Republican Court Research Articles

“A Wife and a Mother Has No Business to Be So Well Dressed”: Gender, Class, and Dynasty in the Revolutionary Republic

Abstract: This essay takes Angelica Schuyler—whose surname, following her husband’s, became Church in 1784—as a case study in the intersection between class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship in the revolutionary American republic. It argues that she and women like her held a distinctively dynastic attitude towards kinship, which shaped the norms of sociability that governed the emerging national state during the first decades of the federal government. Like other wealthy, well-connected, white women in this period, Schuyler Church disavowed the popular ideology of female domesticity and asserted power through the public display of feminine sexuality. The essay builds on studies of the so-called “republican court” in the United States, as well as scholarship on elite women’s role as powerbrokers in British and French society, to draw out the ways that their gendered experience of sexuality and family life interacted with strategies for reproducing and accumulating power. Like all other ruling classes, that of the United States depended upon women. That dependence drove the shifting political salience of gender and sexuality in the early republic.

First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role by Jeanne E. Abrams

Reviewed by: First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role by Jeanne E. Abrams Cassandra Good (bio) First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role. By Jeanne E. Abrams. (New York: New York University Press, 2018. Pp. 312. Cloth, $28.95.) America's founding fathers have long been the focus of biographers, but over the past few decades, scholars have used the insights of women's history to examine the lives of the founders' wives. Jeanne E. Abrams's First Ladies of the Republic draws together recent historiography on women and politics, biographies, and published correspondence to create the first monograph to address America's earliest first ladies collectively. Abrams argues that Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolley Madison all contributed to the development of the role of first lady, each building on her predecessor. Telling their stories together allows Abrams to show clearly how the women influenced one another and identify each woman's unique contributions. It is clear that all three women had significant political influence, but Abrams notes that they all prioritized their domestic roles. This is not contradictory; rather, Abrams contends that we need to understand the "key players" of the era "as a family unit rather than as individuals" (7). The book proceeds chronologically, with chapters focused on the [End Page 563] three women in order. With the longest career and the largest corpus of surviving correspondence, Abigail Adams appropriately has two chapters devoted to her while Martha and Dolley each have one. Abrams briefly addresses each woman's upbringing and education, marriage, family tragedies and difficulties, and political careers. Her focus is squarely on the women's political influence, which is helpful in keeping the book from becoming overly long. However, it means that she glosses over some of the dynamics of the family that she argues are so intertwined with politics. Abrams's chapter on Martha Washington argues more forcefully than many previous scholars have for Martha's political role. Martha's support for George and involvement in the American Revolution, Abrams argues, trained her for her political role as first lady. She successfully established social spaces for politicians and their spouses in New York and later Philadelphia. Her drawing rooms became "the first political salon in the United States" (73) and it was Martha—not Abigail or Dolley—who was first referred to as "Presidentess" (93). After George's retirement, Martha remained politically engaged and, after his death, was more openly partisan than ever before. Throughout this chapter, Abrams also emphasizes Martha's friendship with Abigail Adams as both an emotional bond and a political apprenticeship. Indeed, the first of Abrams's two chapters on Abigail Adams is subtitled "The Long Apprenticeship to the White House." Abrams notes that Abigail was "involved in public life from almost the beginning of her marriage" (103) and thus had a decades-long "apprenticeship" before becoming first lady. She held public roles during the American Revolution, serving on a committee to question suspected loyalist women and as a vote counter in the 1780 Massachusetts election. She was an astute political observer and sharply reflected on women's rights, European politics, and the quickly unraveling events of the new republic. As wife of the vice president, she took on a full social schedule and built alliances with the capital's politicians and their wives. As first lady, Abigail reached the apex of her public profile and political influence. Her version of the so-called republican court was "more frugal and somewhat more austere" than Martha's (165). Many recognized Abigail as a close advisor to John; indeed, some newspapers criticized her for it. She was loyal and supportive of John's decisions, even, Abrams notes perceptively, when he changed course. Abigail was also recognized for her partisan political influence, exercised both in writing [End Page 564] and through social interactions. As the party split widened, Abigail took sides, causing Albert Gallatin to criticize her for being "Mrs. President not of the United States … but of a faction" (182). Like her husband and son, however, Abigail...

