Minnows, spies, and aristocrats: The social crisis of congress in the age of Martin van Buren

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 27, Issue 4, 2007, Pages 599-653

  Pasley, Jeffrey L ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70449905226     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2007.0078     Document Type: Article

References (281)

1. Lee Benson, The Concept of Jacksonian Democracy: New York As a Test Case (New York, 1967)
2. Douglas T. Miller, Jacksonian Aristocracy: Class and Democracy in New York, 1830-1860 (New York, 1967)
3. Edward Pessen, "The Egalitarian Myth and the American Social Reality: Wealth, Mobility, and Equality in the 'Era of the Common Man,"' American Historical Review 76 (1971), 989-1084, quotation on 1027
4. Edward Pessen, Riches, Class, and Power: America Before the Civil War, 2d ed. (New Brunswick, NJ, 1990)
5. Edward Pessen, Jacksonian America: Society, Personality, and Politics (Urbana, IL, 1985)
6. Edward Pessen, The Log Cabin Myth: The Social Backgrounds of the Presidents (New Haven, CT, 1984)
7. For a very different take, see Joyce Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution: The First Generation of Americans (Cambridge, MA, 2000)
8. Allan G. Bogue, Jerome M. Clubb, Carroll R. McKibbin, and Santa A. Traugott, "Members of the House of Representatives and the Processes of Modernization, 1789-1960," Journal of American History 63 (1976), 275-302
9. Whitman H. Ridgway, Community Leadership in Maryland, 1790-1840 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1979)
10. Sean Wilentz, "On Class and Politics in Jacksonian America," Reviews in American History 10 (1982), 45-63
11. Sidney H. Aronson, Status and Kinship in the Higher Civil Service: Standards of Selection in the Administrations of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson (Cambridge, MA, 1964), quotation on 196-97
12. Daniel Feller, "Rediscovering Jacksonian America," in The State of U.S. History, ed. Melvyn Stokes (Oxford, UK, 2002), 69-91
13. Jackson Turner Main, "Government by the People: The American Revolution and the Democratization of the Legislatures," William and Mary Quarterly 23 (1966), 391-407
14. and Jackson Turner Main, Political Parties before the Constitution (New York, 1974)
15. Among many later works build on Main's depiction of the legislatures, for very different purposes, see Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the American Republic, 1776-1787 (New York, 1972)
16. and Calvin H. Johnson, Righteous Anger at the Wicked States: The Meaning of the Founders' Constitution (New York, 2005)
17. For other works that treat the Revolution as the great democratic moment, see Edward Countryman, A People in Revolution: The American Revolution and Political Society in New York, 1760-1790 (New York, 1989)
18. and Gary B. Nash, The Unknown American Revolution: The Unruly Birth of Democracy and the Struggle to Create America (New York, 2005)
19. Works arguing for democratization in the postrevolutionary era include Paul Goodman, "Social Status of Party Leadership: The House of Representatives, 1797-1804," William and Mary Quarterly 25 (1968), 465-74
20. Gordon S. Wood, The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York, 1992)
21. Appleby, Inheriting the Revolution
22. Howard B. Rock, Artisans of the New Republic: The Tradesmen of New York City in the Age of Jefferson (New York, 1984)
23. Jeffrey L. Pasley, "1800 as a Revolution in Political Culture: Newspapers, Celebrations, Democratization, and Voting in the Early Republic," in The Revolution of 1800: Democracy, Race, and the New Republic, ed. James Horn, Jan Ellen Lewis, and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 2002), 121-52
24. and several essays in Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher, eds., Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004)
25. Benson, Concept of Jackonian Democracy
26. The "new political history" produced a vast literature, but its findings on electoral history are most efficiently summarized in Paul Kleppner, Walter Dean Burnham, Ronald P. Formisano, Samuel P. Hays, Richard Jensen, and William G. Shade, The Evolution of American Electoral Systems (Westport, CT, 1981)
27. and Joel H. Silbey, The American Political Nation, 1838-1893 (Stanford, CA, 1991)
28. Harry L. Watson, Jacksonian Politics and Community Conflict: The Emergence of the Second Party System in Cumberland County, North Carolina (Baton Rouge, LA, 1981)
29. Harry L. Watson, "Conflict and Collaboration: Yeomen, Slaveholders, and Politics in the Antebellum South," Social History [Great Britain] 10 (1985), 273-98
30. Harry L. Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990)
31. Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York, 1991), quotation on 33
