From UNC Press: Traditional portrayals of politicians in antebellum Washington, D.C., describe a violent and divisive society, full of angry debates and violent duels, a microcosm of the building animosity throughout the country. Yet, in Washington Brotherhood, Rachel Shelden paints a more nuanced portrait of Washington as a less fractious city with a vibrant social and cultural life. Politicians from different parties and sections of the country interacted in a variety of day-to-day activities outside traditional political spaces and came to know one another on a personal level. Shelden shows that this engagement by figures such as Stephen Douglas, John Crittenden, Abraham Lincoln, and Alexander Stephens had important consequences for how lawmakers dealt with the sectional disputes that bedeviled the country during the 1840s and 1850s–particularly disputes involving slavery in the territories.
Shelden uses primary documents–from housing records to personal diaries–to reveal the ways in which this political sociability influenced how laws were made in the antebellum era. Ultimately, this Washington “bubble” explains why so many of these men were unprepared for secession and war when the winter of 1860-61 arrived.
RECENT ARTICLES
“Dismantling the Party System: Party Fluidity and the Mechanisms of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Politics” (with Erik Alexander), Journal of American History, 110 (Dec. 2023), 419-448.
Nineteenth-century politics were characterized by fluidity, instability, and federalism, rather than the “party system” model scholars typically associate with partisan combat throughout American history. Politics operated through a series of mechanisms–laws, customs, networks, and newspapers–that helped integrate parties into the broader broader world of political engagement. Parties organized to tackle pressing political issues and dissolved once those issues were no longer relevant or another political organization took them up more effectively. Nineteenth-century Americans believed this flexible and fluid political atmosphere was essential to preserving their constitutional experiment. The end of party fluidity developed slowly at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century as the political world became more formal and institutionalized.
“Finding Meaning in the Congressional Globe: The Fourteenth Amendment and the Problem of Constitutional Archives,” JACH 2 (Summer 2024), 715-733.
Mark Graber’s book, Punish Treason, Reward Loyalty uses the Congressional Globe—which then served as the “official” records of the legislative branch—to explain the broader constitutional and political considerations of the men who framed the Fourteenth Amendment. But a closer look at the context in which the Globe operated shows its text was far from an accurate depiction of congressional business. Instead, the Globe’s pages contained an outsized number of “buncombe” speeches–or speeches designed for constituents rather than for persuading or negotiating with colleagues; the men who make up Graber’s book used these speeches as a tool of dialogue with the broader public. Ultimately, the Globe may tell us just as much about the public meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment—and many other constitutional and statutory concerns—as it does about legislative intent.
“I Shall Not Forget or Entirely Forsake Politics on the Bench”: Abraham Lincoln, Dred Scott, and the Political Culture of the Judiciary in the 1850s, MLR 83 (Nov. 2023), 217-230.
Abraham Lincoln famously argued in his “House Divided” speech in 1858 that there was a conspiracy among four men–including Chief Justice Roger Taney–to perpetuate slavery in the United States. Yet, Taney’s place in the conspiracy charge has been largely misunderstood. Scholars have argued that Taney violated judicial propriety and have read the Chief’s behavior (and that of his colleagues) in the context of modern notions of judicial ethics. Instead, Lincoln’s charge against Taney should be understood in the context of nineteenth-century political and judicial norms–norms that included a much fuzzier boundary between judicial and political worlds. As a longtime player in antebellum politics, Lincoln was intimately familiar with the peculiar political and ethical norms that defined Taney’s Supreme Court.