Jefferson – Popular Politics in Early America

October 29, 2013

Determining Intent

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Dr. Shrout said once in class that the hardest thing for a historian to determine is intent. Sara C. Fanning attempts to do just this in “The Roots of Early Black Nationalism: Northern African Americans’ Invocations of Haiti in the Early Nineteenth Century”. Fanning’s thesis is basically that freed black men and women in the north were inspired by the success that Haiti had as an independent black nation after their violent revolution. Fanning uses examples of this success in Haiti as evidence to further her point. By doing so though, she must try to determine the intentions of many people.

Fanning dedicates a section to analyzing why Thomas Jefferson cut ties with Haiti. She surmises that it may have been done to secure Louisiana and Florida from Napoleon or because he was upset that the Haitians shared his same republican ideologies and philosophical outlook. It is really impossible to ever know for sure. Yet, Fanning’s detailed thought process is shown and is fairly convincing.

Throughout the rest of the article, Fanning makes statements that imply that she is determining intent. She says, “they hoped…” and “African Americans who learned of the freedom afforded to black men would have looked upon Haiti as…”. Some of her conclusions about intentions are more reasonable than others. When she discusses how many of the African Americans who immigrated to Haiti returned home, she argues that it was because of cultural differences and problems with Haiti. While this reasoning is fairly sound, it struck me as a little bit of her trying to reason and justify her argument, as opposed to a more concrete answer or evidence.

Fanning does a thorough job of pointing out what made Haiti appealing to African Americans, but I felt that she lacked any real evidence of African Americans noting how they were inspired by Haiti. While I understand that the basis of her argument was that the African Americans surely noticed what was going on in Haiti, it may have been helpful if she had found more concrete sources backing this up. Overall, Fanning’s article is an excellent hypothesis with great details and ideas. It just contained a little bit too much assuming for me. Then again, without some assumptions a historian would struggle to write much of anything. So, in the end, I guess I’ll give Fanning my stamp of approval (whatever that may mean to her).

Hank Updegrave (New York State) raises some interesting questions in his post. His point about Fanning not paying enough attention to the early instability in Haiti is very valid. He brings up the issues of those who returned after going to Haiti and the inevitable tension between black people and those of a mixed race. This is a solid point that I had not thought about. Fanning definitely should have attempted to explain how African Americans would have seen these issues as she did about so many other things. So now, after reading Henry’s blog, I’m back on the fence about Fanning.

October 28, 2013

Missing the Followthrough

I’d like to echo Max’s critique of Fanning’s evidence and the actions of Haitian officials and the acceptance of Haitian ideology in the black population of the United States. Additionally, given that her first words promised to show that “Haiti played a far greater role in cultural and political activities of northern free blacks than historians previously credited,” I think she failed to connect the actions of northern free blacks and Haiti in an adequate manner. While her examples of attempts to encourage the emigration and selected political activities of northern free blacks offer support to her point, the paper lacked the requisite context needed to situate the importance of those events in the larger political actions of the free black community in the northern United States. Answering simple questions like did free blacks immigrate to other nations in in the 1820s or was Haiti the prime destination of immigration would have helped situate her argument a lot more for those unfamiliar with the specific history surrounding this issue.

One of the things I did enjoy in her paper was her engagement with the merchants and sailors. I thought it was an engaging piece because it showed that even white merchants were pushing for Haitian recognition. However, she fails to connect it to the actions of the northern free black community of the United States. While she provided examples of how American laws were affecting the lives of free blacks such as the case in South Carolina and how Haitian opposition to said laws may have garnered respect, the connection is tentative at best.Additionally, I thought the information presented on Jefferson after he became President and his treatment of Haiti was presented well, but I wish she had taken a stronger stance on the issue. While she provided the opinions of various scholars who described the varying reasons behind Jefferson’s decision, she refused to engage the historiography in a way that challenged the flaws in the position that Jefferson’s treatment of Haiti stemmed from his desire to improve diplomatic relations with France. Instead she offered the exceedingly strong statement, “ But he may have had less generous motives” and proceeds to argue that Jefferson’s attention to the Haitian issue was “a testament to Haiti’s politicization of African Americans.” Without offering an argument against the other historians she cites, her conclusion is invalid. It is not a testament to Haiti’s politicization of African Americans if Jefferson was seeking to appease France. The consistent theme in this paper was a failure to connect the actions of Haitian actors to political manifestations in the northern black community.