32. See, among others, Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 1990)
33. David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York, 1991)
34. and Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (London, 1995)
35. A dark view of political democratization runs through most of the essays in Horn, Lewis, and Onuf, eds., The Revolution of 1800, as well much of the recent and not-so-recent literature on Andrew Jackson. George Frederickson popularized the term herrenvolk democracy but used the concept much more judiciously than the "whiteness studies" writers have, locating its advent later (the 1840s and 1850s) and depicting it as a way to square slavery with democracy rather than as the essential core of American democracy. See George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York, 1971)
36. and George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study of American and South African History (New York, 1981)
37. Carl E. Prince, "The Great 'Riot Year': Jacksonian Democracy and Patterns of Violence in 1834," Journal of the Early Republic 3 (Spring 1985), 3-4
38. Nicholas Biddle, An Address Delivered Before the Alumni Association of Nassau-Hall, on the Day of the Annual Commencement of the College of New-Jersey, September 30, 1835, 3d ed. (Princeton, NJ, 1835), 20
39. Frederick Marryat, A Diary in America, With Remarks on Its Institutions, ed. Sydney W. Jackman (New York, 1962), 438
40. The unabridged Marryat is available at http://www.athelstane.co.uk/ marryat/diaramer/diaru/diaru.htm. On the tumultuous scenes of drinking, jeering, and physical intimidation that greeted voters at many polling places in the mid-nineteenth century, see Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ, 2000)
41. and Richard Franklin Bensel, The American Ballot Box in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (New York, 2004), esp. 20-22
42. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (London, 1837)
43. [Thomas Hamilton], Men and Manners in America, 2 vols. (London, 1834), quotation on 2: 141
44. Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States, ed. John William Ward (Ithaca, NY, 1969)
45. Francis J. Grand, Aristocracy in America (1839; rep. New York, 1959)
46. Francis J. Grand, The Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations (Boston, MA, 1837), quotation 410
47. Marc Harris argues convincingly that Grand's writings were intended as a prodemocratic response to the conservatism of the whole European-traveling-in- America genre, and particularly to conservative travel writers like Hamilton and Marryat. See Marc Harris, "A Would-Be Whig Ascendancy of Fashion: Francis J. Grand's Aristocracy in America as a Satirical Account," Yearbook of German-American Studies 23 (1988), 73-90
48. Marryat, Diary in America, 436
49. Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics, 379
50. "Spy in Washington," Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, Oct. 14, 1837
51. Quotations from James Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson (New York, 1860), 2: 182
52. and Grund, Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations, 411, 404
53. The classic argument for the equivalency of the Jeffersonian Republican and Jacksonian Democratic causes is Martin Van Buren, Inquiry into the Origin and Course of Political Parties in the United States (1867; rep. New York, 1967)
54. For the general accuracy of this view in Hill's New Hampshire, see Donald B. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800-1851 (Cambridge, MA, 1970). Democrats were still occasionally using the adjective federal for their opponents in the 1830s and 40s
55. Parton, Life of Andrew Jackson, 2: 179
56. Theodore Roosevelt, Life of Thomas Hart Benton (New York, 1887), 86
57. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, IL, 1979)
58. and Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 19-32
59. Catherine Allgor, Parlor Politics: In Which the Ladies of Washington Help Build a City and a Government (Charlottesville, VA, 2000)
60. and A Perfect Union: Dolley Madison and the Creation of the American Nation (New York, 2006)
61. Allgor's depiction of early Washington life fills in the gaps of the previous classic on the subject, James Sterling Young's Congress-centered The Washington Community, 1800-1828 (New York, 1966)
62. Young emphasized congressional boardinghouses as the early capital's key informal political institutions but, similar to Allgor, argues for the primacy of private social groupings over overtly public and political ones like parties. It is easy to imagine Young's congressional boarders building their social calendars around visits to the houses of Allgor's ladies. Quotations from Gaillard Hunt, ed., The First Forty Years of Washington Society in the Family Letters of Margaret Bayard Smith (1906; rep., New York, 1965), 297, 295
