THREE

A COMMERCIAL REPUBLIC OF FREE INDIVIDUALS

EVEN THOUGH MOST PEOPLE today associate democracy with America—and even though an eminent American historian has plausibly claimed that democracy is “America’s most distinguishing characteristic and its most significant contribution to world history”—it remains a fact that most of the leaders of the American Revolution, including George Washington, John Adams, and James Madison, didn’t think of themselves as democrats, either in theory or in practice. Those among them who knew about ancient democracy doubted its relevance to the American experience: Republican Rome was their model, not Periclean Athens. Distrusting the capacity of ordinary citizens to be self-governing, most of them favored instead creating a hybrid regime, without a king or a hereditary ruling class but with only limited input from commoners, who were expected to pick among their betters in periodic votes to elect a “natural aristocracy” (as John Adams called it), a meritorious elite, comprising men of virtue and talent, who would govern on behalf of all, with a dispassionate regard for the common good.

Benjamin Rush, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence, summed up the founding generation’s conventional wisdom in typically crisp language: “All power is derived from the people,” he averred—but political power is not seated in the people: “They possess it only on the days of their elections. After this, it is the property of their rulers, nor can they exercise or resume it, unless it is abused.”

Such convictions differed sharply from the democratic ideas championed by radicals at the height of the French Revolution. But once enshrined in the Constitution ratified in 1788, this characteristically guarded American approach to popular sovereignty made elections a crucial feature of the new regime—and struggles over the right to vote a focus of subsequent efforts to ensure that all Americans, regardless of race, gender, or wealth, felt they had standing in a republic of equals.

At the same time, the new republic had from the start to reckon with the “moral and political depravity” of race-based slavery. “I tremble for my country when I realize that God is just,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1781; slavery was a system, he acknowledged, that inexorably turned slaveholders like himself into “despots” and his bondsmen into his bitter enemies.

Jefferson in 1776 had articulated the new nation’s most daring political demand—for the right to collective self-determination, on the premise that all men are created equal. But efforts to realize this demand would be “played out in counterpoint to chattel slavery, the most extreme form of servitude,” as the American scholar Judith Shklar sharply remarked. “The equality of political rights, which is the first mark of American citizenship, was proclaimed in the accepted presence of its absolute denial. Its second mark, the overt rejection of hereditary privileges, was no easier to achieve in practice, and for the same reason. Slavery was an inherited condition”—and its consequences haunt America still.

The discrepancy between the nation’s professed ideals and the reality of chattel slavery, combined with a sharp focus on voting as the most important means of political engagement, wasn’t the only distinctive feature of the new republic. Also important was the concurrent rise in America of the conviction that free labor and free trade were crucial guarantors of civic freedom. Appreciating what Adam Smith had called “the human propensity to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another,” some American advocates of free institutions looked primarily to “society,” rather than government, in hopes of creating a commonwealth of self-reliant individuals—a vision eloquently expressed by Thomas Paine in Common Sense, a pamphlet that crystallized American popular opinion in the winter of 1776 and paved the way for the nation’s formal Declaration of Independence later that year.

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TOM PAINE CAME from a humble British background. Before immigrating to America in 1774, he had worked as a corset maker, a sailor, a shopkeeper, and an excise officer. Settling in Philadelphia, Paine became the editor of The Pennsylvania Magazine: or, American Monthly Museum. The new periodical contained a blend of news, feature pieces, poems, philosophical essays in English, foreign works in translation, and lists of vital statistics. The first issue included a profile of Voltaire, a piece on the beavers of North America, and an essay on suicide, among other articles; the vital statistics included current prices in Philadelphia for butter and spirits, and beef and pork. Thirty-eight years old at the time, Paine contributed anonymous poems, pieces on natural science, and signed political commentary, the latter giving him a crash course in the debates of the day.

Since the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775, North America’s British colonies had been at war with Great Britain, though there was no consensus yet on the war’s aims. Some wanted to renegotiate onerous new taxes and restrictions on trade; others hoped to relax or lift London’s administrative control of the colonial state governments; still others argued for a formal declaration of independence. A “Continental Congress,” composed of delegates from the thirteen British colonies in North America, had been meeting in Philadelphia since May 1775. In July, George Washington had assumed command of the Continental Army. Ever since independence had become a real possibility, the American press had been filled with speculation about the political future. By the end of the year, there were thirty-eight newspapers in the mainland colonies, and interested readers could also consult political posters and pamphlets that started to circulate hand to hand.

Priced at two shillings and published anonymously “by an Englishman” in January 1776, the forty-seven-page Common Sense instantly stood out amid this roiling wave of commentary. Paine’s style was simple and his tone impassioned. An argument in favor of independence, the pamphlet was also an attack on traditional republican views of good government. Rejecting the British model, Paine advocated instead a simple government, consisting of a unicameral legislature elected by a broad franchise of citizens; he also advocated frequent elections to ensure that the people controlled the government and not the other way around. This was a far cry from the complex kinds of constitution with limited franchises favored by most patriotic writers at the time. In Massachusetts, John Adams hastened to refute Paine with a learned essay, Thoughts on Government, which defended the value of a mixed constitution for most states. But by then, Paine’s broadside had sold more than a hundred thousand copies in the colonies and was on its way to becoming an international bestseller (it was one of the first such political texts to be so widely distributed).

Common Sense wasn’t the only important piece of political prose to appear in America in 1776. Six months after the appearance of Paine’s pamphlet, the Continental Congress on July 4 formally issued a Declaration of Independence and sent the text to the printers. The declaration was largely the handiwork of one of the congressional delegates, thirty-two-year-old Thomas Jefferson. The owner of a tobacco plantation and the master of a large number of slaves, Jefferson was a polymath: an amateur architect, a widely read man of letters, and an aspiring statesman who had already become well-known for his outspoken views about independence from Great Britain. He embodied a terrible paradox: as the historian Edmund Morgan put it, “Virginians may have had a special appreciation of the freedom dear to republicans, because they saw every day what life was like without it.”

Where Paine had praised a simple form of government directly accountable to its citizens, the Declaration, a much briefer work, invoked a small number of transcendent ideas: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, 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.—That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

As one modern reader has argued, Jefferson’s text exemplifies, in its terseness and directness of address, a new “art of democratic writing.” A revolutionary aide-mémoire, its key lines were as memorable by design as anything in Paine’s Common Sense. Even more important, its ideals offered a profound moral challenge, one that Americans, including Jefferson himself, have struggled to meet. As Abraham Lincoln remarked on the eve of America’s Civil War almost a century later, Jefferson and the other signatories of the Declaration “meant to set up a standard maxim for free society, which should be familiar to all, and revered by all; constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated, and thereby constantly spreading and deepening its influence, and augmenting the happiness and value of life to all people of all colors everywhere.”

It is worth stressing how different the content of such American rhetoric was from that prevalent in ancient Athens. Both the Declaration and Common Sense (and Abraham Lincoln’s oratory) assume that government is subordinate to “the consent of the governed.” The idea of “consent”—understood as voluntarily acceding to what another person or institution proposes or desires, as opposed to compulsory submission—didn’t exist in the classical world. Both Paine and Jefferson also assume that governments grow out of associations of consenting individuals who stand apart from and exist prior to the appearance of a state—a characteristically modern view of politics (though similar views were not completely unknown in antiquity).

Interestingly enough, the word “democracy” is nowhere to be found in the Declaration. Nor does it appear in Common Sense.

Despite the political edge to his pamphlet, Paine focused most of his energy on praising what later writers would call not simply “society,” but “civil society”—a term that denotes not just voluntary associations and nongovernment organizations but also the kind of structured social world created by the spontaneous interactions and market transactions between individuals, each one following his or her own interests in an effort to achieve a modicum of happiness. (In English, the word “individual” to refer to a single person doesn’t appear until the start of the seventeenth century, and the notion of “individualism” doesn’t appear until the 1830s, most notably in volume two of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, first published in 1840.)

