Commons Democracy: Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States 9780823268412

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Commons Democracy

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Commons Democracy Reading the Politics of Participation in the Early United States

dana d. nelson

Fordham University Press new york

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2016

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Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Modified sections of Chapter 2 appeared in “ ‘Indications of the Public Will’: Modern Chivalry’s Theory of Democratic Representation,” ANQ 15, no. 1 (2002): 23–40. A different version of Chapter 3 appeared as “Cooper and the Tragedy of the Commons,” in What Democracy Looks Like: A New Critical Realism for a Post-Seattle World, ed. Cecelia Tichi and Amy Schrager Lang (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 161–72. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available online at catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 18 17 16 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

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for Kirk

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Contents

Commons Democracy: An Introduction 

Telling Stories: Vernacular versus Formal Democracy

24



Between Savagery and Civilization: The Whiskey Rebellion and a Democratic Middle Way

53

The Privatizing State: The Pioneers and the Closing of the Legal Commons

84

  

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1

Settler Self-Governance: Democratic Politics on the Frontier

105

From Nothing to Start, into Being: The Anti-Rent Wars, the Indian Question, and the Triumph of Liberalism

133

Conclusion: “The Wayward, Multitudinous People”

173

Acknowledgments Notes Bibliography Index

183 187 199 213

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Commons Democracy

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Commons Democracy: An Introduction

“What, then, is the American, this new man?” Crèvecoeur famously questions in a preamble to what is surely one of the most anthologized passages in American literature: Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world. Americans are the western pilgrims who are carrying along with them that great mass of arts, sciences, vigour and industry which began long since in the East; they will finish the great circle . . . Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement? . . . The American is a new man, who acts on new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions. From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence. This is an American. (69–70) Downplaying the fact that the citizenship Crèvecoeur celebrates is British and not American, anthologists have long loved this passage for the way it celebrates two familiar signposts of U.S. democratic belonging: the ethnic melting pot and the self-interested individual who in America encounters conditions that enable economic self-making and self-advancement. But the selective anthologizing of this passage, which comes from the opening of the long third letter from the eponymous Farmer James to his European interlocutor, Abbé Raynal, arguably (as is often the case in

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anthologized passages) distorts its message. Soon after this widely known and (in no small part for that reason) thrilling passage, Farmer James’s focus changes from the individual to the collective. As he will shortly declare using first person plural, “We know, properly speaking, no strangers” (80). Crèvecoeur’s story in Letter 3 without doubt emphasizes individual industry. But his point is that such industry finds its reward not because of solitary heroic effort, but because individual effort can flourish in a social economy devoted to a collective good. To illustrate this point, he tells the story of Andrew the Hebridean. Indeed, the emotional climax of Letter 3 comes on the day that Scotch immigrant erects his house. This passage, worth quoting at length (because it is almost never anthologized and is largely read only by scholars who study Crèvecoeur), celebrates something other than the self-interested individual assimilating in the American melting pot. Rather, Crèvecoeur spotlights as typically American a practice of commonwealth formed in communal labor, creation, comity, and celebration: About forty people repaired to the spot; the songs and merry stories went round the woods from cluster to cluster, as the people had gathered to their different works; trees fell on all sides, bushes were cut up and heaped; and while many were thus employed, others with their teams hauled the big logs to the spot which Andrew had pitched upon for the erection of his new dwelling. We all dined in the woods; in the afternoon, the logs were placed with skids and the usual contrivances; thus the rude house was raised and above two acres of land cut up, cleared and heaped. Whilst all these different operations were performing, Andrew was absolutely incapable of working; it was to him the most solemn holiday he had ever seen; it would have been sacrilegious in him to have defiled it with menial labour. Poor man, he sanctified it with joy and thanksgiving and honest libations: he went from one to another with the bottle in his hand, pressing everybody to drink, and drinking himself to show the example. He spent the whole day in smiling, laughing and uttering monosyllables; his wife and son were there . . . The powerful lord, the wealthy merchant, on seeing the superb mansion finished, never can feel half the joy and real happiness which was felt and enjoyed on that day by this honest Hebridean, though this new dwelling, erected in the midst of the woods, was nothing more than a square inclosure, composed of twenty-four large, clumsy logs, let in at the ends. When the work was finished, the company made the woods resound with the noise of their three cheers and the honest

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wishes they formed for Andrew’s prosperity. He could say nothing, but with thankful tears he shook hands with them all. Thus from the first day he had landed, Andrew marched toward this important event. (103–4) This important event, and the happiness Andrew feels—what Crèvecoeur alternately terms the “municipal blessing” (83)—has to do with a key aspect of becoming American, what the narrator describes as an ascension into self-making community. We forget this communal aspect of democratic belonging in the late colonies when we only read the early sections of Crèvecoeur’s famous letter. In the spirit of Crèvecoeur’s forgotten celebration of American commonwealth, Commons Democracy takes up an unexplored layer within the history of United States democracy. This dimension of our political legacy that has been hidden in plain sight: we haven’t seen it because the time-honored story of the growth of U.S. democracy trains us not to see it as such. This history also begins in the late colonies and Revolutionary era. But differently from the more familiar story of the Founders’ high-minded ideals and their careful crafting of the safe framework for democracy—a representative republican government—this book pursues a story about the democratic spirit, ideals, and practices created by ordinary white settlers in the early nation and practiced well into the antebellum period: what I call vernacular or commons democracy. If “democracy” is a term used so commonly it almost defies careful definition, “commons” is a term far less familiar. For that reason, I want clarify how I’m using each, as well as what I mean by putting them together. Let’s start with the commons. When we think of the commons today, we usually think of things like Wikipedia, open-source software, or maybe the anti-copyright Creative Commons (cc), the legal way to “own” your work that lets you share rather than restrict its use. These modern commons, enabled by an Internet that allows people to pool their intellectual resources and creative abilities for a common good, appeal by invoking an older type of commons, where interactions are face-to-face rather than virtual, and where the goods that peer networks create can proliferate. When we cast our mind back to those older forms of commons, we typically recall shared natural resources, often those imperiled because of overuse or misuse: drinking water, the air we breathe, the night sky, the world’s fisheries, seeds or minerals, the ozone layer, forests (as both timber and vital sources of carbon dioxide), topsoil. These are goods that humans have habitually drawn on with more and less attention to their relative abundance and well-being. Differently from the Internet commons,

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we usually think of these material commons as something separate from humankind and available for its use: commons as a natural resource. Garrett Hardin’s influential 1968 essay “The Tragedy of the Commons” offered another powerful frame for understanding the commons, one that aimed at scholars and policy-makers in its effort to refine the notion of the commons as a shared natural resource. In that piece, Hardin argued that man’s inevitable selfishness leads ineluctably to the overuse and destruction of commons. Thus, he insisted, the only recourse for sustainability is either government takeover or privatization. To say this argument was influential understates its impact: “tragedy of the commons” became a commonsense wisdom that spurred decades of research, response, and policy. From the more expert angle proffered a half century ago by Hardin, people have tended to think of the commons as a modern policy problem, driven by population pressures, progress, and development, a difficulty of supply and demand that must be solved by expert research, professional management, and markets. In this expert framework, like the more informal one with which we began, the commons is natural resources separate from people. And after Hardin the commons came to be viewed as something demanding protection from people by larger institutions. In Hardin’s resonant framing, the “tragedy” is that people—here meaning alternately non-experts and non-owners—can only degrade and harm the commons. Thus the only way to “save” commons is to keep ordinary people from using them as such, and for governments or markets to intervene, to manage the resources for the people. This perspective on the commons has reigned in both the hard sciences and the social sciences, and in public policy for several generations now. But Hardin’s “tragedy,” as many have pointed out, is based on a false premise. There’s a difference between a commons and an unfenced or unguarded natural resource with no management system. Commons does not properly refer to “natural resources” because commons do not preexist human action. And so my point is that two of our most familiar ways of framing environmental commons are fundamentally mistaken. No natural resource exists as a commons—something valued, held, and cared for in common by human communities—until it is viewed and treated as such by people, acting together. Commons are always a complex admixture, created from natural supplies plus the labor, social values, rules, and norms of the people in communities who participate in and draw on them. In this far less widely held understanding, the commons exists precisely because of the local stewardship, labor, practices, and traditions of governance of people. From the perspective of this third and more correct framing, we can

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see that the commons and commoning have a long history, and one with distinctively political and social, and not simply ecological entailments. When we think of the commons historically, we tend to picture shared pastoral fields in England. Commoning, though, didn’t end with the British Enclosure Acts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and wasn’t limited to agricultural practices in Europe. Quite otherwise: commoning has been practiced in the “old” world and the “new,” in ancient and modern times, and in a variety of forms, some more successful than others. The Romans, for instance, distinguished between three types of property—res privatae, res publicae, and res communes—the latter referring to, in Yale legal scholar Carol Rose’s term, “things open to all by their nature,” where the “character of some resources makes them incapable of ‘capture’ or any other act of exclusive appropriation” (“Roads,” 93). This category referred broadly to the oceans and what we might think of as the biosphere, and registers the long centrality of the idea of commons to legal understandings of ownership practices. Roman law was, however, less attentive than English Common Law would become about the potential exhaustibility of nature’s bounty. As historian Peter Linebaugh outlines, when the barons faced off against King John at Runnymede, the agreements they produced in 1215, the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest, among other things, focused on access to energy reserves (not yet coal or oil, but wood) by limiting the king’s right to monopolize forests and timber supply. Importantly, too, these documents acknowledged commoners, assumed a commons, and “defined limits of privatization” (28, 40). These documents protected as fundamental the right of individuals and communities to subsistence and insisted on a world of use-value and common access. These rights needed articulating in the thirteenth century perhaps because of the new and growing pressures of emerging capital and its companion forces: privatization and monopoly. Indeed, as soon as the Magna Carta and Charter of the Forest declared limits on enclosure, the Statutes of Merton and Westminster (1235 and 1285) authorized the enclosure of manorial waste. Merchants and the emerging bourgeoisie began promoting commodity and property value. A battle between common and private use-rights that had sparked in the thirteenth century caught fire between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. And this conflict was in no way limited to agricultural fields, the iconic “commons” from which England’s poor were so dramatically enclosed. Rather, it was a battle with vast implications, one that fueled and contoured the emergence of modernity, colonialism and empire, capitalism, liberal individualism, and the nation-state. In other words, practices of enclosure jumped the pond

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with colonization, and had widespread input into the formation of political and legal ideals and practices in the early United States. As Joanna Brooks frames the point in her recent and achingly moving book Why We Left, “England colonized its own lands and dislocated its own indigenous peoples before colonizing abroad.” Commoners in England “were enclosed and improved out of . . . [their] homelands, and then . . . crossed the ocean to try and make some gain” (often, as she notes, “by doing unto others as had been done to [them]”) (19–20). Brooks underscores that “the experiences of dislocation and disposability that have characterized modernity for so many people . . . [were] very broadly distributed, and that modernization has entailed substantial losses even for those who believe or have been led to believe they benefited from it” (21). But it wasn’t just the logic of enclosure that crossed the Atlantic. When we reflect on the era of English and European enclosure, which coincided exactly with the colonization of the Americas, it’s hard to ignore how many poorer immigrants to the British and French colonies of North America would have brought with them what the eminent British historian E. P. Thompson calls “customs in common.” These customs are a local vernacular, in the sense of the plethora of ordinary, domestic practices cultivated in local communities. They are informal, seldom officially codified, and function for the well-being of a self-defined community. We could thumbnail the culture of the commons as a practice of selfprovisioning and mutual support. It emphasized the sharing of material resources, such as seeds, or foraged wood, flora, and fauna. As importantly, it emphasized the sharing of labor as well as creative resources: communal barn-raisings, traditional folk ballads and tales, sharing fires and beds with travelers and remedies with neighbors, local traditions for keeping the peace, or serving in local self-governing militias. Commoning was never then only about the sharing of ecological materials, as our habitual associations with environmental commons assume. It has always been, like human language, a communal labor in communication, sharing, and meaning-making. It is about the sharing of work and materials: not just the bounty of nature but also the bounty of what people can produce together in local community. Commons are produced, regulated, and maintained both in and as local vernaculars. Above all, the culture of the commons is both distributive and productive. And this productive dimension is significant. Functioning optimally, commoning produces a specific good, nurturing practical experiences of communal, self-determining power. As David Bollier reminds, “Cicero had a great line: ‘Freedom is participation in power.’ The commons decentralizes power and invites participation. People are invited

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to contribute their creativity on a decentralized, horizontal scale. They don’t need to remain supplicants to the elites who manage centralized hierarchies and expert-driven institutions, whether of business or government or nonprofits” (“Healing Logic”). In other words, commoning cultivates a political sensibility, one specifically grounded in use-value, in face-to-face community and negotiation. This sensibility, in which people daily experienced their own self-governing powers, is democratic, if by democracy we mean a state of being in which people have power over the terms of their daily lives: demos (the people) + kratia (power). Thus, by the definition I’m mapping here (and will illustrate in the history and fiction of the early United States), the democratic power of the commons is not experienced via the representative institutions we familiarly associate with U.S. democracy. Rather, it is immediate, informal, and nondelegable. And significantly, it is not individual, but instead grounded in community. Not ritual in the sense of voting, the democratic power of the commons is both colloquial and routine: a daily practice. The problem for any practicing commons is that the democratic outcome is never guaranteed. It’s important to emphasize that commoning, a significantly understudied aspect of our democratic history, is not a political panacea and should not be romanticized as such. Though I’m aiming to demonstrate that a commons sensibility was an important part of the United States’ developing democracy, I’m not arguing that things would have been better had it somehow emerged as the predominant understanding of democracy rather than the Framers’ liberal version. As Susan George reminds, “Life in the commons is no more idyllic than anywhere else, quarrels arise and some people refuse to respect the rules” (xiii). At its worst, commoning can be exclusive, exclusionary, and bullying. Local tyrants tyrannize; free riders loaf and take advantage; majorities discriminate; mobs deliver rough justice. It deserves emphasizing (because of contemporary trends to idealize the commons and commoning) that commoning practices are inevitably bound to culture and history, and, crucially, that they are always systems of exclusion: part of constructing a commons involves making rules for who can participate and who can’t. Contemporary and historical outsiders often find these rules worth debating and criticizing. Elizabeth Maddock Dillon offers a specific historical framing for these caveats in her important book New World Drama. There she details the emergence of a “performative commons of an Atlantic public” in colonial and early national theaters from London to Charleston, Kingston, and New York City. Dillon argues that this commoning practice emerged “at the site of the non-identity of capitalist enclosure and popular sovereignty” (29). In

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the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century theaters of the colonial transAtlantic, she uncovers an important archive for understanding struggles against enclosure and for popular sovereignty. New world drama bodied forth a vernacular commons that contests both official representations of “the people” in government as well as abstracted versions in the print public sphere. That this commons was fundamentally shaped by what Dillon terms the “colonial relation,” which interlocked modern ideals of political freedom with “systems of enforced labor, enclosure, and violent dehumanization in the form of race slavery” (31–32), helps her frame, for instance the dynamics by which audiences actively and politically “present the physical proximity of bodies—including the monstrous intimacies of slavery on colonial ground—even while performances on stage cite and erase such intimacies” (59). Having acknowledged that commoning is inextricably bound with culture and history does not mean that investigating them yields only predictable results. She concludes, “As much as the performative commons are themselves racializing and colonizing— engaged in acts of erasure as much as representation—the performative nature of this commoning does include resources for thinking beyond and outside coloniality,” thus offering imaginative and strategic resources that could “wield force and hold possibility for today” (254). It is precisely access to such imaginative and strategic resources that we gain in studying the significance of the contributions of the non-elite to United States democratic history and theory. Recovering and understanding these resources requires scholars to test the bounds of their training as well as of the archives, reading against the grain of often-hostile representations of such people and ideals (I’ll say more about that in the next chapter), and working against the wisdom both of our training as scholars and as good democratic citizens. The rhetorical framing of our familiar story about the growth of democracy has for too long encouraged us to see it as the rational and institutionally structured bequest of the Framers. Ordinary people and their contributions to the Revolutionary era have certainly been studied. But here they are most often studied individually, as exemplary representatives, rather than systematically, as though they might have had an organized political ideology worth understanding, one generated before, and not bequeathed to them by the political leadership in the Revolution. And thus even though “history from below” has led most scholars to take seriously the role of non-elite actors, our familiar framing of the history of democracy nevertheless encourages even some of the best and inventive contemporary scholars to see ordinary people as somehow limited in their understanding—driven primarily by passion, habit, necessity, and emotion, or by mob violence,

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racism, land greed, or debt. This habitual association of non-elite actors with limitation too often leads scholars to limit their own investigation into the alternative democratic ideals which non-elite people supported and on which they acted. We see this, to take a recent example, in historian Benjamin Irwin’s notable study of the Continental Congress’s use of symbols and rituals to attract patriotic support for the new nation, where he associates such attempts (sometimes ham-fisted, sometimes miscalculated, sometimes remarkably effective) with the Framers’ rational and forward-looking comprehension of the problems of nation-building, and quite differently associates the out-of-door resistance of ordinary people (which he also respects and admires) with reactive, undisciplined emotion and with atavistic or premodern folk traditions of misrule. If we do try to understand the rational contours of the democratic ideals, expectations, and practices of ordinary actors in the late British colonies and early United States, though, we see that this vernacular democratic practice presents some interesting alternatives to its companion and competitor, liberal democracy. Importantly, too, commons democracy offers a challenge to a durable truth of political realism, which takes for granted that ordinary people have no interest in or time for the daily work of political self-governing. As we will see in this book, commons democracy existed through and fostered a participatory, democratic vernacular practice. This participatory sensibility fueled—as historians have begun to recognize and map—the involvement of ordinary folk in resistance, Revolution, state constitution-making, and early national civic dissent. The rich variety of commoning customs and practices across the colonies in the Revolutionary era offered non-elite, European-descended Americans a tangible and durable relationship to democratic power, one significantly different from the representative democracy that would be institutionalized by the Framers in 1787. Indeed, the culture of commons democracy that I’ll describe in this book cultivated a sensibility that challenges the supposed ubiquity of the selfish, rational, utility-maximizing model of homo economicus described by the liberal economists of the eighteenth century (and seized on in 1968 by Hardin). As the colonies moved toward their revolutionary claim of independence from England, practitioners of commons democracy understood democratic liberties as communal, not individual, and emphasized the common good of the many over and against an order that would facilitate the good of individual actors as a primary means for achieving national strength. What I’m calling commons democracy was understood in practice in the late colonies and early United States as the political power not just of the “many,” some abstract “majority,” but specifically of ordinary, poor—

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common—folk: the people. As political theorists remind us, democracy’s radical innovation in its classical incarnation was to put the demos—the many, the common, the ordinary—at the center of political power. The Greeks, as Ellen Meiksins Wood puts it, invented free labor, the “peasant citizen” (181; see also 204). This idea, that political participation, power, and direction could come from the bottom of the social order, was an exact inversion of how political power had been long been understood by the elite, and it stood as a challenge to the many conceptions and configurations of power and political order that came after. The nascent commons democracy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century similarly challenged and struggled with the liberal democratic ideals and practices that would triumph in the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. Our nation’s consensus story about its founding omits the challenges offered and the contributions made by non-elite citizens—common folk and their vernacular political practices—to our nation’s democratic history. It does so at least in part because these ideas and practices offered both an often pointed and coherent rebuttal, and a vibrant alternative to the form of liberal, representative democracy institutionalized for us by the Framers. The democracy these ordinary citizens envisioned was robustly participatory, insistently local, roughly equalitarian, and grounded in varieties of exclusion. Quite differently, the democracy framed by the nation’s political leaders, beginning in the Constitution, channeled equalitarian political passions through abstracting political institutions into liberal individualism, a scaffolding for capitalism and expanding state power. They used the ideal of equality to justify a system that would claim property and income inequality as a necessary and indeed healthy feature of its functioning. Liberal democracy exalted and protected the private individual as a competitive, not cooperative, economic actor: in this project, it privatized and re-stratified the democratic good that common people in the early United States had insisted—often with vehemence and sometimes with force—was a shared, public good, a commonwealth. It’s worth noting that the commons democracy envisioned by ordinary actors in the early nation was not anti-capitalist. Grounded in labor and in the demonstrated competence of male economic actors, families, and consenting communities, it did not resist markets, or credit, or individual ownership so much as it insisted on sufficiency for the many rather than accumulation for the few, and on an economy that served and worked through the input of the ordinary citizens. Indeed, commoners generally (though not always) demonstrated commitments to some kinds of privately held property. In the British colonies and the early United States

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especially that often (thought by no means always) meant ownership of land—both as a resource that allowed a competency or a decent means of support for a family, but also as the threshold to legal citizenship when the terms of citizenship were attached to property-holding, as they generally were until the 1820s. In this dynamic, strategic mixture of private ownership and public good was an insistent commitment to commonly created use and good—commonwealth—that is easy both reactively to idealize, and to lose any real conceptual or critical grasp on within the framework of liberalism. Vernacular or commons democracy was an economic vision—rightly or wrongly—less interested in national power through concentrations and mobilizations of wealth, and more interested in creating policies that would spread wealth to support economic competence for (in today’s parlance) the 99 percent. Only this, its proponents argued, would create a stable basis for a healthy political democracy. While the elite, driven by ideals of Republicanism, were able to agree in the years leading toward Independence that economic policies supporting the many would be fundamental to developing an equalitarian political democracy (as Benjamin Trumbull put it in 1773, “It will be highly politic in every free state, to keep property as equally divided among the inhabitants as possible, and not suffer a few persons to amass all the riches and wealth of the country”), they began to separate themselves from this distinctively revolutionary consensus in the early 1780s. They divested from their commitment to a political democracy grounded in widespread economic fairness both responding to international pressure on credit (as historian Terry Bouton details, foreign investors regarded popular government as a threat to their capital investments) and envisioning an economy that would vault the United States into international preeminence. To reassure foreign credit and to fund their vision of national economic greatness, they began searching for ways to erect what they called “barriers against democracy.” The Federal Constitution, as we shall see in more detail, was one important maneuver in this battle. Another came in attaching both the ideal and the history of democracy to the very Federal, representative institutions the Framers erected to “tame” it, bequeathing to citizens a founding story that effectively obscures the democratic ideals, expectations, and practices of ordinary people in the late colonies and early nation, making it seem as if democracy was the Founders’ gift to the ignorant masses, rather than something the Founders struggled mightily against intelligent (if economically disadvantaged) actors to contain. Interestingly, the ratification of the Constitution, bitterly contested by the people historian Saul Cornell terms “plebian” anti-Federalists across

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the new nation, did not at all “tame” vernacular democracy, the informal democratic ideals and actions of the common folk. Protests, regulations, out-of-doors and social actions well into the nineteenth century (denominated “riots,” “rebellions,” and “mobs” by their detractors) document the robust survival of these local democratic expectations and traditions—as do the political novels of the early nation. Curiously, as we shall see, the success of the Framers in casting the struggles of ordinary folk to hold onto their democratic traditions as “irrational,” “illegal,” and “backward” was so complete that historians have only recently been able to start comprehending the scale of these battles and the common goals that link them. But once we start looking, we can see struggles everywhere over what democracy would mean and how it would be practiced.

Early U.S. Novels: Democratic Histories and Political Knowledge Contests over democracy and sovereignty (the so-called power of the people) traverse the history of the early nation, showing up vividly, too, in the political and social novels that will be a key part of my account. Why, some might wonder, turn to novels to learn about these democratic ideals and practices? Novels are, after all, fictions. My answer comes in two parts. First, it’s not easy to study the lives, let alone ideals, of ordinary people in the colonies and early United States. They were not always literate, which means they didn’t leave behind diaries and stacks of letters. Or if they were literate and wrote diaries and stacks of letters, those were often literally left behind: sacrificed to the trash heap or burn pile when the family moved farther west. Their letters weren’t preserved in prestigious libraries of private colleges or historical societies. The archive for studying their lives is thin, especially when compared to the treasure trove of materials saved to document the lives of the political and economic elite. Because early American authors—often though not always from more elite families—were interested in these alternative ideas and the conflicts that emerged from contending forms and ideals of democracy in the early nation (they made terrific stories from them), sometimes (and this is the second part of my answer) we can get a good glimpse of such practices, and the people behind them, in the fictions created to capture, revivify, and make lessons from these conflicts. Because they were fictions founded in real life (as most fictions—even science fictions—are), we of course must be careful to suss out authors’ biases, to think carefully about the various ways their own interests could color the pictures they aimed to create. But since writers worked to endow their characters with

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life and liveliness, precisely for the sake of a good story, we can sometimes get a fuller sense of the humanity of these ordinary actors from novels rather from than the newspaper accounts, court documents, and property records that historians rely on in their study. In other words, the fictional portraits of common folk in the early nation may both be a little less anchored to specific facts, and nevertheless a little more fully human, more dimensional. The Russian structuralist philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin attributes the ability of novels to reveal truths about history to what he terms the novel’s “dialogism,” the fact that “speech diversity and language stratification . . . serve as the basis for style in the novel” (315). He points out that good novelists populate their plots with a variety of living social registers—vernaculars—all of which, while crafted to a novelist’s purposes, nevertheless resonate with the rich multiplicity of intentions of the people who originally used them. Thus such novelistic language, in Bakhtin’s argument, serves two masters at the same time—the novelist, certainly, but also the people who originally spoke in such terms. These novels helped their authors and curious urban readers make sense of the conflicts playing out between vernacular and formal political practices countrywide. Commons Democracy differs from other studies of democracy and American literature in the sense that I’m not trying to make a general theory about American literature in relation to the novels I study here: rather, I’m using these novels to make an argument about history and the political knowledge we generate from its study. Though many classic and important studies of US literature have taken up the subject of popular sovereignty from a variety of angles, most of those studies have shared a position similar to the one I highlighted of previous historiography, that associates ordinary actors with limitation, atavism, reactive emotion, irrationalism, and anarchy, allowing them to function collectively as a relatively undifferentiated figure against which the more valuable literary and democratic achievements of more and less exemplary individual authors stand out. This is as true of F. O. Matthiessen’s observation in his magisterial American Renaissance about Melville (“Notwithstanding the depth of his feeling for ‘the kingly commons,’ Melville knew the strength of the contrast between the great individual and the inert mass,” 445), as it is of Nancy Ruttenberg’s provocative and equally magisterial study locating the achievement of American literary authors in how they formulate and codify a distinctively American “democratic personality” (“the most exemplary type of epochal personality”) out of a collectively anarchic and irrational “compulsive public utterance which gave rise, as popular voice, to a distinctive mode of political (and later, literary) subjectivity” (10, 3).