63. Hamilton, Men and Manners in America, 2: 134-41
64. On the Whigs turning the symbolic democratic tables on Van Buren, see Robert Gray Gunderson, The Log-Cabin Campaign (Lexington, KY, 1957)
65. and John William Ward, "The Whigs Take to the Woods," in Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (New York, 1955), 79-97
66. Except where noted, the discussion of the editorial appointments from here draws on Jeffrey L. Pasley, "The Tyranny of Printers": Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville, VA, 2001), especially ch. 14, and the updates presented at http://pasleybrothers.com/newspols/ officeholding.htm
67. Michael Zakim, "The Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary; or, a Labor History of the Nonproducing Classes," Journal of the Early Republic 26 (Winter 2006), 563-603
68. Marryat, Diary in America, with Remarks on Its Institutions, 406-7
69. Derision for American newspapers and editors can be found in most of the Jacksonian-era travel narratives and elite memoirs. See, for example, Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans, ed. Richard Mullen (New York, 1984), 267-73, 282-83, and all others cited in this essay
70. Grand, Aristocracy in America, 198-99
71. Culver H. Smith, The Press, Politics, and Patronage: The American Government's Use of Newspapers, 1789-1875 (Athens, GA, 1977), 96-99, 297n45
72. I make this argument at greater length in Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, ch. 8
73. The ideal of the eighteenth-century public sphere is sketched out in and critiqued in Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Cambridge, MA, 1991)
74. Michael Warner, The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA, 1990)
75. and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1992), among many other places
76. The most extensive work on the politics of scandal in the early modern Anglo-American world is Anna Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton, NJ, 2003), while the American side is touched on in Joanne B. Freeman, Affairs of Honor: National Politics in the New Republic (New Haven, CT, 2001)
77. This assertion may seem bizarre in light of the still-raging controversy over Thomas Jefferson's relationship with his slave Sally Hemings. In its own time,however, this scandal was most notable for the lack of political traction it was able to gain with voters and readers. In the only election years in which it was much discussed, 1802 and 1804, Jefferson and the Republicans won sweeping national victories. It was during the Civil War era and after that the affair began to take on its familiar modern salience and racial themes. See Scot A. French and Edward L. Ayers, "The Strange Career of Thomas Jefferson: Race and Slavery in American Memory, 1943-1993," in Jeffersonian Legacies, ed. Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 1993), 418-56
78. Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA, 1997)
79. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf, eds., Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture (Charlottesville, VA, 1999)
80. William Wells Brown, Clotel, or The President's Daughter (New York, 2000)
81. Norma Basch, "Marriage, Morals, and Politics in the Election of 1828," Journal of American History 80 (1993), 890-918
82. Allgor, Parlor Politics, 190-238
83. Kirsten E. Wood, " 'One Woman So Dangerous To Public Morals': Gender and Power in the Eaton Affair," Journal of the Early Republic 17 (Summer 1997), 237-75
84. John F. Marszalek, The Petticoat Affair: Manners, Mutiny, and Sex in Andrew Jackon's White House (New York, 1997)
85. Paula Baker, "The Domestication of American Politics: Women and American Political Society, 1780-1920," American Historical Review 89 (1984), 620-47
86. Nancy Fraser, "Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy," in Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere, 109-42
87. Mary Hershberger, "Mobilizing Women, Anticipating Abolition: The Struggle Against Indian Removal in the 1830s," Journal of American History 86 (1999), 1,5-40
88. Alisse Theodore Portnoy, '"Female Petitioners Can Lawfully Be Heard': Negotiating Female Decorum, United States Politics, and Political Agency, 1829-31," Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Winter 2003), 573-610
89. Richard C. Rohrs, " 'Public Attention for . . . Essentially Private Matters': Women Seeking Assistance from President James K. Polk," Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Spring 2004), 107-23
90. Marilyn Schultz Blackwell, "Meddling in Politics: Clarina Howard Nichols and Antebellum Political Culture," Journal of the Early Republic 24 (Spring 2004), 27-63
91. Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women's Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA, 2005)
92. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825-1880 (Baltimore, MD, 1990)
93. On the culmination of this trend in the Progressive Era, see (among others), Elisabeth S. Clemens, The People's Lobby: Organizational Innovation and the Rise of Interest Group Politics, 1890-1925 (Chicago, IL, 1997)
94. and Robyn Muncy, Creating a Female Dominion in American Reform, 1890-1935 (New York, 1991)
95. On the origins of this maxim as used in U.S. politics, see Simon P. Newman, "Principles or Men? George Washington and the Political Culture of National Leadership, 1776-1801," Journal of the Early Republic 12 (Winter 1992), 477-507
96. The literature on this topic is sketchy and filled with advocacy, but some useful works are Grant McConnell, Private Power and American Democracy (New York, 1966)
97. Margaret Susan Thompson, The "Spider Web": Congress and Lobbying in the Age of Grant (Ithaca, NY, 1985)
98. Kenneth Crawford, The Pressure Boys: The Inside Story of Lobbying in America (New York, 1939)
99. Glyndon G. Van Deusen, Thurlow Weed: Wizard of the Lobby (Boston, MA, 1947)
100. Karl Schrift-giesser, The Lobbyists: The Art and Business of Influencing Lawmakers (Boston, MA, 1951)
101. Grant McConnell, The Decline of Agrarian Democracy (Berkeley, CA, 1953)
102. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and Alan S. Murray, Showdown at Gucci Gulch: Lawmakers, Lobbyists, and the Unlikely Triumph of Tax Reform (New York, 1987)
103. Jeffrey H. Birnbaum, The Lobbyists: How Influence Peddlers Work Their Way in Washington (New York, 1993)
104. and Clemens, The People's Lobby. I have intentionally omitted myriad works about the corruption of American politics during the George W. Bush administration, a story that is still unfolding as of this writing
105. Andrew Jackson to T. L. Miller, May 13, 1829, Correspondence of Jackson, 4:32
106. Leonard D. White, The Jacksonians: A Study in Administrative History, 1829-1861 (New York, 1956), ch. 2 & 16
107. Samuel Kernell, "Toward Understanding 19th Century Congressional Careers: Ambition, Competition, and Rotation," American Journal of Political Science 21 (1977), 669-93
108. Nelson W. Polsby, "The Institutionalization of the U.S. House of Representatives," American Political Science Review 62 (1968), 144-68
109. Morris Fiorina, David Rohde, and Peter Wissel, "Historical Change in House Turnover," in Congress in Change: Evolution and Reform, ed. Norman Ornstein (New York, 1975), 24-57
110. Robert Struble, Jr., "House Turnover and the Principle of Rotation," Political Science Quarterly 94 (1979), 649-67
111. For details, see the charts on the Tyranny of Printers companion website at http://pasIeybrothers.com/newspols/officeholding.htm
112. Milwaukee (WI) Sentinel, Apr. 5, 1843
113. Zakim, "Business Clerk as Social Revolutionary," 563-76
114. Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley's Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis (Philadelphia, PA, 1886), 150-51
115. Richard L. Abel, American Lawyers (New York, 1989), 40-41
116. Anton-Hermann Chroust, The Rise of the Legal Profession in America, The Revolution and the Post-Revolutionary Era (Vol. 2) (Norman, OK, 1965)
117. Gary B. Nash, "The Philadelphia Bench and Bar, 1800-1861," Comparative Studies in Society and History 7 (1965), 203-20
118. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (San Diego, CA, 1965), 109-16
119. Philadelphia Pennsylvania Inquirer, Sept. 12, 1829 (quoted)
120. Philadelphia Franklin Gazette, Aug., 26, 31, Sept. 1, 1819
121. There is no modern scholarly study of John Norvell. The only secondary accounts of any kind come from descendants: the unreliable Freeman Norvell, "The History and Times of the Hon. John Norvell," Pioneer Collections: Report of the Pioneer Society of the State of Michigan 3 (1881), 140-48
122. and the helpful John E. Norvell, History of the Norvell and Related Families, 3d ed. (Salem, MA, 1994)
123. For the political background of Norvell's career in Philadelphia and Detroit, respectively, see Philip Shriver Klein, Pennsylvania Politics, 1817-1832: A Game Without Rules (Philadelphia, PA, 1940)
124. and Ronald P. Formisano, The Birth of Mass Political Parties: Michigan, 1827-1861 (Princeton, NJ, 1971)
125. th Cong., 2d sess., Appendix, 21-22, http://memory.loc.gov/cgi-bin/ ampage?collId = llcg&fileName = 005/llcg005.db&recNum = 560
126. Chillicothe (OH) Scioto Gazette, June 15, 1831
127. New-York Spectator, June 21, 1831
128. Portsmouth (ME) Journal and Rockingham Gazette, June 4, 1831
129. Detroit (MI) Democratic Free Press, Dec. 24, 1834
130. Harold M. Dorr, ed., The Michigan Constitutional Conventions of 1835-36: Debates and Proceedings (Ann Arbor, MI, 1940), 303-9, 113, 135-36, 158 (quoted), 313, 338