“Our plan is commerce,” Paine declared in Common Sense. America should become “a free port. Her trade will always be a protection.” Under just laws, the spread of markets, he argued, helped ordinary people to become more rational and autonomous agents—and in this way helped to produce a generally more prosperous and dynamic society. The exchange of goods is civilizing, Paine argued in Rights of Man: “It is a pacific system, operating to cordialize mankind, by rendering nations, as well as individuals, useful to each other.” Trade should be expanded freely, for “if commerce were permitted to act to the universal extent it is capable, it would extirpate the system of war, and produce a revolution in the uncivilized state of governments.”

Paine regarded production, exchange, and consumption as naturally harmonious: “Society is in every state a blessing, but government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil.” Commerce could produce an independent network of associations that would check the corrupting power of the state: “Society is produced by our wants, and government by our wickedness,” he wrote in Common Sense. “The former promotes our happiness positively by uniting our affections, the latter negatively by restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates distinctions.”

This was recognizably the same kind of potentially beneficent social order that the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith had described, also in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations. And it was this new world of enlightened self-government and commercial progress that Paine and Jefferson jointly championed as part of the revolutionary claims they both made on behalf of “common sense” (just as Condorcet had stressed the power of “common reason”).

Still, reading Common Sense in conjunction with the Declaration, it’s hard to miss a tension between the two texts. Commerce may unleash the productive powers of the laboring individuals it connects through free trade—but it also risks creating disparities that might undermine the “self-evident” truth of the assertion that “all men are created equal.” Paine in time acknowledged the tension himself, advocating various public policies to lessen inequality, including an estate tax to fund a onetime cash grant to every person over the age of twenty-one, and an annual pension to everyone over the age of fifty.

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DESPITE A COMMON MISCONCEPTION, the American Revolution was not a bloodless affair. Sixty thousand British loyalists were driven into exile, and the war caused proportionately more deaths than any other American conflict apart from the more famous Civil War of 1861–1865.

Still, as John Adams once remarked to Thomas Jefferson, the real revolution “was in the minds of the people,” and it is possible to track some of its most consequential results in the pamphlets, newspapers, and official records of the new republics, which registered the progress of public opinion. During the course of this quiet conceptual revolution, positive references to democracy in America slowly but surely grew more frequent.

For example, in 1777, Alexander Hamilton had privately praised the new constitution of New York as a prudent and “representative democracy, where the right of election is well secured and regulated & the exercise of the legislative, executive and judiciary authorities, is vested in select persons, chosen really and not nominally by the people.” These were remarkable words—Hamilton was typically skeptical of popular participation in politics, later writing that “the rich and the well-born” deserve “a distinct permanent share in the government.”

Other isolated honorific usages of democracy had appeared even earlier in British North America. For example, in 1641, a meeting of Rhode Island’s General Court of Election ordered that “the Government which this Bodie Politick doth attend unto in this Island, and the Jurisdiction thereof, in favour of our Prince is a DEMOCRACIE, or Popular Government; that is to say, It is in the Powre of the Body of Freemen orderly assembled, or the major part of them, to make or constitute Just Lawes, by which they will be regulated, and to depute from among themselves such Ministers as shall see them faithfully executed between Man and Man.” In 1717, the word “democracy” appears prominently in John Wise’s famous pamphlet, A Vindication of the Government of New-England Churches, a defense of Congregationalist Church government on the grounds that “the Primitive Constitution of the Churches was a Democracy.”

By then, secular authority in New England had in part devolved from the state to the local government of villages and hamlets, where citizens sought to reach consensus in face-to-face town meetings—a radical expression of popular sovereignty, though Americans, even after the Revolution, “would still grope for terms in which to describe this new fact of the dispersal of effective authority.”

In 1776, Americans proclaiming their independence from England had convened a series of extralegal conventions to draft new state constitutions—setting an example the French were to follow in their own Revolution. In the case of the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776, designed to enshrine the sovereignty of the people in practice as well as theory, Americans even created a document that, in its unicameral legislature, use of rotation, and stipulation that the people at large ratify all bills passed by the state’s General Assembly, suggests nothing so much as a native American antecedent to Condorcet’s proposed French constitution of 1793 (in part because Condorcet knew of, and admired, the Pennsylvania document).

Still, striking though some of these experiments in self-governing institutions were, the idea of democracy did not, for a variety of reasons, gain much traction in America before the 1790s. After America had won its freedom from Britain, there was a widespread tendency among the political class to use “republic” and “democracy” as synonyms. Many of them began to confuse republicanism per se with a highly qualified defense of a more “democratical” mixed regime, with its monarchical element eliminated, and a right to vote carefully extended to men with a minimum amount of wealth. While the question “How much democracy?” was crucial in this context, addressing it directly became peculiarly difficult, given the low regard in which democracy as a pure form was generally still held.

As a result, the Americans who drafted the constitution of 1787 broadly agreed that the power of the people, properly understood, was virtual, and that any attempt by them to claim it more directly, as in a simple democracy, could be rebuffed by citing the legitimate authority of the legislature and its duly elected representatives. Even more telling, the franchise in the Constitution was, to start, narrow by design: among the excluded were women, slaves, indigenous people, and adult white males who did not own land. Only a small percentage of Americans cast ballots in the first national elections for president.

Trying to forestall any possible confusion between democracy and republicanism, James Madison, the chief architect of the American Constitution, took pains in the Federalist Papers, published in 1787 and 1788, to distinguish the federal government’s proposed new constitution with its intricate checks and balances, which were praiseworthy, from pure democracies, “which have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention.” Speaking in the Massachusetts convention in defense of Madison’s plan for the federal government, Fisher Ames similarly warned that “a democracy is a volcano, which conceals the fiery materials of its own destruction.”

Still, words like “democracy” remained slippery. Partisans tried to twist the meaning of keywords to their own ends, depending on the political context. For example, when James Wilson, who had helped Madison draft the Constitution, addressed the Pennsylvania state convention to debate the document, he disingenuously reassured his more radical compatriots that the new federal plan simply was a democracy:

In giving a definition of the simple kinds of government known throughout the world, I had occasion to describe what I meant by a democracy; and I think I termed it, that government in which the people retain the supreme power, and exercise it either collectively or by representation. This Constitution declares this principle, in its terms and in its consequences, which is evident from the manner in which it is announced. “We, the People of the United States.”

Wilson had been an outspoken critic of the Pennsylvania constitution of 1776. And despite his peroration a decade later, he hadn’t changed his stripes at all; he subsequently helped draft a new state charter for Pennsylvania that, when adopted in 1790, narrowed the franchise and introduced extensive new checks on popular political participation, modeled on those in the federal Constitution.

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THE NEW AMERICAN CONSTITUTION was ratified in 1788. But it wasn’t long before an even more pointed public debate over the value of democracy in America erupted—this time in response to current events in France.

Though news traveled slowly in those days, on sailing ships and horseback, Americans soon enough learned that Parisians had stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789. Thomas Jefferson, at the time serving as U.S. ambassador to France, prepared an eyewitness account to send to John Jay, the secretary of foreign affairs, in Washington. In his report, Jefferson calmly described how the crowd had poured into the Bastille, freed prisoners, seized weapons, killed the fortress’s governor and lieutenant governor, and then cut off their heads, mounted them on pikes, and “sent them through the city in triumph to the Palais royal.”

The butchery didn’t dampen Jefferson’s sympathies for the revolutionary cause. “I say,” he wrote to James Madison shortly afterward, “the earth belongs to each of these generations during its course, fully and in its own right. The second generation receives it clear of the debts and incumbrances of the first, the third of second, and so on. For if the first could charge it with a debt, then the earth would belong to the dead and not to the living generation.”

At the peak of the American interest in France, between 1792 and 1794, American booksellers offered English editions of the various French constitutions, works by Condorcet, the speeches of Robespierre, something called “Morality of the Sans Culottes…; or, The Republican Gospel”—and, of course, Tom Paine’s bestselling apologia, Rights of Man, the first prominent text in English to praise “representative democracy” as the best feasible form of modern government.

