Politics, Society, and the Narrative of American Democracy

Abstract

With characteristic precision and flair, Robert H. Wiebe recently defined the core of antebellum political historiography: Not only did everybody participate, but everybody participated.''I Here is the emblematic -and, we claim, paradigmatic statement, and it has been our purpose in the essay to begin to interrogate it. What brought white (who, as Wiebe notes and as Jean Harvey Baker emphasizes in her commentary, fell well short of constituting the entire population) to the ballot box? Beyond voting, what was the content and meaning of political participation, and how deep and pervasive was the engagement of people's minds in affairs of party and state? We believe these questions are good and necessary-good because address in fundamental ways the actual practice of democratic politics in the ongoing lives of American people, necessary because have not been raised extensively and systematically elsewhere. On the latter claim we have been challenged by our commentators. Norma Basch suggests that we have reductively swept away the rich complexities and diverse tensions that punctuate the literature and that existing disclaimers and ... take the steam out of many of [our] contentions. However, it is our view that, in the very works she cites, the disclaimers and qualifiers give way to rather sweeping claims of an extensively and intensively engaged electorate. William E. Gienapp, for example, acknowledges antiparty and antipolitician sentiments, but he argues that they generally did not lead to lasting cynicism about the political system or to widespread apathy. . . . Expression of cynicism during this period for the most part lacked conviction. Indeed, faith in the efficacy of politics remained unshaken, and, especially after the party realignment of the mid-1850s, men again found purpose in politics and enthusiastically entered the battle. With respect to Gienapp's and most other political historians' work, we do not believe that calling the engaged electorate nearly a paradigm overstates the case, and we can only ask that readers of this journal peruse the works Basch cites and decide for themselves.2