First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role by Jeanne E. Abrams

Reviewed by: First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role by Jeanne E. Abrams Jacqueline Beatty First Ladies of the Republic: Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, Dolley Madison, and the Creation of an Iconic American Role. By Jeanne E. Abrams. (New York: New York University Press, 2018. 328 pp. Illustrations, notes, index. $28.95.) In First Ladies of the Republic, Jeanne Abrams details the ways in which her three subjects—Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and Dolley Madison—fashioned the position of the first lady in American political life. Though the term "first lady" is anachronistic, Abrams asserts its usefulness due to the formative influence her three subjects had on the position. Drawing from extensive records of correspondence, Abrams demonstrates that each of these figures had a unique approach to their posts, navigating their duties in a way that matched their personalities and the politics of their husbands' presidencies. Notably, the first first ladies "created a role that was uniquely American in both style and substance," a purposeful, marked departure from the standards of contemporary European courts (5). Each woman left her own imprint on the office while learning from the others' experiences. In so doing, their work shaped and defined their husbands' presidencies and the political world of the early American republic. Martha Washington served as a model first lady with no example to follow. At first reluctant in her position, Martha maintained a dogged focus on exemplifying a republican ideology in the construction of these sociopolitical spaces. Her calm temperament and modest personality provided the necessary foundation for the republican court. Abigail Adams, along with her husband, John, receive added attention in Abrams's tome—two chapters, as opposed to the one that both Washington and Madison receive—emphasizing the special relationship the two famously enjoyed. Abrams characterizes the Adams' marriage as a "long apprenticeship to the White House" (101). Abigail's intellect set her tenure as first lady apart from both Martha's and Dolley's, as she followed international politics and advised her husband in such matters. Dolley Madison was the "republican queen," adopting a style quite different from her predecessors (10). Representing a new femininity that was above partisanship, Dolley's sociability, relative youth, and comfort in the spotlight made Dolley, in Abrams's estimation, the "most successful" architect of this uniquely American political style (229). Complementing work by Catherine Allgor and Rosemarie Zagarri, First Ladies of the Republic presents a good synthesis of the field. Its well-written and accessible prose will likely appeal to a popular audience as well. Abrams's argument draws much-needed attention to the ways in which each of these figures was dedicated to preserving the personal and political legacies of her husband. Collectively, they viewed their intertwined domestic and patriotic obligations as essential in the establishment of the new nation. They prioritized their positions as republican wives in support of their powerful husbands but recognized that they played an important political role in setting the tone for each administration and bolstering its effectiveness. Though they existed in a liminal political space, Abrams's three subjects left a remarkable impression on the office of the presidency itself. Abrams's work, though heavily reliant upon canonical scholarship in the field, finds its most important contribution in defining the ways in which these women infused their marital partnerships with political power and in her [End Page 223] argument about these three women's collective, rather than individual, influence on this critical American role. Jacqueline Beatty York College of Pennsylvania Copyright © 2019 The Historical Society of Pennsylvania

