The House and Senate in the 1790s: Petitioning, Lobbying, and Institutional Development

Abstract

This collection contains ten fairly disconnected articles revolving around the general topic announced in the book's title. Six of the essays remain comfortably within the bounds of what we might call traditional political history, that is, a history focused on elections, debates among the founders, or the actions of legislators. With a few exceptions those mostly descriptive essays will probably be of interest only to specialists in the history of formal politics in the early republic. Essays by Jeffrey L. Pasley, Christine A. Desan, Marion Nelson Winship, and the team of Richard R. John and Christopher J. Young, however, make far grander interpretive claims and strive to expand the boundaries of political history. In those four essays readers will find some new and provocative paths through the well-trod ground of 1790s political history. Pasley's article offers the first extended investigation of lobbying in the new nation. He argues convincingly that other historians of lobbying have failed to notice the phenomenon in the early republic because “it was nearly invisible, embedded as it was in the social and political mores of the late eighteenth century” (p. 72). Here Pasley draws on the recent and growing literature on gentility and the elite social world of the “republican court” that powerfully shaped the politics of the 1790s. Effective lobbying in that decade occurred not in what would traditionally be regarded as political arenas, but rather during parlor conversations and at dinner parties in people's homes, in the supposedly private realms of leisure and sociability. Pasley's article thus reinforces what recent work on the political role of elite women and the republican court over which they presided has demonstrated, that the distinction between the private and the public, or the social and the political, often obscures more than it reveals.