A number of American newspapers published pieces in translation from the most radical of the Parisian papers. When Jacques-Louis David presented his portrait of Marat to the French National Convention, readers in Philadelphia heard about it. The ratification of the Jacobin Constitution in 1793 was—literally—front-page news in America. Robespierre’s major speeches were translated with remarkable alacrity, and printed, in their entirety, in major urban daily papers.

On January 24, 1793, radical republicans in buttoned-down Boston saluted the French Revolution with a daylong carnival of food, drink, and festive speeches. In the morning, a throng of men wound through the city displaying a “Peace Offering to Liberty and Equality”—a roasted ox with the tricolor on one gilded horn, and the stars-and-stripes on the other. From rooftops and windows, women and children watched, waved, and roared their approval. In the afternoon, the American patriot Samuel Adams presided over a public banquet in Boston’s Fanueil Hall, flanked by a statue of Lady Liberty, displaying the 1789 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen:

ARTICLE I—Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can be founded only on the common good.

ARTICLE II—The goal of any political association is the conservation of the natural and imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, safety and resistance against oppression.

ARTICLE III—The principle of any sovereignty resides essentially in the Nation. No body, no individual, can exert authority that does not emanate expressly from it.

After washing down their barbecued “peace offering” with a hogshead of punch, the republican celebrants raised a purse for the release of local prisoners, so that all of Boston’s citizens could “breathe the air of liberty.”

In the midst of the republican euphoria that winter and spring appeared Edmund Charles Genet, the first envoy from the new French Republic. Arriving in Charleston on April 8, 1793, “Citizen Genet” plunged recklessly into American politics, trying to embroil America in France’s European war, portraying himself with unfeigned enthusiasm as the prophet of a universal political regeneration.

So great became the political ferment in the weeks after Genet’s arrival that Thomas Jefferson, now back in the United States, marveled that “all the old spirit of 1776 is rekindling.”

“What an age of WONDERS and REVOLUTIONS!!” exclaimed another eyewitness. “Subjects turned into citizens; citizens turned soldiers; peasants turned rulers; palaces turned to prisons; kings turned to dust;… the people turned inquisitive…”

Such sentiments found an organized outlet in a number of American democratic clubs and democratic-republican societies that suddenly began to sprout up. Local in orientation, often linked with armed militias, and always friendly to France, these voluntary political associations, which Citizen Genet naturally went out of his way to encourage, were concentrated along the eastern seaboard and western frontier. Since there were more than forty widely scattered clubs in all, generalizations are risky—the societies varied considerably in size, aims, and appeal. The most important one, in Philadelphia, at one point listed 320 members: it was Genet himself who had suggested the Philadelphia group call itself a “democratic” society. Most of these clubs met monthly; members were carefully screened, and “apostasy from Republican principles” was grounds for expulsion. Composed of artisans, sailors, and small farmers on the one hand, and merchants, shop owners, and journalists on the other, the members were generally self-made men, united by zeal for the democratic spirit of the French Revolution.

Despite their enthusiasm for the French Republic, American democrats regarded themselves as upholding, above all, the ideals of 1776. Their aims were simultaneously sociable, deliberative, and educational. They hoped to create voluntary associations animated by a shared enthusiasm for true republican virtues—and also love for the American republic, its laws and its constitution. Like the Jacobin clubs throughout France, the American societies were determined “not only to discuss the proceedings of Government, but to examine into the conduct of its officers in every department.”

But the American democrats were, literally, conservative: memories of their own glorious revolution were still fresh in their minds. Wishing to renew and revivify the revolutionary tradition in America, they pointed out that the Fourth of July, unlike Bastille Day in France, was too rarely celebrated with appropriate panache. To make plain their own patriotism, in 1794 the New York Democratic Society helped turn the Fourth of July into a proper republican fête, replete with a parade featuring militia companies, members of the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, democratic club members, the state’s governor—all preceded by a procession of French Jacobins, marching two by two, singing “La Marseillaise.”

Like their counterparts in France, the most radical members of the American political clubs regarded “the different members of the government” as “nothing more than agents of the people.” “The government,” declared the New York Democratic Society, “is responsible to the sovereign people”—and the sovereign had an obligation to remain active. “Self-interest, the great moving principle of men in power, has operated to paralyze the American people,” warned “An American Sans Culottes” in 1794: “The people ought to regulate the proceedings of government,” so that it will have “no other rule than the general will.”

“We have too long been amused and misled by names,” wrote a correspondent in the National Gazette. “The new constitution [of 1787] has introduced such a Babel-like confusion into our language, that I fear it will be long, perhaps too long, before the people will be able to come to a right understanding.” Many terms—“popular sovereignty,” for one—“have changed their meaning since 1776,” observed this writer. “If our rapid progress in refinements does not meet with a speedy check, the language of Common Sense will be totally discarded in our country, and the Rights of Man considered chimerical.”

Under attack, radicals now defiantly embraced “democracy” as their preferred form of government. “I am, sir, a true Democrat,” declared one correspondent in the pages of the General Advertiser in the spring of 1794. “Thanks to Gallia’s sans culottes, they gave me an opportunity of appearing a patriot.” “I pronounce them all Democrats where I come from,” wrote “An Old Yankee” farmer that same year.

Though few Americans ever belonged to the clubs, many read about them in the republican papers, and still more heard the new talk of democracy in the taverns and coffeehouses and local assemblies where public affairs were discussed. By popularizing a political lexicon purged of “Babel-like confusion”—and restoring Tom Paine’s plain talk of 1776 and 1792—the American democrat of 1794 hoped to win back a vocabulary (and a republican constitution) that he feared was being surreptitiously hijacked by “masked aristocrats.”

The targets of such rhetoric didn’t warm to being cast as a menace to the republic. In his annual message to Congress delivered in the fall of 1794, President Washington criticized the democratic societies for breaching the limits to political participation that had been carefully laid out in the federal Constitution. The societies, warned Washington, were “self-created.” To be “self-created” was to fall beyond the pale of the law: the implication, familiar from tracts of the 1780s, was that voluntary political associations should be banned as illegally organized factions that posed a threat not just to public order but also to the proper exercise of popular sovereignty, at periodically held elections, when all citizens could freely participate in choosing their representatives. Ironically, the American political elite had by now itself begun to divide into more or less clearly defined “factions”—the Federalists of Washington and John Adams versus the Democratic Republicans of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, each faction denouncing the other as a divisive threat to the common good.

Washington delivered his speech at a time when news of the Jacobin terror in France and the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania—a revolt over federal excise taxes on liquor—had made freshly plausible old fears about democracy. Sooner or later, argued a weighty tradition, democracy, unless wisely tempered in a prudently mixed constitution, would produce—inevitably, ineluctably—mob rule. That Washington suspected radical democrats of helping to foment the Whiskey Rebellion only made this line of thought more compelling, despite the fact that most of the democratic clubs in fact had passed resolutions condemning the armed insurrection as “unconstitutional.”

Though an effort to censure them narrowly failed to win congressional support, the clubs slowly faded from view, their fighting spirit sapped by their failure to defeat John Jay’s controversial treaty with England in 1795, their enthusiasm for the French Revolution dampened by continuing revelations about the bloody horrors of the Jacobin dictatorship. (Some clubs in the slaveholding states of the South fell apart when it was discovered that Edmund Genet belonged to the Société des Amis des Noirs, Society of the Friends of Blacks, a group of mainly white antislavery Frenchmen, founded in 1788 by Brissot.) In this dispute over the new republic’s political lexicon, the Federalists in effect won the battle, by mobilizing their own base of partisan support—but they lost the war, in part by legitimizing the mobilization of ordinary people to settle disputes among rival elite factions.

