Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin, Rude Republic: Americans and Their Politics in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000).

SYNOPSIS:

Altschuler and Blumin examine parties and the political process in the nineteenth century and look intensively at eight communities in the pre-Civil War period. Their study concentrates on how the parties tried to shape the political process and on the level and nature of party activism within these communities. They find that at the local level party politics did not divide the leaders of either commercial ventures or social institutions. They find a shockingly low level of both participation and political activism in these places, and they argue that politics occupied a tenuous "space" within the lives of ordinary Americans. Politics, they suggest, did not enter everything in American society and life in these years. Instead, it competed for the attention of Americans who viewed parties as rude, base, self-aggrandizing institutions, far from the virtuous and altruistic presence in their lives of religion, civic duty, republicanism, and liberalism. Altschuler and Blumin consider these competing arenas "constellations" within the lived experiences of Americans. They consider slavery a "peculiar issue," a special force operating from outside the political parties system to upset it and rejuvenate it at the same time.

EXCERPT:

"Voting in antebellum America was not so simple an act after all, and high voter turnout, as all the foregoing evidence tells us, did not necessarily indicate a widespread and deep engagement in politics on the part of the American people. What it may more powerfully indicate, indeed, is the extraordinary achievement of American political parties in mobilizing voters, some of whom were ignorant of, uninterested in, skeptical about, or even averse to political affairs. . . . Where we differ from most interpretations is in the relationship between the parties and the American electorate. The parties, we argue, developed their elaborate structures and techniques for nominating candidates, devising platforms, conducting campaigns, and maximizing election-day turnout, not from the political passions of a uniformly engaged citizenry, but in response to the very variations of engagement we have been describing." (79)

"We were able to locate on the census manuscripts 88 of the 110 men who played a visible role in their political party on the county level or higher. Of these, a third were professionals (twenty-five lawyers and four physicians), five-eighths were merchants, manufacturers, planters and other businessmen, and one-twentieth were clerical workers. Not one was a skilled or unskilled worker, or even an independent handworking artisan, despite the fact that more than 42 percent of the adult white male workforce in Richmond County was made up of such workers and artisans. (Lawyers comprised 28 percent of the group, and 2 percent of the general workforce.) More than half reported property that placed them within the highest wealth decile in the county, and more than three-fourths placed within the highest quintile. Moreover, the few men who reported little or no property were, for the most part, young businessmen and professionals, and included several young lawyers and planters still living in the homes of their wealthy (and politically active) parents." (90-91)

"What [our data] do tell us is that the institutionalized party system in Augusta contained an extraordinary concentration of lawyers, partisan publishers, officeholders, and rich merchants and planters at its activist core." (91)

"Political friendship was premised on the existence of a relatively closed and continuous fraternity of like-minded and similarly active men, drawn in part from the local community and in larger part from other communities across the county and state." (118)

RELATIONSHIP:

Altschuler and Blumin are concerned primarily with explaining Americans' engagement with the political process at the local level. We agree that politics only represented one sphere of Americans' lives and that many other parts of their lives competed with politics for attention and action. We also agree with Altschuler and Blumin that parties extended the machinery of a national and regional network into the local communities. While they see slavery as an issue that developed outside of the political arena and was brought into it, we emphasize instead the way differences in the social logic of communities, in the lived experiences of Americans, led to deep division over slavery as a political issue. They identify party activists in much the same way as we do--they scour the newspapers of their communities for names and build a list of identified activists.

"In Augusta, Whig Party activists were more likely to own slaves and to own bigger and more valuable farms than their Democratic counterparts."

"In Franklin, Democratic and Republican activists were strikingly similar in their relative household wealth, farm size, and farm values, but had different occupational and social profiles, with the Republicans appearing more 'respectable.' "

"In Augusta, Democratic and Whig activists had different occupational and social profiles, with the Whigs appearing more 'respectable.'"

"Staunton newspapers bore visual and textual markings of slavery, as they regularly contained ads for runaway slaves, slave agents, and slave sales."