The "party period" revisited

Journal of American History

Volumn 86, Issue 1, 1999, Pages 93-119

  Formisano, Ronald P ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA   (United States)

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EID: 11044229947     PISSN: 00218723     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2567408     Document Type: Article

References (290)

1. The seminal work for this synthesis was William Nisbet Chambers and Walter Dean Burnham, eds., The American Party Systems: Stages of Political Development (1967; New York, 1975).
2. See also Paul Kleppner et al., The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, 1981).
3. The fifth, or New Deal, party system ran from the 1930s to the 1960s, though there has been debate regarding its endurance beyond that decade. On the issues involved, see Byron E. Shafer, ed., The End of Realignment? (Madison, 1991).
4. For skepticism regarding the Federalist and Republican parties constituting a system, see Ronald P. Formisano, "Deferential-Participant Politics: The Early Republic's Political Culture, 1789-1840," American Political Science Review, 68 (June 1974), 473-87.
5. Richard L. McCormick, "The Realignment Synthesis in American History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 13 (Summer 1982), 85-105;
6. Jerome M. Clubb, William H. Flanigan, and Nancy H. Zingale, Partisan Realignment: Voters, Parties, and Government in American History (Beverly Hills, 1990);
7. Shafer, ed., End of Realignment? David Plotke, however, made the sensible observation that "even if there were never an election in American history with precisely those attributes [fitting the theory's specifications], the concept of realignment would survive as a way to call attention to the shape of changes in voting behavior, partisan identification, and other electoral phenomena."
8. David Plotke, Building a Democratic Political Order: Reshaping American Liberalism in the 1930s and 1940s (New York, 1996), 36n60.
9. Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, 1991), 126.
10. Julius Caesar in The Norton Shakespeare, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (New York, 1997), 1.2.136-37.
11. Stephen Skowronek, Building a New American State: The Expansion of National Administrative Capacities, 1877-1920 (New York, 1982), 24-52;
12. William E. Nelson, The Roots of American Bureaucracy, 1830-1900 (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), 2.
13. For a review of recent literature reemphasizing the role of the early state, see Richard R. John, "Governmental Institutions as Agents of Change: Rethinking American Political Development in the Early Republic, 1787-1835," Studies in American Political Development, 11 (Fall 1997), 347-80.
14. Among numerous works, see esp. Paula Baker, "The Domestication of Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review, 89 (June 1984), 620-47;
15. and Daniel Walker Howe, "The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture during the Second Party System," Journal of American History, 77 (March 1991), 1216-39.
16. As Mary P. Ryan commented, the writings of Jürgen Habermas on the public sphere "freed politics from the grasp of the state, which, by virtue of the long denial of the franchise to women and their rare status as public officials, effectively defined the public in masculine terms." Mary P. Ryan, "Gender and Public Access: Women's Politics in Nineteenth-Century America," in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass., 1991), 261.
17. See also Jürgen Habermas, "The Public Sphere," in Jürgen Habermas on Society and Politics: A Reader, ed. Steven Seidman (Boston, 1989), 231-36.
18. Morton J. Horowitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1977);
19. Christopher L. Tomlins, Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (New York, 1993);
20. William J. Novak, The People's Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill, 1996).
21. On the spoils system at midcentury, see Paul P. Van Riper, History of the United States Civil Service (Evanston, 1958), 44-59, and esp. 41.
22. See also Ari Hoogenboom, Outlawing the Spoils: A History of the Civil Service Reform Movement, 1865-1883 (Urbana, 1961).
23. For patronage as the driving force of local-level party organizations, see, for example, William D. Mallam, "Butlerism in Massachusetts," New England Quarterly, 33 (June 1960), 191, 193-99, 205-6;
24. and Robert Harrison, "Blaine and the Camerons: A Study in the Limits of Machine Power," Pennsylvania History, 49 (July 1982), 157-75.
25. The New York City Democratic machine was strong enough to appoint ex-Confederates to prominent posts in city government. Samuel T. McSeveney, "Revenge for the Carpetbaggers: A Note on Ex-Confederates in New York City Politics after the Civil War," New York History, 73 (Jan. 1992), 29-42.
26. On the interweaving of party politics and the dispensation of local justice, see Allen Steinberg, The Transformation of Criminal Justice: Philadelphia, 1800-1880 (Chapel Hill, 1989), 92-115.
27. Ronald P. Formisano, "Political Character, Antipartyism, and the Second Party System," American Quarterly, 21 (Winter 1969), 683-709;
28. Richard Hofstadter, The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780-1840 (Berkeley, 1969);
29. Edward L. Mayo, "Republicanism, Antipartyism, and Jacksonian Party Politics: A View from the Nation's Capitol," American Quarterly, 31 (Spring 1979), 3-20.
30. And more recently, see for example, Paula Baker, The Moral Frameworks of Public Life: Gender, Politics, and the State in Rural New York, 1870-1930 (New York, 1991);
31. and Marc W. Kruman, "The Second Party System and the Transformation of Revolutionary Republicanism," Journal of the Early Republic, 12 (Winter 1992), 509-37.
32. Although I emphasize the originality of Gerald Leonard's thesis with respect to the Democrats and Whigs, he (ironically) echoes work on the Federalists and Republicans that recognized the antipartyism of the Founding Fathers, who nevertheless - in the eyes of those scholars - created full-fledged political parties. Gerald Leonard, "The Ironies of Partyism and Antipartyism: Origins of Partisan Political Culture in Jacksonian Illinois," Illinois Historical Journal, 87 (Spring 1994), 21-40.
33. Cf. Joseph Charles, The Origins of the American Party System: Three Essays (Williamsburg, 1956);
34. and William N. Chambers, Political Parties in a New Nation, 1776-1809 (New York, 1967).