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IN THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN of 1800, Thomas Jefferson brought what was now called the Democratic-Republican Party to power, and in this way also brought democracy—at least as a word—into the mainstream of American politics. As Walter Lippmann observed a century later, “The American people came to believe that their Constitution was a democratic instrument, and treated it as such. They owe that fiction to the victory of Thomas Jefferson, and a great conservative fiction it has been. It is a fair guess that if everyone had always regarded the Constitution as did the authors of it, the Constitution would have been violently overthrown, because loyalty to the Constitution and loyalty to democracy would have seemed incompatible.”

Instead, support for democracy and fealty to the Constitution gradually came to be conflated. And the peaceful defeat of the Federalists in 1800 made possible the subsequent triumph of a uniquely American kind of democratic culture: rooted in a shared distrust of big government, combined with a paradoxical reverence for its written Constitution, and devoted as well to free enterprise, commerce, and self-reliant individualism as pillars of a free society. This political culture was nourished by dissenting religious traditions and communitarian local practices such as the New England town meeting—but at the same time it was sustained by coercive policies at the state level that regulated everything from marriage to the availability of alcohol, and established restrictive criteria for citizenship and suffrage. Southern states were free to take a dramatically different approach to the question of chattel slavery than that taken in the North.

Even as great urban centers rapidly formed on the East Coast, the Western territories belonging to the United States expanded even more dramatically in the first half of the nineteenth century. By European standards, and despite the aristocratic pretensions of its founders, America evolved a relatively coarse political culture, and one in which even the poorest citizens over time felt increasingly free to mock authorities and attack privileges. It was liberal in the protections it accorded to private property, broadly understood (as James Madison wrote) to embrace “every thing to which a man may attach a value and have a right,” including his political opinions, his religious beliefs, and “the free use of his faculty and free choice of the objects on which to employ them.”

As one anonymous poet of this new world of politics summed up the American idyll as the eighteenth century drew to a close, “In America,… [every man] will with pleasure view the happiness of a free people, enjoying all the sweets of a pure democratic government: he will see every man enjoying his own property unmolested, choosing his own rulers, enacting his own laws, and the uncontrolled master of his own actions.”

Within a generation, something like this reverie had become a reality for a growing number of primarily white citizens of the United States. In most of the new states, civil society was strong, just as Tom Paine had hoped, while the federal government was comparatively weak. Unlike similarly large European nation-states at the same time, the federal state did not require heavy taxation to support a military establishment (that came later, in twentieth-century America); its policing powers, to start, were relatively modest as well. And because the franchise was broadened only slowly; because political power was localized state by state, town by town; because the United States was far less populous in the 1830s than it would become by the start of the twenty-first century; and because by law in many states women, slaves, indigenous peoples, and even a number of white men too poor to pay taxes, were still excluded from political participation—most of the remaining white men lucky enough to be full-fledged citizens would, in those days, have had some direct experience in public affairs.

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FOR THE FIRST TWO GENERATIONS of the American Republic, “all the presidents had been statesmen in the European sense of the word,” the British scholar James Bryce remarked in his landmark study, The American Commonwealth, first published in 1888; they were “men of education, of administrative experience, of a certain largeness of view and dignity of character.” Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison—these were just the sort of public-spirited “natural aristocrats” the founders had hoped would become the new republic’s leaders and serve as a moderating influence on popular passions. Defending the powers of the presidency in the new American Constitution, Alexander Hamilton wrote, “It will not be too strong to say, that there will be a constant probability of seeing the station filled by characters pre-eminent for ability and virtue.”

But as Bryce ruefully acknowledged in a chapter titled “Why Great Men Are Not Chosen Presidents,” all this changed with Andrew Jackson. To contemporary admirers, Jackson was “at the head of the Democracy of the world, fighting its battles, and stemming the tide of selfish interest combined with unprincipled ambition.” To critics, he was a classic demagogue, a boorish commoner who pandered to the rabble and epitomized “the democracy of numbers.”

Jackson was born in South Carolina in 1767 in a log cabin on the state’s western frontier. Raised by God-fearing Scots and Irish kinsmen, he served as an adolescent soldier in the Continental Army, and barely survived imprisonment by the British in 1781. After studying law and qualifying for the bar in 1787, he moved to Tennessee, where his fortunes changed dramatically. (By then all of his immediate family members were dead, victims of the war, or cholera, or smallpox.)

He married into a prominent local clan and became a protégé of the territorial governor, serving as attorney general in 1791. After Tennessee won statehood in 1796, he became the state’s first representative in the U.S. Congress, and then, briefly, an interim U.S. senator. In these years, he was an outspoken Francophile and ardent champion of the Rights of Man. But his most indomitable political passion was hatred: for monarchy, for aristocracy, for privileged elites, and, above all, for Indians.

Returning to Tennessee, he worked as a circuit-riding justice of the state’s superior court and also began to angle for a post in the state militia, hoping to make his mark as a military man. At the same time, he started to build a personal fortune, eventually becoming the slaveholding master of one of the largest cotton-growing plantations in Tennessee.

Jackson is sometimes celebrated for his rural roots and unvarnished manners—but in many ways, he better embodies the upwardly mobile ethos of “the planter, the farmer, the mechanic, and the laborer” who form, in one of Jackson’s more lyrical formulations, “the bone and sinew of the country.” Like Tom Paine, Jackson hymned the virtues of commerce and worried that an unresponsive federal government was a major threat to the full fruits of free labor.

The War of 1812 turned Jackson, almost overnight, into a national hero. At the Battle of New Orleans, he led the American forces that turned back a far larger British army—a victory achieved, ironically, two weeks after the war had formally ended with a peace treaty signed in Ghent, Belgium.

In the following generation, as the country added new states to the West, many states abolished or lowered property qualifications that had restricted the right to vote. But the process was uneven. And in some states, old barriers remained and new barriers were erected, as public officials tried to channel the democratic currents sweeping through politics.

Jackson was now the most renowned American general since George Washington—and an archetypal self-made man. Given command of the U.S. Army in the South, Jackson and his troops defeated a wing of the Creek nation at the Battle of Horseshoe Bend in 1814. Between 1816 and 1820, Jackson helped force treaties on the Cherokees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws; in 1817, acting on his conviction that whites and Native Americans could never coexist peacefully, Jackson arranged for the Cherokees to surrender two million acres of land in Tennessee, Georgia, and Alabama, and to move west of the Mississippi. He became a leading proponent of a national policy of Indian resettlement, America’s unique contribution to the art of “ethnic cleansing.” After serving several months as the military governor of the Florida Territory, Jackson retired briefly to Tennessee, before winning a seat in the federal Senate in 1822.

Two years later, in a five-way presidential contest, Jackson won a plurality (42 percent) of the popular vote but lost the presidency in a subsequent election in the House of Representatives to his rival John Quincy Adams. The defeat piqued his ambition—and helped to crystallize the positive meaning of democracy in America.

Like his father and other distinguished members of the founding generation—and unlike Andrew Jackson—John Quincy Adams held that while “democracy is the oxygen or vital air” of a government, it is “too pure in itself for human respiration.” In 1828, Adams ran for reelection as a “National Republican,” while Jackson ran as a “Democrat.” By splitting Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party in two, Jackson confirmed that “democracy” from now on would be an unambiguously honorific term in the American political lexicon—and also would define the aspirations of one of America’s two major parties (alongside the resurrected Republican Party that Abraham Lincoln led to victory in 1860).

In those days it was considered crass for a candidate himself to hold rallies and address huge crowds of noisy supporters. But Jackson turned his quest for the White House into a true “campaign”—a military term of art for a coordinated attack on an objective, introduced into politics by a military man. Marches and coordinated media and fund-raising were all elements of Jackson’s presidential campaign of 1828—and so was the marshaling of outrageous lies and various forms of character assassination, disseminated through the mass media of the day, the daily newspapers. A certain image of the candidate was conveyed in the popular press: the hero of New Orleans as an outsider able to clean up political corruption and champion the interests of the little man, not the entrenched elites. Jackson became an icon of democracy. Casting a vote for him was turned into a kind of civic sacrament, reaffirming the sovereignty of the people.