131. Willis Frederick Dunbar, Michigan: A History of the Wolverine State, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids, MI, 1970), 393-97
132. On the broader history of "alien suffrage," see Alexander Keyssar, The Right to Vote: The Contested History of Democracy in the United States (New York, 2000), 32-33, 337-41
133. Dunbar, Michigan, 393-97
134. On the racist character of western antislavery sentiment, see Eugene H. Berwanger, The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy (Urbana, IL, 1967)
135. Lucius Lyon to Sheldon McKnight, Mar. 20, 1836 (quoted), Lyon to E.D. Ellis, Mar. 22, 1836, "Letters of Lucius Lyon," ed. L.G. Stuart, Michigan Pioneer and Historical Collections 27 (1896), 487, 488
136. Norvell to William Woodbridge, Feb. 21, 1839 (quoted), Woodbridge Papers, Burton Collection, DPL. The scope of Norvell's work drafting reports and resolutions can be quickly scanned by searching for the words Norvell and report in the Library of Congress's congressional documents database, A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875, http://memory.loc.gov/ ammem/amlaw/lawhome.html
137. Philadelphia Pennsylvania Inquirer and Daily Courier, Mar. 8, 9, 1838
138. th Cong., 2d sess., Appendix, 172-76
139. Norvell to Ross Wilkins, Nov. 22, 1834, Ross Wilkins Papers, Burton Collection, DPL
140. th Cong., 2d sess., Senate, Apr. 12, 1838, 302; Norvell to Woodbridge, Feb. 21, 1839, William Woodbridge Papers, Burton Collection, DPL
141. Norvell to Wilkins, June 15, 1843, Wilkins Papers, Burton Collection, DPL (quotation)
142. Norvell to Felch, Apr. 16, 1842, Felch Papers, Burton Collection, DPL
143. Cass to Felch, July 25, 1848, Felch Papers, Burton Collection, DPL
144. Emily Virginia Norvell Walker to Clarence M. Burton, Sept. 16, 1912, Reading Room File, Burton Collection, DPL
145. Major L. Wilson, "Republicanism and the Idea of Party in the Jacksonian Period," Journal of the Early Republic 8 (Winter 1988), 419-42
146. Michael L. Wallace, "Ideologies of Party in the Ante-Bellum Republic" (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1973)
147. Biddle, Address Before the Alumni Association of Nassau-Hall, 12-14
148. th Cong., 2d sess., Senate, Apr. 12-13, 1838, 302, 305-6
149. "Remark in Senate, April 13, 1838," The Papers of Henry Clay, ed. James F. Hopkins, Mary W. M. Hargreaves, et al. (Lexington, KY, 1959-1992), 9: 172
150. Speech of Mr. Norvell, of Michigan, on the Bill of Mr. Crittenden to Prevent the Interference of Certain Federal Officers in Elections. Delivered in the Senate of the United States, February 1839 (Washington, DC, 1839), 6-7. A copy of this pamphlet can be found in the Bentley Historical Library, University of Michigan
151. "The Speech of Mr. Duncan," Albany (NY) Jeffersonian, Sept. 1, 1838
152. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight Over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley, CA, 1990), 57-66
153. Andrew W. Robertson, The Language of Democracy: Political Rhetoric in the United States and Britain, 1790-1900 (Ithaca, NY, 1995), 74
154. "From our occasional correspondent Dean Swift, No. II," New York Morning Herald, Sept. 14, 1837
155. Dorr, Michigan Constitutional Conventions, 84
156. For more and much earlier examples of editors defending parties and partisanship as a positive good, see Pasley, Tyranny of Printers, 354-76
157. Pauline Maier, From Resistance to Revolution: Colonial Radicals and the Development of American Opposition to Britain, 1765-1776 (New York, 1974)
158. Altschuler and Blumin, Rude Republic
159. Bensel, American Ballot Box
160. Prince, "Great Riot Year"
161. Michael Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York, 1980)
162. David Grimsted, "Rioting in Its Jacksonian Setting," American Historical Review 77 (1972), 361-97
163. Leonard L. Richards, "Gentlemen of Property and Standing": Anti-Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian America (New York, 1970)
164. Paul A. Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, IN, 1999), 60-86
165. Numbers are drawn from the chart at http://pasleybrothers.com/newspols/ images/Editors_in_Congress.pdf
166. Eric M. Uslaner, "Comity in Context: Confrontation in Historical Perspective," British Journal of Political Science 21 (1991), 45-77
167. th Cong., 2d sess., House of Representatives, June 1, 1838, 422-23
168. Benjamin Brown French, Witness to the Young Republic: A Yankee's Journal, 1828-1870, ed. Donald B. Cole and John J. McDonough (Hanover, NH, 1989), 77, 75
169. "Spy in Washington," Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, Dec. 6, 1838
170. "The Martyrdom of Cilley," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 1 (Mar. 1838), 494
171. Grand, Americans in Their Moral, Social, and Political Relations, 404
172. st sess., House of Representatives, 444-47
173. Poore, Perley's Reminiscences, 150-51