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I do not mean to diminish the reach, importance, or achievement of the many and important studies focusing on questions of democracy and literature, but just to observe that I’m less interested to make claims about distinctive qualities in U.S. literature or the achievements (or failures) of individual authors than I am to learn whatever I can from them about how struggles over the shape of democracy in the early United States played out. Reading carefully, we can use the political novels of the early nation to learn a great deal about the ideas and practices of ordinary folk who were not writing their own novels, nor leaving their journals and letters to major libraries, but who were busy practicing and sometimes fighting for their commons democracy well into the nineteenth century. By reading carefully, I mean two things: first I mean not simply extrapolating “history” from the fiction but coordinating a story’s plotting carefully to documented history, and finding credible overlaps; and second, I mean taking the novel’s arguments about commoning practices seriously, hazarding the possibility that they might shed light on previously ignored aspects of commoning, and putting those arguments square and center for our examination. In my analysis, the political fiction of the early United States participates in democracy’s “history before the fact”—a term Myra Jehlen offers to remind us that authors and historical actors did not know what history would yield in any particular moment, and thus to caution historians and literary critics from importing their own knowledge of what history did decide to their account of texts written “before the fact.” Early novelists’ lack of foreknowledge about the outcomes of conflicts over democratic practice—even in the context of their own political prejudices and affiliations—allows readers to glimpse the liveliness of these battles in the early United States, and it is that liveliness that my readings work to resuscitate. This reading strategy sheds significantly new light on familiar novels (as readers will note particularly in my analysis of Cooper’s The Pioneers) and foregrounds long-ignored novels as key contributors to this historical account. Through the many novels that make alternative democratic cultures and the common actors who motored them keys to their plot, we also begin to get a sense of the insistence of vernacular democratic practices across time in late eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury U.S. culture. The novels I study in this book register well into the 1840s the continuing vitality (or the perceived menace, depending on the author’s perspective) of collective, local practices of democratic power, the power of what theorists then and today call “the multitude”: local self-constituting societies not organized by or subordinated to the nation-state.

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Political theorists today, weary of the corralled and desiccated, expertand corporate-managed forms of “democracy” practiced in the name of the people by governments across the world, have been puzzling whether there ever was a possibility for what the word “democracy” represents in its ideal: a participatory civic body, a deliberative, self-determining, self-governing people. Many, following twentieth-century political realists like Joseph Schumpeter, say no: ordinary folk have never been willing to bother themselves with the daily work of democracy. But others insist that if no were the correct answer, early modern theorists of the social contract, like Thomas Hobbes, wouldn’t have had to work so hard to explain away the possibility for people collectively to self-organize outside or separately from the powers of the state. We have one answer to this question in the understudied aspect of our democratic history: ordinary people in the early nation countered the Constitution’s aim to capture by limiting their collective sovereignty with their own ongoing exercises of locally produced political power. And early novelists eagerly seized the opportunity to highlight, explore and frame these local debates and dramatic conflicts. While the official state narrative encourages citizens to look to the “corridors of power”— the monumental architecture of state and federal government—for the official history of democracy, early political novelists understood that the key possibilities and conflicts were happening on the ground, and especially on the nation’s frontiers. There especially, ordinary people lived out the principles of what historian Melissah Pawlikowski has recently described as an alternative political philosophy articulated in squatter communities that traversed the Susquehanna and Ohio valleys, one that emerges in sharp contrast to the Jeffersonian Republicanism (the political philosophy that historians habitually frame as the sole alternative to Federalism in the early nation). Quite differently from the Jeffersonian vision of democracy, which emphasized individual land ownership and individual liberties (thus making it compatible with emerging ideals of liberalism), the republicanism practiced on the frontiers, in Pawlikowski’s summary, “emphasized mutuality and common access to resources . . . It was a needs-based sociopolitical philosophy wherein individuals profited by meeting community needs. Frontier republicanism paired communitarian liberalism with an eighteenth century understanding of Antinomianism, enabling frontier itinerants successfully to push the bounds of American ‘independence’ and to motor the physical expansion of the United States through their unyielding demand for usage rights to land by all people” (“Endeavors”). The novelists whose work I’ll take up in this book track the vernacular democratic practices that Pawlikowski uncov-

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ers in the nation’s backcountry across the nation and its then-territories, from western Pennsylvania to upstate New York, from Alabama to the frontiers of Michigan. I’ll argue that these novelists understood that these vernacular ideas and practices presented a serious challenge to the institutionalization and normalization of federally ordered, representative democracy. In constructing novels that often highlight the triumphant defeat of such local, vernacular practices—it is the proverbial “happy ending” of many a novel—they leave a vivid record of the lives and ideas of U.S. democracy’s forgotten ordinary contributors, one that usefully corroborates and supplements a growing historical account. The novelists who dramatized these conflicts often distrusted the vernacular informality of commons democracy, or did not believe in its continuing viability in a “civilized” world. Seldom did they paint such practices in a positive light. When they approved, they often did so equivocally. And nevertheless the surprising consistencies that emerge between their stories about common actors at the edges of the expanding nation can help us be sure that they are describing the historical phenomenon of commons democracy: the practices of ordinary people acting on the basis of a shared set of principles and commitments to similar goals of collective self-determination, of economic and political equalitarianism.

Studying Alternative Democratic Legacies and Lessons So what do we learn from this largely unstudied history? First, we learn that “democracy” is not a simple inheritance from the Framers. Rather, democracy was a complex contest of ideas, increasingly played out in bitter opposition, not all of which won out or were even remembered in American history books and civics lessons. The novels I study in this book highlight the stakes of these early battles over the power of the people, battles tied to democracy’s purchase on economic policy, and the demands of ordinary folk across the nation for economic fairness and “access” instead of what would become liberalism’s fabled “opportunity.” There are some lessons here worth recovering, and strategies and ideas possibly worth adapting for challenges we face today. Second, we learn that “democracy” is not reducible to the formal institutions created by Federal government. It was also something the people did, among themselves, even before those institutions were in place. Political “realists” in academia and public policy have been telling us since the mid-twentieth century that ordinary folk do not want to involve themselves in the banal, daily political work of self-governing, and so we can’t and shouldn’t hope for robustly participatory democratic politics.

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But the novels and history I study in this book give the lie to that “truism”: it literally took generations for ordinary folk in the early United States to disinvest themselves from democracy’s daily work. Third, we learn that the “downsizing of democracy,” a phenomenon political scientists locate in the late twentieth century, when governments began working in the 1970s to minimize citizen input and the ability of citizens directly to affect the direction of their government, began far earlier. It was, arguably, a project launched shortly after the United States’ founding. But it’s worth noting that the Framers’ aims for “taming” democracy weren’t accomplished even by 1850s, when the story I tell in this book draws to its close. Fourth, we get a glimpse into a spirit quite different from the one bequeathed by the Framers, with its emphasis on the liberal individual, the privacy-seeking, rational economic actor who wants to be “free from.” Rather, the democracy envisioned by ordinary folk in the late colonies and early nation was grounded in the vernacular principles and customs of the commons: customs that insisted individual profit did not come before everyone was fed; customs that demanded everyone help with barn(or church-) raising; customs that took for granted that people could work out disagreements among themselves, without the help of lawyers, judges, or rules framed in state and federal congress; customs that imagined a common good arising from the people laboring together; customs which held that political equality could not emerge from economic inequality. Fifth, we learn that democracy is not just a noble ideal but also, importantly, a practice. Local practices of commons democracy were informally workaday, improvised and often unattractive to observers and participants, lacking the grandeur of Congress. These local practices were not infallible, and not always fair. But if they could be “homely” or “ugly” in some reporters’ words (and to today’s readers), they were also galvanizing and sometimes heartwarming, returning some outsiders to their sense of common humanity and investing them with a renewed commitment to the demos—the many, ordinary people—of democracy. The homeliness or ugliness of these workaday practices must be confronted. So much of our historical study skews toward actors at the top of economic and political scales—especially (for reasons I just suggested above) when it comes to the history of democracy in the United States. The elite, the Framers, the Founding Fathers are, simply put, more glamorous and pleasing to look at. They dress up better for and maybe behave more politely at parades. Our fascination with the elite encourages students of history to identify with their perspectives and outlooks—an identification that has long made it difficult to give the political ideas and

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traditions of ordinary actors the interest and attention I’m arguing they deserve. And yet, in arguing that the history of commons democracy in the early nation deserves to be told and understood, I am not advocating that we idealize this understudied layer of history, and I am not assuming that those who denigrated the “mobs” were simply unfair or wrong. Neither the Federalists’ representative democracy nor the commons democracy of ordinary people was intrinsically better. I’m not asking readers to choose between the two: history has already done that. And indeed, in our own day, the most notable scholar of historical and contemporary commons, the Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, tells us that choosing between vernacular local and federal institutions is one of the biggest mistakes the managers of commons can make (see, e.g., “Polycentrity”). What I am suggesting is that we learn from these varying political traditions and their battles, and that we use the knowledge we generate in that study to expand and challenge our own sense of democracy’s pratfalls and possibilities today. But for some, idealizing is far from the issue. It’s hard not to suspect that the communities described by the novelists I study—communities made up largely of poor whites—represent more of a problem than a boon for our history and our democratic tool kit. As fellow scholars (taking no prisoners) have informally posed this in question-and-answer sessions at talks I’ve given from this book, “Why should we care about people who were poor white trash? I mean, they were just a bunch of racists, working on behalf of a racist empire.” So let me try to tackle that question: why should we care about U.S. history’s so-called poor white trash? Here, I think our political skepticism, shaped by hard-won and still-contested battles over civil rights, can actually work against our critical commitments. As a scholar, I believe we should care about all and not just some of history’s entailments, details and struggles. We know that writing history is a notoriously fraught and layered endeavor. And in the name of careful history, it seems worth resisting overgeneralizations about groups of people, especially in advance of actual study. For example, historians have just begun the work of telling the stories of squatter communities—the supposed exemplars of land-grubbing, selfish and acquisitive, Indian-hating whites on the nation’s frontier, the putative engine of settler colonialism. What they find is often roughly the opposite of these durable assumptions. They are discovering squatter communities in the mid-Atlantic and Midwest that were interethnic; that sometimes formed alliances with their indigenous neighbors to keep the peace; that were often less interested in land ownership than in communal competence. This preliminary work suggests

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there’s a good deal left for us to learn here, some of which may confirm but some of which may test our long-held assumptions about poor whites in the nation’s backcountry and about what (and who) engineered the advance of the U.S. settler-colonial empire. It’s absolutely true that some of the historical people gestured toward by the novels I study here were definably racist: the historical record of white violence and Indian-hating on the frontier is clear (see, for instance, the work of historian Patrick Griffin, who argues that for frontier denizens, the “crisis of authority” in the run-up to Revolution created “conditions for a world in which violence and racism would be the only certainties,” 154). But this is neither an adequate blanket description nor a historical resting place. Indeed, if Griffin’s characterization were fully adequate, the authors of these novels I study here would not have been working so hard in their different and often frankly racist ways to contain and repudiate the interracial political and social possibilities of the vernacular backcountry communities they aimed to denounce. As we’ll see, U.S. policy-makers in Philadelphia and Washington along with early novelists worked both to limit or end the interethnic ideals of vernacular democratic practices on the nation’s frontier and to harness squatter energies to the national ambitions of the settler empire. It would seem that a fuller history will be more complicated than the notion of “just a bunch of racists, working on behalf of a racist empire” allows. Here it’s worth emphasizing that the frontier residents that authors like Hugh Henry Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper, Robert Montgomery Bird, William Gilmore Simms, and Caroline Kirkland represented— corollary to all those real people raising political and property protests from the 1780s to the 1830s and ’40s—were in the process of becoming white, which is to say they were beginning to organize their political identities around the idea that “whiteness” is something European-descended Americans have in common: a valuable property they share. This developing ideal of whiteness—which was gathering political and social momentum in the 1830s and ironically itself makes its appeal precisely as a commons—was importantly part of the state capture or “taming” of these alternative practices of democratic sociality during this period, not in the least for the advancing purposes of the settler empire (I’ll have more to say about this process in Chapter 5). The new identity ideal of whiteness might, in other words, have functioned as a device that helped bring these self-organizing and self-determining communities into the proverbial fold, by helping individual actors begin to identify themselves with the nation’s liberal ideals, and with state-organized government and sovereignty (the idea that power resides not in people but in the state

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that “represents” them). This is a phenomenon American studies scholars have studied carefully in urban contexts, guided by the germinal work of historians like David Roediger, Noel Ignatiev, and Matthew Jacobson. The specific contours of more rural histories and their sociopolitical legacies in this process of “becoming white” are worth exploring, and understanding more carefully as a crucial tool for the enclosure of layers of historically existing inter- and intra-racial commons along the advancing frontier. I’m suggesting, in other words, that our organizing notions about “poor white trash” have misdirected or oversimplified our understandings of the roles of ordinary white people in the early nation. Bouton has recently flagged this problem, persuasively outlining how the views of ordinary white American men in particular have been obscured by two competing historical approaches (in a passage worth quoting at length): The old view is the founding-elite-centered history where the concept of class and the voices of ordinary white men have never figured largely. It’s a historiography that . . . assumes those voices don’t matter . . . In much of this old narrative, democracy equals capitalism. And importantly, the assumption is that ordinary white [folk] were the ones who wanted democracy to mean capitalism. Ironically, the same conclusions about the political views of ordinary white men can be found in the newer competing narratives that have emphasized race and gender. As we have gotten better about fleshing out the categories of race and gender as analytical tools, we’ve . . . tended to collapse white men into a single analytical category . . . [in a] story . . . about the creation of a white man’s democracy . . . The result has been a convergence of old and new narratives when it comes to the storyline of democracy and capitalism . . . The problem is that ordinary people did speak frequently during the Revolutionary era in petitions, court depositions, through the era’s numerous popular protests. Moreover, when those voices spoke, they hardly articulated a vision of democracy that was akin to liberal capitalism. To the contrary, many—if not most—ordinary white men saw the emerging system of capitalism as a threat to their democratic ideals in the way it shifted power to the elite and undermined the economic equality that they thought was needed for democracy to survive. (“Re-imagining the New American Republic”) Following Bouton’s lead, I’m proposing that we need to work in at least a couple of directions, questioning the political work of developing racial identifications and violences while figuring out what we can learn,

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for good and ill, from alternative democratic histories, practices, collectivities, and subjectivities. Or to put this point a bit differently, I don’t think that generalizations that work like racism—even in the name of anti-racism—should keep us from studying and learning more from this long-ignored historical legacy. A more careful attention to the vernacular democratic practices of ordinary, mostly rural white citizens in the early nation certainly requires us to acknowledge (and might encourage us more carefully to study, rather than just assume) vernacular democracy’s exclusions both intentional and perhaps unintended—how the land prized for its access to citizenship in the late colonies and early nation came always, one way or another, from Native Americans. It might also inspire us to learn more about the intercultural legacies and tensions of commoning practices between and among Native and European American settlers than we currently do. While it seems far more commonsensical that indigenous Americans selfgoverned and administrated cultural and natural resources through the logic of the commons (this is the case Lisa Brooks, for instance, makes, in her methodologically innovative and important book The Common Pot), we do not have a wealth of scholarship on Native American commoning practices as such to date (and given Native American studies’ current investment in questions of national sovereignty—collective forms of indigenous self-governing—the notion of the commons might actually pose the threat of a new kind of colonization, limiting its appeal for study). Thinking about white practices of commons democracy also raises questions about African Americans in British colonies and the early United States, who also, it would seem, would have brought or inherited commons-based political, social, and economic logics from Africa, but whose strategies and communities inside slavery or as free actors in the United States have seldom, to my knowledge, been considered that way (here it would seem commonsensical to think about slave quarter cultures through the lens of commoning, though again, to my knowledge, they have not been studied in those terms).

The Commons and Early U.S. Democratic Practices There are many stories about the political, social, and economic legacies of commoning practices in the United States, then, that scholars have hardly taken up as such, perhaps influenced by the commonplace wisdom that enclosure happened in Europe and not in the Americas. For my own part, I began this book as an investigation of something else altogether, intending to study how new practices of political representation set out in

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the Federal Constitution were taken up, refracted through, and affected by social understandings and aesthetic practices of representation in the early nation. But along the way, my attention got riveted to what seemed to me to be the undeniably consistent understandings and practices of popular sovereignty in the late colonies and early nation; soon, having begun work on the contemporary commons, it dawned on me that the commons was a better lens for understanding this part of history than contending notions of representation, or republicanism and liberalism. The alternative democratic practices and cultures of ordinary citizens in the early United States—which were explored and memorialized in a range of literary texts in the early nation and are only just now being studied at the micro-level by a new generation of historians—offer tantalizing complements, contests, and alternatives to the formal, institutional democracy our nation vaunts. Against liberal democracy’s familiar keywords, like allegiance, sovereignty, individual, and opportunity, commons democracy’s alternative political socialities advocated for politicalness, agency, community, and access. If we’re interested in continuing to develop a democratic project—a democratic commons—there’s an archive here worth unpacking, one that can give us a far more detailed story about the “growth of democracy” in the United States and an interesting set of tools for the many challenges facing us today. In order to frame out the foundational stakes of this historical struggle, Chapter 1 first takes up the broad contours of our consensus story of democracy, and then details the recent contributions of historians who study the historical confrontation (in terms sometimes overlapping but often differing from mine) between federal and vernacular democracy, paying particular attention to debates over the Constitution as an indication of the stakes for and strategies used by the Framers. Then it explores the specific entailments of what E. P. Thompson calls “customs in common” by looking at historical work on British and American colonial commoning practices, and finally turns to a foundational American fiction, Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer, to explore that author’s recognition and (qualified) embrace of distinctively American vernacular commoning practices. Chapter 2 studies the immediate aftermath of the Federal Constitution’s ratification, tracing the emergence of both the consensus narrative and alternatives to that narrative by focusing in particular on the Whiskey Rebellion, contending accounts of it, and the rollicking political burlesque novel later penned by one of its noted participants. In Modern Chivalry Hugh Henry Brackenridge outlines his own social theory about commons/vernacular democracy and makes a strong argument on behalf of its joyful embrace of public happiness for the good

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of representative democracy. Chapter 3 turns to James Fenimore Cooper’s historical account in The Pioneers of the enclosure of the vernacular legal commons, in a plot that critiques the kinds of self-advancement that come at the expense of communal adjudications of fairness and social order. Chapter 4 studies anxieties about popular suffrage and enduring practices of frontier equalitarianism through readings of three novels published in the 1830s, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods, William Gilmore Simms’s Richard Hurdis, and Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? Collectively, these very different novels document the inability of federal institutions to tame citizen democratic politicalness well into the 1830s. Finally, Chapter 5 takes up Cooper’s seldom-read Littlepage trilogy: Satanstoe, The Chainbearer, and The Redskins. Through the history of the Anti-rent War in upstate New York, Cooper compellingly tracks the diminishing force of political appeals that connected citizenship to ideals of economic access. In particular, the third installment maps the sociopolitical victory of liberalism’s legal formalism, its ability to fragment the collective sensibilities and alliances of denizens of vernacular democracy. The conclusion focuses on key entailments of commons democracy for our own democratic practice and theory today. Early novels reflect widely diverging understandings and practices of what “self-government” might be and was, before the historical fact of democratic liberalism’s victory. Commons Democracy details how early U.S. novels animate historical questions about democracy in the early nation and add historical depth to recent theorizing about sovereignty, and about the value of the commons, while challenging us to think beyond familiar categories in our study of U.S. history and literature. I’ll show how literature, history, and politics come together in powerful ways, enabling new windows into our nation’s political history and new questions about democratic possibilities not just in history but also in our own time.

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 /

Telling Stories: Vernacular versus Formal Democracy

One of the cornerstones of the United States’ self-image is a triumphalist story of how its orderly political freedom matured over time into “the world’s leading democracy.” Most U.S. citizens proudly define the nation’s political system as a democracy and consider our governmental model as well as our culture of individual freedoms worthy of the world’s emulation. Of course, the most careful students remember that the U.S. governmental system is a representative republic, and not, properly speaking, a democracy. But those who err can hardly be blamed, because the growth of democracy is one of the United States’ most central and carefully rehearsed stories about itself. In this familiar story, democracy begins as a rhetorical glimmer in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, an inchoate if energizing ideal that fuels the new nation’s Revolutionary bid for independence from England. The Founders’ idealism is wisely seat-belted by the Framers, whose Constitution engineered a representative system to help citizens avoid the “democratic excess” of direct participation. Their model eschewed what they wisely understood to be the impracticability, unpredictability, and even lawlessness of historical expressions of popular democracy. Democracy, properly delimited by official structures of political representation, was then launched by the election of President Jefferson, who released the “voice of the people” in his electoral triumph over the elitist Federalists. The political sway of the common man subsequently burgeoned under Jackson with the advent of the party system and with universal suffrage, when all white men, regardless of their access to wealth or property, won the vote. Of course, the term “universal” now ironically highlights the

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injustices of citizenship in the early nation: women of every race along with African-descended, Native American, and foreign-born men were excluded. Thus began a longer struggle for progress, fueled by the Founders’ ideals and waged almost throughout the twentieth century, for voting rights and access to the ballot box for the remaining majority of the United States’ populations. This narrative, a touchstone of civics education, has long depicted democracy as a boon from the Framers, the generation of political leaders who created prudent constraints allowing ordinary people to take up democratic freedoms responsibly, ensuring that the nation’s common citizens and its political system would mature in tandem. Democracy, we learn, is about getting the vote, which marks political (i.e., law-abiding and self-disciplined) adulthood. This story—we can call it the consensus narrative—describes “democracy” from a bird’s-eye view that reveals to its grateful recipients a relatively orderly progress. Interestingly, though, the first half century of U.S. political fiction contends against this consensus narrative. Early novels offer a different, richer, more historically nuanced, and more deeply democratic picture—if by democracy we refer to the contributions of the demos, the common or poorer classes of citizens. It explores the democratic ideas and traditions of ordinary citizens, framing the conflicts that emerged as a result of competing ideas about democracy and different democratic cultures in the late colonies and early nation. It offers insights into how some ideas, cultures, and practices won out, becoming officially enshrined in the nation’s memory, and how others were squeezed into political irrelevance. It gives us tantalizing hints about diverging democratic histories, and different modes of democratic possibility that might be worth remembering, exploring, and even trying to deploy today. It shows how “representation” in the early nation is more than simply governmental: its politics extend through aesthetic and social practices. The political fiction of the early United States shows that democracy was not an adult-sized suit that childlike citizens grew into, but rather something messier and more contentious, where ordinary citizens had adult ideas from the start—but not always ideas that were in accord with the Constitution’s vision for formal, state-based political order. “Democracy” in these stories was not official government, but vernacular practices: a set of competing ideas, ideals, and customs, fought over, gained, and also lost in the first century of Independence. The democratic conflicts that are explored, historicized, theorized, celebrated, and vilified in the early U.S. novels offer provocative alternative historical and theoretical frameworks for understanding how democratic

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26 / telling stories

cultures were streamlined into a more officially singular democratic culture in the early United States. These fictionalized treatments of conflicting democratic practices and cultures also underscore how many early citizens did not see their fractious and vibrant local democratic practices as being in opposition to Constitutional or Federal order but rather a vital (if contestational) partner with it. Importantly, the political fiction of the early United States actually corroborates and fleshes out the recent investigations of historians into alternative democratic political cultures in the late colonies and early nation. Before turning to literary accounts in the remainder of this book, then, this chapter explores what a recent generation of historians and political theorists have uncovered about contending understandings and practices of democracy in the late colonies and early nation.