One result of this quasi-liturgical marshaling of votes was a notable increase in the number of citizens voting, more than four times the number who had voted in 1824. Despite this uptick in turnout, a golden age of perceived self-rule could, as in ancient Athens, be built on a surprisingly narrow conception of who counted as a member of the putatively sovereign people. The overall number of eligible voters in America was growing—but in a nation of nearly thirteen million people, only about one million white men cast votes in the 1828 presidential election.

Americans at the time nevertheless perceived the outcome as a great victory for democracy. And subsequent historians have tended to agree. One has called the election a “mighty democratic uprising,” while another has observed that “soaring turnouts among white men reinforced the impression of the People governing.” In the years that followed, democracy became “so crucial to America’s nation-building process that rhetorically America and democracy became inseparable, almost interchangeable.”

Despite President Jackson’s cavalier disregard for the rule of law—he simply ignored the Supreme Court’s 1832 decision (in Worcester v. Georgia) holding that the Cherokee Indians constituted a nation with sovereign rights—his reputation as a great American democrat only grew with the passage of time. By the turn of the twentieth century, in the eyes of the preeminent progressive historian Frederick Jackson Turner, he was the very epitome of an era, designated by the phrase “Jacksonian Democracy,” and associated by Turner with the belief that “the self made man had a right to his success in the free competition which Western life afforded.” (It didn’t hurt that Alexis de Tocqueville had visited America when Jackson was president—he briefly met the great man—so that his famous Democracy in America at first glance supported the idea that “Jacksonian democracy” was somehow central to the American experience.)

Still, if one reads modern biographies, one is struck by the discrepancy between what Jackson, based on the evidence, seems actually to have accomplished in the way of democratizing reforms, and the outsize role he assumes in the national lore (at least the lore I was taught growing up about this putative hero of the common man).

Jackson did advocate term limits on officeholders and rotation in office, and he also urged Americans (without success) to abolish the Electoral College, one of the most flagrantly undemocratic elements in the Constitution. Yet in instituting what he called “rotation,” putting term limits on civil servants, Jackson also made it easy to appoint his own allies and friends instead, creating what critics called a spoils system. And by transforming himself into a cynosure for the explicitly democratic hopes of ordinary citizens in his presidential campaigns, Jackson laid the basis for an imperial presidency.

The result was perverse: by mobilizing commoners against an entrenched elite (just as democratic leaders had done in Athens), and by trying to turn the quadrennial vote for the most powerful figure in the federal government into a national plebiscite (institutions and practices unknown in the polis), this personification of egalitarian aspirations came to wield executive powers that perforce risked overshadowing the political initiatives of the ordinary citizens who had chosen him as their tribune.

Frederick Jackson Turner recognized the essential paradox: “Jacksonian democracy flourished, strong in the faith of the intrinsic excellence of the common man, in his right to make his own place in the world, and in his capacity to share in government. But while Jacksonian democracy demanded these rights, it was also loyal to leadership as the very name implies. It was ready to follow to the uttermost the man in whom it placed its trust, whether the hero were frontier fighter or president.”

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ON JUNE 30, 1831, after spending a week at Sing Sing, a prison with nine hundred inmates in Ossining, New York, two young Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, made their way up the Hudson River via sloop and steamboat to Albany, the state capital. The two scions of aristocratic families had persuaded the French government to send them on an official mission to study the new republic’s penitentiary system. Both had previously worked at the tribunal at Versailles, Beaumont as a deputy public prosecutor, Tocqueville as an apprentice judge. They had arrived in America on May 9, landing at Newport, Rhode Island, and immediately traveling to New York City, where they had stayed for more than a month.

A few days after arriving in Albany, Tocqueville experienced a kind of epiphany—and it happened, appropriately enough, on the Fourth of July.

Early that morning, Tocqueville and Beaumont had been wakened by an artillery explosion, the firing of guns, and the ringing of church bells, as Albany prepared to celebrate America’s Independence Day. Shortly afterward, local dignitaries knocked on their hotel door, to implore the two startled guests to join them in a parade and public ceremony.

At 10:00 a.m., the local newspaper, the Albany Argus, reported, the procession began. It was led by a militia escort, followed by a few aging local veterans of George Washington’s army in a carriage, and then the lieutenant governor and the chancellor of New York State, with Tocqueville and Beaumont walking between them. (The officials were Democrats and supporters of President Jackson.) Behind the two Frenchmen marched the Fire Department, the Association of Printers, and the Albany Typographical Society, along with a float featuring a real printing press that was producing real copies of the Declaration of Independence, to hand out to bystanders, followed by a series of benevolent societies and industrial associations marching in formation.

The march ended with a gathering at the city’s Methodist church. After a benediction by a minister, a magistrate read with deliberate gravity the entire text of the Declaration of Independence. A young lawyer then gave a short sermon on the majesty of freedom. The ceremony ended with the performance of a choral hymn to liberty, set to the tune of “La Marseillaise” and accompanied by a single flute that played a ritornello after each couplet:

Child of the skies—Jove’s peerless daughter—

Birthright of men—soul of the free!

Through seas of blood, o’er fields of slaughter

Thy march has been, must ever be.

Though tyrants aye that march impeded,

And superstition spread o’er all

Thy cheerful smiles, her midnight pall,

Still from thy path thou’st ne’er receded.

(Chorus) Then onward be thy way,

Unstayed thy progress be,

Empires and thrones shall own thy sway

Triumphant Liberty!

Beaumont found the spectacle slightly ridiculous. But he was nonetheless impressed, writing in a letter home that “there is more brilliance in our ceremonies; in those of the United States there is more truth.”

Tocqueville was particularly moved by the reading of the Declaration of Independence:

A profound silence reigned in the meeting. When in its eloquent plea Congress reviewed the injustices and tyranny of England we heard a murmur of indignation and anger circulate about us in the auditorium. When it appealed to the justice of its cause and expressed the generous resolution to succumb or free America, it seemed that an electric current made the hearts vibrate. This was not, I assure you, a theatrical performance. There was in the reading of these promises of independence so well kept, in this return of an entire people toward the memories of its birth, in this union of the present generation to that which is no longer, sharing for the moment all its generous passions, there was in all that something deeply felt and truly great.

Tocqueville concluded that democracy in America wasn’t a sham; it was (as the British writer David Runciman has put it) “more like a true religion. Faith was the lynchpin of American democracy. The system worked, Tocqueville decided, because people believed in it.”

In Albany, Tocqueville saw America’s political piety in action. And in Democracy in America, he acknowledged how its civic religion, rooted in a Protestant form of “Christianity that can best be described as democratic and republican,” served as a powerful brake on the potential wildness of self-reliant self-rule. “Thus, even as the law allows the American people to do anything and everything, there are some things that religion prevents them from imagining or forbids them to attempt.”

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WHEN THE FIRST VOLUME of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America was published in 1835, it was an instant success, first in France, then in England, and finally in America as well.

According to Tocqueville, democracy denoted not merely a form of government but, in addition, and more important still, a new kind of society, in which the principle of equality was pushed to its limits. In America, Tocqueville wrote, men “can be seen to be more equal in fortune and intelligence—more equally strong, in other words—than they are in any other country, or were at any other time in recorded history.” (Tocqueville had a genius for hyperbole.) “Democracy does not give the people the most skillful government,” he conceded, “but what it does even the most skillful government is powerless to achieve: it spreads throughout society a restless activity, a superabundant strength, an energy that never exists without it, and which, if circumstances are even slightly favorable, can accomplish miracles.”

Tocqueville is often regarded as an uncanny prophet, and he certainly wasn’t bashful in his generalizations. He was certain, for example, that “the dogma of popular sovereignty” had taken firm root in America during the Revolution: “All classes enlisted in its cause. People fought and triumphed in its name. It became the law of laws.” Tocqueville’s evidence for this was the peaceful spread of “universal suffrage,” which he equated with “the most democratic forms” of the American governments, both state and federal. “Once a people begins to tamper with the property qualification,” removing that barrier to the suffrage, Tocqueville also predicted, “it is easy to foresee that sooner or later it will eliminate it entirely. Of the rules that govern societies, this is one of the most invariable.”

