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Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic
Edited by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher
Through a broad collection of essays, Pasley, Robertson, and Waldstreicher in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic attempt to analyze and interpret the formation of United States government and politics from a “top down, from the bottom up, and perhaps especially from the middle out in every direction” (18). The authors in this work all resolve to balance the focus between the larger than life Founding Fathers and other elites who influenced politics and the masses who shaped the country as the local, state, regional and national levels (2-3). Thus, the authors challenge the notion of separate political and social constructions of government, developing the concepts of “political culture” (6-8), as well as “cultural politics” (9-10). In the introduction, the objective of this text is made clear: the articles are “more and less cultural in orientation, in recognition of the fact that current debates reflect more the division between social history and ‘founders’ or high political history that any sustained or rigorous discussions about the relative importance of policy, institutions, ideas and cultural practices’ (11). The essays are successful in showing that elite and everyday politics co-existed and sometimes even collided and contradicted.
The text provides a variety of topics showing the connection between elite politics of the Founding Fathers and how those without direct access carved out spaces for themselves to influence and assert their voice. In the first article written by Pasley, “The Cheese and Words,” a giant gift of Cheshire Cheese was sent to Thomas Jefferson from the Baptists of that town to try and win political favor (32). As made clear by this discussion on Mammoth Cheese, “popular politics in the early republic was necessarily creative, adaptive, and variable” (39). Pasley uses the gift of cheese to show how this was not some out-of-the-box suggestion but rather fits into the context of the political avenues available to those people at the time, showing this by analyzing songs and regional practices (39-41). In the third article, “Why Thomas Jefferson and African Americans Wore their Politics on Their Sleeves,” Waldstreicher explores the politics of clothing. He shows how Thomas Jefferson himself was aware of the effect his clothing had, and used it for political purposes in the way he chose to dress up or down (84). Yet, he also shows the political context of slave clothing and slave labor to make clothing, which was largely left out of discourse surrounding the self-sufficiency of the United States (87). I appreciated how yaremenkolena tied in the discussion of clothing to Closer to Freedom, which also showed the ways marginalized people gained power, although in a different context.
Some of the articles presented in the text actually surprised me. In the fourth article, “Women and Party Conflict in the Early Republic,” Rosemarie Zagarri showed how women were able to informally participate in politics. I found it interesting that women actually were sought after for their opinion on candidate’s virtue and moral character (110). Women were able to establish themselves as a powerful constituency despite their lack of voting rights. As yaremenkolena stated, the book shows “a demonstration of the influence of politically less powerful citizens at the grassroots level to effect change” and I think is greatly illustrated in the chapter. In the ninth article, “Beyond the Myth of Consensus,” Saul Cornell demonstrates that the second amendment was not accepted as a natural inclusion or addition to the Constitution. The second amendment was added to protect from internal and external threats, some factions were concerned about a militia of citizens being used to establish a tyranny (255-256). Yet, something I never considered was the context of civic duty in which this amendment was created (258). Today, the idea that citizens would obviously defend their nation when called upon is separated from the duties of being a citizen, such as serving jury duty (258). All in all, the work shows the continuity of mass participation in politics rather than a rise of everyday people involving in politics evident in recent American history.
After reading the text, I think that this format was actually a great delivery for these ideas. A compilation of essays from various authors shows the multiplicity of views from this period. In this work, the editors effectively and cohesively demonstrated their thesis through the very different works within. The portrayal of bottom-up sources to show their part in developing political culture and cultural politics would have been less striking had this been a single work. This gave flexibility to show a variety of examples, sources, and methods to essentially prove their case.