September 5, 2013

Religion, newspapers, and cheese: political divides in Jeffersonian America

What significance could a lump of cheese have in revealing important political boundaries in early America? Quite a lot, according to Jeffrey Pasley, if one analyzes the origins, inspirations, and reactions to the colossal dairy creation. To Jefferson, the cheese represented the essence of America: independent, hard-working farmers fighting for a voice in government. To the Federalists, who mockingly named the creation the “Mammoth Cheese”, it was a humorous display of Jeffersonian backwardness and frivolity. Jefferson proudly held it in the East Room of the White House (non-coincidentally nicknamed the “Mammoth Room”) for public consumption for over a two-year period, and no dairy product has replicated its political impact yet.
The origin of the cheese, the western Massachusetts town of Cheshire, reveals much about a vocal faction of the Jeffersonian coalition. As Pasley points out, not only did these farmers resent the snobbish Federalists of urban New England, they also felt their Baptist beliefs were under attack by encroachments on their religious freedom. The vocal religious leader of the “cheesemongers” was priest John Leland (appropriately nicknamed the “Mammoth Priest”), who argued that Jefferson was a Christian hero “greater than Solomon”. This hyperbole is not as shocking as it is ironic; Jefferson was a devotee to Deist philosophy. However, it reveals how little Jefferson’s religious beliefs had to do with his celebrity amongst the cheesemongers; they instead admired Jefferson for his devotion to religious liberty and the yeoman ideal.
I first disagreed with Alex’s claim that the Federalist philosophy “wished nothing more than for the rich to maintain the upper hand in society and for the poorer peoples of meeker status to be barred from participating in national politics” after reading Webster’s argument in People Power. However, after examining the Federalist news response to the Cheshire Cheese, this sharp assertion appears much closer to the truth. The Federalist newsmen of the day, viewing themselves as Stewart or Colbert-esque satirists, had a clear antipathy for the cheesemongers, so far as to calling them “simpletons”, “vermin”, and “Jacobin encomium-mongers”. The latter insult was a clear reference to Jefferson’s support for the French Revolution, which many Federalists saw as a chaotic, orderless catastrophe. Nonetheless, the Cheshire cheesemongers took pride in their illustrious new nicknames. While the Federalists used the word “mammoth” as a term of barbarism and savagery, the Jeffersonians accepted it as a populist anthem: the idea that the “mammoth” populace will overwhelm the elites.
While I admire the populist dedication of the Cheshire dairy farmers to their hero Thomas Jefferson, I simply cannot argue that their situation was an accurate representation of American rural populism. The social and religious circumstances of the Cheshire township make them closer to a Republican interest group than a normal farming community. For example, the 1800 race for Massachusetts governor saw 175 votes go to the Republican candidate in Cheshire, with none going to the Federalist. While many farming areas may often have seen drastic victories for Republican candidates, there logically would be a measurable minority vote in favor of the Federalists. The lack of voting dissent in Cheshire weakens the argument that the Mammoth Cheese was the ‘American farmer’s’ response to Jefferson’s victory. For the evidence supplied, such a claim would overstate the cheese’s significance in the Jeffersonian age of popular politics.

September 4, 2013

The Different Ways to Tell a History

After reading the introduction to Beyond the Founders and discussing it in class on Tuesday, I was very interested to see how the rest of our readings would approach writing about history. Martha Hodes’ “Four Episodes in Re-creating a Life” and Jeffrey L. Pasley’s “The Cheese and the Words: Popular Political Culture and Participatory Democracy in the Early American Republic” both wrote about early American history effectively, but with vastly different methodologies.

Martha Hodes’ exploration into the vaguely narrated life of Eunice Richardson was a bold piece that attempted to fill in some historical blanks. While some of her pieced in evidence seemed far-fetched (such as, “Miss Clara is the same madcap as ever, Eunice wrote of her young daughter in 1864, invoking the common Caymanian manner of address. Had Eunice just received a letter from the sea captain, asking after the children, the unwittingly echoed that West Indian turn of phrase in a letter to her mother?”), the thought process and research that she put into the piece are interesting, creative, and thorough. She followed the story as far as she could, as she traveled throughout the country and visiting the same towns and buildings that Eunice once knew. While it’s hard to say one way or another if Hodes’ thesis has sufficient support, this type of historical writing and research interests me very much. Hodes used creativity in her piece that I have rarely seen before in a history class. Writing about Thomas Jefferson (who filed and recorded his prolific writing so well) would not require this sort of reconnaissance work. Yet, as we talked about in class and AJ Pignone wrote extensively about in his blog, the best way to get a full history of a time period is through a careful combination of the major players and those who were more silenced. As AJ says, “history doesn’t come in squares and circles, it takes many different shapes and sizes, so why should we look at the early republic any differently?” (AJ Pignone, Olney, MD). “Four Episodes” is certainly a different shape and is critical to retelling and interpreting history in the best, most accurate way.

Jeffrey Pasley’s article about the famous (or infamous, as Federalist sympathizers would say) mammoth cheese from Chesire, Massachusetts told the story of early American politics in a way that hardly mentioned the founders. Pasley made some very interesting points about how common people worked to have a political voice. Whether it was through cheese, bread, newspapers, parades, toasts, or votes, Pasley discussed how American factions operated and thrived before organized political parties. I found Pasley’s points about newspapers very remarkable as he writes, “After 1800, no serious political activist thought that anything could be accomplished without newspaper support in as many places as possible, and at times they equated the maintenance of a newspaper with the actual existence of a party, faction, or movement” (41). There was then good information and research showing how newspapers (such as The Sun) influenced and shaped local and national politics. His statements on newspapers stress that they were just as influential and important to politics as Jefferson and Washington were. This is another example of how different shapes and pieces of the puzzle are necessary to get the full history of something. While certainly not as widely read as a biography about Benjamin Franklin would be, articles like Hodes’ and Pasley’s are crucial to the historical tale.