Toward a More Complex History of U.S. Democracy The struggles over the extent to which local democratic cultures and ordinary citizens could contribute to formal political decision- and policymaking—struggles that sometimes culminated in armed conflict—have long been studied by historians for how they illustrated the “lessons” ordinary actors “learned” about democratic political order in the early nation, or how they reflected the growing pangs of capitalism. Earlier historians did not consider these so-called rebellions as movements undergirded by any consistent political theory. But recently historians have begun analyzing the political demands and claims forwarded in these rebellions and property protests, documenting important consistencies in the appeals made by people living across several different regions—Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Vermont, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and the Carolinas. Beginning in the 1760s, rural citizens from South Carolina and North Carolina, in separate movements, began insisting on the right of citizens to enforce fair laws, a right they termed “regulation.” This sense of the people’s self-governing right both to demand and to make fair government burgeoned as the colonies moved toward the Revolution. And soon after, in the face of a severe recession in the 1780s, the spirit of regulation informed a range of actions across the new nation, when citizens began organizing against what they viewed as laws and policies that benefited the few (the wealthy and/or political elite) at the direct expense of the many. The most prominent among such political moves was a Regulator action in Massachusetts, known by the regulation’s opponents as “Shays’ Rebellion,” which began in 1786 as a protest against unfair debt policies and

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onerous taxes. Mounted in the spirit and rhetoric of the Revolution, the protesters took up arms as a last resort to keep officials from carrying out legal proceedings that would foreclose on their farms and possessions. The consensus story of national founding—the story that grew out of the Constitutional moment—framed the Massachusetts protest as an anarchic mob action that catalyzed the Framers into action. Concluding that the nation needed a stronger and more centralized government to prevent such lawlessness and to enforce the collection of taxes, the Framers’ careful deliberations in Philadelphia resulted in the nation’s Constitution. This familiar story frames the concerns that drove the Massachusetts Regulators as irrelevant and even damaging to the course of nation—Shays’ Rebellion—rather than a contribution to it. But the Shaysites’ concerns and demands were not anomalous or simply local. People beyond Massachusetts shared them: the oppositional actions of the Massachusetts citizens emblematized the alternative democratic ideals and strategies of commons or vernacular democracy being practiced and refined across the late colonies and early nation. We can begin to comprehend the significance of these alternative democratic principles and practices present if we study the Massachusetts event in its economic contexts. In the 1780s, as historian Woody Holton has carefully detailed in Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution, Americans in western Massachusetts—and across the newly confederated states—were facing tax burdens three to five times higher than those that had propelled them into Revolution just a decade before. The Continental Congress’s demand that these taxes be paid in hard money exacerbated a cash shortage that inflated debt as it deflated the value of land, livestock, and personal belongings. The cash shortage hit poorer citizens especially hard. A lively trade in war bonds arose among those with the means to speculate as debt-plagued veterans were driven to redeem their wartime promissory notes at fractions of their face value. Poorer veterans traded in their bonds to pay war-related state taxes, only to lose their property and wind up in jail for debt they still couldn’t pay. Their plight spurred many—and not just the poor—to a variety of actions, legal and extralegal, in Massachusetts and in other states. Citizens wrote editorials, lobbied representatives, and agitated for fairer policies about how war bonds should yield interest and eventually be retired, how banks should operate and debt should be collected, and how to use paper money to ease the crisis. When their advocacy was turned aside or ignored by legislative representatives, these citizens invoked the constituent power of the people—a power, as we’ll soon see, they had helped ensure in early state constitutions was constant and non-delegable—and acted

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to block foreclosure hearings and auctions of neighbors’ properties and possessions. These initiatives, legal and extralegal, were not (as the consensus narrative usually describes them) shortsighted and anarchic efforts of scofflaw mobs to evade taxes and debt. Quite differently, recent historians have emphasized how before acting extralegally, ordinary actors deliberated, followed political channels, and proposed policies that were responsive to the state and national interests. These historians emphasize that the citizen–Regulators who assembled militias and took up arms in western Massachusetts did not object to being taxed, or to being responsible for their debts. Rather, they were concerned about fairness: about how burdens of the new nation’s wartime debts were distributed in ways that disproportionately penalized people of lesser means. As historian Leonard Richards summarizes, those involved in the Shays’ Regulation were concerned about Massachusetts’ new state government, and the policies it enacted that enriched “the few at the expense of the many” (63). As poor and middling actors mounted political actions against the economic policies that were strangling livelihoods, the political and economic elite across the states became concerned at the apparent evaporation of deference that had long characterized the relations between the “many” and the “few.” The experiences of the Revolution had emboldened non-elite people all over the new United States to involve themselves even more publicly in the work of self-governing rather than leaving things to their representative “betters.” This growing understanding of what came to be enshrined in the Constitution as the sovereignty of the people started not as an abstraction but in local, face-to-face practices. Common people in the backcountry, towns, and cities believed they had a right both before and after the Revolution to “regulate” the governments they framed to ensure fairness—this was what they considered their “sovereign” power. And in exercising their power to self-govern, they agitated for economic policies that they believed, as both Holton and Bouton detail, would create a strong basis for political democracy. Historians have long celebrated the Revolution’s advancement of political equality. But Terry Bouton notes that the period’s revolutionary push for economic equality has received far less attention. It’s impossible to comprehend the political alternative presented by these vernacular democratic practices without heeding this essential dimension of their claims. Bouton documents that in the run-up to Revolution, Pennsylvanians— poor, middling, and wealthy—came to believe that “economic equality was what made political equality possible . . . To them, concentrations of wealth led to corruption and tyrannical rulers, while widely dispersed

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political and economic power promoted good government” (Taming Democracy, 32). This trans-class alliance of Patriots insisted that the flowering of political democracy would depend on supportive economic policies. Advancing this argument, some argued that democracy should include treating the land as a commonwealth, not to be monopolized by those who had the ability to win out in economic competition, but fairly allocated for ownership to assure the livelihood and equality of the citizenry. These arguments, which informed the early state constitutions, made two interlocking claims for the people’s democracy, claims echoed locally and across the country well into the nineteenth century and that show up across the political novels of the early nation: first, for a more muscular citizen power, a self-governing agency that was, importantly, non-delegable to state and local governments formed by the people; and second, for access to a secure livelihood in the form of productive lands and/or meaningful employment. Patriots widely debated the conditions that would make equal political participation meaningful. Citizens across the late colonies and early states demanded conditions that would maximize public happiness (an idea much discussed in the Revolutionary era of the eighteenth century)—the ability to participate publicly on equal standing and as communities in the project of self-government—rather than a private happiness or individual good. In these demands, democracy was about access, a claim qualitatively different from the civic promise that would soon be enshrined in its place, the promise of “equal opportunity.” In this early Revolutionary-era understanding of democracy, “liberty” was understood to be funded by political equality anchored in economic fairness—as a collective, and not simply an individual, right.

The People, Sovereignty, and the Framers’ “Democracy” However, during the 1780s the elites across the states began to separate themselves from the revolutionary consensus conjoining political with economic equality that had formed during the 1770s. Instead, they began pushing for policies that advocated for a “strong” government that would advantage the wealth of the affluent—men who used capital to accumulate capital—toward the building of national prosperity and might. Alan Taylor has described this layer of conflict as a “new, internal, and attenuated stage in the continuing American Revolution” (Liberty Men, 5). Historian Barbara Smith observes that the restoration of Tory property assured by the Treaty of Paris, and the subsequent entry of restored Tories into citizenship and the U.S. political scene in the 1780s, ushered

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in new political alliances and “a profound change in the Patriot movement.” As she summarizes, “In the 1770s, the central experience of many Americans had been one of association. The 1780s, by contrast, was an era of dissociation” (184; see also 190–91). In this period, the new elite “relied on the consent of the few and uncommon” to redefine “money as private and not public” (186–87). And they worked to redefine key words of the Revolution, “liberty” and “democracy” and “sovereignty,” in ways that would tame and redirect civic energies away from Patriot ideals that anchored democratic constituent power to mutual commitment and common good. We can see this struggle for redefinition at work in the Constitution itself. The notion of the people’s sovereignty is commonly understood today as an innovation of the Framers’ modern statecraft, an ideal that forms the democratic basis on which our representative government was built. The U.S. Constitution offers a mechanism that makes possible what Hamilton, Madison, and Jay described in The Federalist Papers as a democracy that was otherwise impossible. As they argued to their New York audience, democracy, directly practiced, is a form of government that inevitably collapses into tyranny or anarchy. The Constitution’s genius, then, is to make democracy durable through safeguarding, enabling representative structures. These representative institutions, Publius argued, legitimate state power and protect the people’s sovereignty through the rule of law. Edmund Morgan’s magisterial history Inventing the People corroborates the Federalists’ account of Constitutional innovation. He notes that the people’s sovereignty was not, in its original articulation, invented to promote democracy. Rather, it was a way for members of British Parliament to gain strategic power over the king’s appointments and policy choices. When seventeenth-century members of Parliament invented the notion of a sovereign people, their goal, Morgan summarizes, was “to magnify the power not of the people themselves, but of the people’s representatives. It did not originate in popular demonstrations against the king but in the contest between king and Parliament . . . Accordingly, the first formulations of popular sovereignty in England, from which it never quite escaped, elevated the people to supreme power by elevating their elected representatives” (58). The Framers followed that tradition, and we would thus be wrong, Morgan insists, to understand the U.S. Constitution’s invocation of the people’s sovereignty as inventing an actual political power for ordinary citizens. The power of the people, in Morgan’s account, is rather an effect of Constitutional government. And this theoretical power, in Morgan’s assessment, does not exist un-

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til the Framers propose, name, and codify it in the Federal Constitution of 1789. The problems only come, in Morgan’s view, when misinformed citizens take the fiction of the sovereign people literally, attributing to themselves capacities that the fictive ideal cannot properly entail. And of course the people will make such mistakes. For Morgan, nationally oriented patriotism provides the antidote for disorderly citizens’ tendency to misinterpret the Constitution’s touted sovereign power of the people as their own—mistakes that wind up as mobs and rebellions. Nationalist patriotism helps orient such confused citizens toward a more mature understanding of democratic government. Our consensus narrative, along with much history and theory from every political camp, has proceeded from assumptions compatible with Morgan’s arguments. But a more careful historical analysis allows us to see that the Constitution’s resonant opening phrase, “we the people,” is the site not just of a creative or theoretical deployment of an impossible fiction (what recent political theorists like Claude Lefort elegantly theorized as the “empty space” of democracy or what Jacques Derrida more recently characterized, following Tocqueville, as its problematically borderless sphericity). From a more attentive historical angle, “we the people” is better understood as the site of an actual, and not simply theoretical, battle: the federal government’s redefinition and domestication of actually existing, locally active self-creating political bodies, of collective peoples already busily and contentiously engaging in the project of selfgoverning. As legal historian Christian Fritz details, state constitutions in the 1770s enshrined citizens’ active role in regulating and advising the government they constituted, insisting that the people possessed non-delegable powers before, during, and especially after they had ratified a form of government (American Sovereigns, 156). Roughly half the states’ original constitutions declared “that the people were the sole source of legitimate power and insisted on the accountability of elected representatives to their constituents” (Adams, First American Constitutions, 133). Fritz urges that the ramifications of this early moment of constitution-making in the states were “momentous”: “The significance lay in what Americans did with the idea that the people were sovereign—how they implemented it, struggled with its implications for the nature of their governments and society, and ultimately transformed the principle. Their chief innovation and enduring constitutional legacy came from actually involving the people in forming new governments,” and in instructing those governments, by rights of this newly involved popular sovereignty (15; see also Chapter 1 passim). Well before the drafting of the 1787 Federal Constitution, then,

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if we study post-Declaration popular constitutionalism, we can see that a very muscular understanding of popular sovereignty as powers residing with ordinary citizens had been enshrined in early state constitutions and was circulating in the practice of self-government. By no stretch of the imagination was “popular sovereignty” the Framers’ original contribution to United States political theory and practice. Historically this has been hard to see, for Morgan and others, because the consensus narrative of the growth of democracy emphasizes an ideological continuity between the founding and the framing eras. That emphasis is factually misleading. Political scientist Donald S. Lutz observes that the principles undergirding the Declaration and the Constitution are quite different and that the “view of government underlying the Declaration of Independence was institutionally elaborated in the early state constitutions, not in the United States Constitution” (“Theory of Consent,” 13). Historian Mark Kruman observes that though the original state constitutions often forwarded revolutionary claims in the guise of familiar government structures to ease the turbulence of political transition, it’s clear that the state constitution makers were not actually interested in preservation and continuity so much as they “were determined to ‘new modell’ state governments” (4). This ambition drew on both “an inheritance of traditional English constitutionalism and a reconsideration of that heritage” (7). Early state constitutions broke with America’s English constitutional inheritance as they built actual self-governing powers for ordinary citizens. Historian Willi Paul Adams observes that the early framers of state constitutions, working in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration, quite literally invented the notion and practice of constituent power. As he details, the “phrase [i.e., ‘constituent power’] seems to have been first used in the context of the struggle for Vermont statehood,” when in 1777, Pennsylvanian Thomas Young urged for Vermonters to exercise their powers as settlers: “They are the supreme constituent power, and of course their immediate Representatives are the supreme delegate power” (quoted in Adams, 63). As part of their efforts on behalf of popular sovereignty, they designed structures aimed to limit and control not just executive but also legislative autonomy. They disallowed legislatures from framing constitutions, demanding instead that constitutions be crafted by temporarily constituted bodies of citizens who were themselves not part of government. And they tied representatives closely to their constituents: early constitutions made strict residency requirements for representatives, gave citizens the right to instruct them (explicitly turning representatives into dependent actors), and required annual elections. Many early con-

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stitutions demanded that legislatures publish all proceedings, and some states, like Virginia and Massachusetts, required that legislatures conduct their deliberations publicly. In every dimension, these early constitutions crafted structures that kept government beholden to an active and sovereign people: early state constitutions lodged governing power not in representative legislative bodies but in the citizenry itself. This power was understood as collective, based in and belonging to communities. Political theorist Suzette Hemberger highlights how “the revolutionary state constitutions . . . repeatedly refer to . . . collective nouns that attribute to the people a corporate existence independent of government” (“Government,” 294). Revolutionary-era state constitutions built structures for broad citizen consent, framing the political power of consent as being generated within the deliberations of local political communities, not in the minds of isolated individuals. Kruman observes that “during the Revolution, constitution makers provided equal representation for all counties,” associating “equal” representation with region and usually moving swiftly to provide representation for newly settled areas (67; see also 65). Community will—as expressed through the majority— was superior to individual wills, an understanding that meant that private economic actions that conflicted with community will could be regulated by the community. Lutz summarizes the stakes of what would emerge as clashing perspectives on practices of representation a decade down the road: where “radical Whigs saw community of interests . . . Federalists [would see] majority tyranny” (41). Along these same lines, state constitutions provided structures aimed at making representatives mirror the will of their constituents as a community: to act on the specific will of their community rather than “disinterestedly” for the general good. Importantly, Revolutionary-era state constitutions aimed for government not to be checked internally, by other branches, but from below, by citizens acting in political communities. Thus the theory of citizen consent enshrined in early constitutions was active, not passive: citizens acting in community were expected to participate in the project of political selfgoverning. The Framers understood that the informal, collective political selforganizing bodies guaranteed in state constitutions were not simply, as the consensus narrative insists, rudimentary precursors, but persuasive alternatives to the model proposed by the Constitution. They realized that the popularity of local political self-organizing would need to be both out-argued and out-strategized. Those who supported the creation of a stronger federal government repudiated the muscular popular sovereignty upheld in state constitutions by claiming that states were failing to

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“govern” their citizens. Indicatively, the Framers attacked the putatively “weak” state constitutions, as historian Woody Holton pithily frames the point, with a plan aimed at making them even weaker. In a key move, they insisted that in constituting a government, the people delegate their sovereignty to it, and by that act of ratification necessarily acceded to stringent limits on citizens’ involvement in the project of self-government. Benjamin Rush explained this position in January 1787: “It is often said, that ‘the sovereign and all other power is seated in the people.’ This idea is unhappily expressed. It should be—‘all power is derived from the people.’ They possess it only on the days of their elections” (“Address”). Federalist proponents insisted that the contingency of action unleashed by the local initiatives and political collaborations encouraged by Revolutionary-era state constitutions led ineluctably to tyranny. They argued that true liberty—what they described as the “sovereignty” of individual (and importantly not collective) rights—could only be guaranteed by the superior or organizing sovereignty of national or federal power. In so doing, they aimed to fragment the collective aspects of commons democracy and its vernacular practices, by drawing a straight line of loyalty from individual citizens to the power of the nation-state. The Framers’ antidemocratic disposition is supremely clear in the historical record, and to be fair, there is nothing wrong with an honest difference of opinion about the best design for government. Yet, Holton argues, something less than honest occurs in the Convention (which by its very secrecy committed delegates to refusing input from the putatively sovereign people). He documents the rhetorical and structural compromises that animated the Framers, who understood that they needed to appease the popular demand for democracy even as they worked to corral it. In drafting the Constitution, the Framers disguised their political hostility: they “never approved an inflammatory proposal if they could accomplish the same objective using a mechanism their fellow citizens would find easier to swallow” (Unruly Americans, 184). Though they created a governing structure that was “considerably less democratic than even the most conservative state constitution,” they took rhetorical care to assuage concerns about its apparent respect for the people’s power (211). Thus the Framers engineered a government advertising a democratic access it actually aimed to curtail. That, in Holton’s assessment, is the damaging legacy of our governing contract, which looks open to the control of the people, while operating as an “invisible fence” against their actual intrusion (256). As historian Ellen Meiksins Wood elaborates this point, the Framers’ achievement was decisively to dissociate “ ‘democracy’ from the ‘demos’ . . . to shift the focus of ‘democracy’ away from the active

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exercise of popular power to the passive enjoyment of constitutional and procedural safeguards and rights, and away from the collective power of subordinate classes to the privacy and isolation of the individual citizen” (227). Hemberger’s close reading of the Constitution corroborates Holton’s and Wood’s arguments. She observes that the opening of the Constitution, “we the people,” invokes popular democratic authorship that would seem consistent with the notion of general consent developed in the early state constitutions. But the Federal Constitution makes this apparent concession, she insists, in order to frame a structure of government aimed at undermining citizens’ powerful attachments to and involvements with local political communities by simultaneously “nationalizing and individuating the American people” (294, 290–91, 289). Hemberger carefully explicates how the people’s sovereignty appears as the authorization for Constitution, only to disappear within its provisions: “The people” appear, quite conspicuously, in the Preamble, where they “ordain and establish the constitution.” Having done that, they stick around long enough to choose the members of the House of Representatives. By this point—article I, section 2—the people have already been disaggregated. They are “the people of the several States,” not “the People of the United States,” and therefore—as will become apparent in the discussion of the right to instruct—no longer sovereign. After choosing their Representatives, the people disappear from the text of the Constitution, and presumably, from the political stage. The involvement of the people is not required even to amend the Constitution. And while “the people” author the document, they do not sign it. Nor is it signed in their name. The individual signatures witness “the unanimous consent of the States present” to the proposed constitution. (294) Thus, she concludes, the Constitution invokes “the people of the United States” in a bid to de-authorize the collective self-organizing and selfdetermining of people who created, experienced, and deployed their civic power in local arenas and in local government-making throughout the Revolutionary era. The model of government created by the new Federal Constitution, in respect to the question of citizen power, defied the ideals of the Declaration and those expressed in early state constitutions. As Fritz argues, the 1789 Constitution “came close to turning the constitutionalism [ratified in] the state constitutions on its head” (156). It aimed at decollectivizing in the process of de-authorizing local political communities, where

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the colloquial, face-to-face work of democracy had been happening. The Constitution notably eliminated the right of citizens to instruct their representatives. It professionalized the work of government. It directed the so-called sovereignty of the people not through the labor of forging political community but through the minds and abstracted rights of individuals in a synecdochal relation with state power. It effectively redefined “the People” from active producers into simple spectators of political power. Edmund Morgan’s historical account, which assumes the necessity of the United States’ organization of national, or state-based, sovereignty, celebrates the Constitution’s common sense about the necessary limits on peoples’ actual sovereignty. He concludes along with the Federalists that “a fiction taken too literally could destroy the government it was intended to support. A government that surrendered to popular government would cease to govern” (91). By taking the Framers’ perspective from the outset, though, Morgan flattens the historical record. Quite differently, Hemberger’s attentiveness to the actually existing political alternatives being corralled and disallowed during Constitutional ratification reanimates the contingency and intensity of the political stakes at play in this now-obscured historical moment. What Morgan frames as “common sense” Hemberger’s more careful account reveals as the rhetorical strategies deployed by the eventual victors in the heat of intense struggle. And she highlights precisely those alternative political ideals, practices, and democratic subjectivities in the early nation—all of which fascinated the early U.S. authors whose works I study in this book. These crucial, and largely forgotten, democratic practices and subjectivities—the practices and possibilities for personhood formed within vernacular or commons democracy—is what Hannah Arendt highlights in her study On Revolution. There she considers how citizens generate power in the process of Revolution: The astounding fact that the Declaration of Independence was preceded, accompanied, and followed by constitution-making in all thirteen colonies revealed all of the sudden to what extent an entirely new concept of power and authority, an entirely novel idea of what was of prime importance in the political realm had already developed in the New World . . . Those who received the power to constitute, to frame constitutions . . . received their authority from below, and when they held fast to the Roman principle that the seat of power lay in the people, they did not think in terms of a fiction and an absolute, the nation above all authority and absolved from all laws, but in terms of a working reality, the organized multitude whose power was

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exerted in accordance with laws and limited by them . . . These bodies, moreover, were not conceived as governments, strictly speaking; they did not imply rule and the division of the people into rulers and ruled . . . These new bodies politic really were “political societies” and their great importance for the future lay in the formation of a political realm that enjoyed power and was entitled to claim rights without possessing or claiming sovereignty. (166, 168; my emphasis) Political theorist Melissa Orlie emphasizes the importance of Arendt’s insight that “sovereignty is not the only possible conception of the political” (118; my emphasis). Here, Orlie trains our attention to what is almost always overlooked in the U.S. historical record, evidence for the possibility of something other than liberal sovereignty as democracy’s power is commonly imagined. This overlooked possibility that both Orlie and Arendt hint at might better be understood as a non-hierarchic political power generated outside of formal institutions, among and by people: in short, a civic commons where the generation of agency works to create political being in forms “that are collaborative, not sovereign” (Orlie, 9; see also 53).

Uncovering Commons Democracy As historian Alfred Young notes in his study of non-elite patriot actions, “Collective activity by ordinary people was the hallmark of the American revolution” (Liberty, 4). Many of the ordinary people in the British colonies and soon-to-be United States had come to North America because of pressures on commons entitlements and enclosure in Britain, Ireland, Scotland, France, and Germany. Allan Kulikoff details in his study From British Peasants to Colonial American Farmers how those who could afford to emigrate or who came under indentures carried with them a cultural baggage steeped in the traditions of commoning: environmental, domestic, economic and, importantly, civic. They also brought a politics tempered by decades of resistance to enclosure. These historical traditions are complicated and still poorly understood, in England, Europe, and the Americas. Commons culture is colloquial, improvisational, intensely localist (for good and for ill)—and it continues to be only vaguely understood. As the staff of The Ecologist summarizes in an essay for Whole Earth, “Despite its ubiquity, the commons is hard to define. It provides sustenance, security and independence, yet (in what many Westerners feel to be a paradox) typically does not produce commodities. Unlike most things in modern industrial society, moreover,

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it is neither private nor public: neither commercial farm nor communist collective, neither business firm nor state utility, neither jealously guarded private plot nor national nor city park. Nor is it usually open to all. The local community typically decides who uses it and how” (“Commons,” 9–10). In her study of commoners and common right in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England, historian J. M. Neeson thumbnails commoning as “possession without ownership,” noting that “we know relatively little about common right and less about commoners . . . There are many good reasons but one of them is failure of imagination. For good reason . . . imagining how commoners lived off the shared use of the land is difficult in an age such as ours when land is owned exclusively and when enterprise is understood to be essentially individual, not cooperative” (1–2, 6–7). Neeson emphasizes that the interests of the enclosers, their arguments that commoners were “poor” and “lazy” and that enclosure was in the national interest, have shaped the orientation of historians well into our own day. Quite differently from the mainstream of historians who had assumed that common right was “vestigial” by the eighteenth century and that the peasantry had disappeared before enclosure, Neeson, analyzing eighteenth-century debates over enclosure, argues that commoning and commoners were still well dispersed across England in the eighteenth century, that common right “gave commoners an income and a status or independence they found valuable,” and that the extinction of common right over the long eighteenth century transitioned commoners from independence to wage dependence (9). Commoning established alternative economic, social, and political dispositions based not in surplus but in sufficiency. Neeson notes that common right and common waste gave some employment and others subsistence. It was a “vital part of the economy of women and children . . . [and] could double a family income” (177). The commons encouraged frugality, collaboration, and mutuality: “Time spent searching for wild strawberries, mushrooms, whortleberries and cranberries for the vicar, or catching wheatears for the gentry, was time well spent not only in the senses of earning money but also in the sense of establishing connection . . . in this exchange lay a relationship that included personal knowledge and some recognition of mutual need” (181). As Neeson notes, enclosure eliminated such means for ordinary folk to build such “insurance relationships with gifts and exchanges” (182). She argues that enclosure diminished the scope for mutual aid, turning commoners into individualist smallholders, dependents, and beggars and transforming social order. Opponents of common right hated commoners with what Neeson de-

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scribes as a “xenophobic intensity,” characterizing cottagers and squatters alike as selfish thieves, buccaneers, and a “sordid race” (32). But rather than accepting these categories of value as so many historians have, placing commoners outside the pale of modern politics, society, and economy, Neeson highlights their alternative scales of value. She foregrounds the “social efficiency” of commoning collectivism, “overlooked by historians who consider enclosure’s efficiency in narrowly economic terms— measuring only what Keith Snell has called ‘growthsmanship’ ” (321). In a similar vein, U.S. legal historian Stuart Banner urges that we expand our understanding of commoning’s dimensions. He emphasizes that capitalism’s prioritization of private property and economic value has obscured the significant political value of commoning to commoners. In his analysis of common field farming in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century colonial St. Louis, Banner argues that the liberal legal distinction between private and public property is not sufficient to describe the alternative value of a commons, which he denominates a “third category, between public and private . . . owned directly by the public without the intermediation of any government institution or individual” (“Political Function of the Commons,” 64). Examining the commoning practices of white, mainly French colonials as their territory came within the legal institutions and socioeconomic purview of the United States, Banner studies the competing notions of legal ownership between representatives of the United States and local inhabitants, and notes that the very emphasis on “ownership” occludes a significant dimension of the practice, that the commons was “a zone of self-government” (77). The French-descended inhabitants, whose commoning practices closely resembled those of northern Europe, were practicing a form of self-regulating collective land use that was not legally recognized either by Spanish colonial government or within U.S. legal institutions. Under the Spanish, who did not make provisions for formal representative institutions for the colonists, the commons offered the only mechanism for self-governing, and these local practices went largely undisturbed by Spanish colonial officials. The United States worked more aggressively, though, to bring local self-governing into accordance with its representative practices. Upon assuming sovereignty, U.S. government officials began dividing common lands either into fee-simple private ownership or into public lands. Banner traces the convoluted path by which French-descended residents came, over the course of two generations, to accept the absorption of their “third” form of ownership—of land ownership in common—into the second category of “public” land, managed not by the people but by government representatives. This acceptance en-

