Humbug? Bah! Altschuler and Blumin and the Riddle of the Antebellum Electorate

Abstract

Contemporary political historians have grown in school of hard knocks. Most active practitioners baby boom generation were scarcely born when Thomas C. Cochran issued his famous critique of the presidential synthesis in American history, justly denouncing then-reigning tendency to conceive nation's past in rigid, four-year increments, punctuated by disconnected national elections.' Since then, we have absorbed gospel of history from bottom up and embraced exciting opportunities to study millions who were overlooked or taken for granted by those who fixated on presidents and congressmen. More recently, rise of women's history and history of racial minorities has put some of us on defensive again, trying to explain why it is important to study an inherently hierarchical activity which women and blacks were so frequently excluded. In prevailing intellectual climate, it is a wonder that politics have continued to be studied at all. Glenn C. Altschuler and Stuart M. Blumin's attack on current studies of antebellum political culture and behavior is thus latest volley in a long-established line of criticism. Their announced purpose is to document how the political engagement of antebellum Americans varied significantly. This is a laudable goal and a useful corrective to perhaps too easy conclusions of recent political historians that antebellum political engagement was uniformly high. Much of their evidence is effectively mobilized to make this point, but authors evidently have a further goal in mind. Instead of merely showing variation in Americans' political engagement (which would include periods of intense and sincere interest as well as periods of cynical detachment, probably varying further across region, class, and party), they attempt to show that detachment politics was virtually rule rather than an intermittent exception. Citing example of nineteenth century's most famous purveyor of humbug, they leave impression that