35. For accounts of a more gradual evolution of party institutions, see, for example, Lynn Marshall, "The Strange Stillbirth of the Whig Party," American Historical Review, 72 (Jan. 1967), 445-68;
36. and Michael Wallace, "Changing Concepts of Party in the United States: New York, 1815-1828," American Historical Review, ibid., 74 (Dec. 1968), 453-91.
37. Bruce Laurie, "'Spavined Ministers, Lying Toothpullers, and Buggering Priests': Third-Partyism and the Search for Security in the Antebellum North," in American Artisans: Crafting Social Identity, 1750-1850, ed. Howard Rock, Paul A. Gilje, and Robert Asher (Baltimore, 1995), 117.
38. See also Mark Voss-Hubbard, The Antiparty Persuasion: Politics and Nonpartisanship in the North before the Civil War (Baltimore, in press).
39. For an early assessment of the formative influence of minor parties in the 1820s and 1830s, see Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York as a Test Case (Princeton, 1961).
40. On the centrality of third parties to nineteenth-century politics, see Michael F. Holt, "The Antimasonic and Know Nothing Parties," in History of U.S. Political Parties, ed. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. (4 vols., New York, 1973), I, 575-620;
41. and Michael F. Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development: From the Age of Jackson to the Age of Lincoln (Baton Rouge, 1992), 27-28.
42. Even students of southern politics have arrived at a heightened appreciation of third parties. See, for example, Michael R. Hyman, The Anti-Redeemers: Hill Country Political Dissenters in the Lower South from Redemption to Populism (Baton Rouge, 1990);
43. and Stephen Cresswell, Multiparty Politics in Mississippi, 1877-1902 (Jackson, 1995).
44. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, "Limits of Political Engagement in Antebellum America: A New Look at the Golden Age of Participatory Democracy," Journal of American History, 84 (Dec. 1997), 878-79.
45. Although political historians have recently minimized the extent of voting fraud in producing high turnouts, these too have been questioned - with the recognition that fraud was sometimes deflationary rather than inflationary. See Peter H. Argersinger, "New Perspectives on Election Fraud in the Gilded Age," Political Science Quarterly, 100 (Winter 1985-1986), 669-87.
46. Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Homewood, 1978), 149-96.
47. For a view of parties as oligarchies that implicitly supports that of Altschuler and Blumin, see Philip J. Ethington, The Public City: The Political Construction of Urban Life in San Francisco, 1850-1900 (New York, 1994), 70-79.
48. For a contrasting interpretation stressing the democratic character of local government, see Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats, Washington County: Politics and Community in Antebellum America (Baltimore, 1995), 95-115.
49. For a comparative examination of different types of party structures, see Whitman H. Ridgway, Community Leadership in Maryland, 1790-1840: A Comparative Analysis of Power in Society (Chapel Hill, 1979).
50. Paul Bourke and Donald DeBats's analysis of individual voting records from Washington County, Oregon, offers mixed support for the Altschuler-Blumin argument. Their linkage of records over five elections suggests that participation was "extensive but . . . more casual than consistent," and apart from the core of loyalist voters, for "the vast majority, participation and partisanship were variable." Bourke and DeBats, Washington County, 188, 189, 191, 193, 208, 209.
51. Silbey, American Political Nation, 126, 156-58, esp. 157;
52. Paul Kleppner, "Voters and Parties in the West, 1876-1900," Western Political Quarterly, 14 (Jan. 1983), 49-68;
53. Paul Kleppner, "Politics without Parties: The Western States, 1900-1984," in The Twentieth-Century West: Historical Interpretations, ed. Gerald Nash and Richard Etulain (Albuquerque, 1989), 295-338.
54. See also David W. Brady, Critical Elections and Congressional Policy Making (Stanford, 1988).
55. One brilliant exception is the work of Kathleen Neils Conzen, whose study of German Americans emphasizes distrust of party as a "defining characteristic of the political culture." Kathleen Neils Conzen, German-Americans and Ethnic Political Culture: Stearns County, Minnesota, 1855-1915, Working Paper no. 16, John F. Kennedy - Institut für Nordamerikastudien (Berlin, 1989), 5.
56. See also Voss-Hubbard, Antiparty Persuasion.
57. Michael H. Frisch, Town into City: Springfield, Massachusetts, and the Meaning of Community, 1840-1860 (Cambridge, Mass., 1972), 80, 82, 202;
58. Mason Green, Springfield, 1636-1886 (Springfield, 1888), 483, 484, 489-90, 520-39.
59. Regarding Kingston and Roundout, New York, in the antebellum period, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Urban Threshold: Growth and Change in a Nineteenth-Century American Community (Chicago, 1976), 134-36, 140.
60. In the mid-nineteenth century, St. Louis city elections usually engaged Democrats and Whigs/ Republicans, but in 1876 voters elected a nonpartisan mayor to run the city, according to a contemporary, "upon what are called 'business principles.'" Thomas J. Scharf, History of St. Louis City and County (Philadelphia, 1883), 709-15, 716n.
61. See also History of St. Louis City and County ibid., 665-71, 673, 678, 679, 687-93, 700-708.
62. See Bessie Louise Pierce, A History of Chicago (3 vols., New York, 1937-1957), II, 199-203, III, 340-43.
63. On the antipartisan ethos in Richmond's city politics in the 1850s, see Michael Douglas Naragon, "Ballots, Bullets, and Blood: The Political Transformation of Richmond, Virginia, 1850-1874" (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1996), 3, 154-56, 174-84.