Re-reintroducing the Republican Court

Re-reintroducing the Republican Court François Furstenberg (bio) and David Waldstreicher (bio) Keywords Republican Court, Early U.S. politics, Women's role in politics, Feminist historiography “Let us imagine a space for where femmes savantes might speak freely about politics with politicians, art with artists, gentility with gentlemen, and even the theory and practice of domesticity if they so chose.’ “ “Republican Court—the focus of society for the new governing class.” “Such an institution did exist. . . .” In a series of conference papers delivered in the mid-1990s to the early 2000s, Fredrika J. Teute and David S. Shields performed an act of historical recovery in front of an audience of early American historians. The papers were a signal contribution to scholars seeking to gauge women’s role in early national politics and public life. Ranging across methodological, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries, they opened new vistas by moving beyond the public/private dichotomy that had implicitly structured much historical analysis.1 [End Page 165] Teute and Shields intervened in a conversation then burgeoning about the relevance of the Habermasian public sphere for early Americanists, locating the oft-diffuse concept in time and space. Focusing on the national capital’s “Republican Court” between the last decade of the eighteenth century and the first decade of the nineteenth, they showed that it was a site—and a very material one at that—where women played a central role. Teute and Shields did not stop with that notable contribution, however. They further reinterpreted Jefferson’s presidency from the perspective of the Republican Court as regress rather than progress— anticipating a good deal of scholarship that would similarly break from lingering dispositions inherited from the Progressive historians. They provided a model of creative interdisciplinary collaboration that married archival work, close reading, and deep-cultural contextualization. In drawing their inspiration, they looked not just across the Atlantic to German sociology and French history; they looked back to a forgotten historiography from the mid-nineteenth century, and showed that it knew something most historians in the 1990s did not. And, not least, Shields and Teute showed that such a collaboration, and the salons of the early republic themselves, could best be reintroduced through the performances of their papers as a dialogue—marrying form and argument in an academic paper. Perhaps in part because of their performative dimensions, the papers were never published. Instead, they circulated in the manner of eighteenth-century manuscripts, through private networks of friendship, conversation, and correspondence. For unpublished papers, they had a remarkable influence; references to the papers lie scatted across books and articles published in the first decade of the twenty-first century. For papers that were written twenty years ago, they remain remarkably fresh. They are, of course, anchored in their historiographical moment, but they continue to speak to contemporary issues in the scholarship: the state of feminist historiography; the reevaluation of Federalist-era politics; the opening of early American history toward more international [End Page 166] historiographies; a turn to more material history approaches to the past; the engagement with theater and performance studies; and a recent inward turn toward emotions, sensibility, and novelistic approaches to the past. The editors of this forum have two objectives. The first, and simplest, is to put these papers, as it were, into the printed public sphere, and make them accessible to scholars beyond the aging networks of friendship and correspondence by which they have thus far circulated. Other than to cut a few sections for the sake of redundancy, we have not edited or updated the papers in any way; we wanted them frozen in time, anchored to their historiographical moment. But we did not want them to be mere museum pieces. Our second objective was to use these essays as a way of provoking some reflection on the current state of the scholarship. Instead of asking the authors to revise the original papers, we asked Toby Ditz, Sophia Rosenfeld, Jason Shaffer, Amy Henderson, and Andrew R. L. Cayton to respond to them from their professional and disciplinary perspectives. They reflect not just on the conference papers themselves, and on the issues they raised when they were first presented, but also on...

The Republican Court and the Historiography of a Women’s Domain in the Public Sphere

One of the more useful recent developments in feminist historiography has been the turn away from the simple binarism of public/ private in discussions of the social activities of early modem women in western cultures. In particular Dena Goodman's work on the salons of ancien regime France has recovered the public work of women in the private institutions of sociability that operated in distinction to court and state.1Goodman's understanding of the public sphere is Habermasian in that it understands the public to have been a highly ramified ideal, entailing the antique concept of publicum as the depersonalized authority of state, the idea of public as a discursive space in which the vox populi can speak in distinction to the dictates of the state, and as an array of private institutions-clubs, coffeehouses, tea tables, salons-that constituted an autonomous region of political and cultural power. Women operated differently in light of the different forms of public in which they participated. One could make a quick and crude distinction: Women of the court in the absolutist public sphere exerted influence through secrecy, intrigue, and deception; one might say they were feminized and privatized. The salonnieres, in contrast, molded public opinion by sponsoring and participating in a liberty of conversation; they were publicizers of philosophy and maimers.What does Goodman's renovation of the understanding of women's public roles in France have to do with the historiography of the early republic? It permits us to question the all-powerful dominion of the domesticity thesis in the historiography of women.2The domesticity thesis holds that republican ideology entirely constrained woman's work within the world of the private household. Goodman's work permits us to imagine for early America a fully formed woman's domain in the public sphere, an arena of expression where domesticity does not restrict communication, or republican ideology limit women's roles to virtuous daughter, wife, and mother. She gives us as an alternative to the practice of the salon. The great salons were superintended by women who set mies for conversation, enforcing politeness by wit and quashing incivility with charm. The salonnieres promoted a colloquy between persons of state, savants, artists, and women of taste. The company was exclusive, but not so much in tenus of class or nationality as in terms of talent and conversational skill. The conversation of the salon became the crucible in which the ideas of politicians and philosophers were tried.Let us imagine for early America a space where femmes savantes might speak freely about politics with politicians, art with artists, gentility with gentlemen, and even the theory and practice of domesticity if they so chose. It should have the cosmopolitanism of the French salon-with its +heterosociability-yet there should be something more, an interest in forming a civil sorority found in certain British women's circles. We can visualize a domain of private society that, while permitting mixed conversation, also enabled women to project public concerns-to reform manners, cultivate taste, and critique culture. For the sake of argument, let us also conceive that this domain, or community, is organized so that it can project its views throughout the continent, say by means of a network of subsidiaiy provincial salons. Or let us be more concrete: Let us imagine Abigail Adams not in the meditative solitude of her household in Braintree, but at the center of a metropolitan company of men and especially women of learning, sensibility, and taste. And let us imagine this company actively publicizing an ideal of civility.Such an institution did exist during the final decade of the eighteenth century in America. It was called the Republican Court. Until the rise of the progressive historians early in this century, the Republican Court and its doings were matters of common knowledge among literate Americans. …