Still, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, the effective extent of the franchise dramatically varied from state to state. This irregularity was a by-product of American federalism. And where property restrictions remained, the response could be dramatic and even violent—as could be seen in one of the strangest episodes in antebellum America, Rhode Island’s democratic uprising of 1842.

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IN 1776, most American states had organized conventions to establish new forms of state government, and most of the resulting constitutions had been ratified in some sort of popular vote. Rhode Island, however, had retained the royal charter granted by King Charles II of England in 1663. In its day, this charter had been a model of progressive governance, with a relatively large enfranchised population, despite a modest property qualification. But by the 1830s, in the context of rapid industrialization and the Democratic Party’s exaltation of the common man, pressure was mounting to extend the right to vote to the state’s growing number of landless laborers, many of them poor Irish immigrants.

In 1840, with presidential campaigns for both the major political parties deploying the barnstorming techniques pioneered by Andrew Jackson, the percentage of citizens voting in a presidential election sharply rose, to over 70 percent of those eligible in a majority of the states. (Supplying free liquor at rallies helped boost the popular passion for politics in those days.)

In Rhode Island, by contrast, the turnout in 1840 had been less than 40 percent of eligible voters. In an effort to excite more interest in politics among those eligible to vote, and in hopes of instituting universal manhood suffrage as a good way to accomplish this, local democrats formed a new organization, the Rhode Island Suffrage Association.

The most prominent of its leaders was Thomas Wilson Dorr. The son of a prominent Providence family, he was an Exeter and Harvard man who had repudiated his patrician pedigree and championed instead the creation of a new republic of equals within his home state.

The Suffrage Association was decentralized in its organization, local in its orientation—but radical in its ultimate aims. Ignoring restrictions laid out in the royal charter, Dorr and his allies declared that the people of Rhode Island had every right to organize a constitutional convention of their own, in keeping with the conventions held in most other states in 1776.

On July 4, 1841, the Suffrage Association held a large rally in Providence to announce the convening of a “People’s Convention” that would be open to any male residents over the age of twenty-one, blacks included. (In 1840, blacks comprised about 3 percent of Rhode Island’s population.) The delegates would be selected at local meetings.

The idea of a People’s Convention caught on. But it turned out that a great majority of the state’s most zealous democrats opposed extending the franchise to black men. Opposition was especially fierce in Newport, which in the eighteenth century had been a major hub of the Atlantic slave trade. When the People’s Convention met that fall, the delegates voted by an overwhelming majority to limit the franchise to white men.

It is telling that the new People’s Constitution cast doubt on Thomas Jefferson’s famous assertion that “all men are created equal.” The events in Rhode Island gave a preview of the increasingly bitter American debate over slavery and race—a debate that would be provisionally resolved only by the Civil War, and the leadership of Abraham Lincoln, who almost single-handedly turned the opening lines of the Declaration of Independence into an inviolable set of core principles that guaranteed civil rights to all Americans, regardless of race. Lincoln’s own laconic, and completely unconventional, definition of democracy—a term he normally avoided because of its association with a political party he opposed—is noteworthy: “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.”

On December 1, 1841, the People’s Party organized a referendum on the People’s Constitution, which dramatically extended the right to vote to all white men. A clear majority of Rhode Island’s eligible citizens, more than fourteen thousand people, ratified the document—an overwhelming victory, despite a boycott of the vote by opponents.

The sitting governor and formally elected state assembly had naturally ignored both the People’s Convention and the new People’s Constitution, both of which were illegal under the colonial charter. Throughout the first months of the new year, supporters and opponents of the People’s Constitution marched in demonstrations, debated in pamphlets, and appealed for political support from outside the state.

Dorr and his allies argued that the state’s people were merely exercising their sovereign power to establish a legitimate form of government. Opponents warned that their illegal acts had put a powder “magazine beneath the fabric of civil society,” which they might explode “without warning.”

The chief justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court intervened on the side of law and order, cautioning that any effort to implement the People’s Constitution risked reproducing the bloodshed of the French Revolution. The official state assembly chosen under the charter’s franchise passed laws imposing penalties on anyone who presided at a meeting or ran for office under the People’s Constitution, and further decreed that anyone assuming office under its auspices would be guilty of treason.

Dorr plunged ahead. His People’s Party staged elections under the expanded franchise established by the People’s Constitution. The illegal vote produced a new people’s state assembly and a new people’s governor—Thomas Wilson Dorr. And on May 3, 1842, Dorr choreographed his own inauguration in Providence. After marshaling in front of Hoyle’s Tavern near Federal Hill, the people’s volunteer militia led a procession of thousands on foot, followed by representatives of the different trades on horseback. “Even the most conservative estimates placed the number of those present at more than 20 percent of the city’s population; others thought it exceeded 40 percent.” Rhode Island was now “a house divided.”

The bizarre situation in Rhode Island—which seemed to have two different elected governors and two different state assemblies—attracted national attention. Moderates decried the potential for anarchy, while Andrew Jackson in private endorsed the right “of the people” to “alter and amend their system of government when a majority wills it.” Outsiders, including Daniel Webster, the U.S. secretary of state, intervened in an effort to broker a compromise between Dorr and the official state government. At the same time, radical Democrats, particularly in New York City, were inciting Dorr. On a visit to the city, he was presented with a sword that Andrew Jackson had used during one of his Indian campaigns and urged to go home and fearlessly fight the good fight. Emboldened, Dorr and his confederates began to plot an armed assault on the state arsenal, in hopes of forcing the duly elected governor and assembly to stand down.

What followed was pure farce. Dorr’s health was fragile at best, and his mastery of the martial arts nonexistent. Defying the state’s threat of sanctions, Dorr returned to Rhode Island on May 15. A small-d democrat with a weakness for pageantry, he paraded through Providence again, this time with a gleaming sword at his side, riding in an open-air coach pulled by a team of four white horses and escorted by three hundred armed men followed by a large crowd of supporters.

Assuming power, the people’s governor convened the people’s state assembly. He began to fire off official letters, including one to the U.S. Senate, signing it “Thomas Wilson Dorr Governor of the State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations.”

Two days later, some of Dorr’s men raided a Marine Corps armory in downtown Providence, seizing two cannons that had been confiscated from the British at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777. They brought the guns to Dorr’s headquarters on Federal Hill, where, in a show of force, they were aimed at the city below.

Alarmed allies and friends pleaded with Dorr to get a grip. Night fell. Delayed but undaunted, Dorr and his troops at last slowly marched, lugging along the British cannons, through a damp fog toward the arsenal in the west end of the city. By then, word of the planned assault had spread, and the state was able to muster a large force to defend the arms depot. When Dorr’s men arrived, the loyalists—including Dorr’s father, who abhorred his son’s madness—refused to surrender.

The rebels wheeled their ordnance into position and hastily aimed the antique pieces. In the chaos, both weapons were fired, perhaps on Dorr’s command. The powder flashed, but the big guns failed to discharge. The arsenal’s defenders were left staring as Dorr and his men melted back into the night, leaving the cannons behind.

This botched assault left the outlaws isolated and on the run. Conceding defeat, Thomas Wilson Dorr a few weeks later fled the state and took refuge in New Hampshire under the protection of a sympathetic Democratic governor—thus sparing Rhode Island an improbable civil war over the right to vote.

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STILL, EVENTS IN PROVIDENCE showed how intense the American struggle over the right to vote could be—and gave a preview of battles still to come.

It is often assumed that suffrage had become all but universal for white men in the 1830s and 1840s—but that assumption is a bit misleading. Although the franchise on the whole had been broadened in the 1820s, a growing number of immigrants and the looming crisis over slavery spurred the introduction of new barriers on the franchise, targeting specific groups. As Alexander Keyssar has shown in his definitive study, The Right to Vote, “these barriers were expressions of the nation’s reluctance to embrace universal suffrage, of the limits to the democratic impulses that characterized the era.”