64. Bayard Still, Milwaukee: History of a City (Madison, 1948), 281-86;
65. Laurence Marcellus Larson, A Financial and Administrative History of Milwaukee (Madison, 1908), 76, 78-79, 124-25.
66. On Otoe County, see "Come Brothers Arouse."A Mass Meeting Saturday, September 17, 1870, at 12 O'Clock Noon, People's Reform Ticket. Come One, Come All, Broadside Collection (Newberry Library, Chicago, Ill.).
67. On Lucas County, see Harvey Scribner, ed., Memoirs of Lucas County and the City of Toledo, vol. I (Madison, 1910), 119-20.
68. On San Francisco, see Ethington, Public City, 66-67, esp. 67. The statement refers to consecutive years: only one party served more than four years straight.
69. Ripon Commonwealth, April 8, 22, 1864, March 31, esp. April 7, 1865, April 6, 1866.
70. The Ripon, Wisconsin, papers cited here are on microfilm at the Newberry Library. Ripon Free Press, April 10, 1873.
71. In nearby Fond du Lac that year some Democrats backed the election of a nonpartisan Republican. Ripon Free Press, Ibid., April 15, 1875, April 6, 1876.
72. On the 1877 election in which the Republican-temperance alliance won a majority of city offices, see Ripon Free Press, ibid., March 22, 29, April 5, 12, 1877, and esp. March 20, 1879.
73. Ripon Free Press, Ibid., March 24, 1881.
74. On a mayor elected without opposition, see Ripon Free Press, ibid., April 7, 1881.
75. Ripon Free Press, Ibid., March 9, 23, April 13, 1882, March 22, 29, April 5, 1883, esp. April 3, 1884.
76. In 1875 the Free Press had complained of illegal voting by a "delegation" of German immigrants. See Ripon Free Press, ibid., April 15, 1875.
77. Ripon Republican, April 6, 13, 1885, April 8, 1886, March 3, 31, 1887.
78. For a report that in nearby Metomen all license men were elected, see Ripon Republican, ibid., April 7, 1887.
79. Ripon Free Press, March 3, 22, 29, 1888. In 1888 Fond du Lac also elected a Citizens' Ticket, and the Metomen election again turned on liquor.
80. See Ripon Free Press, ibid., April 5, 1888,
81. and esp. Ripon Republican, April 6, 1885.
82. Ripon Free Press, March 21, April 4, 1889, March 20, 27, April 3, 1890.
83. On the secular origins of republican antipartyism, see Bernard Bailyn, The Origins of American Politics (New York, 1970);
84. Caroline Robbins, "'Discordant Parties': A Study of the Acceptance of Party by Englishmen," Political Science Quarterly, 63 (Dec. 1958), 505-29;
85. Robert E. Shalhope, "Toward a Republican Synthesis: The Emergence of an Understanding of Republicanism in American Historiography," William and Mary Quarterly, 29 (Jan. 1972), 49-80;
86. and M. J. Heale, The Making of American Politics, 1750-1850 (New York, 1977).
87. Antipartyism had varied roots, including religious and evangelical ones. See Formisano, "Political Character, Antipartyism, and the Second Party System."
88. Richard L. McCormick, "The Party Period and Public Policy: An Exploratory Hypothesis," Journal of American History, 66 (Sept. 1979), 281-98.
89. Subsequent citations are to the reprinted version: Richard L. McCormick, The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era (New York, 1986), 197-227, esp. 200-221, 204-6, 209. (Emphasis added.) McCormick saw diverse circumstances encouraging the distributive process.
90. The abundance and divisibility of resources, combined with the eager cooperation of legislatures, caused the goodies to be spread around and mollified discontent. Free banking and general incorporation laws epitomized this institutional largess, while citizens' acceptance of public aid to industry - tied to imprecision about what was private and what was public - nurtured "distributive policies." The Party Period and Public Policy: American Politics from the Age of Jackson to the Progressive Era Ibid., 207-9.
91. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 209-10. The secondary sources McCormick used at this juncture included theoretical essays regarding parties and policy, particularly by Theodore Lowi, and historical works that established the ideological division between the parties, but not their function as "vehicles" of distribution.
92. See Party Period and Public Policy, ibid., 209n25, 210n26.
93. McCormick added that some of these historical studies and others (including one by this writer) showed that "the promotional impulse [existed] in both parties." Yet the sources cited did not support the process of parties' implementation of distribution. Party Period and Public Policy, Ibid., 210-11n27.
94. The references were Benjamin P. Thomas, Abraham Lincoln: A Biography (New York, 1953), 55-62;
95. Marc Wayne Kruman, "Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1846-1865" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1978), 104-7;
96. and Richard L. McCormick, "Shaping Republican Strategy: Political Change in New York State, 1893-1910" (Ph.D. diss., Yale University, 1976), 320-27.
97. McCormick also referred to a monograph that supported his thesis regarding "the role of party in channeling distributive measures": Peter D. Levine, The Behavior of State Legislative Parties in the Jacksonian Era: New Jersey, 1829-1844 (Rutherford, 1977), 106, 126, 191, 230.
98. The note also referred to a theoretical essay: Theodore J. Lowi, "Party, Policy, and Constitution in America," in American Party Systems, ed. Chambers and Burnham, 273-74.
99. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 211.
100. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 211. Ibid.
101. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, Ibid., 214-15, 217. (Emphasis added.)
102. For McCormick's subsequent qualifications on the link between distributive policies and voting, see Richard L. McCormick, From Realignment to Reform: Political Change in New York State, 1893-1910 (Ithaca, 1981), 34-35, 38;
103. and McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 4, 11, 19.