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tailed a communal memory loss: by 1850, he argues, “a way of thinking about land had vanished” (82). Banner observes that “the earliest European colonizers in many parts of the present-day United States held much of their productive land in common. They farmed in part in common fields, grazed their animals in common pastures and gathered wood and other natural resources from common wasteland” (65) (e.g., common land practices have been identified in Massachusetts, New York Virginia, Illinois, and Missouri; common grazing practices have been identified and analyzed across the southern, Midwestern, and western states). Noting that commons practices in the American colonies have been little studied, and urging that we not overgeneralize from one specific instance to another, Banner suggests that we should nevertheless attend to the political value of the commons, how collective resource management offers a satisfying experience of selfgoverning to participants, enabling them “to make their own decisions on matters most likely to have an economic effect on them” (64). He speculates that perhaps the unusual duration of land commoning in St. Louis might be explained by considering that the farmers may well have valued participating in their management: “the process of self-government” might have been as important and satisfying as “the output of self-government” (88). In other words, the intangible values of commoning might be as, if not more, compelling for commoners than the economic benefits. There’s a long-standing wisdom that commoning did not really exist in the British American colonies, having been taken up and quickly abandoned by the Pilgrims off the Mayflower. Historians gesture toward the few locations in New England where open field agricultural cultivation practices were a short-lived experiment. But in this historical common sense, the understanding of commoning is surprisingly narrow: its measure is largely limited to the presence of common field cropping, as though commoning could only be understood through the most spectacular terms of British enclosure, as if British enclosure laws didn’t also attack the exercise of common rights in fens and forests, rivers and oceans, as if commoning couldn’t exist alongside practices of private property, as if logics of commoning could not evolve, pollinating and competing cross-culturally. Cross-pollination and competition is what early British colonial historians have found, for instance, comparing indigenous collective and individual land holding practices to those of the British colonists. For instance, Banner argues that “resemblances between Indian and preenclosure English property systems most likely inclined English settlers to recognize the Indians as property owners” (Indians, 39). Timothy Ives

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shows how for the English colonists, commons most typically functioned as a form of town capital to be sold off after having attracted sufficient town population and development, whereas neighboring Wangunk Indians “upheld corporate management of [land] toward an opposing purpose—to defend it from dissolution in the market economy” (80; see also Silverman, Little, Clemmer, O’Brien). Other historians have documented surviving and evolving U.S. commoning cultures and practices—for instance, Reeve Huston, who studies the culture of commoning preserved among the tenants of upstate New York well into the second round of Anti-rent Wars of the 1840s, or Karl Jacoby, whose Crimes against Nature considers the commoning traditions of mountain folk in the Adirondacks into the early twentieth century. Historians variously have analyzed free-range livestock traditions in the South and in Michigan in terms of commoning (Herschock, McWhiney and McDonald, King), and fencing practices across the continent as evidencing lingering commons traditions among both whites and Native Americans (Danhof, Silverman). Anthropologist Bonnie McCay has analyzed common property fishery regimes in North America as they evolved from “the experience of the enclosure of fish and wildlife commons in the Old World” and argues that North American common property law has roots simultaneously in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century commoning arguments for social equity and in emerging practices of “laissez faire competition” (196). As McCay powerfully demonstrates, commoning was by no means incompatible with some forms of capitalism and thus we should not take participation in markets or capitalist economic practices like land ownership to a priori exclude the possibility of commoning practices. Scholars have only barely begun exploring the range of commoning practices with regard to tangible (e.g., wood, water, fisheries) and intangible resources (folk ballads, cooperative labor, civic, legal, and political practices) in North America, nor have we much explored the cross-cultural dimensions implied in the mixture of European cultures (British, French, Spanish, Dutch) encountering indigenous cultural practices, or (as I mentioned in the introduction) the commoning traditions and practices of enslaved and free African-descended peoples. We need a broader and richer understanding of the vernacular customs and legal histories of the commons, as well as their range of possible manifestations inter- and intra-culturally, to apprehend and appreciate the conflicts, dimensions, and evolutions of commoning practices in the Americas, and specifically (for the concerns of this book) in the early nation. And until we do that work, we cannot fully comprehend the scope that various forms of enclosure took. In Banner’s account, French colonials in the early 1800s acquiesced

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relatively peacefully to the redefinition of their land commons, and to the absorption of a collective practice of self-governing into the United States’ representative, individualizing order. Other conflicts over the redefinition and taking of local democratic values, practices, and goals, however, had been and would continue to be more contentious. For instance, as Bouton details in Taming Democracy, residents in western Pennsylvania and across the colonies fought hard against policies in the 1780s that betrayed Revolutionary ideals linking wealth parity and political democracy. They utilized extralegal strategies for resistance that echoed tactics from European and British anti-enclosure resistance. To contest new policies enacted in the Pennsylvania legislature in the 1780s that attacked wealth equality and democratic means for people to obtain redress, ordinary Pennsylvanians first tried formal politics: they organized to elect representatives they assumed were friendly to Revolutionary ideals and proposed alternative policies that would ensure fair tax and debt collection, providing for “common benefit” and not “the particular emolument or advantage of any single man, family, or set of men who are only part of that community” (1776 Pennsylvania Constitution). When those attempts failed, they turned to strategies that reasserted the right of “the people” to govern themselves, deploying a series of collaborative extralegal strategies that aimed to protect community interest, often at direct cost to individual actors. County tax officers dragged their feet on collection, even when they knew they might be sued and foreclosed themselves for their resistance. Local justices of the peace refused to enforce orders for foreclosure, or even to hear tax-related lawsuits, even when they knew they could be accountable for those taxes. Juries themselves returned “not guilty” findings when judges did hear such cases. Sheriffs refused to foreclose when juries did pronounce guilt. Communities made and enacted no-bid pacts when the sheriff did allow auctions to proceed. Much of the resistance was nonviolent, but sometimes communities enacted a time-honored, ritualized custom of “rough music” to humiliate and punish local officials who violated community accord. Militias refused to turn out against their own and other communities. When other means of resistance were overcome by new state-level laws and policies, communities closed roads with fences, rocks, heavy logs, and trenches, and by redirecting streams to flood them. These barricades prevented courts from meeting, judges and juries from attending, and sheriffs from holding foreclosure auctions. These strategies, as Bouton observes, were impressively similar to those used to fight enclosure in England. Ordinary folk across the nation (there were similar series of actions in Massachusetts, New Jersey, Maryland, Virginia, and South Carolina during the 1780s) worked hard to preserve

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not just local rights but also political democratic ideals that had mobilized the Revolution. Such historical investigations of the politics, actions, and goals of ordinary people in Europe and the Americas during decades leading up to Revolution emphasize that recently renewed debates over the political power of the ordinary citizens (the demos, or what political theorists call “the multitude”) have not just a forward-looking, theoretical purchase in organizing responses to globalization—as such influential theorists as Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt argue—but also a historical one. Indeed, this alternative form of political organizing and sociality, of selforganizing civic commoning, sat squarely at the center of seventeenthand eighteenth-century controversies theorizing the establishment of modern states. As political theorist Paolo Virno summarizes: For Spinoza, the multitudo indicates a plurality which persists as such in the public scene, in collective action, in the handling of communal affairs, without converging into a One, without evaporating within a centripetal form of motion. . . . For Spinoza, the multitudo is the architrave of civil liberties . . . For Hobbes, the decisive political clash is the one which takes place between multitude and people. The modern public sphere can have as its barycenter either one or the other. . . . The multitude, according to Hobbes, shuns political unity, resists authority, does not enter into lasting agreements, never attains the status of a juridical person because it never transfers its own natural rights to the sovereign. (21–23) Hobbes enduringly framed the multitude as the organization of people in the state of nature—in other words, as pre-political. Hobbes’s strategy informed the Framers’ framing of extralegal organizations of the people—those unofficial instructions, petitions, assemblies, conventions, committees of correspondence, and out-of-door actions that had long been regarded as quasi-legitimate cultural expressions of a locally public will—these were foreclosed as the atavistic and anarchic expressions of the mob, not extralegal but illegal. In these notions of sovereignty and common good, in the continuing practices that manifested these theories, and in the accelerating condemnation of them as “rebellion,” we have the opportunity to study an important alternative to state-based sovereignty and its grounding in the liberal individual, what has come to stand as democracy’s “official” expression here and across the world. Increasingly, historians who study the history of the early nation acknowledge widespread democratic awareness, activism, and organization among people whose revolutionary resistance had become coordinated

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through such forms, and concede that the Constitution worked to corral these energies. But too many seem to conclude that ratification resolved these battles in favor of representative, federal order—if not by the document itself, then the consensus it manufactured among the elite, who controlled access to the print public sphere. Thus analyses of democratic history in the United States remain tied to the consensus narrative. This move is evident in Saul Cornell’s excellent study The Other Founders, which highlights how what he denominates plebian anti-Federalism— far more radically democratic and egalitarian than its middling and elite counterparts—predominated as the sentiment of ordinary citizens in the early United States. Cornell raises the problem of the archive, making innovative use of records of popular protests in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, to highlight the presence and influence of plebian radicalism on the Constitutional debates, staged by folk who by and large did not have much access to print. But he raises this problem only to pretend it doesn’t exist: once elite and middling anti-federalists disavow their common cause with more radical actors, forming themselves as a “loyal opposition” alongside Federalists in the run-up to ratification, Cornell simply abandons any accounting of these alternative ideas and practices within U.S. democracy, and the second half of his book actually operates securely within the elite/ state bias that the first half of his book so productively questions. As Cornell’s work underscores, if we are to pursue such questions we face two related problems: one of perspective—what Neeson characterizes as a failure of scholarly or historical imagination—and the other concerning the archive. Historian Reeve Huston argues that the U.S. representative political system has fostered a practice of “democratic ventriloquism” that from the beginning obfuscated “division, dissent, and difference” both in the political imaginary and the historical archive, empowering political, party, and organizational “cadre” to speak for and as the so-called popular will (“Speak?” 2–3). But Huston urges that this fact should not mean we constrain our study only to the politics of representation. He insists that the “rank and file . . . do have an archive—it’s just that it is scattered, fragmentary, and stuffed with edited transcriptions and outright forgeries” (5). That act of recovery involves innovative and careful use of available archives, and sometimes critical extrapolations. Novelists in the early nation were fascinated—both attracted and repulsed—by these democratic cultures and ideals. Their fictional, semifictional, and historical writings populate, animate, and explore the democratic ideas and traditions of ordinary citizens, along with the conflicts that emerged from competing ideas about democracy and conflicting democratic cultures in the late colonies and early nation. Their novels

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offer a provocative alternative historical archive for understanding how democratic cultures were streamlined into a more officially singular democratic state culture. And they underscore that many early citizens did not see their fractious and vibrant local democratic political and cultural commons as opposing Constitutional democracy or federal order but rather a vital (if sometimes contestational) partner with it.

From Nothing to Start, into Being To study how political fiction offers a window into the democratic ideals of ordinary citizens in the late colonial period, we can return to Crèvecoeur’s famous “What is an American?” passage from Letter 3 in Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. This passage, which traces the emerging awareness of American freedom among poor immigrants, has long been excerpted and anthologized to illustrate the dawning of the “American dream”: the ability of poorer people to gain property in the early United States by harnessing self-interest to economic self-making. As I suggested in the opening pages of this book, however, that liberal gloss is factually wrong, historically as well as politically misleading. For instance (and as I mentioned), the citizenship the narrator Farmer James celebrates is British—as Farmer James narrates this letter the Revolution has not yet begun. And the dream he describes for poor European immigrants in the colonies, ordinary folk, not elite, is something more complicated than just owning property, less about economic agency than how economic agency serves as a launching pad for political participation. More carefully studied, this passage offers readers a window into the interlocking political and economic innovations of citizenship in the British colonies of the late eighteenth century. In Letter 3, Farmer James advertises the “pleasing uniformity of decent competence that exists throughout our habitations” (67), drawing attention to a widely noted phenomenon, how the American colonies evidence less of a wealth gap than does Europe. Crèvecoeur’s description, however, focuses not on wealth per se, but on how such “pleasing” economic parity funds political equality. In “this great American asylum,” the poor of Europe access a more meaningful manhood as they become political equals. This ascension in status comes by dint of their own labor, the land’s easy abundance, and an affable equalitarianism that infuses the culture of the colonies. According to James’s generic description: He is hired, he goes to work and works moderately; instead of being employed by a haughty person, he finds himself with his equal,

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placed at the substantial table of the farmer . . . He begins to feel the effects of a sort of resurrection; hitherto he had not lived, but simply vegetated; he now feels himself a man because he is treated as such . . . Judge what an alteration there must arise in the mind and the thoughts of this man. He begins to forget his former servitude . . . his heart involuntarily swells and glows; this first swell inspires him with those new thoughts which constitute an American. (82) These new “American” thoughts lead the laborer both to dream and to act: to save money, to protect and build his reputation in order to earn the credit that will make the difference between his savings and the purchase price of the property he now dares to seek. The purchase of land itself, though, is importantly not the culmination to Crèvecoeur’s story. Rather, that comes with what that purchase enables. The benefits that accompany the freehold effect what Farmer James describes as the “great metamorphosis”: “What an epoch in this man’s life! He is become a freeholder . . . From nothing to start into being; from a servant to the rank of master; from being the slave of some despotic prince, to become a free man, invested with lands to which every municipal blessing is annexed! . . . It is in consequence of that change that he becomes an American” (83). Trained by anthology introductions and civics classes, readers typically parse James’s “American dream” as the owning of property, the specifically private bounty of the yeoman farmer. And yet these passages, closely read, point toward ownership only as a stage en route to political agency in community, what Farmer James describes as “every municipal blessing.” For James, the being made miraculously possible in America is precisely equalitarian, corporately self-determining citizenship. This ideal summarizes what historian Jeffrey Sklansky terms “a plebian political economy as the basis for an expansive understanding of equal rights” (15), the very conjoining of ideals of economic and political equality that, as Bouton argues, spurred Revolution. Today it’s difficult to comprehend the magically transformative qualities that Farmer James associates with citizenship. One reason is that in the United States—and especially without the draft or any kind of compulsory national service—we tend to take our citizenship for granted. Another reason today is that in relation to other kinds of powers we have, for instance as consumers, the power of citizenship seems much less significant. But it’s worth returning to the wonder that Crèvecoeur asks his readers to associate with emerging practices of and possibilities for citizenship in the British colonies, and unpacking its historical lessons about

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the differing practices and ideals of democracy experienced by common citizens in the late colonies and early nation. Crèvecoeur stages the metamorphosis of economic ascension, political awareness, and civic participation as a specifically American harvest. The political craving for independence and free manhood drove English yeoman migrants to North American shores. This was a craving born from their own struggles with emerging capitalism in England and Europe, as historian Alan Kulikoff usefully outlines: The first migrants to our shores—husbandmen (a term for all those who worked the land, whether as tenants or owners), former husbandmen, and urban workers—had lived through the birth of English capitalism. Although feudal lords had coerced peasants into making extraeconomic payments, in return, peasants had controlled most of England’s lands. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, capitalist landlords had expropriated the lands of these peasants, renting [it] to improving tenants. Forced into agricultural labor or into the urban work force, these new proletarians protested regularly, tearing down the hedges that enclosed common lands, flooding drained swamplands, rioting for a fair price for bread. In the revolution of the 1640s, they supported the radical democrats. Believing wage labor to be debased, they dreamed of regaining land they or their parents had lost. When they left England behind, the first white Americans of the seventeenth century carried with them a craving for independence from lordship and an ardor for secure control over land. These goals were difficult to achieve. (“Revolution, Capitalism, and the Formation of Yeoman Classes,” 84–85) Kulikoff highlights how the “craving for independence” and “ardor for secure control over land” were complexly mixed with remainders of the very culture and economy they were being enclosed from: that of the commons. This is a key ingredient in the first stage of the “great metamorphosis” that Farmer James traces. The historical fact of enclosure combines with the lingering sociality of the commons, or what Sklansky calls plebian political economy, to feed desires for the security that comes with secure land possession, a decent competence, the right to civic participation, and the easy social equality that immigrant laborers encounter in colonial America. We might reasonably describe the conjoining of land ownership and economic competence with political citizenship as the new world evolution of commoning practice and ideals, where the

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“self-interest” Farmer James celebrates in Letter 3 as the great motive for a person’s labor is both supported by and in turn buoys the social and civic commonwealth. This is precisely what Crèvecoeur’s tale of Andrew the Hebridean illustrates, as I suggested in the introduction. Visiting in Philadelphia, Farmer James goes with an acquaintance to the docks to watch immigrants disembark. The friend invites a confused looking Scotsman, his wife, and his child to stay at his house, and thus begins Farmer James’s involvement with Andrew of Barra. With evident pleasure, Farmer James recounts how he and “Mr. C” assist Andrew in gaining employment for himself and members of his family, so that they might save up enough money to buy land. James assists him in that eventual purchase, a process which mystifies the humble Scotsman: “How could the person who never possessed anything conceive that he could extend his new dominion over this land, even after he should be laid in his grave?” (102). James describes the effects of this purchase for Andrew using exactly the terms of his generic description: “Here, then, is honest Andrew, invested with every municipal advantage they confer, become a freeholder, possessed of a vote, of a place of residence, a citizen of the province of Pennsylvania,” emphasizing how the owning of land stages an ascension to the powers of corporate self-governing. As Alan Taylor so beautifully summarizes: Crèvecoeur was no mere celebrator of American materialism. He understood that abundance could corrupt as well as liberate. Nor was he any champion of rugged individualism. He regarded social bonds as essential to sustained prosperity in the new land . . . he lovingly describes the cooperative activity of bees, quail, cattle, pigeons, hornets and wasps in order to cast sociability as a natural imperative . . . Crèvecoeur dwells on the evolution of Andrew the Hebridean into an American with the help of benevolent patrons and sympathetic friends. The key moment comes not through his individual exertions but when neighbors gather to help him clear two acres of land. (“American Beginning”) In that moment, when “about forty” of his neighbors gather to sing, clear land, construct a house, and eat together in celebration, Andrew was, as we have seen, “absolutely incapable of working; it was to him the most solemn holiday he had ever seen” (103). Celebrating this day “with joy, and thanksgiving and honest libations,” Andrew serves his neighbors, celebrated and wept with joy, going forward into a future that allows him “to help others as generously as others had helped him.” This communal labor and celebration funds what Crèvecoeur details as “the great meta-

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morphosis,” a transmutation that harnesses self-interest to communal support and communal good. Crèvecoeur celebrates the civic joys of political participation that increased freeholding enabled in America. The ascension to property “has established all our rights; on it is founded our rank, our freedom, our power as citizens, our importance as inhabitants of such a district” (54). His language is emphatically collective: our rights, our rank, our freedom, our power, our importance. As members of this civic collective, ordinary American men “will carefully read the newspapers, enter into every political disquisition, freely blame or censure governors and others” (71). Alongside their participation in an abstract print republic, Farmer James shows American colonists participating in locally produced civic commons, describing how Americans collaboratively extend to new residents the help that will enable their ascension to freeholding and their “power as citizens.” As Farmer James rhapsodizes in Letter 3, “We know, properly speaking, no strangers . . . No sooner does an European arrive, no matter of what condition, than his eyes are opened upon the fair prospect . . . he meets with hospitality, kindness and plenty everywhere . . . There is room for everybody in America” (80–81). Scholars have paid little attention to the customs of commoning that Farmer James forwards as characteristically American, customs that, as we have seen, form the climax to his story about Andrew the Hebridean. This overlooking is easy to do, given our familiar understanding that enclosure happened in England, not America, that it was accomplished before the United States’ independence, that questions of citizenship were productively separated from ownership by universal white manhood suffrage soon after, that citizenship is an individual right and not collective good. But a careful reading of Crèvecoeur’s works can help us cultivate the very imagination that Neeson suggests might reanimate these forgotten political, social, and economic possibilities. Such examinations can expand U.S. democracy’s history, re-enlivening debate about what it was and what it can be today. In the Sketches (composed contemporaneously but not included in Letters from an American Farmer), Crèvecoeur similarly elaborates admiringly on the labor and domestic commons that characterize the colonies. Ruminating on residents’ “famous” proclivity for taking good care of the neighborhood poor leads Farmer James to expound more particularly on how northern colonists share labor and leisure alike, collaborating to plow, spin, clear stones, and drain swamps, and then to enjoy relaxation and merriment at the end of hard work: “Thus we help one another; thus by our single toils at home and by our collective strength we remove

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many obstacles which no single family could do” (“Various Rural Subjects,” in Letters, 278). James highlights the routine expectation of winter commoning of domestic shelter and provisions, when: the severity of the climate requires that all our doors should be opened to the frozen traveler, and indeed, we shut them not, either by night or by day at any time of the year. The traveler when cold has a right to stop and warm himself at the first house he sees. He freely goes to the fire, which is kept a-burning all night. There he forgets the keenness of the cold; he smokes his pipe; drinks of the cider which is often left on the hearth; and departs in peace. We always sleep in these rooms; at least I do, and have often seen mine full when I was in my bed. On waking I have sometimes spoken to them; at other times it was a silent meeting. These reasons which force these people to travel in these dreadful nights is that they may be able to return home the same day. They are farmers carrying their produce to the market, and their great distance from it obliges them to set out sometimes at twelve o’clock. Far from being uneasy at seeing my house thus filled while my wife and I are abed, I think it, on the contrary, a great compliment when I consider that by thus stopping they convince me that they have thought my house and my fire better than that of my neighbors. (318) Sharing material, labor, and affective resources, citizens participate publicly and privately together in creating a commonwealth as a realm of labor and value distinct from the market. As Alan Taylor summarizes the expression of this ethos on the Maine frontier in the 1780s, “Mutual support sustained the settlers’ tenuous hold on their liberty as freeholders. Their cherished concept of independence meant freedom from domination by a superior, rather than an aversion to interdependence with equals” (Liberty Men, 83). Taylor describes Maine settlers’ tradition of “changing works” and “good neighborhood”—collective work parties and labor exchange much like what Farmer James records of his Pennsylvanian neighborhood. In his Sketches, Crèvecoeur links this local collectivist ethos, the experience of making local commonwealth, to the political confidence and activism of ordinary colonials: “They bring their governors and assemblymen to a severe account; they boldly blame them or censure them for such measures as they dislike. Here you might see the American freeman in all the latitude of his political felicity” (278). The political felicity Crèvecoeur describes is a phenomenon Thomas Jefferson characterized in a 1774 essay as public happiness: “Our ancestors . . . possessed a right, which nature has given to all men, of departing

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from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them, of going in quest of new habitations, and of there establishing new societies, under such laws and regulations as, to them, shall seem most likely to promote public happiness” (“Rights,” 105–6). Hannah Arendt pursues the importance of this quickly forgotten concept: If Jefferson was right . . . they must have been prompted even then by some sort of dissatisfaction with the rights and liberties of Englishmen, prompted by a desire for some kind of freedom which the “free inhabitants” of the mother country did not enjoy. This freedom, they called it later, when they had come to taste it, “public happiness,” and it consisted in the citizen’s right of access to the public realm, in his share in public power—to be “a participator in government affairs” in Jefferson’s telling phrase . . . The very fact that the word “happiness” was chosen in laying claim to a share in public power indicates strongly that there existed in the country, prior to the revolution, such a thing as “public happiness,” and that men knew they could not be altogether “happy” if their happiness was located and enjoyed only in private life. (127) Crèvecoeur did not share Jefferson’s more radical political leanings: he disavows the politicalness of the colonists when it manifests in any form other than quiet appreciation for the blessings of British citizenship. In fact, his protagonist Farmer James flees to the frontier when his neighbors begin choosing sides in the Revolution. Instead, Crèvecoeur’s portrait of American life highlights the less contentious emotional, social, and economic pleasures created by the culture of commoning. His descriptions of British colonial life nevertheless gesture repeatedly toward the nascent civic commons that Jefferson described—the “municipal blessings” supported by abundant land combined with the labor and hospitality commons that the author of our Declaration of Independence’s first draft was more able to appreciate in their revolutionary political dimensions.

Democracy before the Fact Crèvecoeur’s staging of this “great metamorphosis”—the wonder of citizenship in common or public happiness that Farmer James describes— was both embraced and hotly debated in the early nation. Farmer James idealizes a collective civic good, a robust conception of self-governing democratic power and access which inspired many to dream, demand, and act—from the late colonies through the antebellum period. That robust understanding of corporate self-governing democratic power soon

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became an object of concern for the Framers, who aimed to contain its effects in the architecture of representative government, as I have argued in this chapter. But the ratification of the Constitution and its orderproducing structures for delegated representation did not effect the disappearance of expectations that regular citizens had developed for their own “active liberty” in the project of self-governing, as I’ll demonstrate in the chapters ahead. Though proponents of the Constitution increasingly represented ordinary political actors as disorderly threats to the democratic project, these citizens, who continued agitating for better access both politically and economically, did not see their efforts as opposing official government. (Indeed, the fractious populist practices and actions were never a threat to national government—they aimed not at overthrow, but at law and policy reform, as Ron Formisano has detailed.) Rather than disappearing, then, as the Framers seemed to have hoped, such expectations and demands survived across the United States, manifested in communities, informal practices, organized protests, and formal political organizations throughout the nation’s first century. We will track their robust survival—and eventual containment—in political novels published well into the mid-nineteenth century, and we will begin by looking at a key episode after ratification, one that allowed the Framers to launch an impressive rhetorical framing of commons democracy that would shape broader understandings of the value of its vernacular practices.