The Court of Abigail Adams

The Court of Abigail Adams David S. Shields and Fredrika J. Teute Keywords Abigail Adams, John Adams, Martha Washington, Levees, George Washington, Public opinion Bluestocking—middle-aged Protestant townswoman prone to organizing benevolent networks, promoting education, and monitoring the improvement of manners. Known for a taste in reading, she cultivates sense rather than scandal in conversation, has the mastery of at least one polite art (singing, playing an instrument, drawing, amateur theatricals, dancing, or recitation), and dresses stylishly, but not extravagantly. She is the capable mistress of her townhouse, a complaísant hostess in her drawing room, and a sociable companion in public. Whiggish in politics, she belongs to the town gentry, but manifests a concern for women of all ranks and conditions. On May 6, 1796, Abigail Adams arrived in Philadelphia to assume the duties of first lady. John Adams had been president since March 4 and had taken up residence in the house vacated by the Washingtons, a place in disarray, furnished with remnant and broken chairs, devoid of dishes, and too dirty to welcome visitors. Expert at household management, having years of experience during her husband’s long overseas absences, Abigail took two days to put the place in order, then began the inaugural levées signaling her assumption of the role as hostess of the Republican Court. Since the social season had passed, she did not have to hold until autumn the traditional weekly Friday drawing room that Martha Washington had established in 1788. Instead, she held company dinners and visitations, capped with a July 4 general fête for the entire governing class—a costly entertainment begun by President Washington and a source of anxiety to Abigail. It was an event on too public a scale, too bibulous (two quarter casks of wine and spirits drained), too ravenous (200 pounds of cake gobbled), and too loud. The sociable intimacy, the mannerliness, and the domesticity of the drawing room were lacking. [End Page 227] Republican Court—the focus of society for the new American governing class. Inaugurated by Martha Washington in New York in 1788, it operated as a private “drawing room” held on Friday evenings at the president’s house. Superintended by women, it promoted conversation among the various actors in public life, provided a place of reception for diplomats and visitors, promoted a style of manners that demonstrated in the eyes of the world a standard of civility, yet avoided the ostentatious display of aristocratic and beau monde fashion typical of the European royal courts. When Abigail Adams assumed control of the Republican Court, her experiences and aims differed from those of her predecessor. Martha Washington had never experienced first-hand the royal courts. Abigail had experienced court life in London and Paris. As the consort to the ambassador of the United States, Abigail had attended a levée with George III, Queen Charlotte, and the princesses, and had endured the long wait for the royal progress down the receiving line. The formality of the reception and the chilly behavior of the female royals inspired a deep personal distaste for the ceremoniousness and hauteur of the levée. The ostentation of court dress, particularly for women, in both London and Paris irritated that New England republican part of her that cherished simplicity. Yet fashion appealed to her acute aesthetic sense and made her realize that there had to be glamour in civil life. She became an importer of fashionable clothing and material to New England before she became a first lady. As the hostess of the Republican Court she, much more than Martha, was concerned with fashion as an expression of both the sumptuary adequacy of the United States and a register of a kind of modest elegance suited to republican gentility. Finally, Abigail had a substantially broader understanding of the sorts of activities women could undertake in conjunction with public affairs. She became a broker of patronage, and conduit of information to newspapers, a counselor to the president, and a figure whose known influence on the president caused her to be the target of petition and persuasion. These overtures most frequently took place in the Court.1 [End Page 228] Levée—a...