104. McCormick had originally sketched out the distributive-policies thesis in an essay that anticipated the 1979 article examined here: Richard L. McCormick, "Ethno-Cultural Interpretations of Nineteenth-Century American Voting Behavior," Political Science Quarterly, 89 (June 1974), 351-77.
105. Shortly after, Gerald N. Grob argued that the structure of the early-nineteenth-century polity "was such that it was difficult, if not impossible, to identify and then to process broad social demands into policy outputs." Historians who assumed a relationship between party voting and policy, Grob held, had not demonstrated it. Gerald N. Grob, "The Political System and Social Policy in the Nineteenth Century: Legacy of the Revolution," Mid-America, 58 (Jan. 1976), 6-7, 10.
106. Ironically, Grob relied for his theory on two of the same political scientists invoked by McCormick, Theodore Lowi and David Easton. See Gerald N. Grob, Mid-America, ibid., 7n4, 12n12.
107. Cf. McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 204n16, 209n25, 211n28.
108. Skowronek, Building a New American State, 24. Skowronek did not endorse the distributive-policies thesis.
109. See Skowronek, Building a New American State, ibid., 26. But his emphasis on the parties' integrative and coordinating functions came to be interpreted as support for it.
110. Silbey, American Political Nation, 186, 188, 189-90, 191, 176-95 passim. (Emphasis added.)
111. Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present (Bloomington, 1995), 46, 47.
112. For the observation that "vast segments of policy-making in the American polity, especially in states and cities, remain unexplored or underresearched," see Ballard C. Campbell, The Growth of American Government: Governance from the Cleveland Era to the Present ibid., 246n27;
113. and Ballard C. Campbell, "The State Legislature in American History: A Review Essay," Historical Methods, 9 (Sept. 1976), 185-94.
114. William G. Shade, Democratizing the Old Dominion: Virginia and the Second Party System, 1834-1861 (Charlottesville, 1996), 9.
115. Douglas E. Bowers, "From Log Rolling to Corruption: The Development of Lobbying in Pennsylvania, 1815-1861," Journal of the Early Republic, 3 (Winter 1983), 439-74;
116. Donald A. DeBats, "An Uncertain Arena: The Georgia House of Representatives, 1818-1861," Journal of Southern History, 56 (Aug. 1990), 423-56;
117. Ballard C. Campbell, Representative Democracy: Public Policy and Midwestern Legislatures in the Late Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass., 1980).
118. DeBats, "Uncertain Arena," 446;
119. William G. Shade, "State Legislatures in the Nineteenth Century," in Encyclopedia of the American Legislative System, ed. Joel H. Silbey (3 vols., New York, 1994), I, 203. In a study of the New York legislature from 1854 to 1873 (23,958 roll calls), John F. Kirn Jr. found the influence of party "consistently strongest on those matters that had least to do with . . . state policy, namely resolutions concerning national policy, and issues which directly affected the relative power of the parties themselves."
120. John F. Kirn Jr., "Legislative Elections and Public Policy in New York State during the Civil War Era," paper presented to the Social Science History annual convention, Baltimore, Maryland, Nov. 6, 1993 (in Ronald P. Formisano's possession), 28. Michael Holt brought this paper to my attention. Paula Baker emphasized that in rural New York in the 1890s local editors avoided state issues in favor of national issues.
121. Paula Baker, "The Culture of Politics in the Late Nineteenth Century: Community and Political Behavior in Rural New York," Journal of Social History, 18 (Winter 1984), 167-93.
122. Cf. Kirn, "Legislative Elections and Public Policy," 18-24.
123. Thomas E. Jeffrey, State Parties and National Politics: North Carolina, 1815-1861 (Athens, Ga., 1989), 327;
124. Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865 (Baton Rouge, 1983), 81.
125. See also Marc W. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 1836-1865 ibid., 14-18, 25-28, 63, 85.
126. For McCormick's use of Kruman's 1978 dissertation as a source for his North Carolina example, see McCormick, Party Period and Public Policy, 211 n28. In my view the evidence in Kruman suggests that distributive policies could not have been used to cement geographically based constituencies.
127. See esp. Kruman, Parties and Politics in North Carolina, 14-18, 25-28, 85.
128. Robert H. Wiebe, The Opening of American Society: From the Adoption of the Constitution to the Eve of Disunion (New York, 1984), 349-52.
129. On the party's role as an intermediary between mass voting and legislative policy making, see Paul Kleppner, The Third Electoral System, 1853-1892: Parties, Voters, and Political Cultures (Chapel Hill, 1979), 371-82.
130. On "elite inter-party association in business," see, for example, Ronald P. Formisano, "Toward a Reorientation of Jacksonian Politics: A Review of the Literature, 1959-1975," Journal of American History, 63 (June 1976), 51;
131. Kathleen Smith Kutolowski, "Antimasonry Reexamined: Social Bases of the Grass-Roots Party," Journal of American History, ibid., 71 (Sept. 1984), 283-84;
132. Alexandra McCoy, "Political Affiliations of American Economic Elites: Wayne County, Michigan, 1844, 1860, as a Test Case" (Ph.D. diss., Wayne State University, 1965), 160-61, 173-83, 193-99;
133. Pierce, History of Chicago, I, 394-97;
134. Burton W. Folsom II, "The Politics of Elites: Prominence and Party in Davidson County, Tennessee, 1835-1861," Journal of Southern History, 39 (Aug. 1973), 366-67;
135. Paul E Bourke and Donald A. DeBats, "Restoring Politics to Political History," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 15 (Winter 1985), 459-66;
136. Gail Williams O'Brien, The Legal Fraternity and the Making of a New South Community, 1848-1882 (Athens, Ga., 1986), 3, 79;
137. Christopher Morris, Becoming Southern: The Evolution of a Way of Life: Warren County and Vicksburg, Mississippi, 1770-1860 (New York, 1995), 137-38, 148-49;
138. Mark Voss-Hubbard, "The Amesbury-Salisbury Strike and the Social Origins of Political Nativism in Antebellum Massachusetts," Journal of Social History, 29 (March 1996), 571;
139. and Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (forthcoming).