174. Walter E. Hugins, "Ely Moore: The Case History of a Jacksonian Labor Leader," Political Science Quarterly 65 (1950), 105-25
175. Among other works on antebellum dueling, this account is most influenced by Steven M. Stowe, Intimacy and Power in the Old South: Ritual in the Lives of the Planters (Baltimore, MD, 1987)
176. and Dick Steward, Duels and the Roots of Violence in Missouri (Columbia, MO, 2000)
177. On the democratization of formerly aristocratic cultural forms, see Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York, 1993)
178. V. G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford, UK, 1988), 187-203, 304-14, quotation on 187-88. Despite the title, Kiernan covers the British colonies as well as Europe
179. While there is no good study of regional dueling patterns in the nineteenth century, the heavy association of the mid-century South with the duel and other aspects of honor culture is covered in such works as Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South (New York, 1982)
180. Stowe, Intimacy and Power
181. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Masters and Statesmen: The Political Culture of American Slavery (Baltimore, MD, 1988)
182. Kenneth S. Greenberg, Honor & Slavery: Lies, Duels, Noses, Mash, Dressing As a Woman, Gifts, Strangers, Humanitarianism, Death, Slave Rebellions, the Proslavery Argument, Baseball, Hunting, and Gambling in the Old South (Princeton, NJ, 1996)
183. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South (Austin, TX, 1979)
184. and Virginius Dabney, Pistols and Pointed Pens: The Dueling Editors of Old Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987)
185. Constance McLaughlin Green, Washington: Village and Capital,, 1800-1878 (Princeton, NJ, 1962), 95-101, 109-10
186. Major L. Wilson, The Presidency of Martin Van Buren (Lawrence, KS, 1984)
187. Watson, Liberty and Power
188. Donald B. Cole, Martin Van Buren and the American Political System (Princeton, NJ, 1984)
189. Sellers, Market Revolution
190. "Congressional History. The Second Session of the Twenty-Fifth Congress," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 4 (Oct. 1838), 105-7
191. "The Martyrdom of Cilley," 494
192. Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York, 1984)
193. The most extensive source on Jonathan Cilley's life and personality is Eve Anderson, ed., A Breach of Privilege: Cilley Family Letters, 1820-1867 (Rockland, ME, 2002)
194. For a contemporary biographical sketch, see Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Biographical Sketch of Jonathan Cilley," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 3 (1838), 69-77
195. and Myra L. Spaulding, "Dueling in the District of Columbia," Records of the Columbia Historical Society 29-30 (1928), 117-210, among other sources
196. Spaulding purports to cover all the known congressional duels, but a complete accounting is probably yet to be made. A surprisingly dispassionate and judicious contemporary history of the duel appears in "Death of Cilley," United States Magazine and Democratic Review 4 (Nov. & Dec. 1840), 196-200, available on the Internet beginning at http://cdl.library. cornell.edu/ cgi-bin/moa/pageviewer?frames = l&cite = &coIl = &view = 50&root = %2Fmoa %2Fusde%2Fusde0004%2F&tif=00206.TIF&pagenum=196
197. This is part of the Democratic Review's unique and valuable "Congressional History." Many primary sources on the duel, including the report of the congressional committee that investigated it, are reprinted in Lorenzo Sabine, Notes on Duels and Duelling, Alphabetically Arranged With a Preliminary Historical Essay (Boston, MA, 1856), 89-108
198. Craig M. Simpson, A Good Southerner: The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1985), 38-39
199. "Martyrdom of Cilley," 495
200. The history of congressional reporting is covered in Donald A. Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA, 1991)
201. F. B. Marbut, News From the Capital: The Story of Washington Reporting (Edwardsville, IL, 1971)
202. Thomas C. Leonard, The Power of the Press: The Birth of American Political Reporting (New York, 1986)
203. By far the best account of early congressional reporting appears in Charlene Bangs Bickford, Kenneth R. Bowling, and Helen Veit, eds., Documentary History of the First Federal Congress of the United States of America, 4 March 1789-3 March 1791, Vol. X: Debates in the House of Representatives, First Session: April-May 1789 (Baltimore, MD, 1992), xi-xli
204. Ritchie, Press Gallery, 20-22
205. For the most judicious accounts of the rise of the penny press, and what it did and did not mean, see John Nerone, "The Mythology of the Penny Press," Critical Studies in Mass Communication 4 (1987), 376-422
206. and Gerald J. Baldasty, The Commercialization of News in the Nineteenth Century (Madison, WI, 1992)
