Pasley – Popular Politics in Early America

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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.

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.

Tag: Pasley

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

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