140. For perhaps the strongest support to date for a qualified and nuanced version of the voting/policy thesis, see Lex Renda, Running on the Record: Civil War-Era Politics in New Hampshire (Charlottesville, 1997), esp. 182, 38.
141. Morton Keller, Affairs of State: Public Life in Late Nineteenth Century America (Cambridge, Mass., 1977), 115-16, esp. 116, 238-83.
142. The political science literature undermines "the assumption [of a] relationship between the voting process and subsequent government activity," according to Joel H. Silbey, Allan G. Bogue, and William H. Flanigan, eds., History of American Electoral Behavior (Princeton, 1978), 343.
143. See also J. Rogers Hollingsworth, "The Impact of Electoral Behavior on Public Policy: The Urban Dimension, 1900," History of American Electoral Behavior ibid., 346-71.
144. Donald J. Pisani, "Promotion and Regulation: Constitutionalism and the American Economy," Journal of American History, 74 (Dec. 1987), 744.
145. Studies of roads and turnpikes are also silent on the role of parties. See Daniel B. Klein and John Majewski, "Economy, Community, and Law: The Turnpike Movement in New York, 1797-1845," Law & Society Review, 26 (no. 3, 1992), 469-512;
146. John Majewski, Christopher Baer, and Daniel B. Klein, "Responding to Relative Decline: The Plank Road Boom of Antebellum New York," Journal of Economic History 53 (March 1993), 106-22;
147. and Hal S. Barron, "And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight: Public Road Administration and the Decline of Localism in the Rural North, 1870-1930," Journal of Social History, 26 (Fall 1992), 81-103.
148. Representative urban biographies include Blake McKelvey, Rochester, the Water-Power City: 1812-1854 (Cambridge, Mass., 1945);
149. Blake McKelvey, Rochester, the Flower City: 1855-1890 (Cambridge, Mass., 1949);
150. and Still, Milwaukee.
151. For emphasis on the party machine's dominance of city life, see Harold C. Syrett, The City of Brooklyn, 1865-1898 (New York, 1944).
152. But parties apparently were irrelevant to early urban growth in four Texas cities and in Natchez, Mississippi: see Kenneth W. Wheeler, To Wear a City's Crown: The Beginning: of Urban Growth in Texas, 1836-1865 (Cambridge, Mass., 1968);
153. and James D. Clayton, Antebellum Natchez (Baton Rouge, 1968), 136-37, 153-59, 165-66, 169-70, 178.
154. Edward Pessen, "The Social Configuration of the Antebellum City: An Historical and Theoretical Inquiry," Journal of Urban History, 2 (May 1976), 294;
155. Pessen, Jacksonian America, 98;
156. Edward Pessen, "How Different from Each Other Were the Antebellum North and South?," American Historical Review, 85 (Dec. 1980), 1141;
157. Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power before the Civil War (Lexington, Mass., 1973), 251-301.
158. Recent studies of southern cities support these assertions about policy formation. John Deal, "The Structure and Function of Nineteenth-Century Southern Municipal Government: A Historiographical Review," seminar paper, University of Florida, History Department, spring 1997 (in Formisano's possession).
159. Robin L. Einhorn, Property Rules: Political Economy in Chicago, 1833-1872 (Chicago, 1991).
160. On the special place of property owners in city governance, see Frisch, Town into City, 43;
161. and Chilton Williamson, From Property to Suffrage (Princeton, 1960), 271.
162. In Newark, New Jersey, tax-paying and residency qualifications discouraged some journeymen craftsmen from voting, and those who voted sometimes faced employer pressure to vote Whig. Susan E. Hirsch, Roots of the American Working Class: The Industrialization of Crafts in Newark, 1800-1860 (Philadelphia, 1978), 115.
163. L. Ray Gunn, The Decline of Authority: Public Economic Policy and Political Development in New York, 1800-1860 (Ithaca, 1988);
164. David Montgomery, Citizen Worker: The Experience of Workers in the United States with Democracy and the Free Market Economy during the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1993), 2.
165. On the decline of the private prosecution that had flourished in criminal courts in the first half of the nineteenth century and "the gradual disempowerment of ordinary citizens," see Steinberg, Transformation of Criminal Justice, esp. 3.
166. For a contrasting view of the role of the state, but not necessarily of parties, see Novak, People's Welfare.
167. Richard Oestreicher, "Urban Working-Class Political Behavior and Theories of American Electoral Politics, 1870-1940," Journal of American History, 74 (March 1988), 1276-81.
168. On antebellum efforts by workers, see, for example, Pessen, Jacksonian America, 270-79;
169. and Scan Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York, 1984), 174-75, 212-13.
170. In her study of New York, San Francisco, and New Orleans, which came to hand after this essay was written, Mary P. Ryan observed that locally "the major parties regularly splintered into contending factions that were joined by an array of serious and sometimes successful contenders for local power, chief among them working men, abolitionists, nativists and municipal reformers." Mary P. Ryan, Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1997), 16.
171. Leon Fink, Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (Urbana, 1983), 26.
172. In spring 1887, at least 73 labor tickets engaged in independent political action, but by fall labors surge fell off sharply. Gerald N. Grob, Workers and Utopia: A Study of Ideological Conflict in the American Labor Movement, 1865-1900 (Chicago, 1961), 87-89.
