of the “sublime clique” and affirming instead her citizenship in the “wild woods” of Michigan (186).
Self Culture versus Interpersonal Democracy
The property and political disputes and rebellions that had peppered the early nation began cropping up again in the 1840s – for instance, the Anti-Rent Wars of New York State and the Dorr’s Rebellion in Rhode Island, where political activism intensified around the conflict between liberal democracy and the demands of workers who wanted access to land and livelihood and not just capitalism’s fabled “opportunity.” Historian Mark Lause has detailed how the National Reformers of the 1840s reignited revolutionary era demands, agitating for equalitarian social reconstruction by calling for an end to seizure of homesteads for debt, a federal homestead act, and a limitation on land ownership. These political ideals, reflecting the interests of agrarian and urban working classes alike, would be echoed by the “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” slogan of the Republican Party when it formed in the mid-1850s. But the nation’s formal commitment to developing capitalism at the direct expense of democracy hardened in this era, as private law increasingly shielded the economy from political intervention (see Horwitz).
Meanwhile, more canonical writers from the nineteenth century – those who have been steadily admired and studied throughout our nation’s history – were developing literary styles and philosophies that both elaborated and tested the consensus narrative that celebrates representative government while separating the economy from democratic influence. Emerson’s Transcendentalism made a virtue out of political individualism even as it attached it spiritually to a larger corporate good, reflecting even as it refined to a narrower ambit the utopian and socialist perfectionism of a variety of middle-class movements in the mid-nineteenth century, from Fourierism and Mormonism to the Oneidas and Brook Farm. Emerson counters what he sees as the mobbish tendencies – the banal, untidy, and conformist orientation – of association with the higher, symbolically directed exercise of self-culture. This is an argument that culminates in “New England Reformers” (1844), when Emerson outlines his distrust of party politics and reformist leagues:
[C]oncert is neither better nor worse, neither more nor less potent than individual force. All the men in the world cannot make a statue walk and speak, cannot make a drop of blood, or a blade of grass, any more than one man can. But let there be one man, let there be truth in two men, in ten men, then there is concert for the first time possible, because the force which moves the world is a new quality, and can never be furnished by adding whatever qualities of a different kind. What is the use of the concert of the false and disunited? There can be no concert in two where there is no concert in one. … The union is only perfect, when all of the uniters are isolated. (598–9)
For Emerson, political interaction – the Revolutionary era’s vaunted public happiness – compromises communal good more often than not: it warps, distracts, and diverts civic actors. Taking aim at the growing party power and democratizing aspirations of the “common man,” Emerson argues that political and spiritual goods alike lie not in association, but that the “union must be ideal in actual individualism” (599). In Emerson’s account, even political representation would ideally act as a function of self-culture. The concept of representation makes unity symbolically present where it did not before exist, and he suggests that it is indeed by serving the ideal Representative that we best advance our self: “Serve the great. Stick at no humiliation. Grudge no office thou canst render. Be the limb of their body, the breath of their mouth. Compromise thy egotism. Who cares for that, so thou gain aught wider and nobler?” (629).
Others influenced by Emerson’s Transcendentalism, like Walt Whitman and Frederick Douglass, would leverage Emerson’s isolationist representative philosophy toward a broader sociality and a more expansively face-to-face practice. In contrast to Emerson’s self-disciplining service to the Representative, Whitman’s poet imagines a sprawling and undisciplined reciprocity. His bardic persona proffers self-culture as an athletic sympathy that will extend democratic openness and public happiness both within individuals and between diverse people, turning the Constitution’s representative distance into revitalizing, local, and global democratic contact. Douglass, for his part, deployed the achievements of his self-culture in ways that challenged the representative order of the white republic, first to free himself from slavery, then on behalf of abolition, in his autobiographies and his activist work within black print culture and community. From his earliest endeavors to teach himself to read with a copy of the Columbian Orator, the arts of citizenship were of central concern to Douglass, and he theorizes citizenship throughout his career, while parrying its real-life exclusions even after the passage of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments.
