Invisible Sovereign: Imagining Public Opinion from the Revolution to Reconstruction

Abstract

In Invisible Sovereign Mark G. Schmeller notes that although historians have not ignored public opinion, no book-length studies and few scholarly articles on the subject exist. Historians who study the topic often complain that nonspecialists do not use the concept carefully and precisely and therefore fail to learn from the methods and ideas of public opinion scholars. Schmeller's observations prompted me to recall my book Beware the People Weeping (1982), to which I blithely appended the subtitle “Public Opinion and the Assassination of Abraham Lincoln.” While the book generally received positive reviews as the first work about Abraham Lincoln's death by an academic historian, several critics asked what I meant by the term public opinion and how I had measured it. Just because I had utilized a large number of newspapers, could I really claim to understand how public opinion affected the pursuit, trial, and punishment of the Lincoln assassins?