173. In Detroit the Knights entered politics through the Independent Labor Party (ILP) and - using joint nominations with major parties - elected several union leaders as city officers and state legislators, but opposition to alliances with major party politicians inhibited the vote and led to the ILP'S decline. Richard Oestreicher, Solidarity and Fragmentation: Working People and Class Consciousness, Detroit, 1875-1900 (Urbana, 1986), 114-17, 120, 180-85.
174. In Cincinnati in 1887 the United Labor Party (ULP) won 17,317 votes for mayor, second to the Republicans by 682 votes, and ahead of the Democrats by 5,459. The ULP ran third in the fall state election and faded. Steven J. Ross, Workers on the Edge: Work, Leisure, and Politics in Industrializing Cincinnati, 1788-1890 (New York, 1985), 295-315.
175. Fink, Workingmen's Democracy, 32, 34.
176. On the Knights' reactionary side, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990), 310.
177. Nonetheless, I agree with Mike Davis that the Knights' "embryonic class culture . . . not only transcended a 'pure and simple' trade-union economism, but also provided the first alternative to dominant ethno-religious subcultures," an alternative that did not materialize. Mike Davis, Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (London, 1986), 31.
178. Alan M. Kraut, "Partisanship and Principles: The Liberty Party in Antebellum Political Culture," in Crusaders and Compromisers: Essays on the Relationship of the Antislavery Struggle to the Antebellum Party System, ed. Alan M. Kraut (Westport, 1983), 71-99.
179. On nativist parties, see Pessen, Jacksonian America, 279-83;
180. Ray Allen Billington, The Protestant Crusade, 1800-1860 (New York, 1938);
181. Tyler Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery: The Northern Know Nothings and the Politics of the 1850s (New York, 1992), 9-14.
182. The largest disruption of antebellum politics before the 1850s came in the late 1820s and early 1830s via the Antimasonic movement and party. See, for example, Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition, 1826-1836 (New York, 1988).
183. On antipartyism and other independent tendencies in antebellum "insurgencies," see John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Society and Political Culture in Worcester County, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (New York, 1989), 310-83;
184. and Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, 1971), 60-61, 66-67, 74-76, 249-50, 264, 327-28.
185. Michael Holt has argued that independent parties proliferated when the major parties failed to offer distinctive economic programs, as in the 1850s and 1870s, but this argument seems not to account for the great variation among localities throughout the party period. See Holt, Political Parties and American Political Development, passim.
186. William E. Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987), 97-100;
187. Kleppner, Third Electoral System, 293-96;
188. Christopher J. Olsen, "Community, Honor, and Secession in the Deep South: Mississippi's Political Culture, 1840s-1861" (Ph.D. diss., University of Florida, 1995);
189. Jean H. Baker, The Politics of Continuity: Maryland Politics from 1858 to 1870 (Baltimore, 1973), 5-6, 15-16;
190. Laurie, "'Spavined Ministers, Lying Toothpullers, and Buggering Priests,'" 99-108;
191. John R. Mulkern, The Know-Nothing Party in Massachusetts: The Rise and Fall of a People's Movement (Boston, 1990);
192. Ronald P. Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1780s-1840s (New York, 1983), 331-40.
193. To attribute the antipartyism of the Know-Nothings to the slavery issue, as Anbinder does, is to miss its pervasiveness throughout the century as well as its multiple sources. See Anbinder, Nativism and Slavery, xiii-xiv.
194. Robert J. Kolesar, "The Politics of Development: Worcester, Massachusetts, in the Late Nineteenth Century," Journal of Urban History, 16 (Nov. 1989), 3-28, esp. 7.
195. For a full treatment, see Robert J. Kolesar, "Politics and Policy in a Developing Industrial City: Worcester, Massachusetts, in the Late Nineteenth Century" (Ph.D. diss., Clark University, 1987).
196. Harold L. Platt, City Building in the New South: The Growth of Public Services in Houston, Texas (Philadelphia, 1983), 76-77, 96-97.
197. For similar movements elsewhere, see James Michael Russell, Atlanta, 1847-1900: City Building in the Old South and the New (Baton Rouge, 1988), 170-71, 182-87, 206-15;
198. and Don H. Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 1880-1930 (Knoxville, 1985), 136-39.
199. For a different view of the emergence of antiparty or nonpartisan reform movements, see Martin Shefter, "The Emergence of the Political Machine: An Alternative View," in Theoretical Perspectives in Urban Politics, ed. Willis Hawley and Michael Lipsky (Englewood Cliffs, 1976), 14-44.
200. Robert C. Reinders, End of an Era: New Orleans, 1850-1860 (New Orleans, 1964), 56;
201. Carol E. Hoffecker, Wilmington, Delaware: Portrait of an Industrial City, 1830-1910 (Charlottesville, 1974), 50-51, 54-57, 61-62;
202. McKelvey, Rochester, the Flower City, 138, 157-59, 266;
203. Address and Reports of the Citizens' Association of Chicago, 1874 to 1876 (Chicago, 1876), 11.
204. (The seeds of later historical interpretations emphasizing urban failure may well have been sown by the charges of these "reform" associations. See Address and Reports of the Citizens' Association of Chicago, 1874 to 1876 ibid., 4.
205. For a counterview, see Jon C. Teaford, The Unheralded Triumph: City Government in America, 1870-1900 [Baltimore, 1984].)
206. In Chicago's electoral and public policy contests following the fire, traditional parties played no role. See Karen Sawislak, Smoldering City: Chicagoans and the Great Fire, 1871-1874 (Chicago, 1995), 243-59.
207. Cleveland also created boards in the 1870s. See Elroy McKendree Avery, A History of Cleveland and Its Environs, vol. I (Chicago, 1918), 433-34.