By the 1840s, as historian Ronald Formisano shows, democratic activists began more and more to look for ways to work within and alongside constitutional political process rather than externally to it (as “Regulators”). We see this accommodation, for instance, in Douglass’s move from Garrisonian opposition, deciding instead to hold the nation’s political system to its own highest ideals by insisting that the Constitution was antislavery (despite the 3/5ths and fugitive slave clauses). The emphasis on internal democratic reform correlates with a societal shift from an emphasis on public happiness – the activism of regular citizens in their communities and in dialogue with their federally representative government – to private happiness and individual heroism. Or, to frame this in historian Jeffrey Sklansky’s terms, American understandings of selfhood and society swapped political economy for social psychology. Citizenship’s purview shifted away from the self-authorizing, communal, sovereign right to watch over and participate in government to a narrower focus on individual heroism and self-reform. Thus, public happiness, which philosopher Hannah Arendt summarizes as “the citizen’s right of access to the public realm, in his share of public power – to be a ‘participator in the government of affairs’ in Jefferson’s telling phrase,” was replaced with private happiness, the definition we still definitively associated with Jefferson’s “self-evident” list of truths: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” (see Arendt 127). The pursuit of this private happiness is, however, a mixed treasure, what cultural theorist Christopher Castiglia has termed “democracy’s door prize”: “No longer entitled to exert agency over [democratic] institutions, citizens were given the responsibility of regulating and managing the turbulent interiors that supposedly made them unfit for civic participation” (6).
As Douglass frequently emphasized, private happiness was not equally protected: individual achievement often didn’t count within a society that called itself “democratic” and organized itself through race, class, gender, and regional hierarchies. Political, social, and economic exclusions continued challenging and limiting the nation’s officially stated equalitarian aims. Indeed, the question of race carried the nation into Civil War. Two novels published in that war’s immediate aftermath take up the struggle of democratic cultures and the problem of the United States’ ascriptive exclusions. These stories counter the insistence on individual representativeness and heroism in Emerson and even Douglass to suggest instead – only somewhat less narrowly – that the nation’s most important political struggles for equality take place on a local and even intimate scale: in workplaces, on neighborhood streets, and within the family.
Like Douglass, Anna Dickinson explored how racism warped and perversely misrepresented black citizens and slaves, probing how whites’ attitudes change when they discover someone they admire is black (if white enough to pass). Her historical romance, What Answer? (1868), set amidst the Civil War, the New York City Draft Riots of 1863, and the storming of Fort Wagner by a Black Infantry regiment in 1864, centers on the burgeoning love between Willie Surrey, the only child of well-to-do parents, and Francesca Ercildoune, a universally admired young woman who is, unknown to most in her social circle, the daughter of a quadroon father and white mother. Dickinson’s plot explores how a range of whites, from poor immigrant Irish workers to some of New York’s and Philadelphia’s most privileged elite, respond to situations that test their moral mettle, and she delineates the struggles and race pride that inform the actions of the novel’s black characters.
Dickinson foregrounds how class anxieties play into the social reproduction of racism when she has the Irish laborer, Jim Given, bring a petition on behalf of his nearly 300 coworkers to Willie, his boss’s son. The petition threatens a strike to protest the promotion of Abram Franklin, a young African American bookkeeper. Jim, who is resolute in his commitment to maintaining white supremacy in this episode, will later change his mind as he interacts with slaves as a result of his Union service during the Civil War. Dickinson counterpoints Jim’s change of heart, though, with a collage of scenes that feature a drunken Irish coal heaver, who endeavors to have a Black Union soldier dumped off the trolley they’re riding; Surrey’s wealthy parents disinheriting him when they discover that he wants to marry a black woman; and, perhaps most poignantly, the lynching of Franklin during the Draft Riots. Dickinson doesn’t try to pretend that an individual’s change of heart will change the world, any more than she sees abolition or even war as producing the necessary changes. But her novel, featuring the developing interracial friendships and alliances of an array of characters, insists that even the most banal interpersonal exchanges might produce crucial transformations that lead governmentally empowered whites to help fight for social justice for all.