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Between Savagery and Civilization : The Whiskey Rebellion and a Democratic Middle Way

Democratic Sovereignty or Anarchy? As protests over debt and paper money played out across the nation in the 1780s, a group of Yale-educated New Englanders known as the “Hartford” or “Connecticut Wits”—David Humphreys, Joel Barlow, John Trumbull, and Lemuel Hopkins—published twelve installments of a mock-epic poem, The Anarchiad, between October 1786 and September 1787 (the Constitutional Convention began in May and sat through September 1787). Attempting to influence public opinion toward a stronger, federalized government, the authors conjured a witty trick, promoting their work as a “rediscovered” epic poem (supposedly excavated from an antiquated American fortress) that uncannily prophesies current political unrest. The poem warns of a “darkness” that threatens to overwhelm “the new-born state,” and describes the dangers that will be posed by badly dressed “mobs in myriad” who “blacken all the way,” “shade with rags the plain” and “discord spread” (6). The document even divines the names of two key players in the events it forecasts: (Daniel) Shays and (Job) Shattuck. Characterizing the forces these men unleash as “Chaos,” the Wits summarize contemporary political struggles in Manichaean terms, as an age-old battle between good and evil (6). The putative prophesy doesn’t bother with the Regulators’ specific complaints (aggressive foreclosure and regressive taxation policies) or concerns (post-Revolutionary economic restructuring that benefited wealthy speculators rather than ordinary people). Rather, the mythically happy ending of the poem comes

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when Hesper confronts the mob’s disorderly filthiness. This mythological figure (who manifests Venus, the “bringer of light”) salvifically summons the nation’s sages to assemble in Philadelphia and rescue the country. The poem thus positions contemporary citizens protesting unfair taxation and economic policy as a primordial threat to the nation’s existence. The Wits maneuver to obscure the very democratic possibilities for equality and citizen self-determination the Massachusetts Regulators aimed to uphold in what is known to history as the Shays’ Rebellion. Portraying these actors as savage and evil, the Wits place them beyond the pale, appealing to wise men to rescue the nation from the anarchy these rebels promoted. Anarchy familiarly connotes political disorder, an opposition to law and government. Recently, though, political anthropologist James C. Scott has reclaimed the term precisely for the study of political systems that don’t resist political order per se but do push back against capture by the modern nation-state. The familiar charge of anarchy directs attention away from the fact of the alternative politics, but by studying groups and movements so labeled Scott excavates what he characterizes as the sensible democratic practices of ordinary people trying to resist being corralled within a political–economic order hostile to their interests. Scott’s career has been given, in large part, to describing how “peasants, artisans, and workers were themselves political thinkers,” and he has analyzed their practices with the same respect that is accorded to the study of the political philosophy and practice of elite actors (Two Cheers, xxiii). In Scott’s view, the political vernacular of the non-elite—their daily practices of communal good and survival—register as anarchism in the view of the state to the extent that such practices critique or rebut its official economic and political aims. In his comparative and historical analysis, vernacular practices more often than not demonstrate a commitment to economic equalitarianism. Thus Scott discovers not anarchism in the (mythic) sense of lawlessness but in the (political–economic) sense of “mutuality, or cooperation without hierarchy or state rule” (xiii). Not intrinsically hostile to the state, the anarchism Scott generalizes from his comparative anthropological research nevertheless sometimes attempts to correct the course of state for the good of the many. If local practices do become hostile to the state, Scott emphasizes, they do so when the state makes itself into the enemy of common folk, aiming to eliminate their vernacular self-governing practices. The aims of the political anarchism Scott captures for analysis sound a lot like those vernacular or commons democracy in the late colonies and early United States. If we turn to the next major regulation in U.S. history,

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the so-called Whiskey Rebellion, we can see quite vividly how this Regulation (like its Massachusetts predecessor) was posed to correct (not overturn) federal power, and how federal leaders made themselves into the enemy of common folk on the western frontier, aiming to eliminate those citizens’ vernacular self-governing power. The Regulators had pursued legal remedies before they turned to extralegal action, and all the while saw themselves as citizens participating in local, state, and federal selfgovernment. But Washington and Hamilton framed their collaborative aims quite differently: as conflict. They cast the Pennsylvania Regulators as enemies of the nation. From their Federal perspective, the two could not peacefully coexist. As we will see, Hamilton in particular aimed to showcase the triumph of official, federally deliberated law and policy over and against the vernacular practices of democracy. The first part of this chapter examines the stakes of the battle. Then it studies how key players in the West countered official descriptions of the episode. Finally, it shows how a particularly inventive novel, composed across and beyond the years of this episode, theorizes the political stakes of this battle over democratic practice and understanding. Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s multivolume novel Modern Chivalry posits vernacular democracy as a vital partner to formal democratic institutions, insisting on its reconsideration in a way that anticipates Scott’s repurposing of the notion of anarchism.

Regulation or Rebellion? The so-called Whiskey Rebellion, the most dramatic Regulation in the wake of the ratification of the Federal Constitution, evolved rapidly in 1794. It came in response to renewed attempts to enforce a three-yearold federal excise on whiskey (a tax that Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton had promised Congress would raise necessary revenues to redeem the war-bond debt). As Judge Alexander Addison, a Federalist district judge, noted in his account of the rebellion, protesters were following a long and successful tradition: their pattern of protest against similar state excises enacted in 1781 and 1783 had resulted in Pennsylvania’s repeal of the taxes in 1791 (which happened to be the same year the federal excise was signed into law). And so westerners’ opposition to the 1791 federal imposition, buoyed by recent state success, was especially robust. Westerners fought this tax because of the particular hardship it imposed on the poorest inhabitants, who didn’t have a profitable way to transport wheat (a product not excised) beyond their own region except by converting it to whiskey. Literally, as the inhabitants west of the Alleghenies understood, this tax—the first federal excise—was one that

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directly and disproportionately favored easterners over westerners, and the wealthy over the poor. Hamilton’s legislation package for funding the state war bonds as a national debt may have been too complicated for most in Congress to follow when they passed it in 1791, but its aims did not escape those whom the tax most burdened. Whiskey had become not just a product, but also a fundamental means of finance in the West: where wheat was used by tenants to pay their rent and labor was paid in wheat, where transportation across the mountains to market was prohibitively expensive, distilling wheat to whiskey (often in communal stills) was the only way to convert it to profit. As historian William Hogeland summarizes, a “liquid commodity both literally and figuratively, the drink democratized local economies, offering even tenants and sharecropping laborers a benefit . . . The product connected popular finance theories with small-scale commercial development that, though marginal, had potential to free rural people of debt and dependency” (Whiskey Rebellion, 67). Westerners knew that large producers could afford the excise, which had to be paid before the sale of the whiskey (which couldn’t legally be sold without federal stamps on casks). The majority of producers, however, were smallholders who lived on slim profit margins and who usually didn’t have cash until they sold their whiskey. And these small operators knew that even if they could pay the excise in advance of sale, marking up the price of their whiskey to recuperate the difference, large distillers would simply cut their prices and undercut small operator sales. The enforcement of the excise would thus force tenuously solvent smallholders to give up this key source of revenue, without which they would have to sell out to the large landholders. As Hogeland summarizes it elsewhere, “Hamilton wrote the tax law to amplify the advantages of big, industrial distillers throughout the country; to put seasonal distillers out of business; and to defeat the democratic effects of whiskey economics in the west” (Founding Finance, 179). Westerners saw this tax as an attempt to undercut their hard-won economic independence, driving them even deeper into debt and into the pockets of profiteering creditors. But it was not simply a new economic hardship. Rather, it was more evidence that the post-Revolutionary elite had abandoned their commitment to economic and political equality. Protesters in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina responded vigorously from the moment of the excise’s Congressional approval by organizing committees of correspondence in four counties. Democratic–Republican committees supported their opposition, east and west of the Alleghenies. While subsequent historians have tended to focus largely on the more radical, extralegal maneuvers of the so-called

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rebels (which included tarring and feathering several deeply unfortunate excise collectors and officers, threats of secession, and ultimately seizing the federal garrison’s equipment and ammunition), recent scholars of that episode have shown that in the main, western citizens staged their opposition in ways that drew on and honored republican ideals and Constitutional process as well as the democratic principles that fueled Revolution against England. It is precisely this evidence that allows us to question long-standing assertions of “rebellion,” the notion that the protestors simply aimed at lawless opposition to fair law and taxes. (Hamilton is widely credited with being the first to assign the term “rebellion” to the showdown.) As historian Jeffrey Davis points out, the western societies engaged in protesting the excise were “certainly concerned with local autonomy. However, their methods—such as resolutions, remonstrances and electioneering—as well as the language they spoke went well beyond the local” (44). The societies publicly explained their opposition appealing to national principles, calling on citizens to “fraternize with us in a common cause” (46). The representatives of the “local” in this episode clearly believed in and acted on the idea that the practice of democracy devolved on a continuum of scales, in deliberative and representational, legal and extralegal maneuvers. Three years into the protest, and as Sharp notes, at “the height of the popularity and strength of the Democratic–Republican societies” (92), Washington’s Philadelphia administration decided to enforce the excise. Because of the long-standing and successful regional opposition to distilled liquor taxes, federal collectors faced well-rehearsed and organized techniques of opposition. Hearing rumors that Federal representatives were serving subpoenas to sixty tax delinquents to face charges in Philadelphia during harvesting season, more than fifty armed men gathered to challenge the two marshals. David Neville, the enormously wealthy whiskey distiller and widely despised tax collector, faced the protestors from within his fortified mansion and fired into the crowd, wounding several and killing one. The protestors returned fire before withdrawing. After they left, the community resolved, according to excise opponent David Bradford, “to support those who attacked Neville’s house and not let them be persecuted by the law” (Davis, 53–54). As state representative William Findlay noted in his account of the events, the particular timing of these subpoenas virtually ensured that the community would turn out to support whiskey tax resistors: it was a tradition that neighbors assisted one another during grain harvest, and the removal of anyone from the community threatened everyone’s harvest (78). Backcountry folk first supported the return to Neville’s home, where a crowd of now more than

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five hundred men engaged in another round of verbal battle with Neville and his supporters before setting fire to buildings on his property. Locals proceeded to conduct mass meetings, to intercept mail, and to seize the federal arsenal in Pittsburgh. Western Pennsylvanians acted on their understanding of the nondelegable sovereignty of the people. As Hugh Henry Brackenridge insisted in his own account of the episode, “It was the people commanding the officer [of the militia], not the officer the people” (41). Receiving news of these rapidly developing events, President Washington gave orders to amass a federal militia, authorizing a force of men (12,950) as large as the one he had commanded during the Revolution. Pennsylvania Governor Thomas Mifflin joined Pennsylvania Secretary of State Alexander Dallas to urge for federal military restraint “until judiciary authority has proved incompetent to enforce obedience or to punish infractions” (Sharp, American Politics, 96). But after only a brief negotiation Washington, urged on by Hamilton, insisted on the military “submission” of the westerners, and the militia moved in for what would turn into a months-long occupation. The standing committee orchestrating the Regulation/Rebellion voted to sign an oath of submission to federal law—including the hated excise—before the troops arrived. The more radical participants in the episode fled the country, heading farther west to avoid the mass arrests they rightly suspected would be demanded by Hamilton. It can seem ungenerous to observe that President Washington had direct financial interest in the location chosen for enforcement. As historian Thomas Slaughter notes, General Washington had in the 1760s and ’70s “mounted a campaign for land on the frontier more impressive than any he ever executed as a general—and more successful. He had an acquisitive genius and was a ruthless exploiter of advantage” (81), and eventually would accumulate more than “58,000 acres beyond the Appalachian Mountains,” with “4,695 acres in southwestern Pennsylvania alone” (88). He along with other investors stood to benefit (and did) from the military action there. Washington would himself observe that “this event having happened at the time it did was fortunate”: as Slaughter summarizes, the action “helped raise the value of Washington’s property by about 50 percent” (224). Recognizing Washington’s interest in the region—as did the people being served rent notices by Washington’s agents in the backcountry—nevertheless clarifies why westerners would understand this episode as yet more evidence that the official, federal government was being gamed to advantage the few at the expense of the many. For them, opposition to the whiskey excise was not just a refusal to pay taxes—it was a

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stand to ensure the kind of economic fairness that could support political equality in the nation’s revolutionary democracy. Thus we do not have to study Washington’s specific economic selfinterest to understand the economic calculations involved in the showdown between the federal government and the backcountry. As Albert Gallatin noted in a 1794 speech to the Pennsylvania General Assembly on the subject of the Whiskey Rebellion, “I am told that the President mentioned that there were two great objects in view in calling out the militia: the first to show, not only to the inhabitants of the western country but to the Union at large, and indeed, to foreign nations, both the possibility of a republican government exerting its physical strength in order to enforce the execution of laws when opposed; and the second, to procure a full and complete restoration of order and submission to the laws among the insurgents. The first object, the President added, was fully attained” (3:25). The aim of convincing the larger United States and foreign nations was specifically to reassure creditors of the security of their investments. As Hogeland highlights, Hamilton’s strategy for the federal response to this event was key to implementing his long-term plan for “funding the domestic debt, liberating the nation’s commercial energy while placing all significant public investment in federal hands . . . by adding to the import duties a single tax, exhaustively calculated to serve a precise purpose: the federal excise, soon to be known as the whiskey tax” (Whiskey Rebellion, 52). Hamilton meant to squash regional resistance as such, to redirect the democratic opposition of “the people,” self-constituting at the local level, into individual submission to federal power. This would enable him to achieve the dream of Robert Morris, Philadelphia’s fabled financier of the Revolution, to “open the purses of the people” for the purposes of national funding (306). Hamilton aimed the collection specifically at the Pennsylvania backcountry (and not the other three protesting states) because it was that region which had effectively engaged the democratic process to advance debtor relief. Pennsylvania citizens accomplished this by electing two representatives, one a farmer (Robert Whitehill) and the other a weaver (William Findley), to the Philadelphia assembly, where, in the early 1780s, these ordinary westerners persuaded their fellow representatives to revoke the charter for Robert Morris’s Bank of North America because, they argued, it served no public function, favoring the interests of wealthy speculators. In its place they wanted a new land bank, which would offer small loans on terms favorable to ordinary borrowers. Hogeland describes this as a “remarkable victory of populist lawmaking,” and it was precisely such

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democratically achieved power that Hamilton aimed to corral. Stage 1 of that maneuver came in the ratification of the Federal Constitution, which, supporters believed, as Hogeland notes, “would disable rural populism’s political wing in the state assemblies while subjecting its violent wing in the countryside to strong policing” (Whiskey Rebellion, 58). Stage 2 came with the revising of the Pennsylvania Constitution in 1790, where James Wilson, an associate of Robert Morris, played a key role in replacing the unicameral General Assembly with a bicameral legislature, a stronger and independently elected executive, and district judges no longer regionally elected, but appointed by the governor. Stage 3 had been the spectacular execution of the whiskey excise showdown to produce revenue that would end agitation about popular local sovereignty and fund the retiring of war bond debt at inflated prices that would benefit speculators and gratify creditors. As Sharp summarizes the episode, this uprising “was part of the American struggle to come to grips with republicanism and the nature of representative government.” In his analysis, the “whiskey rebels, as well as other aggrieved minorities of the time, failed to understand that compromise was essential in order for representative government to work” (98). But the participants, by no remote definition a minority in the western counties, had asked for compromise—a different form of tax on land, which would be more fairly distributed across easterners and westerners and proportionately distributed among rich and poor. The struggle here seems better described as one over the functional direction of democratic “compromise”: federal government used this opportunity spectacularly to establish its right to dictate that direction.

The Politics of Representing “Democracy” The Whiskey Rebellion would fundamentally reset the popular terms for understanding vernacular or commons democracy in the nation. Henceforth it would be framed as a phenomenon located largely in the nation’s backcountry or frontier, a set of uncivilized energies that demanded federal policing and civilizing for the good of the nation. The spectacle of this episode aided Federalism’s project of converting the self-governing civic collectives established under the first state constitutions into juridical individuals who experience their sovereignty in the act of self-subordinating to and identifying with federally oriented state power. And Federal authority through this incident re-figured the long-standing tradition of “extra-institutional” democratic protest as anti-institutional and, indeed, as anti-national. Hamilton’s triumph, then, came not just in the benefits that the crushed rebellion would yield for wealthy bond and land specu-

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lators, who were now able to enforce their collection of debt and their hold on land, but also in the rhetorical re-inscription of this political battle in the apolitical terms of myth. Thereafter, following the terms suggested by The Anarchiad, Federalists were able to stage confrontations between vernacular and formal democracy not politically—as a debate between differing opinions for a common good—but mythically, as a showdown between savagery and civilization. Westerners, who lived in pre-political savagery on the nation’s borderlands, needed to be civilized and modernized in order to become productive members of the nation’s polity. Key political actors in the Whiskey Rebellion understood the practical stakes along with the broader implications of this rhetorical framing. Albert Gallatin, William Findley, and Hugh Henry Brackenridge all countered attempts to demonize the citizens of the West and to characterize their resistance and protest as unlawful. As participants who were already visible political actors before the events reached their crisis, all three became the targets of Federalists in the years following. These three men waged a telling battle over the rhetorical stakes of democratic representation in their responses to these later attacks. Gallatin’s 1794 election to the Pennsylvania General Assembly as Fayette County’s representative was soon challenged by two of his fellow representatives. They argued that his appointment was unconstitutional because the county had been insurrectionary since it had begun opposing the federal excise in 1791. In January 1795 Gallatin delivered a speech not so much defending the prospects for his political career as challenging the terms by which the so-called insurrection was represented. He reminded his fellow representatives of the lawful avenues pursued by the putative rebels during a period of time when representatives of the Pennsylvania General Assembly, having revoked their own state excise, were publishing opinions against the federal excise: “Was it more criminal in the inhabitants of the western country than in this House to circulate their opinions? Can a circulation of opinion be called criminal? This doctrine, once adopted, would destroy the privilege, the constitutional privilege, of citizens to assemble peacefully, to remonstrate, to discuss the measures of government, and to publish their thoughts. We must distinguish between a publication of sentiments and acting” (3:5). To charges that Gallatin’s presence at the various meetings held by the western communities to determine their course of action, and specifically the meeting on August 14 at Parkinson’s Ferry, was proof that he himself was an insurgent, criminal, and therefore ineligible to serve, Gallatin responded that not “only the object and the conduct of the meeting were unexceptionable, but its effect and consequences were highly favorable. It was that meeting which restored

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order and internal peace; it was that meeting which first stemmed the torrent” (3:30). And more generally, he insisted, “the doctrine” that undergirded such a charge “is not less dangerous than absurd. It goes to support an idea that whenever riots shall take place, or a mob grow dangerous, instead of trying every means of persuasion to induce the offenders to desist, it is the duty of a good citizen to keep aloof, to suffer the whole country, under the dominion of a mob, to become a prey to anarchy, and to risk the event of a general rebellion, rather than attempt to recall to a sense of duty as many of their fellow citizens as they can” (3:29–30). Gallatin, like Findley, would insist on the lawfulness of all but a portion of the proceedings denominated “rebellion.” Each insisted on distinguishing between the rough actions of a few and the community’s ongoing attempts at deliberation—even under difficult pressures—to determine the course of the community’s response. And they both emphasized the community’s voluntary submission to the excise by the federally imposed deadline of September 11. More provocatively than Gallatin, though, Findley, who published a book-length rebuttal to Hamilton’s representations of the “rebellion,” attacked the antidemocratic and even unlawful aims of Hamilton’s rhetorical and policy strategies throughout the incident. Findley’s argument—that “there are few instances of treason and rebellion which may not be traced to indiscreet laws as their source”—readily concedes that there was some lawlessness on the side of the westerners (49). But he insisted that western lawlessness was a boomerang effect from the actions of federal leadership, and specifically from Secretary of Treasury Alexander Hamilton, against whose judgments and representations of the rebellion Findley mounts an insistent case. Responding to Hamilton’s public assertion that he had shown restraint in the exercise of force against the westerners, Findley queries: Did the laws give him any more power to dispense with the application of their coercive powers than it did to the people in their non-compliance. The constitution has indeed vested the humane and salutary power of pardoning in the President but has not vested the power of granting impunity in the commission of crimes, nor of dispensing with the execution of laws in the Secretary. That impunity, which evidently contributes to promote opposition to the laws, and increase the number and the crimes of the offenders, is undeserving of the name of lenity. It is a refinement in cruelty. (75–76) Findley highlights the unilateralism of democratic “compromise” claimed by Federal government in the excise. He insists that the practice of political representation has a moral imperative to multilateralism, calling

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“absurd” claims that westerners had no right to oppose a law passed by Congress. “This doctrine,” Findley insists, “is supported by a presumption, that a government of representatives can never mistake the true interests of their constituents” (49). “How much better would it have been,” he argues, “how much more honorable to the state, to have listened to the remonstrances of the people in time” (51). In Findley’s account, it is Congress’s refusal of democratic dialogue between representatives and their constituents that propelled actions toward violence in the West. Findley also targets the official actions of the federal government and its militia. In his telling, they do not restore order so much as they impose the very “terror” that they ostensibly came to western Pennsylvania to restrain. Despite the heated rhetoric and threats of the “rebels,” Findley avers, he “saw none of these dreadful threats executed.” To his dismay, however, “I clearly saw that very same spirit was operating in the army, that had thus convulsed the western country” (145–46). Once events had advanced toward violence, “the situation and circumstances were not convenient for deliberate or impartial examination” on either side (216). Findley’s rebuttal aimed to make retrospective understandings of the so-called rebellion more deliberative exactly by making them less onesided. And he’s especially eager to undermine patriotic enthusiasm for the militia’s subjugation of the western counties. As he reminds, the calling up of the militia after the residents of the western counties had signed an oath of submission to federal law was extra-Constitutional, more like an act of war than a lawful response to a real threat: “That the facts should have been represented with pretty high colouring, was not at all surprising, but that that conduct which was lawful should have been represented as criminal, and that charges should have been insinuated against the whole people of the western counties which were not founded in fact, could not be justified on any honest principle” (226). His rebuke is pointed. The Constitution claims sovereignty over individuals, not groups: as Madison had insisted during the Constitutional Convention, national government would operate on individuals, not on the states. Punishing an entire population indiscriminately is not within the legal purview of the Constitution to which Washington and Hamilton were demanding western submission. Military force enacted against collectives of citizens is not criminal punishment but war. In this charge, Findley signals that he understood Hamilton’s ultimate goal, which was not so much to punish individuals’ rejection of the excise but to quash the challenge western populist radicalism presented to the Federalist vision of democratic order. Hamilton wanted westerners defined as an anarchic mob. Findley wanted them taken seriously as a self-governing citizenry, invested in

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the work of building a democratic nation grounded both in political and economic fairness. In his view the westerners were not lawless: they had made their commitment to lawful order prominent in repeated public and signed resolutions throughout the protest. As a participant, Findley’s conclusion is that the only error of the westerners was “an opinion that an immoral law might be opposed and yet the government respected, and all other laws obeyed” (300). He observes, “It is not easy to convince a people that a law, in their opinion unjust and oppressive in its operation, is at the same time constitutional” (43). If the force of federal law was against them in this conclusion, nevertheless their logic was republican and democratic in principle: “This theory became with many a religious principle, in defense of which they reasoned with considerable address” (300). Hamilton, Findley insisted, was wrong to treat the people of western Pennsylvania as enemies of the nation, just as he was wrong to represent the events leading up to the showdown as anarchic. Hamilton had aimed, in the event’s aftermath, to arrest and make examples of William Findley and Albert Gallatin, both of whom had opposed the National Bank and Hamilton’s finance plan. Thwarted in his hopes to punish these two men, he went hard after Hugh Henry Brackenridge, another prominent westerner involved in the incident. The Neville family promised Hamilton that they had evidence of Brackenridge’s malfeasance. By the time the militia arrived in western Pennsylvania, Brackenridge’s fate was predicted to be, at best, public trial and execution, and, at worst, assassination. But the main piece of evidence against him turned out to be useless. Still, Hamilton pursued the charge of treason, questioning Brackenridge personally for a full day. Ultimately Brackenridge’s detailed recounting of his work to quell armed opposition to the enforcement of the excise finally persuaded Hamilton that it would not be worth prosecuting him either. Brackenridge’s self-exculpatory account, Incidents of the Insurrection, published a year later (1795), is notably less interested than Gallatin’s or Findley’s in defending the motives of the western citizens (though in an earlier essay protesting this excise, he expresses his puzzlement that a region so remote from commercial centers, so burdened by problems of transportation and border defense, and in general so impoverished would be identified as a “country from which to raise a revenue”) (Incidents, 48). Rather, Brackenridge ponders the problem he faced during the events: how best to calm an agitated “multitude.” In the midst of describing his own role, Brackenridge demonstrates what can only be described as a philosophical interest in the decision-making processes of the western citizens past the point that events had turned toward violence. He is fasci-