The situation varied greatly from state to state. For example, in Pennsylvania, in rules newly adopted in 1838, only white men were eligible to vote, if, and only if, they had paid state or county taxes during the previous two years. In Virginia in that decade, a white man was eligible to vote if, and only if, he had owned land for six months prior to the election or could prove some other material assets (for example, a “leasehold estate, with the evidence of title recorded two years before he shall offer to vote, of a term originally not less than five years, of the annual value or rent of twenty dollars”). In North Carolina in the 1830s, there was no property qualification for a white man to choose a candidate for the House of Representatives, but a freehold of at least fifty acres was required to vote to choose a candidate for the Senate.

And that was not the end of the limits on the right to vote. Rhode Island, in the constitution of 1842 it passed in the wake of the Dorr rebellion, became the first state to grant suffrage to African Americans; the new charter eliminated property qualifications to vote but excluded “those convicted of bribery or of any crime deemed infamous at common law, until expressly restored to the right of suffrage by act of General Assembly.” The state’s new constitution also excluded “paupers, lunatics, persons non compos mentis, persons under guardianship.”

Many states also maintained residency requirements to vote that excluded white men who were students from out of state, soldiers in the federal army, or men living in almshouses. In the United States, astonishingly enough, the use of poll and other taxpaying prerequisites for voting were outlawed at the federal level only by the Twenty-fourth Amendment to the Constitution, passed in 1964.

And then there was the color line. For example, in New York before the Civil War, a “man of color” could vote, but only if he had been in possession for at least one year of “a freehold estate of the value of $250 over and above all debts and incumbrances charged thereon.” There was no such property qualification for white men.

The young Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave who had already emerged as one of the most stirring abolitionist orators in New England, had aggressively campaigned against the People’s Constitution in Rhode Island, precisely because of its exclusion of blacks from the franchise. Six years later, in 1848, Douglass was one of the few men to participate in the women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York, organized by local Quakers and the pioneering feminist Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Stanton and Douglass were longtime allies; they were both abolitionists, and both supported women’s right to vote. In 1866, Douglass gladly joined the Equal Rights Association that Stanton had launched.

But within a few years, they split bitterly over the Fifteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which in 1870 would grant black men the right to vote. Douglass himself wished that the amendment had outlawed qualification tests for the franchise, and had also extended the vote to women, but he was a pragmatist, and he was willing to support the amendment on offer.

Furious that women were being left behind, Stanton opposed the amendment. She predicted that giving black men the vote would “culminate in fearful outrages on womanhood.” As the most recent biographer of Douglass, David Blight, drily remarks, “The imagined demon of the black rapist crawled into the suffrage debate, courtesy of the leader of the women’s rights crusade.” In her fury, Stanton even argued that “it is better to be the slave of an educated white man, than a degraded, ignorant black one.”

As Stanton feared, it would take fifty more years for American women to gain the franchise. They won the right to vote only with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.

By then, many states, especially in the South, had introduced legislation designed to roll back, in practice, the ability of blacks to vote, by adopting poll taxes, literacy tests, lengthy residence requirements, elaborate registration systems and, eventually, party primaries restricted to white voters. In this period, felony disenfranchisement also became widespread.

Some of these restrictions were challenged successfully by the American civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, and overturned. For the first time since Reconstruction, black men and women won municipal, state, and federal elections. Still, new barriers to blacks voting were subsequently put into place. As a result of an extraordinary increase in America’s prison population, the number of black men who have suffered felony disenfranchisement has dramatically risen in recent decades.

Even as struggles continue over the right to vote, the percentage of eligible voters actually voting has fluctuated even more wildly throughout American history. For example, the percentage of eligible voters who participate in American elections is lower in the second decade of the twenty-first century than it was in the mid-nineteenth century. And current American rates are far below levels of voter participation in other contemporary democracies around the world. Voter participation in America also remains extremely uneven: older and wealthier people vote in far larger numbers than those who are young or poor. Unequal voter turnout produces unequal political influence.

Most of these problems could be solved simply if the United States chose to follow Australia, Belgium, and a number of South American countries in making voting compulsory (just as jury duty, paying taxes, and primary education are compulsory in America). In his presidential address to the American Political Science Association in 1996, the Dutch scholar Arend Lijphart argued that the United States should seriously consider treating the franchise not simply as a right but as a civic duty: “Its advantages far outweigh the normative and practical objections to it.”

But given the historic resistance of many Americans to compulsory rules of any kind—and given a recurrent fear that ignorant citizens will embrace venal demagogues running on disingenuous policy platforms—it is highly unlikely that voting will ever become obligatory in the United States.

Instead, proponents of political participation will have to keep struggling to make it easier, rather than harder, to register to vote, just as candidates seeking election will have to continue investing time and money to convince supporters to turn out to vote—making the United States a seriously limited democracy by its own preferred political criterion for defining the term.

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IN VOLUME 2 of Democracy in America, first published in France in 1840, Tocqueville had intuited that America’s culture might well prove more significant than its political institutions for determining the future of democracy in America. “I see an innumerable multitude of men,” Tocqueville icily observed, “alike and equal, circling around in pursuit of the petty and banal pleasures with which they glut their souls. Each one of them, withdrawn into himself, is almost unaware of the fate of the rest … I have thought that this brand of orderly, gentle, peaceful slavery which I have just described could be combined, more easily than is generally supposed, with some of the external forms of freedom … Under this system, the citizens quit their state of dependence just long enough to choose their masters and fall back into it.”

Tocqueville’s worries about conformism proved misleading. In those years, the United States had already begun to elaborate a distinctively clamorous style of public culture, with opera houses, Shakespeare’s plays, and legitimate theater flourishing alongside such mass-marketed diversions as dime novels, minstrel shows, and lectures aimed at a working-class public. As America’s historic commitment to a commercial society solidified, an emergent culture industry made it both possible—and profitable—to market cultural artifacts that strove to satisfy the otherwise frustrated yearnings of ordinary Americans to be regarded as free and equal individuals, with cultural tastes as valid and worthy as those of any European aristocrat.

This nascent demotic American culture emerged as an unacknowledged legislator of the American heart, helping to shape public opinion. In midcentury America, it was popular novels and public lectures and minstrel shows that most vividly expressed common yearnings and equally consequential popular ambivalences—about class, about race, about Puritanism. Because they were more attuned to the psychic discords of American national identity, the producers of America’s demotic culture were able to play a leading role in articulating conflicting desires, fears, and dreams that were barely expressible in the realm of electoral politics.

Consider, for example, the paradoxical convergence in antebellum America of popular interest in the northern states in Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and the minstrel show—a cultural convergence that helped set the stage for the Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery.

Emerson became the architect of a popular philosophy for the new nation by lecturing on the Lyceum circuit of organizations that sponsored public events meant to promote “the universal diffusion of knowledge” to the general public. As the prophet of a new secular gospel of “self-reliance” (not so different from that preached by Nietzsche in Europe a generation later), Emerson provided a quasi-religious sanction for the American cult of individualism—this, in essence, is what the American critic Irving Howe meant when he described Emersonianism as America’s characteristic “ideology” (one that fosters what another cultural critic derided as “the herd of independent minds”).

From the start, this Emersonian ideology was in tension with puritanical religious and moral commandments. “I do not wish to expiate but to live,” preaches Emerson in “Self-Reliance.” “If I am the Devil’s child, I will live then from the Devil.”

Insofar as America’s public culture has assumed an Emersonian cast, it has often turned inward. The self-reliant individualist is wary, on principle, of the moral and political convictions and conventions that circulate in society at large. Redemption is to be sought not in obedience to the laws and adherence to outward forms but rather in the elaboration of “a new degree of culture”; it is through the novelty of his creative life that the self-reliant individualist may hope to “instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits.”

A key implication of this worldview was its express disdain for conventional forms of politics. “Some fetish of a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular up or down,” declared Emerson in one of his most famous lectures, “The American Scholar.” “The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest thought.”