207. For more conventional accounts that treat the penny press as America's "first mass medium," see Andie Tucher, Froth & Scum,: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the Ax Murder in America's First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill, NC, 1994)
208. and Michael Schudson, Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New York, 1978)
209. "A Spy at Washington," Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, Dec. 1, 1832
210. On Webb, see James L. Crouthamel, James Watson Webb: A Biography (Middletown, CT, 1969)
211. Crouthamel argues that Webb had already decided to support the bank before receiving the loan, but he and even Biddle's admiring biographer Thomas Govan concede that efforts were made to use the bank's resources to garner favorable treatment in the press. In New York, the offers came not from Biddle himself, but an unofficial agent of his, Silas E. Burrows. See James L. Crouthamel, "Did the Second Bank of the United States Bribe the Press?" Journalism Quarterly 36 (1959), 35-44
212. and Thomas Payne Govan, Nicholas Biddle: Nationalist and Public Banker, 1786-1844 (Chicago, IL, 1959), 147-58
213. Jerome Mushkat, "Matthew Livingston Davis and the Political Legacy of Aaron Burr," New-York Historical Society Quarterly 59 (1975), 123-48
214. Jeffrey L. Pasley, "Matthew Livingston Davis's Notes from the Political Underground: The Conflict of Political Values in the Early American Republic," May 2000, unpublished essay posted at http://jeff. pasleybrothers.com/writings/davisv2.htm
215. Matthew L. Davis, Memoirs of Aaron Burr. With Miscellaneous Selections From His Correspondence (New York, 1836), 1: v-vi
216. "Corruption in Congress," ibid., Feb. 10, 1838
217. Anderson, ed., Breach of Privilege, 151
218. On the rise of the Conservatives, see Cole, Presidency of Andrew Jackson, 102-3
219. Wilson, Presidency of Martin Van Buren, 15-16, 54, 61, 63-64, 75, 94-95, 111-13,193
220. John Niven, Gideon Welles: Lincoln's Secretary of the Navy (Baton Rouge, LA, 1994), ch. 7-9, quotation on 119
221. Crouthamel, "Did the Second Bank of the United States Bribe the Press?"
222. Baldasty, Commercialization of News
223. Cole, Presidency of Jackson, 102-3
224. For late-twentieth-century versions of Jesse Bynum's line of argument, see Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York, 1988)
225. Robert M. Entman, Democracy Without Citizens: Media and the Decay of American Politics (New York, 1989)
226. Eric Alterman, Sound and Fury: The Washington Punditocracy and the Collapse of American Politics (New York, 1992)
227. Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order (New York, 1994)
228. J. Herbert Altschull, Agents of Power: The Media and Public Policy (White Plains, NY, 1995)
229. James Fallows, Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy (New York, 1996)
230. Robert W. McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication Politics in Dubious Times (New York, 2000)
231. "The Spy in Washington," Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, Feb. 15 and 16, 1838
232. th Cong., 2d sess., House of Representatives, Feb. 12, 1838, 173
233. Cilley and Wise are quoted from the Washington National Intelligencer
234. The correspondence leading up to the duel and the seconds' report of it were printed in many places, but a convenient contemporary collection of the documents related to the duel can be found in Funeral Oration Delivered at the Capital in Washington Over the Body of Hon. Jonathan Cilley, With a Full Account of the Late Duel, Comprising Many Facts Never Before Published (Boston, MA, 1838)
235. Freeman, Affairs of Honor
236. Norman L. Rosenberg, Protecting the Best Men: An Interpretive History of the Law of Libel (Chapel Hill, NC, 1986)
237. George Wallace Jones, "Autobiography and Personal Recollections," in George Wallace Jones, ed. John Carl Parish (Iowa City, IA, 1912), 162-64
238. French, Witness, 76-77
239. Funeral Oration with Full Account, 35-36
240. "Death of Cilley," 199-200
241. Sabine, Notes on Duels. It should be noted that competing Whig rumors had Cilley out practicing and laughing
242. Heman Humphrey, The Sixth Commandment: a Discourse Delivered in the Chapel of Amherst College, March 11, 1838, and Published at the Request of the Students (Amherst, MA, 1838), 14
243. Mark Schmeller, '"Public Opinion is Practically the Paramount Law of the Land': The Cilley-Graves Duel and the Antimonies of Antebellum Anti-Dueling," paper presented at Society for Historians of the Early American Republic annual meeting, Columbus, OH, July 20, 2003
244. Jones, "Autobiography," 166
245. Humphrey, Sixth Commandment, 30-31
246. James M. MacDonald, A Mourning Land: A Sermon, Occasioned by the Late Duel at Washington, Between Jonathan Cilley, and William J. Graves, Members of Congress.: Preached at New-London, Sabbath Evening, March 18, 1838 (New London, CT, 1838), 11-12