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nated by crowd affect and its dynamics—what he alternately denominates the “multitude” and “the popular mind.” As he notes early in this process, “It was impossible to know the real sentiment of almost any one among the multitude; how far they were there from necessity or from choice. Every man was afraid of the opinion of another” (54). Brackenridge describes his project as mediator (perhaps self-servingly, though it’s fair to note that his own account is corroborated in the accounts of Gallatin and Findley, neither of whom particularly liked Brackenridge). In his account he poses to earn the sympathy of those most rebellious by pretending to agree with them, in order to await an opportunity to help them consider alternatives to battle or secession. This was no easy feat: his neighbors didn’t trust him to begin with, having recently voted him out of office for supporting the passage of the Federal Constitution. As events accelerated toward armed resistance and talk of secession was bandied, Brackenridge began insisting on secret ballots, so people could vote their mind and hearts without the threat of peer pressure; he insisted on electing representative delegations, “taking the business out of the hands of the multitude by establishing an organization through which alone they could act” (82). Detailing the dynamics by which the community became enraged and embattled in this incident, Brackenridge also diagrams the means by which they calmed down, backed away from the more radical proposals that had been bandied, and eventually agreed to submit to the excise. The lesson he draws is, perhaps surprisingly, that the “popular mind, though passionate, is generous; and if it becomes sensible it has wronged a man, will repair it” (110). Even in the face of such moments, it can fairly be said that Brackenridge’s non-fictional account of the events in the West is more interested in self-exoneration than in defending as democratic the actions of his western constituents and neighbors (we could imagine his written account probably followed the contours of the account demanded from him by Hamilton—as well as conditioned by the anxiety that producing such a self-defense might have generated). The same charge of self-exculpation is often made against subsequent installments of his magnum opus novel, Modern Chivalry. Most critics and historians, when they do treat the picaresque, episodic novel that Brackenridge published over the course of quarter of a century (from 1792 to 1816), describe it as a mishmash of satire on democracy, a seemingly never-ending plot to make westerners and elites both look idiotic, or, as a recent editor summarizes it, a novel “split” between Brackenridge’s contending political passions, “at once defending the elite ruler and democracy” (White, “Introduction,” xxiv). Literary historian Ed White notes that though Brackenridge thematizes the Whiskey

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Rebellion in subsequent installments (beginning with the fourth volume) as “an uncontrollable radicalism clashing with a blind and unyielding authoritarianism, with a comic mediator increasingly caught in the middle,” he actually avoids treating the incident directly, save in one episode where the hero’s hapless sidekick, the Irishman Teague, becomes an excise collector and suffers the wrath of the people (xvii). From this point, White concludes, the narrator is confounded to discover himself “at the mercy of others’ interpretation” and the “narrative voice” of the novel “struggles” for its long remainder with the new realization that “being in a republic is not like being confined to [Plato’s] cave, but rather a matter of being drawn into a cave, with its distorting optics” (xviii). “Split” is a fair word for describing Brackenridge’s political loyalties. But it might be more accurate to say that he was just never very good at toeing any party’s line. Born in Scotland and fleeing poverty, Brackenridge’s family came to Philadelphia when he was only five, and from there began migrating west. His affinity was for intellectual work, not manual labor. He excelled in school and as a young adult tried his hand at journalism and theology before settling into a legal practice in Pittsburgh at the age of twenty-six. Brackenridge’s legal practice was as much a conundrum as his politics would become. He took on the claims of squatters and the wealthy alike; though he professed to hate Native Americans (he called them “animals”) he represented a Delaware, Mamachtaga, in his murder trial. Elected by westerners to the Pennsylvania General Assembly in 1786, he helped garner funding for the “Pittsburgh Academy” (which would become University of Pittsburgh) and, to the dismay of most of his constituents, supported the Federal Constitution. A nationalist, he opposed the secession of Westsylvania. But he thought the democratic future of the country lay in the spirit and practices of the scrappy westerners he lived among, people he liked and admired (as he explains in his account of the insurrection, “I had an attachment to the people because they had an attachment to me,” 93). Brackenridge’s reputation never quite recovered among people on either side of the battle. But even in the face of his own personal disappointments in its aftermath—he never was reelected to political office by his fellow citizens—Brackenridge stayed in the West. And despite the apparent consensus of literary critics and historians who criticize his selfinterest and argue that he had mostly contempt for his fellow westerners, it seems evident that Brackenridge remained deeply invested in promoting the value of vernacular democratic practices to federally “representative” democratic institutions. Indeed, the sections of Modern Chivalry he wrote after the rebellion play out multiple versions of his advocacy. If he

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does not draw specific incidents from the whiskey excise resistance in his rambling, comedic novel, he does—especially from the fourth volume forward—work at understanding and theorizing the very political ethos Hamilton wanted to squelch. In these subsequent installments he argues that democracy could not just survive but actually thrive in the tensions emerging between local practice and national government. In so doing, he advocates an impressively expanded notion of political representation as the practice of public happiness. Public happiness for Brackenridge is what a people trying to determine their course together can produce if all goes well (and, he urges, mostly it does). In this way (and despite the fact that he does so in a novel), Brackenridge, perhaps more ambitiously than either Gallatin or Findley, uses what he learns from the whiskey excise protests to promote a notion of democracy that could productively combine the formal institutions of national government with the robust local political practices of ordinary folk. He offers readers something different from a simple “either/or” choice between Hamilton and Washington’s federalism and the westerners’ democratic economic localism. Rather, Brackenridge’s vision is unapologetically “both/and,” and hilariously developed in the form of a mock-heroic (perhaps to acknowledge a kinship with or response to the Connecticut Wits’ mock-epic Anarchiad). Acknowledging the perils, messiness, and mistakes that result from local practices, Brackenridge insists that this end—the people’s end—of the democratic spectrum is nevertheless an important balancing against the excesses, tyranny, and mistakes of formal, representative institutions.

Modern Chivalry as Political Theory Because of its incredible length and episodic nature, Modern Chivalry has never been high on the list of must-reads for scholars of the literature or politics in the early republic. Weighing in at over eight hundred pages, with multiple books and a confusing publication record (Brackenridge continued revising the whole novel throughout the twenty-three years he published parts of it), it was not reprinted from 1937 until 2009. Most scholars interested in Hugh Henry Brackenridge’s politics read his far shorter—and far less richly theorized—Incidents of the Insurrection. But anyone who is interested in political theory and early U.S. democracy should study Modern Chivalry for Brackenridge’s social theory of democratic representation, a theory drawn specifically from his embrace of the local, face-to-face democratic practices of his western neighbors. His arguments are substantially different (and less dystopian about the

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possibilities of democracy) from more familiar novels from this period, like Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland and Arthur Mervyn, or Hannah Webster Foster’s The Coquette. Dismissing Brackenridge’s novel as “split” in its political loyalties means we miss noticing Brackenridge’s rich arguments about the productive self-division of democracy itself, and how that self-division can be harnessed for a richer, more effective and satisfying democratic practice. The dialogic form of Brackenridge’s novel makes it an ideal space (precisely because it combines episodic political contention and debate with humor) to explore and theorize conflicts that emerge in the process of political representation between local actors, and between governments and citizens. Modern Chivalry offers a range of ideas about what democratic practice might include. And it frames as productive and even crucial the tensions produced between direct democratic local traditions and the federal representative order. Brackenridge proposes opening up the Constitution’s mechanistic model to a more comprehensive—and at the same time more porous and less predictable—representational practice by harnessing precisely the expansive, often chaotic, always inventive dynamic of local democratic radicalism for both local and national political work. The novel takes the political practices of ordinary westerners seriously. Brackenridge concludes that vernacular practices have real value for the United States’ evolving experiment with democracy. His theory of democratic representation expands the scope of political representation proffered by the Constitution and provides for a disposition toward democracy that we might think of as an elaboration on Jefferson’s notion of public happiness. If the endless and frustrating work of democracy is something citizens and government must resign themselves to engaging with, Brackenridge opines philosophically that they might as well do so cheerfully, in the spirit of improvement. We can productively read Modern Chivalry, then, as serious political theory, a substantive offering to the new nation’s democratic project. Two iconic examples from the long picaresque will introduce us to the major aims of Brackenridge’s political theory. First, early in Modern Chivalry (Pt. I, Vol. I, Bk. II, Chap. IV, 1792 ed.), Captain Farrago is about to lose the services of his personal servant, Teague O’Regan, yet again. This time O’Regan has somehow convinced a presbytery that he would make a good candidate for holy orders. Captain Farrago, having recently persuaded Teague to decline an opportunity to be elected to Congress and to turn down his election to the American Philosophical Society, manages to persuade him to refuse this new opportunity and to content himself instead with continuing in the career of a servant. To do so, he provides

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Teague with a terrifying version of his new opportunity, pointing out to the Irish “bog-trotter” that these ministers are recruiting him for a “war with the devil”: It is a silly thing to be drawn into a party, when there is but little to be got by it: Nay worse than little: For it will be all on the other side. Think you the devil will forget the mischief you do him in this world, and not resent it when he comes across you in a future state? . . . When you go to hell, as one day you must, you can expect but little quarter, after abusing him in this world. He will make you squeal like a pig; take you by the throat and kick you like a cat. His very scullions will piss upon you and give you no better life than a dog among their feet; while these very clergymen, that put you forward to blackguard for them, will stand by laughing in their sleeves that you could be such a fool. (39) Farrago’s “representation,” notes the narrator, as in previous (and subsequent) episodes, “had the desired effect upon Teague and he thought no more of the matter” (39–40). Within pages, though, the narrator recaps the episode a little differently: “The selfishness of the captain prevailed, and obstructed [Teague’s] advancement” (42). The second example comes much later in the novel (Pt. II, Vol. IV, Bk. II, Chap. V, 1815 ed.). Captain—now Governor—Farrago is threatened with impeachment by his constituents, because of some rumors that he has been unfairly lenient with Teague, recently regaled an Indian war hero, currently (and rightfully) suspected by his fellow white constituents of misrepresenting his role in the taking of Indian scalps. Farrago manages to persuade them that he is no longer responsible for Teague’s actions, and the infuriated crowd calls for Teague’s blood. Happily, a cagey gardener presents a piece of panther hide, claiming it to be Teague’s scalp, which calms the crowd and brings it back to its (collective) sense. The narrator summarizes: “Hence the fury abated in a moment, and when it occurred to them that their remonstrance to the governor had been the occasion of the tragedy, they began to relent, and to blame themselves as having been too precipitate in their representations” (736). In this long burlesque on the democratic practices of the early nation, backcountry folk (the “multitude”) often struggle hilariously to arrive at a proper representation of the “public mind.” The novel’s whacky, oftrepeating scenarios highlight the tendency of both formal and vernacular practices to produce misrepresentations. The complications that arise during the process of representation are vexing: sometimes infuriating, sometimes humorous, and always utterly central to Brackenridge’s theo-

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rizing about democratic possibility. Thus “representation” becomes the novel’s keyword and the punch line of almost every episode. Through its repetition-with-variations, the novel teaches that representation comes in many forms and modes, both collective and individual. Never disinterested, representation is always informed by a variety of motives. It is sometimes selfish, too hasty, poorly informed. At its best, it is informed by a variety of competing, deliberated, and reconsidered views. Brackenridge’s point is that representation is not just the result of democratic decision-making (in the form of elections delegating political power to proxies, or in the form of legal decisions), as it is in the federal Constitution; it is also the basis for informal as well as formal democratic decisionmaking, the material from which people form the opinions that shape their decisions about how best to represent their political will. In the first scene, Brackenridge sets out a problem that will plague the supposed political clarity of the Constitution’s model for representation in the new republic, that of the many versus the few. It’s absolutely central that the first instance of the Captain’s interactions with democracy comes in talking Teague out of accepting his election as a democratic representative. In this instance, democratic representation functions to preserve familiar socioeconomic inequities, as advantaged actors (wealthier, more educated) persuade their social inferiors to accept the counsel, guidance, and leadership of those wiser than they, for better and—as the narrator clearly signals—at times, for worse. In the second instance, we see a different problem. A “mob,” motivated by its unmediated passions, finds (thanks to another misrepresentation) the time to examine its own self-representation. In this instance, the people discover they have misrepresented their public will to themselves and, shocked by their own precipitousness, chart a better course. It’s a little convoluted—like much of the novel—but as we will see, it drives home a nice lesson (and question). As Farrago has framed this question elsewhere when challenging fellow townsmen to reconsider their decision to hang the judges, how do you know when some people are the People? (e.g., 485). In his accounts of the rebellion, Albert Gallatin tried to shave distinctions between “full” and “partial” representations of the people to explain why some meetings concluded for and others against rebellion. Farrago’s answer is less mathematical and more philosophical than Gallatin’s: some people are not the People if they have not deliberated, and they have not deliberated until they have entertained a full range of competing representations, including the question, have we adequately represented this situation to ourselves? Brackenridge uses countervailing plots, characters, and episodes to

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tackle what were then (and are now) crucial, often overlooked, fundamental questions about the interaction of federal and local democratic representation, the relative sufficiency of the Constitution’s representative institutions in the context of vigorous traditions and expectations for faceto-face democracy, and the benefits of multiple platforms and scales for representation in a world of sociopolitical difference. The novel suggests that the representative political practice prescribed in the nation’s new federal Constitution cannot satisfy such questions with its mathematical formulas and the checking and balancing of branches. Interestingly, the antics of the “multitude” become not the anarchic diversion from this difficulty but its corrective. The vernacular practices of the multitude temper Constitutionalism’s tendencies toward a disembodied, rational perfectionism. Just so, Brackenridge’s own, less regulated and systematized notion of democracy thrives on reasonability instead of rationalism, and on continuing division and disagreement rather than a settled and unified harmony. Yet though Brackenridge makes vernacular practices essential to the national project, he doesn’t privilege these local informal principles and outcomes any more than he does the formal representative practices he supported in the federal Constitution. Expanding the practice of representation from an electoral process to a more plastic range of practices that inform and determine political outcomes, the novel intriguingly proposes that more thoughtful and considered practices of representation can help mediate a productive relation between informal and formal modes of selfgovernance. Brackenridge’s argument for what he terms “the middle way,” a mode of democracy that thrives on the interplay between vernacular and formal practices, is notably similar to one forwarded by Elinor Ostrom more than two centuries later, about the ideal management of common pool resources, from physical assets like fisheries and forests to municipal goods like city and county government. In many ways, what Modern Chivalry stages over and over could be described in the terms of contemporary social science as “collective action problems.” These are problems that concern communities of differently minded people when the community needs to act as one. How to overcome internal differences and disagreements in order to solve pressing problems? In Brackenridge’s day, local communities mostly felt that decisions were best made close to home but were experimenting with the idea of deferring these decisions to the lawand policy-making institutions of the new federal government, which advocated for letting the professional planners and expert representatives make public policy for the good of the whole. Two hundred years after

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Brackenridge, Ostrom and her team of researchers, working over a fortyyear period, empirically documented the false assumptions that undergird policy centralization. As it turns out, in common pool resource management problems throughout history and across the world, the most effective structures are ones that are not centralized but, in Ostrom’s terms, “polycentric”: systems built on “semiautonomous units of government . . . located at small, regional, national, and now international scales of organization.” She goes on to explain: “having only a decentralized system of small local units can lead to small-scale tyrannies,” but central agencies are based on the “false conception that there are only a few rules that need to be considered and that only experts know these options and can combine optimal policies.” Central institutions erroneously—and to the detriment of common pool resources and their human actors—crowd “out the knowledge of local circumstances and the experimentation needed to design effective institutions” (“Crowding Out,” 12–13). Rather, Ostrom urges, much as Brackenridge does, that “all policies should be viewed as experiments” (12). Brackenridge uses his novel to experiment with plots that pattern policies for a more polycentric practice of democratic representation, treating, in other words, democracy as a common pool resource, with interested actors at various levels of scale. The episodic unfolding of the novel allows Brackenridge the room to maneuver in various directions with collective action problems, with regard to both their local outcomes and their national import. Brackenridge indeed seems to suggest that the novel, with its ability to plot disagreement and diversity, allows readers to play—experiment—with alternative outcomes and to think through democratic problems more carefully. In this way, the novel itself becomes a place for understanding, navigating, and optimizing democracy’s paradoxical qualities. For Brackenridge, democracy’s paradox begins in the structurally self-dividing work of self-governing, in the always-present tension between governing and being governed. Indeed, how to interpret and manage that tension was a key part of the Constitutional debates and one that Federalists like Benjamin Rush (as we have seen in the previous chapter) urged should be laid to rest after each election. But Brackenridge sees this paradoxical space that opens up within each citizen as well as within any political community and in the larger polity as a resource for democracy and argues for keeping it open. Self-doubt paired with self-criticism steers democratic practice toward freedom, and away from tyranny. Rather than avoiding the tension of the democratic division between the governing and the

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governed, the representatives and represented, he urges that this selfdivision be both structurally and practically embraced. The next section of this chapter focuses on Brackenridge’s advocacy for a democratic practice that maximizes the benefits of carefully engaging political disagreement and division as it multiplies venues for the deliberative work of self-governing far beyond the institutions of federal and state government. The last section of the chapter will take up the novel’s penchant for conundrums and riddles, its emphasis on the necessity for a humorous orientation toward democratic work, on democratic representation’s necessary alliance with the misrepresentations of fiction, and its insistence that questions are often better than answers when it comes to democratic processes.

“Political division will always exist,” said the Captain In one early episode of Modern Chivalry, Captain Farrago meets a stranger who wants to hire Teague to play the part of a Kickapoo Indian chief. When Farrago expresses his incredulity that the man would think it possible for Teague to “pass” thusly, the man explains, “The government . . . is at a great distance. It knows no more of Indians than a cow does of Greek” (56). He is thus confident that by teaching Teague some formulaic “Indian” rhetoric (“burying hatchets under large trees, kindling fires, brightening chains”) and having him pronounce these in his Irish brogue could deceive the government officials and ensure a successful treaty negotiation, one that would allow him to serve as a middleman in the distribution of goods. In the ensuing discussion, the stranger productively links this information gap between federal government and local politics to an opportunity for economic speculation: “It is a very common thing for men to speculate nowadays,” he observes (56). He speculates by using the government’s ability to make treaties in order to facilitate the circulation of goods from the federal center to the frontier. The narrator later acknowledges the political and practical usefulness of the government’s treaty policy with Indians. But this scene delineates a representational problem in the early nation, where the government was so far away from many of its constituents that misrepresentation ran both ways, with middlemen profiting from misrepresentation at the expense of both local citizens and the federal government. Here economic advantage for some grows at the expense of adequate (or correct) political representation for both indigenous nations and frontier citizens. In this instance, the distance of federal government from its citizens is a problem.

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But everywhere in this novel, the problem of the distance of federal government from the nation’s frontiers is countered by another dilemma, the tendency of local, more informal, direct methods of democratic action to be too hasty and irrational. Repeatedly, the novel shows how vernacular, face-to-face practices produce tyranny instead of fairness, despotism instead of freedom. For instance, in Part II, Book III (published in 1815), on yet another Election Day, Farrago can’t find Teague. And so, once again, Farrago fears that Teague might be mistaken for an adequate representative and get himself elected, once again threatening to deprive the long-suffering Farrago of his services. But this time it turns out that Teague is in danger of execution, not election. The area has been swept with a wave of anti-judicial sentiment, and he’s been mistaken for a judge. Ever scrappy, Teague takes advantage of a minor distraction to make his escape. Farrago stays, though, to expostulate with the crowd about their hastiness and the ease with which they resort to violence. They reply, “Do you call into question the right of the people . . . to hang their officers?” (485). Farrago answers: But are you the people? . . . A few mad caps get together, and call themselves the people; and talk of the majesty of the people. You do not appear to me to be a very discerning people; to take my bogtrotter for a judge; nor can your majesty be deemed very gracious, and merciful, that would hang him up, not giving him time to say his prayers, or to have the conversation of a clergyman. Had he been a spy come into your camp, in the war, on the eve of an engagement, you could not have showed a greater dispatch in taking away life, than in this instance. (485) Farrago’s point is that too often, citizens relying on vernacular practices wage war on their own, and with far less resort to form and protocol than in formal warfare. The novel takes the very notion of the People as a problem for representation, not a given within it and certainly not the basis for it. It marks a sharp distinction between the immediacy of “public spirit” and the process of deliberation achieved through various modes of representation that would result in any adequate apprehension of the “mind of the People.” The novel’s formulaic plot teaches (over and over!) that vernacular democracy, in order to actualize its democratic aspirations, needs the mediation of opinion that occurs through a representational project that must provide the needed time for self-criticism while bridging the divide between the always self-governed and the always self-governing, and between different scales of government.

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Modern Chivalry equally insists that the rigid distancing of the federal needs the messy immediacy of the vernacular even as it shows how the informality of the vernacular can create tyrannies usefully blocked or mediated by the distance of federal institutions. Brackenridge is not positing a battle here: rather, he emphasizes the importance of what happens between. In between is a gap of purpose, knowledge, understanding, or communication where, for whatever reason, the process of representation becomes necessary. Thus the novel’s theory of representation goes far beyond the simple postulate of an elected “representative,” the people’s delegated agent in government. Far more complexly, the novel explores the deliberative (rational), aesthetic (social), and affective (irrational) processes by which people represent a political situation to themselves, to their fellow citizens at a distance, by which they imagine themselves together and apart as a People, by which they negotiate the project of self-governance. Brackenridge’s interest in this space or gap between the institutional and the informal, between the governed and the governing, is something other than political theorist Claude Lefort’s lauded argument about democracy’s empty symbolic space, the space of power from which the body of the king has been removed. (Lefort argues that this space, symbolically embodied by the king, cannot be embodied once sovereignty has been transferred to the People, and it is the impossibility of putting a body in this space, this magnificent empty space of power, that gives democracy its tremendous symbolic charge.) Brackenridge, invested in the local practices of the western democratic radicals, seems more interested in a kind of space that is not so much symbolic as structural. It opens up within individual citizens, between citizens and polities, between the always self-governing and the always self-governed, producing the necessity of representation. Representation is thus, Brackenridge insists, the process by which the people can carefully encounter, cultivate, and utilize the fundamental division within democracy in ways that produce democratic power instead of despotism. Intriguingly, in its fascination with representation’s creative and open space, Modern Chivalry relocates democratic power away from both “the People” and government, and places it in the space and processes of representation. By locating political power neither in citizens nor institutions but in representation itself, the novel advocates for a practice of political representation far more broadly and complexly conceived than that made possible by the simple process of election. The narrator will eventually specify a distinction between “true” and “mere” democracy: “But it is the rage of mere democracy that has brought reproach upon republicks;

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democratic power unbalanced is but the despotism of many instead of one. It is the balancing with stays and braces of distributed power that gives safety. This distribution of power is the highest effort of the mind” (740). To achieve something more like “true” democracy, the novel proposes a “distribution of power” achieved precisely by the kind of nesting of representative practices that Ostrom maps for successful strategies of common pool resource management. Brackenridge envisions multiple self-governing or representational sites at varying scales—ranging from internal, self-critical deliberation to dinner table discussions, coffeehouse conversations, and editorial journalism to mob actions and burlesque novels, and then to elections, congressional deliberation, and judicial decisions—to mediate what the novel imagines as the ideal space for the production of true democratic power, within, among, and between citizens and government. Brackenridge offers, in other words, a notion of representation that does not end with a vote. The novel’s suspicion about simplistic representation (“mere democracy”) versus balanced and more complex modes of representation (“true democracy”) extends to a pointed critique of majoritarianism, which it represents as political formula that forestalls democratic creativity. For instance, in some of the narrator’s reflections on the course of the French Revolution, he muses: Marat the journalist and Robespierre were pushed gradually to blood; by the principle, which governed them, of taking it for granted that all who thought differently upon a subject were traitors; and that a majority of the vote was the criterion of being right. The mountain, the bulk of the national assembly, could not but be in their opinion, infallible. . . . [But it] was a mountain pregnant with subterranean fire. It burst, and exists a volcano to this day. So much for the majority of a public body, being always right; and so much for a journalist meaning well, and yet destroying the republic. (425) The productive self-division of democracy, Brackenridge insists, should never be short-circuited by majoritarian “resolution.” Indeed, Brackenridge suspects consensus—in local communities as in federal elections, policies, and laws—as rushing with too much haste toward a too often despotic political conclusion. The novel’s claim here is something other than Madison’s well-rehearsed arguments about the “mischiefs of faction.” In Federalist No. 10, Madison frames political differences as a “necessary evil,” the result of men’s “fallible” nature, an imperfection (except when it results in differentials of wealth) that can only be managed. But

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the novel makes political diversity central to the health of the representational process. It is not an albatross that might eventually be dumped but a fundamental condition for healthy democratic being. Farrago makes just this point in an argument with a member of his community in Part II, Vol. I (published in 1804). The man (“a citizen”) is ridiculing the people of the town for their political changeability and the way political changes of course leave certain public projects unfinished. “They might act wisely,” the citizen concludes, “were it not for political divisions.” Farrago responds, “Political divisions will always exist . . . It is inseparable from the nature of community” (358). Later, a coffeehouse conversation expands on this theme. Several men are discussing the putative wisdom of the People in general, and the problems of self-governance in particular. One opines, “The great mischief of democracy is party.” In the debate that follows—some say without parties the commonwealth would stagnate; others say that one party will eventually predominate and supersede all others—Farrago weighs in to observe that: no party can maintain power long. The ascendancy carries its overthrow along with it. The duration depends on the judgment of the leaders of the councils. But the leaders, will find that they cannot lead, after the overthrow of an adversary. While they were struggling up the ascent, every one was willing to be helped, and took advice. But on the top of the precipice, they take possession of the plain, and scamper and hoop, and there is no restraining them. A leader of judgment, will always find it more difficult to manage his own people than to combat his adversaries. They cannot be brought to a halt at a proper point; and their errors bring them down again, as those in power did before them. (383) Unlike Madison’s opinion in Federalist No. 10 that man’s failure is his imperfectability, Farrago actually argues against the desire for any such rational perfectionism as part of the disposition he recommends toward democracy. As the narrator elsewhere observes, “In human affairs, there is no reaching the perfect in the application of principle. All that can be done, is to come as near to it as possible, by a just discernment of circumstances. What is done, may be blamed; but there might be more blame, had the contrary been done” (743). The novel often resorts to conundrums like this. These riddles, however frustrating taken on their own, nevertheless accumulate as a policy proposal: in its assessments of democracy, as in its reflections on human nature and human possibility, the novel promotes reasonability (the in-

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formal, the vernacular) against rationality (the formal, the institutional, the official). In other words, it insists over and again that democracy’s lack of susceptibility to the clean, predictable outcomes of rational, scientific formula is a positive good. It posits as an alternative to rationalism’s impersonal qualities a more lenient, mess-tolerant, people-friendly mode of reasonability. (We could say that the novel’s political philosophy aligns more with Montaigne than Hobbes.) Instead of rules and outcomes, the novel promotes instead what it terms a “middle way.” Neither formula nor plan, “the middle way” is the disposition with which citizens committed to democracy come to understand that in the wealth of local particularities, human difference, and diversity of opinion, rational prescriptions will seldom produce the expected results. And in case anyone might get an idea that the middle way itself might profitably be rationalized, the novel presents an episode that warns against just that. As a gentleman anecdotally explains in response to the Captain’s questions about “the fluctuations of parties in republics,” “The reasons are many . . . But one is the unskillful driving of the state carriage, by those who get possession of the curricle. Phaeton, you know, thought he had the best advice from his father: In medio tutissimus ibis. The middle way is best; yet before the middle of the day, he had set the earth on fire” (399). The “middle way,” then, like other aspects of the novel’s political theory, is proffered as a riddle. Through riddles and conundrums, the novel teaches tolerance not just for conflict, not just for human fallibility, but for what political philosopher F. R. Ankersmit summarizes, following Tocqueville, as the democratic paradox. As he frames it, “The concept of independence ties together a movement toward freedom and a contrary one toward despotism. Thus at the heart of democracy we find an ambivalence beyond which we cannot go, which does not permit reduction to a deeper level where the paradox is eliminated” (319). We might think of “freedom” here as a shorthand for the democratic power citizens produce by cultivating conflict and self-division through the process of deliberative, nested practices of representation. Alternately, we might think of despotism as representation gone wrong: rushed, curtailed, or zero-sum. Brackenridge’s point is that there’s no way to game in advance the outcome for good: every political engagement can go one way or the other. That fundamental truth, however, is no reason to despair for democracy, or to call unwelcome outcomes anarchy. As the narrator observes early on (echoing Brackenridge’s Incidents), “The people are a sovereign, and greatly despotic; but, in the main, just” (21). Thus the novel teaches that

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democracy’s countervailing energies of freedom and despotism must ever be negotiated anew (hence its voluminously episodic character).

