I had intended to begin my review of this book of essays by recommending that every subscriber to the Journal of the Early Republic read and ponder it. That was before I noticed the list price. Given the price tag, my first recommendation is to try to persuade your college or university library to acquire more than one copy of it. This strongly positive recommendation is not based on a conviction that every essay here provides the last word on its subject, but that the collection exemplifies a powerful and rewarding perspective on antebellum American history with wideranging implications, one that may well help shape a coming generation of scholarship. A salient contribution of the anthology is its demonstration of the international quality of present scholarly innovation in the field of American history. This volume views the century from 1763 to 1863 as united by a competition, often violent, over the domination and exploitation of the North American continent. The acquisition of land and of labor to work it are obviously central to such a perspective. Specific issues (including revolution, slavery, Indian relations, party politics, ideas of liberty, economic fluctuations, and warfare) are viewed as they arise within this context. The individual contributions to the collection exemplify solid, original scholarship. The Atlantic vision of American history, which has been so rewarding for over a generation, is implicitly enlisted by these authors in the service of their approach. Embracing their common perspective by

The Significance of the Frontier in American History

The politics of race in a free and a slave society: Free black issues in the legislatures of antebellum Ohio and Tennessee

................................................................................................................................i Acknowledgments ...............................................................................................................ii Nota Bene ...........................................................................................................................iii Preamble: ..............................................................................................................................

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Of First Principles & Organic Laws

This research focuses on the forms of exclusion that democratizing processes have historically facilitated. The dynamics of democratization often lead political coalitions to change electoral rules to simultaneously extend and constrict the right to vote across different categories of persons, as well as to reinforce existing exclusions. This pattern occurred in all the 'exemplary models' of early democratization, and yet the historical narratives relied on by the comparative democratization literature neglect its exclusionary dimension, and thereby misinform comparative theory building. The dissertation
empirically documents the "dark side of democratization" in the three paradigmatic cases of the United States, the United Kingdom, and France, and develops and tests a theory explaining cross-national and cross-time variation. At key moments in a country's development, political entrepreneurs advance ideas of community belonging for the purpose of securing a governing coalition. When successful the ideas of political community are embedded in new institutions and in public opinion, shaping the expectations of political agents across the political spectrum and resulting in higher costs of coalition-building and political mobilization across categories of people. The exclusions were thereby made resilient to subsequent democratizing processes. The dissertation advances research the role of ideas in social science by focusing on the micro-foundations of democratic exclusion. The model predicts various of political behavior that are integrally important to democratization, and is tested against debates, voting behavior, and correspondence in and outside of parliaments, legislatures, and constitutional conventions. The data draws on archival field work research, multiple datasets of legislator behavior, constituency demographics, and institutional change. These allow for the identification of stable patterns as well as change across time, and supplement a process tracing research design.

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Democratic exclusion. The right to vote in the United States, United Kingdom, and France

The Right to Vote

A long tradition in American political history associates the presidency of Andrew Jackson with the achievement of universal suffrage and the coming of democracy, at least for adult white males. There is some justification for this view, but only in limited senses; for the most part this interpretation has had a deleterious effect on our understanding of political development in the early republic. In particular it has created the belief that relatively few people possessed the right to vote in the early republic, and that therefore mass participation was postponed to the years after 1815. As recently as September 2008 the distinguished historian Jill Lepore could write in the New Yorker that during Washington's presidency only 6 percent of Americans could vote - which admittedly translates into about 15 percent of the free adult population. Sean Wilentz's prize-winning Rise of American Democracy (2005) recognizes that the suffrage was much more widely spread before 1815, but he still builds his interpretation around the assumption that politics did not involve the public at large until the Age of Jackson. Even Alexander Keyssar's illuminating The Right to Vote (2000) and Daniel Walker Howe's excellent What Hath God Wrought (2007) assume that the practice of politics became more democratic in the 1820s because of recent fundamental changes in electoral rules. Such views are explicitly contradicted by the voting data that Philip Lampi has gathered that are now available on the A New Nation Votes website, which confirm the huge expansion of popular participation within two decades or so of the adoption of the United States Constitution.1This expansion was possible because the right to vote had always been extraordinarily widespread - at least among adult white males - even before the country gained its independence. During the colonial period, the right to vote for the lower house of colonial legislatures had been defined in traditional British terms: Only people who had freehold landed property sufficient to ensure that they were personally independent and had a vested interest in the welfare of their communities could vote. That qualification normally applied to men who were heads of households, since women were almost by definition dependent, but the right could extend to widows who had become responsible for the family property. Some colonies excluded propertied people whose civic commitment they suspected - recent arrivals, members of minority religious sects, and racial groups deemed unacceptable. But those most generally excluded were laborers, tenant farmers, unskilled workers, and indentured servants, all of whom were considered to lack a "stake in society," a permanent interest in the community, and the wherewithal to withstand corruption.2In Britain property qualifications increasingly restricted the number qualified to vote. Whereas over 20 percent of adult males had enjoyed the franchise around 1700, population growth and the increasing concentration of wealth reduced the proportion to 17.2 percent by 1754, continuing down to 12.7 percent in England and Wales by the 1820s.3By contrast, the abundance and availability of land in North America meant that large numbers of colonists satisfied similarly denned requirements. This was especially true where the requirement was expressed in terms of acreage rather than value, as was customarily the case in the southern colonies: It was much easier to acquire (and to measure) 50 acres than land worth £50 either at sale or in annual rents. Six colonies also allowed alternative qualifications to freehold ownership in the form of personal property or payment of taxes, opening the suffrage to owners of urban property, and even to those prosperous farmers who rented their land or held it on some form of leasehold.4Consequently, as early as the 1 720s the suffrage was uniquely wide in the colonies. Virginia reputedly had the most restrictive franchise, with fewer than half the free white males qualified to vote, but a recent calculation raises the figure to two-thirds at midcentury, declining slightly thereafter. …