But this is not the whole story. After all, there were moments when Emerson himself rose above his own inclination to contemplative quiescence. Throughout the 1850s, after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, he denounced the law and urged others to flout it. And in 1859, after John Brown’s apocalyptic raid on Harpers Ferry, Emerson provoked a minor uproar when he declared that Brown’s execution would “make the gallows as glorious as the cross.”

When the self-reliant Emersonian does descend into the cave of politics, it is by preference in the form of civil disobedience, no matter how violent—as witness the representative figures of Thoreau, whom Emerson had mentored, and of John Brown, the archetype of all later transcendentalist political outlaws.

Emerson in these years also expressed his admiration for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin not only for its abolitionist sentiments but also because “it is read equally in the parlor and the kitchen and the nursery of every house.” Through a dramatization of the conflict between the evil of slavery and the redemptive power of Christian love, Stowe meant to touch, and so transform, the sentiments of a large and mixed public that included countless members of the northern working class.

The product of a rare kind of enthusiasm (in the literal sense: she felt inspired by God), Stowe’s novel did, in fact, “instantly revolutionize the entire system of human pursuits” in antebellum America. After its publication in 1852, Uncle Tom’s Cabin went on to become one of the bestselling books in the world, eventually selling more copies in America in the nineteenth century than any other work except the Bible.

A paradigmatic product of America’s nascent culture industry, the novel produced a flood of consumable artifacts meant either to capitalize on its popularity, or to amplify its abolitionist message, or both. There were Uncle Tom dioramas, engravings, gift books, card games, figurines, plates, silverware, and needlepoint. Poems and songs about Tom appeared. Above all, his story was dramatized throughout America in minstrel shows, which offered a parody of African American experience, featuring singers, dancers, and comedians, usually white people, always performing in blackface.

Minstrelsy was America’s first major contribution to the emergent global entertainment industry (Stephen Foster, a midcentury composer of minstrel songs, was the first major American popular musician to achieve global fame, through the international sale of sheet music). In later decades, as the minstrel tradition was reinvented by a variety of black performers, it produced the musical and melodramatic basis for almost all subsequent forms of African American musical entertainment, from ragtime to blues to jazz (the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young cut his teeth in a black minstrel show).

But in the beginning, the minstrel shows were the sole province of white folk. White performers “blacked-up” to amuse the same kind of white northern working-class audience that had flocked to hear Emerson’s lectures and to read Uncle Tom’s Cabin. As one modern scholar put it, “blackface was their bohemianism”—an essential reinforcement, now racially coded, of the anti-Puritan impulses already at play in the Emersonian dispensation.

For several fateful years, Uncle Tom’s Cabin in its various incarnations—as a novel, as kitsch, as minstrel entertainment—defined the cultural climate of the northern United States. Years later, the novelist Henry James recalled his youthful trips to watch the martyrdom of Uncle Tom reenacted on the minstrel stage. “We lived and moved at that time, with great intensity, in Mrs. Stowe’s novel,” James wrote. The book, he continued, “knew the large felicity of gathering in alike the small and the simple and the big and the wise, and had above all the extraordinary fortune of finding itself, for an immense number of people, much less a book than a state of vision.”

To be able to communicate a “state of vision” is an astonishing feat under any circumstances. That the convergent popularity of Emersonian nonconformism, Stowe’s novel, and the minstrel show accomplished this feat before the Civil War is beyond dispute. That the public in the North could now see black slaves as figures of sympathy transformed the grounds on which political debate could move forward. As one prominent aficionado of minstrelsy, Abraham Lincoln, purportedly quipped when he met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, “So this is the little lady who made this big war.”

Still, there were obvious limits to what a writer like Stowe could accomplish. Weeping at her depiction of Uncle Tom’s suffering is not an act comparable to joining others in a struggle to abolish racial injustice. A fantasy of racial justice can provoke a demand for real racial justice—or it can serve as a palliative substitute, covering up a lack of real political justice by allowing isolated citizens to satisfy a certain desire for compassion and justice in fantasy, not in reality. Indeed, as the entire history of the United States confirms, nonconformism and defiant individualism can flourish while entrenched racial prejudices are left in place—and the quest to create a more inclusive democratic society languishes.

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IN THE WAKE of the Civil War, Walt Whitman, America’s self-declared “poet of democracy,” was living in Washington, D.C., where he was a clerk for the attorney general. A decade earlier, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman had exalted America’s democracy as he had experienced it inwardly, as a kind of sublime pantheism, egalitarian in substance and cosmic in scope:

Whoever degrades another degrades me.… and whatever is done or said returns at last to me,

And whatever I do or say I also return.

Through me the afflatus surging and surging.… through me the current and index.

I speak the password primeval.… I give the sign of democracy;

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

“In all people I see myself,” he wrote elsewhere in Leaves of Grass, “none more and not one a barleycorn less, / And the good or bad I say of myself I say of them.”

The war, however, had chastened Whitman and left him feeling more ambivalent than ever about the depth of his democratic faith, in part because he now had deeper doubts about the capacity of ordinary people to measure up to his rapturous vision: “The people! Like our huge earth itself, which, to ordinary scansion, is full of vulgar contradictions and offence, Man, viewed in the lump, displeases, and is a constant puzzle and affront.”

During Whitman’s time living in Washington, the city’s black population had exploded. In January 1866, Congress, which was still in the hands of radical Republicans, passed a new voting statute for the District of Columbia, granting virtually all males over the age of twenty-one the right to vote, without regard to race, property, or educational background. Two years later, black voters turned out in force to help elect a new mayor of Washington, Sayles Jenks Bowen, a radical Republican who was also a civil rights activist. The night of Bowen’s victory, Washington’s streets filled with revelers, as Whitman wrote to his mother:

We had the strangest procession here last Tuesday night, about 3000 darkeys, old & young, men & women—I saw them all—they turned out in honor of their victory in electing the Mayor, Mr. Bowen—the men were all armed with clubs or pistols—besides the procession in the street, there was a string went along the sidewalk in single file with bludgeons & sticks, yelling & gesticulating like madmen … they looked like so many wild brutes let loose—thousands of slaves from the Southern plantations have crowded up here—many are supported by the Gov’t.

The poet who had once boasted that he could “contain multitudes” now, in private, expressed disgust at dark-skinned compatriots who were intoxicated by their first taste of political power.

At the time Whitman wrote this acerb letter, he was struggling to write an ambitious essay that would confute the critics of America’s great experiment in self-government. Hoping to measure up to, and take the measure of the British prose writer he most admired, the increasingly dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle, he titled the book Democratic Vistas. It began briskly:

I will not gloss over the appalling dangers of universal suffrage in the United States. In fact, it is to admit and face these dangers I am writing. To him or her within whose thought rages the battle, advancing, retreating, between Democracy’s convictions, aspirations, and the People’s crudeness, vice, caprices, I mainly write this book.

Whitman goes on to deplore the country’s crass materialism and lament the ignorance of most people. At the same time he hymns the glories of a “perfect individualism,” the true “purpose of democracy,” the “doctrine or theory that man, properly trained in sanest, highest freedom, may and must become a law, and series of laws, unto himself, surrounding and providing for, not only his own personal control, but all his relations to other individuals, and to the State.”

This passage articulates a sentiment I can recognize within myself—I was raised to revere Walt Whitman, in part because my father admired his poetry and devoted more than one academic monograph to analyzing his work. But what a strange vision!

In Whitman’s hands, democracy is no longer a form of government. It is a kind of prophecy, a voice raised to keep faith with a future to which our shared past has committed us, and it is a supreme fiction, made up of portents and warnings, exhilaration and fear, as if the common man could live on the bread of faithful speech. America’s democratic vistas provoke wonderment, not unlike what Jay Gatsby experienced gazing at the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1927 novel The Great Gatsby. For Whitman, democracy was (to borrow Fitzgerald’s words) an “orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther…”

But this is what democracy in America often seems like: an elusive fantasy, forever out of reach, forever unrealized, even as its most eloquent bards, trapped in their own prejudices, are “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”