In another, perhaps more ambitious postwar historical romance, Rebecca Harding Davis poses a similar analysis. Waiting for the Verdict (1867) more self-consciously forwards an argument about democratic change on the home front. Its backdrop is the threatened breakdown of national community in the Civil War. Her plot relies on the model of historical romance, interweaving and intermarrying characters from Alabama, Kentucky, and Pennsylvania. Conflicts and desire emerge around social difference: characters create and destroy relationships, seek each other out, and disagree in ways that challenge them to become more aware of how exclusions of class, race, citizenship, and gender affect those they love. Davis simultaneously uses and critiques the romance form, infusing it with a realist countersensibility. This novel’s “social realism” attempts to imagine democracy socially as disagreement, and not its resolution in “consensus.” In other words, it explores conflicts and their limited resolutions between ordinary, limited, and frequently unsympathetic citizens. In this world, there is no possible unity because no one can “stand for” the good of the whole. Instead, Davis offers us at least a gesture toward a different kind of democratic literature and political understanding, one that in substance and style repudiates any possible “consensus” narrative, all the while insisting on the democratic good of a functionally discordant but still substantive community.
The central plot turns around two sets of “mismatched” couples whose stories occupy the bulk of the novel, and one well-matched couple (the married and enslaved Annie and Nathan) whose efforts to reunite form much of its backdrop. The first mismatched couple is Ross Burley, a girl who grows up in abject poverty in Philadelphia, who develops class solidarity and a (not always antiracist) commitment to abolition, and Garrick Randolph, a weak-willed and selfishly romantic Kentucky native who impulsively casts his lot with the Union cause, and who sells a family slave “down the river” to protect his inheritance. In the second mismatched couple, we find the mysterious Dr. Broderip – a renowned surgeon, educated in France, who was well admired among the social elite of Philadelphia, but whose moodiness makes him socially remote – who falls in love with Margaret Conrad, the daughter of a blind minister, who is characterized by her absolute inflexibility of opinion. One of these opinions has to do with her belief – even in the context of her abolitionism – in an unbridgeable difference between blacks and whites, expressed as her absolute repulsion from blacks. The conflict between these two lovers emerges when Broderip painfully decides, late in the war, publicly to acknowledge the secret of his past: aided by white benefactors, he has been passing and is “in reality” Nathan’s brother and James Strebling’s escaped slave “Sip.” Margaret renounces him immediately; he enlists to lead a black regiment; and he dies at the end of the war from injuries sustained leading troops into Richmond, having just been released from a prisoner camp.
In its multiple plots, Waiting for the Verdict rebuts the representative idealism of Emerson’s transcendentalist self-culture. Indeed, the novel refuses to offer even a marginal but wise character: all are flawed and limited by their own experiences and habits of perception. Davis extends this strategy to her characters’ appearance, all depicted as average and even ugly – except in the eyes of those who love them best. Every character operates fully as a multivalent, rich, and limited subject. Davis’s dogged insistence on the productive value of their differences and limitations denies power to the ideal of the singular Representative who can stand for the good of the whole. Rather, she insists that the most important forces for democratic political change come not from the halls of Congress or the office of the President, but in daily interactions at work, on the streets, and at home.
Dickinson’s and Davis’s novels push back against the “individual” democracy forwarded by Emerson, and adapted by Whitman and Douglass, to insist on interpersonal democracy. Quite differently from the self-sufficiency embraced by these better-known (and more carefully studied) male writers, Davis and Dickinson contend that every character is a limited actor, and that it takes many different people working together to produce an equalitarian society. In their vision, the nation’s commonwealth depends both on an independence and interdependence that are produced more meaningfully in close spaces of domestic, labor, and social exchange than by government action.