Masculine Republics and “Female Politicians” in the Age of Revolution

Ever since advent of women's history as a specialized discipline, feminists have been debating impact of age of revolutions on women's political participation. In early iterations of this debate, liberals and many Marxist feminists thought that language of natural rights made it possible for excluded groups, including women, to make claims upon state for full citizenship rights. Of course, it would take over a centuiy of collective struggle to hold powers that be to promise of civil and political equality. In contrast, radical feminist position taken by Catherine MacKinnon and Carole Patemen, among others, was that modem liberal regimes were in principle masculine: The new republican citizen and subject of rights was founded on exclusion and by definition, male and white.1Teute and Shields's essays on republican court were, on American side, crucial interventions into this debate, which had, by early 1990s, taken a Habermasian turn. The central utility of Habermas, for all of us, whether we identified ourselves as working within Habermasian camp or simply as in conversation with it, was that it broadened greatly our understanding of what constituted politically relevant modes of communication and places of debate. This was especially true of revisionists like Teute and Shields, who rejected narrowly orthodox readings of Habeimasian public sphere and favored, instead, a more capacious version of what counted as politically relevant. They cite Dena Goodman as an important influence, and this is significant because she sympathetically reread Habermas in light of scholarly work on sociability and manners originating with Norbert Elias and Philippe Aries and elaborated, on British side, by John Pocock, Lawrence Klein, and many others. The result was a new conceptual map of the political, the social, and the in late eighteenth century. This new map reframed debate on gender and politics not least because it upended older, blunt opposition between public and private life, in which private had been taken by historians to mean merely domestic and feminized. Instead, public sphere now embraced many of cultural institutions and spaces that fostered heterosociability, including interior places, like drawing rooms and tea tables, that were especially closely associated with women.2Teute and Shields's focus on republican court and its central institution, salon, was right on money precisely because in Habermasian ternis, salon was part of an intennediate zone where women (and men) projected public concerns. Their work helped launch a vibrant line of scholarship associated with Catherine Allgor, Susan Branson, Rosemary Zagarri, and, for a later period, Elizabeth Varon, among others, on political activities of elite and middle-class white women. The result has been a startling reappraisal.3Although they have since scaled back strongest of their claims, Teute and Shields unequivocally argue in these essays that women of republican court were powerful political agents who helped to forge a national governing class in era stretching from Confederation through presidencies of Jefferson and Madison. And list of what they did was long. They presided over salons that linked capital city to different regions of country and provided spaces of sociability where political partisans could mingle and converse; they fostered marriages that consolidated links between leading political families and regional commercial elites; they managed demands of local constituents; they brokered what federal patronage there was to dispense; and they massaged political news and opinion as it traveled along circuits of communication that linked conversational circles, personal correspondence, unpublished belle lettres, and press.* * * 4Teute and Shields also perceptively argue that there was nothing invisible to their contemporaries, or, for that matter, to later nineteenth century historians, about power of these women, however oblivious to it twentieth-century professional historians may have been. …

Jefferson in Washington: Domesticating Manners in the Republican Court

Sir,THAT women greatly influence the habits and manners of men the history of most civilized nations, as well as our own experience, will sufficiently prove; nay that they often give impressions which continue during life, the observations of every unprejudiced observer will equally substantiate-It will not be denied that an intercourse with our sex polishes the manners, and gives a delicacy to the minds of men; if such is their influence, I am not wrong in supposing that they are capable, and very often give a cast to our political complexion-The superior light in which you have been accustomed to view yourselves, may make this opinion of difficult admission; but on reflection it will be found, that the secret power which we have over you, enables us to fashion you lords of the creation as we please-It is scarcely necessary to resort to times past to prove my position; the history of France will furnish ample testimony in my favour, not only that women have fashioned, but that they have actually governed men. Perhaps the cause of the present revolution of France may be traced to that government; the earl of Chesterfield supposed that women gave men a currency, the history of some of the ancient republics informs us that women formed some of their most renowned patriots-It is a trite saying that a man must ask his wife if he shall be rich; I will extend this idea a little further and say, that a man must ask our sex if he shall be free. The great influence which fashion has, and there are fashionable opinions as well as fashions in dress, may he justly termed tyranny, and that we direct fashion is incontrovertible. If then a fashion is introduced which may serve to lessen the independence of the human mind, by teaching it a humility repugnant to republican principles, am I not just in the inference that we form your political characters; that we can hold out liberty, or slavery to you? So jealous is the government of China, that the customs, manners and fashions of the present day have been from time immemorial, and are preserved with an almost religious veneration, lest a change in them might produce a revolution in their political belief; ought we not to have the same jealousy with regard to our government, and if possible stifle any practices which favour of distinction and inequality, lest we lay a foundation for change in our political order? The above remarks suggested themselves to my mind on reading some reflections in your paper under the different signatures of Mirabeau and Condorcet.The remarks of those writers are but too just, but they have not struck the evil at its root. I conceive that they should have resorted to us as leading instruments of such anti-republican distinctions; witness THE DRAWING ROOM!!No character or place ought to be so sacred in a republican government as to be above criticism. Inviolability and infallibility are royal qualities, which slaves only can comprehend. It is the unalienable prerogative of freemen to scrutinize the conduct of their rulers, and if derogatory to just and equal principles, it ought to meet their severest reprehension. To elevate any character, however meritorious, beyond the level of scrutiny, is to establish a precedent big with the most destructive consequences. It is to lay out the turnpike of slavery. It might be considered as an invasion of female rights, for you, gentlemen, to comment upon the conduct of women, but for one of the same sex to do it, will, perhaps, abate a little of the censure; mine has been the task, and I trust that my fair countrywomen will not persist in giving currency to opinions, destructive of equality, the vital principle of republicanism. Let us fashion men to virtue, but not to the servility and adulation of royalty; let us reverence merit in whatever form or station it may appear to us, but let it be the reverence of dignified and independent minds; let us display our charms to show our individual freedom and consequence, but let us beware of becoming satellites, lest our revolutions should be made permanent, and we deprived of the power of receding. …