208. See, for example, Jo Ann Manfra, "Hometown Politics and the American Protective Association, 1887-1890," Annals of Iowa, 55 (Spring 1996), 143-45.
209. Baker, "Domestication of Politics," 622.
210. Others extended the "notion of politics" further, "to include questions of power, domination, and 'respect' at work, at home, and in the community." Joan Tronto, "Changing Goals and Changing Strategies: Varieties of Women's Political Activities," Feminist Studies, 17 (Spring 1991), 85-104.
211. Baker, Moral Frameworks of Public Life, 108;
212. Ryan, "Gender and Public Access";
213. Habermas, "Public Sphere";
214. Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989).
215. According to a study influenced by Habermas, the engagement by antebellum women's rights activists with a wide range of issues in the public sphere constituted a broad feminist challenge to women's unequal citizenship. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998).
216. Elizabeth R. Varon, "Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too: White Women and Party Politics in Antebellum Virginia," Journal of American History, 82 (Sept. 1995), 494-521;
217. Janet L. Coryell, "Superseding Gender: The Role of the Woman Politico in Antebellum Partisan Politics," in Political Identities: American Women and the Emergence of a Secular State, ed. Stephanie Cole and Alison Parker (Arlington, forthcoming, 1999);
218. Kathleen C. Berkeley, "Partisan Politics Makes for Strange Bedfellows: The Political Career of Anna Elizabeth Dickinson, 1842-1932," paper delivered at the annual meeting of the Southern Historical Association, New Orleans, Nov. 1995 (in Formisano's possession);
219. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, "Whig Women, Politics, and Culture in the Campaign of 1840: Three Perspectives from Massachusetts," Journal of the Early Republic, 17 (Summer 1997), 314.
220. See also Elaine F. Crane, "The World of Elizabeth Drinker," Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biograptry, 107 (Jan. 1983), 3-28;
221. Robert E. May, "Southern Elite Women, Sectional Extremism, and the Male Political Sphere: The Case of John A. Quitman's Wife and Female Descendants, 1847-1931," Journal of Mississippi History, 50 (Nov. 1988), 251-85;
222. and Ronald P. Formisano, "The New Political History and the Election of 1840," Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23 (Spring 1993), 681-82n36.
223. Michael D. Pierson, "'Guard the Foundation Well': Antebellum New York Democrats and the Defense of Patriarchy," Gender & History, 7 (April 1995), 25-40;
224. Laura F. Edwards, Gendered Strife and Confusion: The Political Culture of Reconstruction (Urbana, 1997), esp. 230-44.
225. On the uses of gender and race in reestablishing white supremacy in North Carolina in the 1890s, see Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 (Chapel Hill, 1996), 91-146.
226. Coryell, "Superseding Gender," 11;
227. Berkeley, "Partisan Politics Makes for Strange Bedfellows," 6;
228. Varon, "Tippecanoe and the Ladies, Too."
229. See also Christopher J. Olsen, "'Molly Pitcher' of the Mississippi Whigs: The Editorial Career of Mrs. Harriet N. Prewett," Journal of Mississippi History, 58 (Fall 1996), 237-54;
230. and Christopher J. Olsen, "Women and Party Politics in the Old South: Mississippi in the 1840s and 1850s," Journal of Women's History (forthcoming).
231. Ronald P. Formisano, "The Role of Women in the Dorr Rebellion," Rhode Island History, 44 (Aug. 1994), 89-104.
232. Women committed to the Dorrite cause of universal white male suffrage engaged also in partisan activities and developed a proto-feminist consciousness. But the major recent statements regarding nineteenth-century women's politics miss women's partisan activity and emphasize the distinctiveness of women's separate political culture. See Baker, "Domestication of Politics," 625;
233. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots (Baltimore, 1990);
234. and Michael McGerr, "Political Style and Women's Power, 1830-1930," Journal of American History, 77 (Dec. 1990), 864-85, esp. 867.
235. Elsa Barkley Brown, "Negotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom," Public Culture, 7 (Fall 1994), 108-24, esp. 122-23;
236. Thomas Holt, Black over White: Negro Political Leadership in South Carolina during Reconstruction (Urbana, 1977), 34-35;
237. Joel Williamson, After Slavery: The Negro in South Carolina during Reconstruction, 1861-1877 (Chapel Hill, 1965), 338, 343-44.
238. Ellen Carol DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage: The Emergence of an Independent Women's Movement in America, 1848-1869 (Ithaca, 1978), 79, 81;
239. Ruth Bordin, Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power and Liberty, 1873-1900 (Philadelphia, 1981), 127;
240. Ripon Republican, March 24, 31, April 7, 1887.
241. See also Anne M. Boylan, "Women and Politics in the Era before Seneca Falls," Journal of the Early Republic, 10 (Fall 1990), 363-82;
242. and Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill, 1998).
243. Lori Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Haven, 1990), 69, 71.
244. One might add office holding to the list of activities in the text. See Bordin, Woman and Temperance, xiii-xiv.
245. Suzanne Lebsock, "Women and American Politics, 1880-1920," in Women, Politics, and Change, ed. Louise A. Tilly and Patricia Gurin (New York, 1990), 37.
246. Nancy F. Cott described three kinds of consciousness among women: feminism, female consciousness ("a mind-set not biologically female but socially constructed from women's common tasks"), and communal consciousness ("based on solidarity with men and women of the same group"). Nancy F. Cott, "What's in a Name? The Limits of 'Social Feminism"; or, Expanding the Vocabulary of Women's History," Journal of American History, 76 (Dec. 1989), 827.
247. On the voluntarist, benevolent side, Nancy A. Hewitt has identified three "paths" by which women went from "benevolent work through evangelicalism and abolition to women's rights." See Nancy A. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, 1984), 22-23.
248. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change, 185;
249. Ginzberg, Women and the Work of Benevolence, 109.
250. See Lori Ginzberg, "'Moral Suasion Is Moral Balderdash': Women, Politics, and Social Activism in the 1850s," Journal of American History, 73 (Dec. 1986), 601-22.
251. Jean Gould Hales, "'Co-Laborers in the Cause': Women in the Ante-bellum Nativist Movement," Civil War History, 25 (June 1979), 119-38;
252. Jack S. Blocker Jr., American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston, 1989), 57, 58;
253. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change, 161;
254. Barbara Leslie Epstein, The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, 1981), 4;
255. DuBois, Feminism and Suffrage, 41n47, 42;
256. Norma Basch, "Equity vs. Equality: Emerging Concepts of Women's Political Status in the Age of Jackson," Journal of the Early Republic, 3 (Fall 1983), 317;
257. Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, 1982).
258. Hewitt did not describe a falloff in women's activities in Rochester, New York, but presented evidence on both sides. See Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change, 139, 145, 177, 180, 182, 183, 185, 189.
259. Bourke and DeBats, Washington County, 117, 119, 120, 138, 140-45, esp. 124.
260. Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change, 192.
261. On the way the Civil War and defeat expanded exConfederate women's public activities, see LeeAnn Whites, The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender: Augusta, Georgia, 1860-1890 (Athens, Ga., 1995), 166, 185-86, 190, 191.
262. See also Nancy Engle, "'We Can't Be the Women We Were Before': Mary Livermore and Chicago Women in the American Civil War" (M.A. thesis, University of Central Florida, 1996).
263. Bordin, Woman and Temperance, xvi, 13-14, 33, 138, 157, esp. xvi and 157.
264. In Nashville, Tennessee, non-WCTU women also followed temperance into political action and related public issues, becoming part of a white backlash against black voting rights. See Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 132-35.
265. Bordin, Woman and Temperance, 104-6, 123-28;
266. Epstein, Politics of Domesticity, 122-24;
267. Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow, 46-53;
268. Christine Bolt, The Women's Movement in the United States and Britain from the 1790s to the 1920s (Amherst, 1993), 152.
269. Many rural women may have been even less bound by the restraints of their separate sphere. Nancy Grey Osterud, Bonds of Community: The Lives of Farm Women in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca, 1991), 275.
270. See also Donald B. Marti, "Sisters of the Grange: Rural Feminism in the Late Nineteenth Century," Agricultural History, 58 (July 1984), 247-61;
271. and Julie Roy Jeffrey, "Women in the Southern Farmers' Alliance: A Reconsideration of the Role and Status of Women in the Late Nineteenth Century," Feminist Studies, 3 (Fall 1975), 72-91.
272. A pathbreaking study shedding light on the decline of women's partisan activity is Michael Lewis Goldberg, An Army of Women: Gender and Politics in Gilded Age Kansas (Baltimore, 1997) .
273. The case of African American men before the Civil War also testifies both for and against the party period concept. In 1860 blacks could vote without property restrictions in New England, but only 6% of African Americans lived there. The Democratic party's overt racism made many African Americans vote Whig, especially in New York, which had a property restriction. See Benson, Concept of Jacksonian Democracy, 179-80, 320;
274. and Leon Litwack, North of Slavery: The Negro in the Free States, 1790-1860 (Chicago, 1961), 80.
275. Increasingly, blacks gravitated to the Liberty, Free-Soil, and then Republican parties, while throughout the North, African American men and (after 1848) women held conventions and meetings calling for suffrage and other rights, activities that were more important than voting. Benjamin Quartes, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969), 169-90;
276. Litwack, North of Slavery, 88-90.
277. Frederick Douglass perhaps mirrored the ambivalence of the majority in his "inconsistent" responses to the Republican party in the 1850s. David W. Blight, Frederick Douglass' Civil War: Keeping Faith in Jubilee (Baton Rouge, 1989), 47-58;
278. Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 188-89. In the Reconstruction South, far more African Americans voted, and until disfranchisement in the 1890s, "the Republican Party - the party of emancipation and black voting rights - became an institution as central to the black community as the church and the school."
279. Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877 (New York, 1988), 291.
280. See also Kleppner, Third Electoral System, 105-6, 180.
281. For the freedmen, "as with Frederick Douglass, the Republican party was the deck; all else, the sea." Holt, Black over White, 122.
282. Yet Williamson observed that "the Negro voter could be fully as capricious under the hand of the professional party manager as his white counterpart." Williamson, After Slavery, 342.
283. In one state African Americans' participation varied greatly by county. See Randolph B. Campbell, Grass Roots Reconstruction in Texas, 1865-1880 (Baton Rouge, 1997).
284. Baker, Moral Frameworks of Public Life, xvii, 55, 83, 90-118 passim.
285. See also Baker, "Domestication of Politics."
286. For a thoughtful critique of Baker for assigning "electoral politics to the male sphere of activity far more fully and securely than the nineteenth century did," see Mark Lawrence Kornbluh, "Men, Women, and Politics in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries," Reviews in American History, 20 (March 1992), 75.
287. Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics in the United States, 1890-1925 (Chicago, 1997), 13, 3, 4.
288. On the career of the National American Woman Suffrage Association as a pressure group in the early twentieth century, see Sara Hunter Graham, Woman Suffrage and the New Democracy (New Haven, 1996).
289. Norma Basch, "A Challenge to the Story of Popular Politics," Journal of American History, 84 (Dec. 1997), 903;
290. Jean Harvey Baker, "Politics, Paradigms, and Public Culture," Journal of American History, ibid., 898.