247. Samuel Barrett, "Thou Shalt Not Kill.": A Sermon, Preached in the Twelfth Congregational Church, Boston, Sunday, March 4, 1838. In Consequence of the Late Duel in Washington. (Boston, MA, 1838)
248. M. A. De Wolfe Howe, The Willing Homicide Unfit to Be a Legislator.: A Discourse, Delivered in St. James' Church, Roxbury, on the Evening of Sunday, March 11, 1838 (Boston, MA, 1838)
249. William Buell Sprague, A Sermon Addressed to the Second Presbyterian Congregation in Albany, March 4, 1838, the Sabbath After Intelligence Was Received That the Hon. Jonathan Cilley . . . Has Been Shot in a Duel With the Hon. William J. Graves . . . (Albany, NY, 1838)
250. Henry Ware, The Law of Honor: A Discourse, Occasioned by the Recent Duel in Washington: Delivered March 4, 1838, in the Chapel of Harvard University, and in the West Church, Boston (Cambridge, MA, 1838)
251. Isaac R. Worcester, A Discourse Occasioned by the Recent Duel at Washington: Delivered at Littleton, N.H on Fast Day, April 12, 1838 (Concord, NH, 1838)
252. th Cong., 2d sess., Senate, Appendix, Mar. 29, 1838, 226
253. For a particularly blunt example of Yankee feelings of cultural superiority, see William Withington, Cilley of Maine, Murdered by Graves of Kentucky (Portland, ME, Mar. 3, 1838), a verse broadside found at the American Antiquarian Society
254. Green, Washington: Village and Capital, 107-9
255. John Fairfield to Anna Thornton Fairfield, Feb. 26, 1838, Arthur Staples, ed., The Letters of John Fairfield (Lewiston, ME, 1922), 204
256. On the seemingly more sedate boys' club that was Washington in Jefferson's era, see Young, Washington Community
257. Spaulding, "Dueling in the District of Columbia," 180-83
258. th Cong., 3d sess., House of Representatives, Feb. 21, 1839, 197 ff.
259. For a full list of attendees at the duel, see Funeral Oration with Full Account, 36n
260. For Wise's point of view, and a charitable interpretation of his role, see Simpson, A Good Southerner, 37-42
261. John Fairfield to Anna Thornton Fairfield, June 9, 1838, Letters of John Fairfield, 234
262. X. W., "Notes in Washington-Feb. 22," The New-Yorker, Mar. 2, 1839, 24
263. For two works that are especially good on the political impact of the caning of Sen. Charles Sumner, see Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1983)
264. and William E. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987)
265. For what can be fairly called celebrations, taking nothing away from the quality of the scholarship involved, see William E. Gienapp, " 'Politics Seem To Enter into Everything': Political Culture in the North, 1840-1860," in Essays on American Antebellum Politics, 1840-1860, ed. Stephen E. Maizlish and John J. Kushma (College Station, TX, 1982), 14-69
266. Silbey, American Political Nation
267. and Michael E. McGerr, The Decline of Popular Politics: The American North, 1865-1928 (New York, 1986)
268. A more nuanced and sobering account, emphasizing the role of racism, can be found in Jean H. Baker, Affairs of Party: The Political Culture of Northern Democrats in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, NY, 1983)
269. While democratization has been hard to prove as a general thing, historians by and large have found it to be true that Whig leaders and voters were generally wealthier, or haled from wealthier, more commercial places, than their Democratic counterparts. For examples, see Charles Grier Sellers, Jr., "Who Were the Southern Whigs?" American Historical Review 59 (1954), 335-46
270. and Paul Goodman, "The Social Basis of New England Politics in Jacksonian America," Journal of the Early Republic 6 (Spring 1986), 23-58
271. Jonathan Earle found that Free Soil Democrats (like Norvell) were particularly prone to this pattern, usually coming from economic backwaters like David Wilmot's northern Pennsylvania. See Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), esp. 123-31
272. Hugins, "Ely Moore," 121
273. H. Craig Miner and William E. Unrau, The End of Indian Kansas: A Study of Cultural Revolution (Lawrence, KS, 1990), 24
274. Cole, Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 187-207
275. Donald B. Cole, A Jackson Man: Amos Kendall and the Rise of American Democracy (Baton Rouge, LA, 2004), 245-77
276. For another example of just how bad a radical Jacksonian of that time could go, see Robert Sampson's recent biography of the editor of the Democratic Review, John L. O'Sullivan and His Times (Kent, OH, 2003)
277. Wilson, Presidency of Van Buren
278. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil
279. Wilentz, Rise of Democracy
280. Niven, Gideon Welles
281. John Ashworth, "Agrarians" and "Aristocrats": Party Political Ideology in the United States, 1837-1846 (Cambridge, UK, 1987)