The ‘‘Rights of Woman’’ and the Problem of Power

What I value most about David S. Shields and Fredrika J. Teute's series of remarkable essays is the example of scholars willing to investigate important questions in unexpected places and to push our collective conversation in different directions. More specifically, they challenged me, and many others, to rethink our conventional sense of the of woman as a political problem and contemplate its cultural dimensions.Rather than frame the question of women and power in terms of citizenship, Shields and Teute approached it within a social context. Their republican court is a variation on the monarchical courts of early modem Europe as much as the salons of eighteenth-century Paris. Renowned for lavish entertainments, costumes, meals, and patronage of artists, musicians, and the occasional writer, courts were theaters of intrigue where the common goal was access to the body of the princess. In this patriarchal world, women exercised influence but they rarely exercised power. Elizabeth Tudor was the exception that proved the rule. Women mattered to the extent of their attachment to powerful men; young women mattered even more because their bodies, in particular their wombs, mattered. Court politics revolved around marriage, that is, an alliance among rival families. Gossip about women's virginity, fertility, and sexuality facilitated and destroyed dynastic dreams. Fathers, uncles, and brothers chose suitors, negotiated the exchange of property, and dispensed patronage; mothers and other post-menopausal women supervised the transformation of daughters into wives (or mistresses) and eventually mothers. Part of the genius of Hilary Mantel's novels about the Tudor court lies in the detailing of its culture through the eyes of an ambitious, talented, but solitary man trying to navigate the thickets of rival families obsessed with winning the favor of Henry VIII through their daughters.Shields and Teute's court is not the same; it couldn't have been. Yes, marriage potentially united the interests of powerful men through an exchange of women who produced heirs and daughters to marry to other heirs; yes, Martha Washington, Abigail Adams, and others were capable women with husbands who took them seriously. But the centrality of marriage to politics was evaporating. Growing numbers of women and men were redefining marriage as the union of two individuals who chose each other out of love rather than an alliance between patriarchal households. The redefinition of marriage was in turn part of a reorganization of politics. First, power in the United States and to a lesser extent Great Britain was not concentrated in the body of a man, but parceled out to various bodies of men elected by the people. Second, the expansion of literacy and print had long since prompted a redefinition of influence as public persuasion rather than private whispers. And third, the liberal idea of a nation as a collection of citizens united not by loyalty to a prince but by a commitment to equality before the law and collective participation had disentangled states and families. By the 1790s, people around the Atlantic were debating the expansion of rights as the remedy for the all inequalities. Citizenship was about individuals, not families; a court connoted the law, not a king; and alliances bred parties, not sons.Shields and Teute, in other words, were working on the wrong side of history and, indeed, historiography. Rather than valorize the emerging liberal state, they focused on high culture, marriage, family, and implicitly sexuality. As Shields and Teute were presenting their papers, many historians were studying women who asserted their rights and credentials as valuable members of the body politic.1 Others scholars were finding women reading, writing, and conversing with other women and sympathetic men about a wide range of topics. Learning to stand and speak for themselves, educated women entered into civil society, subverting if not always challenging their exclusion from full citizenship. …