“The Song That Has No End”; or, “The Right of Office to All the Citizens” How, the novel insistently queries, would you know whether you’re inclining toward despotism or freedom in any given act of representation? The answer it gives is that you can never be entirely sure, which is why you have to stay self-critical, self-denying, and humble (766), why you have to be willing to take time for the work that representation entails: considering alternatives, balancing differences of opinion, taking in more information to test your own opinion, exercising your indignation, laughing at your own and everyone else’s absurdities, and deliberating fully within yourself and with others the range of possible solutions to any given conflict. This humorously skeptical, self-critical disposition prevents the individual mind from collapsing into “a unity of one” and disallows this in the political body of the people as well. Rather, as Brackenridge insists, the goal is not to eliminate but to make the tension of the self-division between the governing and the governed fundamental to the work of political representation. That tension cultivates the critical distance or space that allows the People to move, more or less, toward democratic freedom and, more or less, away from the kind of democratic despotism narrowly avoided in my second opening example (where the mob called for Teague’s blood, only to wish they hadn’t when presented with what they were told was his scalp). But in its penchant for delivering lessons about democracy in the form of episodic riddles, Modern Chivalry can make democracy seem a little too much like “The Song That Has No End” (“It just goes on and on, my friend. / Some people started singing it not knowing what it was, / and they’ll continue singing it forever just because / it is the song that has no end . . .”): silly, repetitive, and easy to tune out. But, it turns out, silliness is what makes it fun to keep laboring at the repetitively hard work of representation. It is their very commitment to that hard work that helps citizens arrive at more productive modes for engaging democracy’s dangerous simultaneous double tendency (toward true democracy’s freedom and mere democracy’s despotism). Thus the middle way—evoking a sense of humor and even joy—offers the incentive and the disposition needed to keep navigating the endlessly dangerous, difficult, and often disappointing work of democracy.

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The novel’s most repetitive plot exemplifies the paradoxically serious democratic work that silliness and riddling makes room for in the world of the book. The People are (once again) being stupid; they are missing the point of democratic responsibility; they are generating the sensation of power for themselves on a false basis, by empowering as representatives people entirely unqualified in the arts of government. As an observer comments at the outset of the novel, “There is a kind of creating power exerted in making a senator of a unqualified person; which, when the author has done, he exults over the work, and like the Creator himself when he made the world, sees that ‘it is very good’ ” (19). The People are (yet again) falsely equating expert training with unfair interest, and disqualifying the best representatives on that count, as another observer details later in the novel: “In the works projected, the people insist that no man shall be consulted in his own occupation. The mason shall make out the bills of scantling; and the carpenter determine the arches in a stone bridge . . . They are prejudiced . . . or thought to be so” (357). The novel rails against “the evil of men seeking office for which they are not qualified” and moralizes that “the preposterous ambition of the bog-trotter [Teague] points to this” (611). Yet the novel also insists on equal suffrage as a “birthright” (521) and, more important, on “the right of office to all the citizens” (533). In embracing and insisting on this paradox (not all the people are qualified for office, yet all the people have a right to office), the novel models the self-dividing and self-critical representational process it idealizes. Stupidity, as one might expect in the context of all this riddling, is not necessarily an impediment to good outcomes. We learn this again when the narrator trains his sites on the stupidity of novelists. In their case, they don’t know how to “mind the main chance.” As the narrator summarizes, “It is doubtless a general rule that the way to be rich is to excel in your profession, and whoever excels may in general be rich . . . But we see that, in all the lovers of the arts, painting, music, statuary, eloquence, there is a neglect of riches, the mind carried off from the love of money and placed upon the art itself. The main chance is overlooked; and it is only late in life that the folly is discovered by the person himself, though others had been remarking it all along” (362). This personal economic folly quickly turns out to be a positive good for the collective and, in effect, a democratic virtue: That man is to be trusted who is free from the imputation of inordinate selfishness in private life. You will find an artist that is fonder of the art than the emoluments. There are men that connect the public good with their own happiness; generous spirits who manifest this by their disinterestedness

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in ordinary transactions. This is a good sign, and ought to inspire confidence in their agency, in public matters. The man that covets good will more than money, and the praise of benevolence, more than that of private gain has some soul in him, and other things equal, is to be trusted before him of a contracted spirit. (400) The invocation of novelists’ failure to “mind the main chance” is more than a simple opportunity for Brackenridge to plug the public value of his own novel. It’s an opening into the novel’s broader argument against the expansion of private interest over and against the public interest. Modern Chivalry urges that the escalation and generalization of a speculative capitalist ethos is a problem for the democracy it treasures. As the narrator inveighs in Part I, Book IV (published in the immediate aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion), “A system of finance, has introduced the love of unequal wealth; destroyed the spirit of common industry; and planted that of lottery in the human heart; making the mass of the people gamblers, and under the idea of speculation, shrouded engrossing and monopoly everywhere” (281). Several episodes in the novel preach against making property a condition for citizenship; others emphasize (as did the Kickapoo Indian episode) how selfish economic speculation can overtake and corrupt political processes. The novel here again claims for writers a specific advantage in the realm of democratic representation: “There is a natural alliance between liberty and letters. Men of letters are seldom men of wealth and these naturally ally themselves with the democratic interest in a commonwealth” (401). In this, Brackenridge stages yet another sortie in his critique of Hamilton’s plan for hitching the advance of state power to the expanding authority of high finance, as well as his aim to place economic policy-making beyond the purview of democratic debate. As Brackenridge shows, men of letters are able to represent as negotiable conflict what too many others desire to represent as benign convergence (the interests of democracy and economy) or zero-sum opposition (the clash of the virtuous many versus the corrupt few). In this way, men of letters turn out to be ideally suited for the never-ending work of self-criticism entailed by representative democracy (and novel-reading emerges as an important form of democratic deliberation). And yet, even here, the novel leaves open a space for self-doubt. It’s actually difficult to find a clearly trustworthy vantage for “the truth” of the novel amid double-fisted maneuvers that leave readers with more questions than answers. While Farrago and the narrator ridicule Teague throughout for his political and professional pretensions (and it seems hard to find a vantage for reader sympathy since Teague is so perdurably

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lazy and consistently overreaches his own abilities), still, Farrago will later help train him for government office—not cynically, but out of genuine democratic commitment. Throughout the novel, the narrator makes it clear that the book is a kind of publicity vehicle for his own political aspirations. (Given the narrator’s remarks about men younger than forty-five seeking public office, it’s worth noting that Brackenridge was doing just that in his thirties and had been aspiring toward it since his late twenties.) Once again, the sociopolitical commentary wraps back around itself so many times that it’s simply impossible to make a one-to-one correspondence between the narrator and Brackenridge, and it’s as impossible to be sure that Brackenridge isn’t poking some fun at himself for his own authorial and political intentions. The redoubling plot lines keep readers questioning their own assumptions, and that, as I have been arguing, is precisely the novel’s point about the work and value of democratic representation. This is exactly why the novel yokes burlesque to reason. Reason’s seduction is that it can provide the single, unifying, right answer; burlesque checks reason’s momentum. As the narrator summarizes on another occasion: What we have depicted therefore ought not to be set down as incredible. I would not wonder if [extending suffrage to animals] should come to be seriously agitated some years hence, unless this burlesque prevents it. For you might as well express surprise at a man under an influenza having a fever, as at the multitude under a political impression being thrown into a delirium, and phrenzy. In a case of such madness, direct reasoning will be of no avail; but the turning the course of the thought aside, and a substitution of some other; not perhaps questioning the practicability, much less the expediency of the proposition, in vogue, but suggesting a more eligible mode of execution. If divisions can be sown amongst the motivators as to the ways and the means, they maybe diverted from the principle object. (642; see also 676) Burlesque, as we can finally see, is for Brackenridge the art of mis/representation. It is a form of democratic representation that introduces division into democratic “reason,” so that citizens can slow down for the deliberation essential to turning their orientation from despotism toward freedom. Thus, in the mode of the riddle or the paradox, the novel forwards a theory of mis/representation as being essential to creating the self-division that keeps democratic actors engaging in self-criticism. In this way, the novel plays out its most maddening conundrum. Representation is a problem because citizens can never easily know when a

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situation might be misrepresented (as, for instance, when Teague is able falsely to proclaim himself the victor against a force of Indians simply because he’s an opportunistic liar and there are no witnesses to his lie). Yet mis/representation can sometimes be more effective in forestalling democratic despotism than the direct representation of truth (as when the gardener keeps the crowd from lynching Teague for a judge by showing them the piece of bloody panther hide he claims is his scalp). The people rely on representation in more ways than traditional political theory allows (“And how can it be otherwise when the people cannot themselves be all present to see what is done?” 597), and the novel’s paradoxical point is that it is only through representational process, where mis/representation divides reason, that democratic freedom can be more closely approached. Brackenridge’s advocacy for his expanded practice of representation depends absolutely on the political flourishing of local practice—and not just for its zany unpredictability, but precisely for its insertion of an even chaotic human variety into what, at the Federal level, always threatens to become an abstractly thin representation of the polity. Similarly, it depends on the federal to interrupt vernacular practice’s rush toward local tyrannies. In the back and forth between federal and vernacular practices, representation does the work of disallowing “mere” democracy, the collapse into the tyranny of the many or the individual into a “unity of one.” As we have seen, Brackenridge’s riddling burlesque offers a pointed rebuttal to Hamilton’s plans to eliminate what he viewed as the political primitivism and anarchy of western radicalism. Brackenridge contends, quite differently, that such vernacular practices are essential to avoiding despotism and expanding democratic freedom and power. Perhaps more concertedly than either Gallatin or Findley, Brackenridge defended western practices and proposed a vision of representative democracy that would sidestep the either/or terms established by Hamilton. Modern Chivalry’s both/and prescription for democratic vitality prescribes and trains its readers toward a disposition, one that cultivates a pleasure in what the novel characterizes as the honorable yet silly, vexing, and endless work of true democracy. In the end, for Brackenridge, true democracy is not about getting the right answers or settling questions. It’s about what happens in the middle: between the governed and governing, between the representatives and represented, between the vernacular and the institutional, between freedom and despotism, between either and or. It’s about having the patience to linger with riddling political questions, as well as the wisdom to appreciate human diversity and division, fallibility and foibles, as a fundamental part of making political community together.

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 /

The Privatizing State: The Pioneers and the Closing of the Legal Commons

Brackenridge understood that if democracy did not necessarily culminate in the vernacular participation and practices of ordinary people, it was crucially fueled by them. His political theory about democracy’s “middle way” and the civic power generated within the democratic commons argued against Hamilton’s and the Federalists’ desire to curtail the input of local communities and ordinary citizens into the designs of state government. Like Brackenridge, James Fenimore Cooper was interested in the legacy of the civic commons in the late colonies and early United States. But Cooper did not advocate for its ongoing role in a robust democracy. Instead, he dramatized what he framed as its decline. Cooper’s interest in historical densities, political complexities, and social transitions—especially in the region of central New York where he grew up—makes him an important source for an account of vernacular or commons democracy in the early United States. His early novel The Pioneers (1826), so familiarly analyzed by the myth and symbol critics as an account of the conflict between “nature and civilization,” and by environmental critics as a depiction of man’s inherent greed and wastefulness, becomes something more nuanced and historical when viewed with questions of the commons in mind. From this angle, Cooper’s novel, set in the 1790s, appears less a simple, mythic account of “man’s” transition from the state of “nature” into “civilization,” and more a carefully historicized account of how people on the frontier distributed access to shared goods and constructed vernacular systems of social order, “fair play,” or “the peace.” In particular, it details how local actors reacted to the imposition of a top-down and more systematized (“modern”) legal system,

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engineered through the combined force of state/federal government and private capital. Cooper dramatizes what he characterizes as a transition (and what participants often experienced in terms of conflict) shaping up in local economies, not just in central New York but also around the country. As various historians have documented, the institutions of state law and the early nation’s liberal legal system had to contend for supremacy with powerful and deep local traditions of social order. These traditions were, in the words of legal historian William J. Novak, infused by “powerfully anti-individualistic sentiments about social duties, public obligations and restraints on private rights and interests” (6). But these local systems of community justice have been difficult to see and are little studied, not in the least because of the sway of the consensus story, which depicts the Framers heroically crafting the apparatus of state power ex nihilo in the early United States. As Novak summarizes this myth, “America was essentially born free, without elaborate bureaucratic, governmental, or political–philosophical traditions” (3). This myth asks us to ignore the possibility of legal practices without the Framers’ bureaucracy, administrators, political leaders, experts, or state-based institutions that centralize and rationalize the enforcement of laws. But these alternative legal practices were in fact ubiquitous. Despite their local idiosyncrasies, they shared key traits. They were informal, decentralized, and process-oriented. They were collectivist, motored by the regular involvement of ordinary people. Historians frequently assert that these local traditions emerged in the Revolutionary era, enabled by the political and practical exigencies of that event (for instance, both Novak and Laura Edwards argue that the local traditions they study were mobilized by the political event of Revolution). But scholars studying squatters’ settlements in the late colonies and early nation also document robust traditions for social order and the people’s law that clearly preexist the Revolutionary era. Such evidence makes it clear that the vernacular practices of ordinary folk in the late colonies and early nation constituted what we might describe as legal commons—the production of locally negotiated justice that kept the peace and reinforced standards of fairness among inhabitants—that preceded and arguably helped to fund the democratic expectations and practices of the American Revolution. Historian Melissah Pawlikowski, whose dissertation studies migrant squatter settlements in the Susquehanna, Juniata, and Ohio River valleys from the 1730s to the 1780s, points out how wrong it is “to conclude that the lack of solid [colonial] legal infrastructure and enforcement led to a lawless space” (151). She details an admittedly rough and informal but

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definite legal order in the squatter settlements and colonial backcountry, cobbled together by “men familiar with military codes,” and a community familiar with biblical law and a political tradition of natural rights or “liberties” going back to the Magna Carta (149–50). The legal structures as well as the social norms constructed within squatter communities, Pawlikowski underscores, penalized individualism: “Exclusive self-interest proved impractical and socially unfit in an environment that otherwise required symbiotic relationships. Social law shaped around reciprocity. Communities warned out or ‘hated out’ those people who threatened order including criminals, belligerents, or those who simply did not participate in communality” (256). As she describes it, these communities constructed systems of laws that made sense in their particular circumstances and environments, which “gained support through practice, custom and perceived understanding” (149). Backcountry settlements’ practice of justice structured and enforced their dual commitment to regional and interethnic peace, and to the common good. These communities not only enforced land distribution among new settlers and regulated social order among inhabitants, visitors, and neighbors (often creating interethnic alliances with local Native Americans and reciprocally enforcing justice for petty thievery as well as for more dramatic offenses like beatings and murder), they often literally wrote constitutions for their settlements, framing contractual agreements for socioeconomic and political self-governing. Entire communities participated in the framing of such binding documents and structures. In his study of a late-eighteenth-century squatter settlement in the West Branch Valley of the Susquehanna River, Marcus Gallo discovers a similar commitment to interethnic peace, as well as schemes for the fair distribution of land to newcomers and the communal enforcement of justice. This community elected men annually to one-year terms on its justice tribunal, called the “Fair Play” tribunal, aiming to distribute the chance to participate among members of the community (420). As he notes, the community’s broad participation in electing and serving as “Fair Play Men” and enforcing its decisions “cemented bonds of community between men and women who relied upon one another for survival” (418). Studying practices of local justice, or “people’s peace,” in the more settled communities of North and South Carolina as they transitioned into state-based legal systems from the 1780s to the 1840s, Laura Edwards emphasizes how “recovering the importance of localized law places ordinary people, rather than legal professionals and political leaders, at the center of laws and governance in this period.” These two legal orders did

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not interface smoothly: “Where state law protected the rights of legally recognized individuals, localized law maintained the social order—the ‘peace,’ a well-established Anglo-American concept that expressed the ideal order of a metaphorical public body” (3–4). Localized law understood “the peace” to be grounded in the “maintenance of relations established through customs in specific communities,” quite differently from state law, grounded in liberal ideals that anchored social order in the protection of individual property rights (289). Edwards’s aim is not to offer localized law as the better alternative, because it wasn’t. Profoundly hierarchical, localized law “forced everyone into its patriarchal embrace and raised its collective interest over those of any given individual” (7). But because it was locally negotiated within communities, groups of people whose rights would become unrecognizable within state law (like white women and slaves) could often obtain both voice and justice within the “people’s peace.” These two different systems each produced justices and injustices. It’s important to learn from both. As Edwards observes, the contrast between these systems suggestively demonstrates that property and “individual rights provide only one way to imagine and produce claims” on justice (298). Like Edwards, Cooper analyzes and historicizes a commons in its encounter with the forces of liberal bureaucratic modernization. The Pioneers does not project viable alternatives to these forces of administrative government, private capital, and systematic management sweeping the eastern states in the early nation: indeed, the novel’s conclusion would seem to confirm their inevitability. From this angle, it’s easy to see why ecological critics have assumed that Cooper’s tale anticipates biologist Garrett Hardin’s controversial 1968 argument that the fate of the commons tends inevitably toward tragedy. But a more careful reading shows how Cooper fully rejects Hardin’s assumption that people are naturally selfish and acquisitive. Nor does he agree with Hardin’s hypothesis that systematized management and a top-down system of laws will be the most beneficial way to allocate the natural (distributive) and civic (productive) commons. The alternative Cooper provides through the character of Natty Bumppo is, as we will see, both ethically and politically problematic. But Cooper does provide us with an account that at least argues, if it does not conclude, against the inevitability formulated by Hardin and gives us an important window into a functioning if imperfect civic commons. The events affecting the community in Cooper’s plot hinge on the new economic development planned by Judge Marmaduke Temple. His intention to map, fence, and manage environmental abundance for profit

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drives a new recognition of scarcity among citizens of Templeton, New York. These aims—and the judge’s ability to influence their implementation both with his own capital and his access to state politics—affect both residents’ customary access to natural goods as well as their own right to adjudicate the fair distribution of goods and justice. We could characterize the history Cooper outlines as a form of enclosure. That’s a term seldom used to describe processes more typically explained with terms like “modernization” and “economic development” in the early United States. British American colonies, as we saw in Chapter 1, have traditionally been viewed as an exception to the coercive effects of poverty that characterized England during this period. Abundant with land and game, America was, as this familiar story goes, the country for the “common man,” where western European peoples could claim life and land ownership unafflicted by poverty and want. But historians for the last several decades have dismantled the notion that colonial America was a land of opportunity for all. They have trained attention on all of the following: paupers and criminals forcibly brought under indenture to the colonies; the growing disparities of wealth that deepened from the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth; the emerging racism that worsened conditions for enslaved Africans and African Americans, diminished civic possibilities and narrowed economic prospects for free blacks, and drove official policy toward Native Americans; and the various class conflicts among whites that emerged around issues concerning access to land and title, taxation and debt schemes, and cash shortages, which pushed the country toward Revolution in ways the Founders didn’t favor. Without ignoring how the natural abundance of the Americas allowed higher proportions of European-descended colonists access to some kind of land title, recent historians still emphasize some basic commonalities with the kinds of pressures created by game laws and enclosure in England on the laboring and non-propertied classes in the British American colonies and early United States. They focus attention on the competition of big money to control access to land and wealth, creating severe limits most especially for Native Americans but also for poor whites. For instance, in the squatter settlements I just described, the arrival of wealthy men with state-certified title to the land meant precisely that their commons were to be enclosed. If they couldn’t find a way to purchase their own title to the land or negotiate a livable rent, they moved on. As Joanna Brooks underscores in her recent book Why We Left, the history of the United States is not an exception to but instead a long episode in the lessons of “dislocation and disposability that have characterized modernity” (21). Poor white settlers—whose parents had perhaps come to the

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Americas as indentured servants, convicts, or debtors, and whose families had perhaps been displaced from competencies by enclosure—had hard choices to make when land jobbers and surveyors came on behalf of wealthy owners in the early United States. Current residents could move west, abandoning their improvements and rejecting the new conditions imposed by landowners. Or they could stay, giving up customary practices of self-government. This is the story—the history—that Cooper’s novel details.