Conclusion: Democracy
In the aftermath of Civil War, newly freed African-descended Americans took up the “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” motto of the young Republican Party with their own demand for “forty acres and a mule” – but their appeal past the end of Reconstruction fell on deaf white ears. The launch of Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan coordinated with expanding Indian Wars in the West and the resettlement of defeated nations onto reservations. The Homestead Act (1862) encouraged white settlement of lands seized from resettled Indians and ignited a new round of economic expansion both at home and, soon, overseas. The completion of transcontinental railroads and communication networks accelerated the extraction of natural resources through mining and timbering, a second industrial revolution, and the expansion of population, markets, and corporate power that ushered the United States into the Gilded Age. At the end of the nineteenth century, new conflicts between common laborers, farmers, and robber baron corporate heads and bankers yielded new political forces like Populism and Progressivism as the United States entered its second century.
Just at that moment, one of the United States’ most esteemed figures, Henry Adams, published a withering assessment of the nation’s experiment with the people’s sovereignty and representative government. In Democracy: An American Novel (1880), set in the aftermath of the Civil War, the failure of radical reconstruction, and a time of widening wealth gaps between the many and the few that were already producing bitter protests and strikes, Adams probed the nation’s representative system for answers. Turning away from the play of local traditions and clash of regional cultures that animate writers from Brackenridge to Kirkland; from the nobility of civic self-culture probed so carefully by Emerson, Whitman, and Douglass; or local aspects of daily life in which Dickenson and Davis locate democratic work, Adams focused rather on the grand machinery of federal democratic government – and finds it definitively lacking.
The novel centers on Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, a wealthy young widow, who takes her sister Sibyl to spend a season in Washington, DC, searching for a meaning she has been unable to find in her extensive reading, in her travels, in her philanthropic work, or even in the New York society in which she circulates. In the capital, she hopes to understand her Americanness, to see
the clash of interests, the interests of forty millions of people and a whole continent, centering at Washington; guided, restrained, controlled, or unrestrained and uncontrollable, by men of ordinary mould; the tremendous forces of government and the machinery of society at work. (18)
Madeleine starts in the Senate Gallery, where she is inspired by the power of democratic oratory of senator Silas P. Ratcliffe, “the Prairie Giant of Peonia, the Favorite Son of Illinois.” Her acquaintances describe him as a “great statesman,” notable, the narrator slyly observes, for the “smoothness of his manipulation” (90). Silas, for his part, is mesmerized by Madeleine, and she – no longer interested in love past the death of both husband and child, but tugged by appeals to woman’s “goodness” and philanthropic obligation – is soon captivated by Ratcliffe, who calculatingly offers her the mission of being his political guiding moral force as he maneuvers her toward accepting his marriage proposal.
As Madeleine is drawn deeper into the “eddying dance of democracy” (55), she becomes more and more disillusioned by Washington society and government alike. The cabinet members, congressmen, and ambassadors she circulates among are not motivated by selflessness and a commitment to the common good, but rather by egotism, mindless party loyalty, and gross ambition. Washington, as it develops under her observation, is crowded with “swarms” of “simple-minded exhibitions of human nature; men and women curiously out of place, whom it would be cruel to ridicule and ridiculous to weep over,” with politicians who can hardly pay intelligible lip service to democracy, with presidents who are only a “horrid warning to ambition” (54–5). For Madeleine, the representatives are as crass and debased as those they represent. She generalizes from Ratcliffe to the representative system, concluding that those in power talk about “virtue and vice as a man who is colorblind talks about red and green,” speculating that “politics” causes “this atrophy of moral sense by disuse” (182).
Ultimately, Madeleine resolves to leave the “business of democratic government,” which she has discovered to be “noting more than government of any other kind,” for the “true democracy of her life, her paupers and her prisons, her schools and her hospitals” (176). But the novel does not unequivocally endorse Madeleine’s view; rather, the narrator observes that “the bystander who looked on this scene with a wider knowledge of facts might have found entertainment in another view of the subject, that is to say, the guilelessness of Madeleine Lee” (182). Democracy thus deprives the reader of even Madeleine’s noble conclusions, offering rather a splintered raft of realpolitik without an oar of idealism.