Material Matters: Reading the Chairs of the Republican Court

The elegant side chair, with its clean lines, green silk upholstery, and crisp, white paint, was a key piece of furniture in George and Martha Washington's presidential home. Between 1790 and 1797, when they owned this chair and its companion pieces-five more side chairs, twelve armchairs, and a sofa-it defined their best parlor as a drawing room. We know that this chair was made in France; that the Washingtons (along with many of their guests) sat in it; and that today it is reverently preserved at Mount Vernon, where it selves to validate the historic house experience.* 1But can a chair tell us more? Does it offer evidence about the social networks and quest for national identity that drove members of the republican court-as David Shields and Fredrika Teute inform us-to make styles of manners and sociability a topic of political conversation and a cause of anxiety? Collectively, this suite of furniture from Paris heralded the intentions of the Washingtons to conduct their household, and by extension the new nation, along the Enlightenment principles of sociability: the hallmark of a genteel, polite, and civilized society. Yet, when tied to the narrative of nostalgia that Shields and Teute posit as central to the post-bellum formulation of the republican court, the story of these chairs enr iches our understanding of the politics of politeness in the early republic while at the same time illustrating the power of material culture to authenticate historical memory.In drawing our attention to the republican court during the Washington, Adams, and Jefferson administrations, Shields and Teute demonstrate that symbols are powerful stuff. They show how the ritual acts and behaviors performed in Philadelphia and Washington drawing rooms- associated with gentility, politeness, taste, sociability, and civility- helped build a community of interest, fostering the creation of a national, elite identity. With its focus on the culture of the drawing room, their work opened up new historical spaces in which scholars not only explored women's influence on society and politics, or the home's role as a public, political arena, but also opened avenues for understanding how the material world itself-displayed on bodies or within homes- contributed to the formation of that national elite.2Let's return to George and Martha Washington's chairs. Keenly sensitive to the ways his personal and public life set political and aesthetic precedents, Washington paid considerable attention to his furnishings. When Congress rented 3 Cherry Street in New York City to serve as the first official residence, it appointed William Duel and Samuel Osgood to furnish the house. Recognizing the scope of this task, they pitched on their wives for help, according to a niece, as the ladies were likely to do it better.3Catherine Duel and Maria Osgood, seasoned shoppers both, worked with cabinetmaker Thomas Burling to purchase 125 pieces of furniture, from tables and sideboards to wash stands, beds, and 73 chairs.4 Surviving pieces and later inventory descriptions suggest the ladies selected items in the Chippendale style, rather than the latest Adam style then becoming more fashionable in elite London and Paris circles. Although Martha Washington declared the house handsomely furnished, it was evidently not to the standard they had in mind for a drawing room welcoming national leaders and foreign dignitaries. At the first opportunity, the Washingtons supplemented the Congressional purchases with a suite of furniture from France.5The side chair probably came into the Washingtons' possession through this purchase. It bears the maker's mark for Jean-Baptiste Lelarge, a third-generation Parisian master joiner considered among the best chair makers working in the Louis XVI style.6 In that purchase from EleanorFrancois Elie, Compte de Moustier, the French ambassador, Washington acquired the twelve armchairs, six side chairs, and sofa upholstered in a green, flowered silk damask, together with three matching green silk curtains. …

ABA ratings: what do they really measure?

This study reveals the ABA as systematically giving lower ratings to Republican circuit court nominees, although no similar bias appears to exist for district court nominees. The data show how important it is to separate the evidence for circuit and district court nominees. This study fits in with my previous research showing that it is the brightest nominees who face the most difficult time getting confirmed and that the most difficult confirmations involve circuit court nominees. One difference with earlier findings is that the biases seem to be hidden and are worse than looking at the averages across administrations. For example, the oldest Republican nominees, who will not be on the court for long, receive the highest ratings. The reverse is true for Democratic nominees. Similarly, the research explains why Republican nominees tend to get their lowest evaluations from the ABA when the Democrats control the Senate.