The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787-1828

The Nullification crisis has frequently been misunderstood because too much emphasis has been placed on South Carolina and the dramatic events of 1832–33. The broader perspective presented here reveals that not just South Carolina but the whole South (except the border states) turned against federal authority in the 1820s, driven by economic discontents and anxieties about maintaining control of the South's racial minorities. In 1828, however, this rebellious outlook found political satisfaction when Andrew Jackson and his supporters took control in Washington and proceeded to redress most of the South's grievances, including, in 1832, the difficult issue of the protective tariff. As a result, the rest of the South stood aside when South Carolina obstructed federal revenue laws, and South Carolina escaped from the crisis only by accepting a settlement that gave it a nominal victory while, in reality, restoring to Northern protectionists some of the advantages they had lost in the settlement of 1832. The i...

The nullification crisis, southern discontents, and the American political process

Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793-1821

THE formation of national political parties in the Jacksonian era is most fashionably described from the point of view of the politicians who formally directed the process. The story usually tells how politicians, in their quest for office and power, developed organizational machinery capable of winning elections in their various states, while at the national level they formed alliances with powerful political leaders in other states whose cooperation could enable them to win control of the presidency. Political issues are assumed to have been largely irrelevant to this process, partly because the political strife of the 1820s is considered to have been a contest of ambitious personalities rather than of issues and partly because it is now almost axiomatic that American political parties are catchall electoral machines designed essentially for nominating and electing candidates to office. Similarly, the attitudes and interests of the electorate are thought to have had little influence on party formation, since the politicians had apparently mastered the techniques of winning votes and could therefore lead their constituents. These assumptions have, if anything, been strengthened by recent studies of Jacksonian voting behavior, for these usually emphasize that the electorate divided along ethnic and cultural lines and was largely uninfluenced by the political debates and power struggles of the politicians. Leading historians of party formation accordingly have felt justified in ignoring political issues and the responses of the electorate and in slighting the importance of ideology and constituencies, even though they have run the risk of divorcing the growth of a political party from its immediate historical environment.,

The Role of Voters and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio, 1824

By the 1840s a far, far greater proportion of the adult white male population of the United States voted regularly than had done so fifty years earlier. This significant change, we know, owed less to alterations in suffrage law, since the franchise was already broadly available in most states by 1789, than to the increase in the number of polling stations and, even more, to the growing interest of the electorate in politics.1 So much seems certain, but at what precise moments did the decisive extensions of the voting habit occur? Was there a sudden major surge of interest, for example, with the introduction of the nationwide, evenly balanced Second Party System in the late 1830s? Or had the increase come about incrementally, with a succession of minor expansions, each extending the range of popular involvement? Over twenty years ago J. R. Pole, Richard P. McCormick, and David Hackett Fischer demonstrated that at times far more men voted during the Jeffersonian era than earlier writers had assumed; and, on the whole, these moments of high voter turnout coincided with the climaxes of intense party competition between Federalists and Republicans.2 Yet what happened after such periods of greater involve-

Donald J. Ratcliffe

Papers

The Right to Vote and the Rise of Democracy, 1787-1828

The nullification crisis, southern discontents, and the American political process

Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793-1821

The Role of Voters and Issues in Party Formation: Ohio, 1824

Voter Turnout in Early Ohio