Exhausted by the conflicts and compromises that wracked the nation from the mid-nineteenth century, Adams, like many other writers of his generation, looked away from the resilient cultures of democracy that still lived in local cultures, if not perhaps in the nation’s Capitol and its formal representative government. Brotherhood and community have entirely vanished in this story; even domestic relationships (excepting perhaps sisterhood) are portrayed as manipulative and competitive. Adams’s novel presages a significant narrowing in the nation’s democratic imaginary. If the common people of the early nation envisioned government as something the people come together to do, Adams offers government as an institutionalized (and corruptive) force decisively beyond the influence of ordinary people. Washington, DC – its federal institutions and its governing culture – is “popular sovereignty.” In “democracy,” now a geographical-institutional site that guards the barrier between those (representatives) with power and those (citizens) who are simply acted upon or left alone by government, there is no basis for public service other than an unquenchable rage for (or against) power. Anyone who dreams otherwise, like Madeleine, is a credible fool.
Adams’s novel does not, however, end the proverbial story. Corporate power coordinated with industrialized government in the late nineteenth century’s Gilded Age, and their grabs for power at the expense of ordinary workers, would eventually galvanize new local democratic movements – the Populists, whose cooperatives burgeoned across the South and Midwest in the 1890s, and the urban Progressive movement of the new century. Writers would again be inspired by these competing cultures, the necessity of which has never been eliminated by the federal government that the Framers promised would represent them. Rather, democratic cultures would continue to compete and clash, at their worst producing conflict, intolerance, and even violence, and at their best inspiring new democratic visions, activism, and demands in the new century.
References and Further Reading
Adams, Henry. Democracy: An American Novel. 1880. New York: Meridian, 1994.
Arendt, Hannah. On Revolution. 1963. New York: Penguin, 1965.
Bird, Robert Montgomery. Nick of the Woods. 1838. Ed. Curtis Dahl. New Haven, CT: College and University Press, 1967.
Bouton, Terry. Taming Democracy: “The People,” the Founders and the Troubled Ending of the American Revolution. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Brackenridge, Hugh Henry. Modern Chivalry. Ed. Claude M. Newlin. New York: American Book Company, 1937.
Castiglia, Christopher. Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008.
Davis, Rebecca Harding. Waiting for the Verdict. 1867. Ed. Donald Dingledine. Albany, NY: College and University Press, 1995.
Dickinson, Anna E. What Answer? 1868. Amherst, NY: Humanity Books, 2003.
Douglass, Frederick. Selected Speeches and Writings. Ed. Philip S. Foner. Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999.
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983.
Formisano, Ronald P. For the People: American Populist Movements from the Revolution to the 1850s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008.
Fritz, Christian G. American Sovereigns: The People and America’s Constitutional Tradition before the Civil War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
Grimsted, David. American Mobbing, 1828–1861. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Holton, Woody. Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution. New York: Hill and Wang, 2007.
Horwitz, Morton J. The Transformation of American Law, 1780–1860. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979.
Humphries, David, et al. The Anarchiad: A New England Poem. 1786–7. Ed. Luther Riggs (1861) and William Bottorff. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1967.
Kirkland, Caroline. A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Ed. Sandra A. Zagarell. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1990.
Lause, Mark A. Young America: Land, Labor, and the Republican Community. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005.
Simms, William Gilmore. Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama. Ed. John Caldwell Guilds. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995.
Sklansky, Jeffrey. The Soul’s Economy: Market Society and Selfhood in American Thought, 1820–1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
Whitman, Walt. Whitman: Poetry and Prose. Ed. Justin Kaplan. New York: Library of America, 1996.
Zagarri, Rosemary. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.