Liberal Justice: Judicial Reform in Venezuela’s Courts, 1786–1850

Abstract This article addresses two questions regarding the court system in Venezuela, 1780s–1840s, placed within the context of legal reforms throughout Latin America. First, how accurate is the assumption in the historiography that the disruptions of the independence war and the establishment of a republican government prompted Venezuelans to lose confidence in the courts and virtually stop using them? The investigation finds that republican Venezuelans used the courts as much as or more than their colonial counterparts; the number of court cases dropped during periods of intense violence but then quickly rebounded. Second, did the post-independence judicial system effectively integrate liberal legislative reforms into courtroom standards and practices? The study shows that, while republican court reform failed in some measures, it also succeeded in the following four areas: The courts changed the standards of evidence so that they gave clear preference to the empirical observations of the litigants and witnesses rather than their personal reputations; they reorganized court jurisdictions into an unambiguous hierarchy; they increased transparency; and they adopted constitutionally defined civil liberties of defendants in a manner that equates with modern “due process.” The article contextualizes these changes within legal reforms throughout the Atlantic world that, beginning in the eighteenth century, sought to increase state centralization through establishing the dominance of state legislation over other norms of justice (religious law, tradition, and custom) and creating clear bureaucratic hierarchies. Venezuela’s republican government pursued goals previously aspired to by the colonial government, but accelerated them as it promoted legal equality and rational empiricism.

What Does the American Bar Association Judicial Rating Really Measure?

This study reveals the ABA as systematically giving lower ratings to Republican circuit court nominees, although no similar bias appears to exist for district court nominees. The data shows how important it is to separate the evidence for circuit and district court nominees. This study fits in with my previous research showing that it is the brightest nominees who face the most difficult time getting confirmed. One difference with earlier findings is that the biases seem to be hidden and are worse than looking at the averages across administrations. For example, the oldest Republican nominees, who will not be on the court for long, receive the highest ratings. The reverse is true for Democratic nominees. Similarly, the research explains why Republican nominees tend to get their lowest evaluations from the ABA when the Democrats control the Senate. Another factor that stands out is that Republican nominees who have written opinion pieces suffer large much lower ratings than Democrats who have done the same thing.

Artistic exchange and cultural translation in the Italian Renaissance city

Introduction: art, identity and cultural translation in Renaissance Italy Stephen J. Campbell and Stephen J. Milner Part I. How to Translate: 1. Subject matters: contracts, designs and the exchange of ideas between painters and clients in Renaissance Italy Michelle O'Malley 2. Copying practices and marketing strategies in a late fifteenth-century painter's workshop Megan Holmes 3. Mino da Fiesole's Forteguerri Tomb: a 'Florentine' monument in Rome Shelley Zuraw 4. Bertoldo di Giovanni, republican court artist Luke Syson Part II. Regional Identities and the Encounter with Florence: 5. 'Our eagles always held fast to your lilies': the Este, the Medici, and the negotiation of cultural identity Stephen J. Campbell 6. Giovanni Il Bentovoglio and the uses of chivalry: creating a republican court in late fifteenth-century Bologna Georgia Clarke 7. 'Acqua viva e corrent': private display and public distribution of fresh water at the Neapolitan villa of Poggioreale as a hydraulic model for sixteenth-century Medici gardens Bruce L. Edelstein 8. The politics of patronage: Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo and the Forteguerri monument Stephen Milner 9. Between legend, history and power politics: the Santa Fina Chapel in San Gimignano Deborah Krohn Part III. Negotiating the Cultural Other: 10. From center to periphery in the Florentine intellectual field: orthodoxy reconsidered Christopher Celenza 11. The Sphinx in the piazza: Egyptian monuments and urban spaces in Renaissance Italy Brian A. Curran 12. Immigrants and church patronage in sixteenth-century Ancona Morten Steen Hansen.

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

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.

The Supreme Court as a Policy Arena: The Strategies and Tactics of State Attorneys General

Presently, state governments are more active and more successful in the U.S. Supreme Court than at any time since the New Deal. These rates of activity and success are a function of two coincident forces—the emergence of the Republican Court and the increased capacity of the states to pursue their policy goals aggressively before the High Bench. In this analysis, we seek to offer a better‐defined portrait of the states’ evolving advocacy in the Supreme Court. Using archival and survey data, we find that, as a group, the states are more capable Supreme Court litigators, that their perceptions of the Republican Court have encouraged them to increase their pursuit of policy goals through litigation, and that they are “procedurally rational”—i.e., their estimates of success enter into their decisions to engage the Court.

Mrs. X v. Y.

Recognition — Of States — Effects of Non-Recognition — Judgments of Courts — Republic of Indonesia after the Defeat of Japan.19Recognition of Acts of Foreign Governments — Non-Recognized Governments — De facto Government of the Republic of Indonesia after the Defeat of Japan — Restoration of Lawful Government — Validity of Judgments Rendered by a Temporary Republican Court.