Commoning Traditions and Modern Betterments Cooper’s first Leatherstocking novel begins with a thumbnail account of the construction of a political commonwealth carved out of the wilderness. In forty years, we learn, the land has passed hands from pioneers, to yeoman settlers, to second-generation farmers, all who had industriously applied themselves to improvements and community-building. The setting—as the author reveals in his preface—is Cooper’s own childhood home of Otsego County, New York. The narrator summarizes the bounty of the area thusly: “In short, the whole district is hourly exhibiting how much can be done, in even a rugged country, and with a severe climate, under the dominion of mild laws, and where every man feels a direct interest in the prosperity of a commonwealth, of which he knows himself to form a part” (15–16). As the novel opens, the region’s natural abundance mixed with human labor and the beneficence of man-made laws produces a civic commons: a commonwealth. Within pages, however, that concordance is disturbed. The dramatic action of the first chapter foregrounds the functioning of the commons with a trial, offering a tense lesson in how the community negotiates access to limited natural resources, and hinting at the emerging contest over whose rules will determine the social order. As this scene opens, Judge Marmaduke Temple, the area’s largest landholder, has shot at a deer, hoping by this chance sighting on the way home from fetching his daughter that he will be able to supply his family with prized venison for its holiday meal. The deer falls, but as two men emerge from the cover of woods with smoking rifles, it is clear there is going to be a dispute. Deer may still be abundant in the late-eighteenth-century New York, but it takes skill to bring one down. Of course, all the men who shot want to claim the skill. But even beyond questions of skill, Temple wants the deer: after all, it’s his land, it’s Christmas Eve, and his pretty young daughter Elizabeth has just come home from boarding school. If ever an owner should be able to claim privileges accorded to possession, it should be now. So when the

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aged squatter Natty Bumppo and a newcomer to the community, Oliver Edwards, argue that Temple’s double-barrel in all likelihood did not contribute to killing the deer, the judge makes it clear that he considers the deer his by right of ownership. No Scrooge on the holiday, Temple generously invokes his privilege: he offers a fee to the two hunters to offset his claim. Thus, he seems to indicate, he will take his cake by affording his social inferiors to buy bread. As the men negotiate the disposition of the buck, an informal legal drama unfolds. The judge is aware enough of Elizabeth’s and his slave Aggy’s role as judging members of the community that he jokingly invokes the court to discredit their still unvoiced opinion: “I am out-voted—over-ruled, as we say on the bench. There is Aggy, he can’t vote, being a slave; and Bess is a minor—so I must make the best of it” (22). His joke about legal process makes dramatic fodder from the standoff between the alternative legal cultures the novel features. This informal opening scene sketches the main feature of localized law, the involvement of local citizens with direct interest in the conflict at hand, who value flexibility, as Laura Edwards summarizes, over the fixed and unbending principles of formal legal doctrine: “Law was a means to a just outcome in daily life; it was a loosely defined collection of malleable principles that could guide the resolution of conflicts toward a result that best fit the circumstances of those involved and the needs of the community” (44). Thus the judge’s seemingly extemporaneous joke signals his more serious awareness that he is, however reluctantly, involved in a vernacular legal process that will decide duties and obligations in this particular case, just as (readers soon will learn) he seeks to replace those informal processes with his centralized, state-based, rationalized system of law. From the novel’s outset, then, readers can see that there is no automatic accord between local justice and the new state-based law in Otsego County, and moreover, that the two competing systems of law advance different ideas about access to the common abundance. The judge’s generous offer to pay Natty and Edwards for the deer does not settle the question, as he so clearly hoped it would. Rather, it sharpens the seventy-year-old trapper Natty’s resistance. The old man invokes his “lawful dues in a free country,” grumbling against the idea that “might often makes right here, as well as in the old country” (20). When the judge suggests that it is only by his grace that Natty hunts on Temple property in the first place (and, it’s worth noting, as he subtly threatens to rescind that permission, he invokes the very “might” that Natty just hinted he would), Natty fires back, “There’s them living who say, that Nathaniel Bumppo’s right to shoot on these hills, is of older date than Marmaduke Temple’s right to forbid him” (23). As Natty’s rejoinder pointedly signals,

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the judge’s insistence on his own landed privilege to control the game on his property is not, in fact, the law. The “right” that Natty cites, a tradition of game free-taking, runs deep in U.S. law and hunting practice (such that even today, landowners must post signs forbidding hunting if they do not intend to share the game on their land with hunters). Indeed, the judge himself acknowledges as much a little later in the novel, at the Bold Dragoon (Templeton’s tavern), where he proclaims his hope to “live to see the day, when a man’s rights in his game shall be as much respected as his title to his farm” (161). Thus, from the opening scene, the narrator highlights how the judge’s investments in capital accumulation and state-based, liberal law conveniently (though perhaps not necessarily legally) converge. For Natty, the question of who gets the deer is not just about who gets to eat what for Christmas dinner. It goes to a deeper issue. In this negotiation he is concerned about disappearing forms of use rights, and how the newer rights marked by private ownership, exclusion, and enclosure are crowding out those prior rights both practically and legally. “The game is becoming hard to find indeed, Judge, with your clearings and betterments,” he grumps. Clearing and bettering had long been understood to herald the process of converting woodlands to agriculture and had likewise long been recognized within English Common Law as one way to establish title. But Natty’s choice of the term “betterment” resonates beyond its legal dimensions: “betterment” as modern rationalization is precisely the vision that the judge and his cousin, the sheriff, have for all the land they own, a vision traced over the course of the novel. This betterment will include modern transportation networks, and schemes for land and resource management that will put an end to the squatting, subsistence, and competence economies that had long depended on the local management of—and distribution of access to—common resources. The newcomer Edwards likewise escalates the significance of the deer beyond the level of simple provision to questions of legality and ownership as he dramatically reveals that the some of the judge’s shot has lodged in his shoulder: “The injury is but slight and the bullet has missed the bones; but I believe, sir, you will now admit my title to the venison” (23; my emphasis). But the judge—who comes, readers soon will learn, from a mercantile Quaker background—acts the part of lord of the manor, insisting that aristocratic privileges come with his ownership of the vast tracts of land. Refusing to relinquish the deer even now that it’s clear he’s missed it altogether and has shot Edwards instead, Temple makes a noble offer: along with $100 (worth $2,000 today) in compensation for the deer, Temple promises Edwards that “I here give thee a right to shoot deer, or bears, or any thing thou pleasest in my woods forever. Leather-stocking

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is the only other man that I have granted the same privilege to; and the time is coming when it will be of value” (23). This is an offer that invokes not just aristocratic rights but, more specifically, the threat of enclosure. Its reference is pointed: as such offers were in the era of British enclosure, this one will be of value for Edwards in the post-Revolutionary moment because the land in central New York is being developed—cleared, fenced, and settled—and thus hunting grounds, hunting rights, and game are all becoming more scarce, and therefore more valuable. In this offer Judge Temple, less aristocrat than capitalist investor, invokes what the staff of The Ecologist summarizes as the “race between growth and scarcity that growth creates” (11). This is a race propelled by the judge himself, who, the narrator informs readers in the next chapter, has turned from mercantile enterprise to land acquisition and development after the Revolution. He’s good at it, too: “His property increased in a tenfold ratio, and he was already ranked among the most wealthy and important of his countrymen” (35). Like many other land speculators, then, Temple has literally everything to gain from securing tenants and developing his town and county. His sidekick cousin, the indefatigable planner and sheriff Richard Jones, administrates the developments, as he will breathlessly recount to Elizabeth the next day: “Everything depends on system, girl. I shall sit down this afternoon and systematize the county” (182). His plan for improvement runs from streets (laid out “by the compass,” in disregard of “trees, hills, ponds, stumps”) to turnpikes and canals, and a grid for law enforcement (180–82, 262). As Alan Taylor observes, Temple’s plans for systematization, much like those of James Fenimore Cooper’s own father (whom his character invokes), aims to “maximize the value . . . of every natural resource,” turning “nature into commodities” (William, 102). Throughout the novel Natty voices strong opposition to these modernizing and systematizing aims. When the judge and the sheriff appeal to the “dignity” of their laws—as though their law is a long-settled tradition—to fortify their agenda for new development (160), Natty calls them on their historical legerdemain: “ ‘Game is game, and he who finds may kill; that has been the law in these mountains for forty years, to my sartain knowledge; and I think one old law is worth two new ones . . . your titles and your farms are all new together,’ cried Natty; ‘but laws should be equal and not more for one than the other’ ” (160–61). The new fencing constructed in development, he grumps, is an even more immediate hindrance to his right to hunt than the new laws, recounting the recent chase of a wounded deer: “If there hadn’t been a fence, I should have gotten another shot into it . . . No, no, Judge, it’s the farmers that makes the

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game scearce [sic], and not the hunters.” He concludes that new laws, like new fences, are enclosing him out of his “honest calling for a livelihood” (161). Natty’s point is that the “betterments” only better conditions for some members of the community: those whom they exclude are stuck with worse. His objections to the judge’s schemes for “betterments” echo the demands for fairness posed by Regulators from the time of the late colonies and into the early nation, demands which highlighted their suspicions that political elites were rigging the new nation’s political system in favor of the wealthy. Natty’s objection here is critically pivotal. Critics have habitually figured Natty as taking a stand against society or civilization in toto. This move comes in two versions. They either figure Natty as an iconic, lone individual opposed to society, or as representative of the Lockean State of Nature where individuals operate intuitively on their own divine sense of fairness until the pressures of property accumulation drive them to form a social contract and enter the State of Civilization, where they agree to be governed by civil law. But Natty’s comments, here and elsewhere in the novel, do not support such claims. Specifically, his invocation of prior laws—ones which he takes part in negotiating and to which he is willing to subscribe—counters these critical traditions’ (too) easy summary of Natty’s anti-social, pre-contractual opposition to society and law. His comments about the judge replacing one, prior, set of laws with a new one highlight that there is indeed no lawless before, a procedural vacuum the judge’s civil law fills. Quite differently, Natty asserts that the judge’s laws replace by fiat one vision of lawful community with another. His arguments directly invoke a tradition of local self-government, of citizen sovereignty and communal self-determination that local actors carried forward in the early republic, even past the spectacular defeat of the Whiskey Rebellion. Judge Temple wants to replace Natty’s political challenge—which asks for negotiation—with the finality of a legal decision from above. Here he represents the interests of those who seek to consolidate centralized governing institutions advancing rationalized law, institutions which will function as the final repository of legal authority. These political actors in the early nation, as Laura Edwards notes, “insisted on the superiority” of regularized state law to the locally negotiated “peace.” Temple’s subsequent judgment on Natty in his own court of law later in the novel will enact this very superiority: Judge Temple convicts Natty as having behaved lawlessly, as being, therefore, against the law (Marmaduke’s cousin, the sheriff, has already denominated him an “out-law” at the point of his arrest, 360). Critics have generally, if regretfully, followed the judge and

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sheriff ’s perspective in their reading of the novel. Myth and symbol critics and eco-critics may differ about the historical import of the novel, but they agree that, in Brook Thomas’s words, “The Pioneers reveals how many Americans have come to accept the necessity of the legal order despite their nagging sense that it infringes on their freedom” (87). Thomas, for his own part, argues that “if The Pioneers does not directly reflect a historical reality it does offer a persuasive way to narrate the conflict between the individual and the law that so many Americans have felt” (87), the conflict (as he terms it) between “Natty and society” that Cooper is “unable to resolve” (110). But the difficulty for Thomas’s argument and others like it is that Cooper emphasizes that Natty does not reject the laws he helps to create—we could call them laws-in-common—negotiated by the residents of the world he lives in before the arrival of intensive capitalist speculation, real estate development, and federal order as imposed by Judge Temple. The Pioneers dramatizes the conflicts created by externally imposed legal orders (precisely the same kinds of conflict traced by such historians as Edwards). Critics influenced by the myth and symbol school’s insistence on the conflict between “man” and “civilization,” or by Lockean contract theory, have oriented too many readers away from noticing that Natty never asks to live without or outside law: his argument with the judge is neither pre-social nor pre-political. He is rather questioning where good governance comes from and whose laws he has to abide: formal federal or state laws influenced by lawmakers with major propertied interests, or those communally negotiated by the residents of a particular community. The novel’s opening scene, of Natty, Edwards, and Temple negotiating the fate of the deer, develops in pointed contrast to the formalized legal scene that comes later in the novel, when Natty is hauled to court and judged by Temple for shooting another deer, this time out of season. Differently from the formality that governs the latter trial, in the opening scene those involved argue informally and before the eyes of their community—Elizabeth and Aggie—to determine the disposition of the deer. They do so without recourse to the formal rules of U.S. or New York state statute law. Rather, they negotiate the fate of one particular common resource in person, invoking competing traditions (like the coin flip of chance) and settling the dispute informally. The novel will repeatedly demonstrate that the results of these face-to-face, case-by-case adjudications are as morally and environmentally sound as judgments reached by the rules of formal law. But it also dramatizes how local self-governance is losing out to newer rules of property and management principles. As

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much as it documents the vanishing game, trappers, and, crucially, Indians, The Pioneers details the vanishing rights of residents to navigate and allocate their immediate resources among themselves in the face of modernization and development.

The Dignity of the Law From its opening pages, then, The Pioneers focuses on the local negotiation of resources and questions of fairness and legal order in the new nation’s backcountry. These debates take on a new urgency as backcountry denizens begin to confront the national and even global imperatives of modernization and capitalist development. Chapter 1 sketches the contours of these conflicts, practically and culturally. In Chapter 2 readers are offered a more personal history, concerning Judge Marmaduke Temple’s climb to economic success. His biography, as it turns out, is representative in the sense that his experiences epitomize what would become a familiar, and even mythic, story of American “self-making.” It is a story that takes us from the languishing remainders of aristocratic British feudalism to the ascension of entrepreneurial American capitalism. But Marmaduke’s story simultaneously and deliberately undercuts the notion that his success was nobly self-engineered. Rather, the narrator paints Marmaduke as a profiteer with questionable morals. The son of a Quaker who married “up,” Temple’s mother’s family monies allowed him to attend a better school than might otherwise have been possible. Marmaduke uses this schooling to his advantage: he forms a friendship. It is this “fortunate connexion,” more than any education he receives at school, which “paved the way to most of his future elevation in life” (29). The friend, Edward Effingham, has “not only great wealth, but high court interest” (29). He comes from an old-fashioned family, though, that discourages his interest in business. As old world aristocrats, the Effinghams think it “a degradation to its members, to descend to the pursuits of commerce.” Rather, they involve themselves in governing and defending the colonies. But when he comes into his estate, Edward honors his friendship with Marmaduke by underwriting his entry into commercial enterprise as a silent partner. This funding enables Marmaduke to begin building his fortune as a merchant. Then the American Revolution erupts, politically and then literally dividing the friends. Just before the Battle of Lexington, Loyalist Effingham gives Temple his land titles for safekeeping, and leaves the colony. As the war progresses, communication between the two friends ends. Patriot Temple, though occupied with civil service to his country, “never” (as the narrator snips) “seemed to lose sight of his

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own interests” (34). He snaps up the confiscated estates of the Royalists at bargain prices. And so we learn it is actually Effingham’s former holdings, now claimed by Temple, which provide the setting for the novel. Temple’s post-Revolutionary activities—his development of “Temple’s or Effingham’s Patent” (as the locals call this land, preserving in their vernacular usage the ambiguity of Marmaduke’s claim)—and his increasing command of wealth and labor in his enterprise earns him the position of judge: “His property increased in a tenfold ratio, and he was already ranked one of the most wealthy and important of his countrymen . . . [and] when the district in which his estates lay, had become sufficiently populous to be set off as a county, Mr. Temple had, according to the custom of the new settlements, been selected to fill its highest judicial station.” Happily for all concerned, Temple’s native intellectual habits were such, the narrator (it seems, tongue in cheek) informs the readers, that Temple “felt himself, and was unanimously acknowledged to be among the first” of his fellow county judges (35). The judge’s position—his wealth, his influence as landlord, and his political preeminence in the area—give him a vested interest in enforcing the state’s new laws. He has returned to Templeton not just with his daughter, but also with a report on the most recent legislative session, which he had been attending. “The legislature has been passing laws,” he reports to those assembled at the town tavern, “that the country much required” (160). These are laws that he both heralds and helps to make: as he reports on the laws passed, he adds, “Nor do I despair of getting an act, to make the unlawful felling of timber a criminal offence.” These laws aid Marmaduke’s project of systematizing the country, rationalizing the rules by which it is administrated. In the Bold Dragoon, the judge, depending on a certain fealty from his audience, aims to give them a lesson on what he shortly terms “the dignity of the law.” By this phrase the judge refers to a centralized, uniformatized, and rationalized body of law devoted to the protection of property rights—the very property, indeed, that he has seemingly seized and developed on the back of his former friend’s choosing the “wrong” side in the war. Temple avoids acknowledging that his newer form of law contends with locally negotiated law. Instead, he positions the state legislature and his role in relation to it as the bringer of law to a lawless land. Just as would state authorities in the Carolinas during this period, the judge “posits a single, controlling view of law as the only viable option” (Edwards, 13). As usual, Natty wants to argue. He dryly observes that legislators are at too great a distance from the lands they seek to regulate to pass just laws

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or to fairly administrate the laws they pass: “You may make your laws, Judge . . . but who will you find to watch the mountains through the long summer days, or the lakes at night?” (160). Natty challenges the plausibility of the legislature’s systematizing aims, ridiculing their scale. He insists that relying on local experience is the most effective and efficient way to administrate local bounty. And he has a larger point to make. Natty contends that instead of the promised order, the new laws bring disorder: the judge’s “law” is ruinous both of the land’s natural abundance and of social relations. As he observes early on, in a conversation with Oliver Edwards, “They say that there’s new laws in the land, and I am sartain that there’s new ways in the mountains. They alter the country so much, one hardly knows the lakes and streams” (206). And as he’ll angrily summarize later in a confrontation with the sheriff, Richard Jones, when he arrives to arrest Natty for trial, “You’ve driven God’s creatures from the wilderness where his providence had put them for his own pleasure, and you’ve brought in the troubles and divilties [sic] of the law, where no man was known to disturb one another” (362). Aiming to end Natty’s advocacy for the local negotiation of social order, the judge soon will have the squatter arrested and hauled to court for shooting a deer out of season. In this second central legal scene, the community’s expectations for local law collide with the judge’s hierarchically administered law. They expect, as the narrator notes, to resolve the conflict themselves, and “assert the dignity of the people” by collecting a fine from Natty (338). But this resolution will not satisfy the Judge’s law, and so Natty is arrested and held for trial. The locals have not yet understood that their “people’s peace” is to be replaced altogether. Residents turn out en masse for Natty’s trial, assuming their own centrality to the proceedings. As Edwards summarizes of the similar vernacular legal practice in the Carolinas, “Local law depended on the presence and participation of people in local communities, combining popular conceptions of justice with Revolutionary ideology in a literal rendering of popular sovereignty. ‘The people’ did not exist as the abstraction that provided the basis for government, as they did in state constitutions, statutes, appellate cases, and the U.S. Constitution. They figured as flesh-and-blood individuals, whose presence and opinions informed the entire process: people constituted the legal process, and law was what emerged through their interactions with one another” (65). Marmaduke Temple banks on their presence, and makes a parade that highlights the new hierarchical dispensation of his law: the sheriff, his constables, and the judge’s associates on the bench solemnly proceed, followed by the community, into the

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building that serves the community both as jail and courthouse. With all the trappings of a royal procession, the judge puts the top-down “dignity” of his law on display, making spectators out of the community and disallowing their participation in the decision along with any of the informal dialogue that marked the judge’s negotiations in the opening scene over the disposition of the deer. With no hint of the joking that characterized his behavior on Christmas Eve, Judge Temple orders Natty to take his hat off to hear the charges. The conflict between these two legal registers is apparent from the moment the judge asks how Natty pleads to the charges against him. As Natty begins a convoluted explanation in response, the judge cuts him off, addressing not him but his counsel: “Instruct your client how to plead” (368). Natty’s lack of familiarity with these new rules of order is treated as disrespect for the court. And the judge is equally impatient with Natty’s breech of protocol when he renders his verdict, sentencing Natty to be conveyed to the public stocks for an hour, then fined $100 and imprisoned for a month or until the fine is paid. Natty can’t contain himself, despite the gravitas of the judge’s demeanor. He interrupts, sensibly objecting that he can’t raise money for the fine from inside the jail. Judge Temple, having just offered to let the court hear Natty’s objections, cuts off Natty’s appeal, declaring, “I must be governed by the law.” Natty counters the judge’s impartiality by insisting precisely on personal contingency, reminding him that he had just rescued his daughter Elizabeth from being killed by a panther: “Did the beast of the forest mind your laws when it was thirsty and hungering for the blood of your own child?” (376). This appeal again fails to move the judge, who exclaims, “My private feelings must not enter into . . .” only to be interrupted again by Natty, who next reminds him of their shared youth on the Patent. Natty’s plaintive personal appeal for negotiation is amplified by the community in the person of Benjamin Pump, who, moved by the exchange, makes his way to the front of the court to offer what little money he has to offset Natty’s sentence. Despite the judge’s insistence on “dignity” (i.e., respect for his unilateral legal command), the community insists on its own right to engage the process of rendering justice, acting in full confidence (and despite Temple’s repeated admonitions) that the people can engage, challenge, and participate in making the law. Their persistence finally creates an emotional struggle for the judge. He tries mightily to curtail the crowd’s involvement along with the feelings their own sense of justice evokes inside him. “There must be an end to this,” he decrees. But the narrator makes sure readers know he is “struggling to overcome his feelings” as he remands Natty to the stocks.

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The Law versus Fair Play The drama of the judge’s courtroom develops its resonance for readers not just through the emotional dissonance that requires the judge to battle down his fatherly partiality in order to condemn Natty. It also resonates by contrast with the community’s informal economy of justice. Indeed, Cooper has built his narrative to ensure that the judge’s legalistically impartial ruling feels painful and even wrong to readers because they have already witnessed the ability of a variety of residents to negotiate fairer outcomes on their own. For example, the turkey shoot scene provides a comic setting to sketch the differences between communal law and procedural or formal law. Cooper idealizes neither, depicting the turkey shoot as a practice that takes everyone back to the days of the frontier—and, we might add, the days of the commons: “It was connected with the daily practices of a people, who often laid aside the axe or the sithe [sic], to seize the rifle, as the deer glided through the forests they were felling, or the bear entered their rough meadows” (189). Three friendly rivals—Billy Kirby, Oliver Edwards, and Natty Bumppo—compete to kill the turkey before the gathered community. A debate emerges when Natty’s flint doesn’t spark in his first attempt to fire. The free black, Abraham Freeborn (“Brom”), who owns the turkey and hosts the shoot, insists that Natty has in fact fired and must pay again in order to shoot again. In response, Natty threatens physically to assault Freeborn. This is a telling moment for the man who earlier had complained against Judge Temple’s use of superior might to win his point. Natty’s maneuver here, as well as the white crowd’s ritualistic exclusion of Freeborn (who, as Andy Doolen notes, can appeal to the “democratic sentiments” of his white fellow citizens only by “debasing himself ”) (145), has seldom tempered critics’ enthusiasm for Natty’s representation of “natural” law. This moment highlights exactly how locally negotiated self-governance can produce injustices. The racism that informs the white participants’ behavior (and indeed Cooper’s minstrel-like depiction of Freeborn) should caution us against romanticizing or overgeneralizing about locally negotiated justice. Recognizing the racism and other forms of majoritarian exclusions that can sometimes result from local self-governance—and appreciating, for instance, the value of nesting scales of government, which can serve as checks on such locally produced tyrannies (as Elinor Ostrom highlights)—should not, however, prevent us from examining the value of local practices to participatory democracy, and questioning the inevitability of their replacement with systems of top-down management.

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In the end Natty bags the turkey, Elizabeth pays Freeborn for it, and all parties to the debate and the crowd seem roughly satisfied—except the sheriff. He sniffs, “There is an uncertainty about the rules of this sport, that it is proper I should remove. If you will appoint a committee, gentlemen, to wait on me this morning, I will draw up, in writing, a set of regulations” (199). Jones muses that such activities should be banned by statute law, and that perhaps they already are “indictable at common law” (200). The sheriff wants to fix the game by banishing its self-managed informality—what Natty upholds as the laws-in-common. A much less comic version of this conflict between forms of law comes when Natty shoots the out-of-season deer. One morning, Natty’s hounds chase a buck that plunges into the lake. Unable to resist the physical and mental sport of spearing the buck as it swims, Natty disregards Edwards, who urges him to remember the judge’s warnings against killing the buck out of season. Working as a team, Chingachgook and Natty coral and kill the deer: “So much for Marmaduke Temple’s law,” exalts Natty. He counters Temple’s law with his own sense of the laws-in-common: “I know many that will relish the creater’s steaks, for all the betterments in the land!” (302). Natty’s mistake is to imagine that he can negotiate within the terms of a state-administered law (according to Findley, as we saw in Chapter 2, this is the mistake of the Whiskey Rebels as well). We see this when the troops renew their attempt to bring Natty to “justice.” Billy Kirby, deputized before he learns his mission, scoffs at the idea that Natty would mount an armed resistance, and declares, “He has as good a right to kill deer as any on the Patent” (337). Nevertheless, he agrees to present Natty with the papers. Their intention to enter his abode ups the stakes for Natty, who is assisting Oliver’s scheme to get his father’s land back by hiding his grandfather in his cabin. He feels honor-bound to prevent the men from finding Major Effingham inside and so comes to the door with his rifle. Startled by his friend’s ominous greeting, Kirby initiates a friendly negotiation. Kirby, like Natty, also clearly assumes there is room to navigate in the “law” that Squire Doolittle declares unbending “for all” (337). In the negotiation Kirby initiates, Natty offers to forego claiming the bounty for two panthers he has killed in saving Temple’s daughter Elizabeth. “Well that’s fair,” Kirby announces, “he forgives the county his demand and the county should forgive him the fine; it’s what I call an even trade and should be concluded on the spot” (339–40). Billy Kirby’s sense of fairness has been widely noted by critics. It’s worth paying attention to something less noted: how he and Natty assume throughout that they can settle questions of law, or social order, on

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a case-by-case, face-to-face basis. Later, when Kirby is sent to bring Natty in for escaping from jail, he will again take up Natty’s gambit to negotiate. Again, he casts his on-the-spot decisions in terms of fairness: “That’s fair; and what’s fair is right” (437). His preference for face-to-face adjudication of fairness resonates with the practices of the Fair Play tribunal described by Gallo. And it importantly highlights how the judge’s formal law is not in fact inevitably fair or right, as the narrative underlines by associating it with Jones, Doolittle, and Jotham, characters discredited by a variety of nefarious ambitions. For his part, Natty repeatedly castigates formal law for its “wasty ways,” as when Kirby first shows him the warrant for his arrest: “Well, well,” he says of Judge Temple, “that man loves the new ways and his betterments and his lands, afore his own flesh and blood” (339). Here Natty echoes the voiced regret of squatters in the West Susquehanna Valley as they witnessed the transition from the rules of Fair Play to Pennsylvania state law. As Peter Rodey asserted to a judge in court, “All I can say is, that since your Honor’s coorts have come among us, fair play has entirely ceased, and the law has taken its place” (Gallo, 406).

The Tragedy of the Commons? Or of Privatization? The Pioneers is perhaps most famous today for its scenes of overtaking: the pigeon hunt and the net fishing. Cooper balances these scenes with alternative philosophies, forwarding Natty, the novel’s most “natural” white man, as a compelling conservationist who speaks at every opportunity against the greed that has emerged among casual hunters and market-oriented farmers. From inside his commitment to subsistence Natty denounces indiscriminate logging, clearing, overhunting, and overfishing. In biologist Garrett Hardin’s famous thesis, it is man’s competitive “nature” that leads to overuse and depletion of the commons. Cooper presents these behaviors as rooted in specific historical causes. For instance, the novel presents peoples’ actions in the pigeon shoot through a range of specifically historical registers: from colonialist violence (quoth Natty: “There’s Mr. Oliver, as bad as the rest of them, firing into the flocks as if he was shooting down nothing but Mingo warriors”; quoth Sheriff Jones: “Victory! We have driven the enemy from the field!”) to farmer frustration (Billy, defending his townsmen from Natty’s critique: “If you had to sow your wheat twice and three times, as I have done, you wouldn’t be so massyfuly feeling’d”) to aristocratic privilege (quoth Judge Temple: “Boys, I will give thee six pence a hundred for the pigeons’ heads only”) (249–52). These various rhetorical frames underscore the scene’s histori-

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cal implication in enclosure and primitive colonialist accumulation that precedes and conditions Marmaduke Temple’s emergence as a large landholder, political leader, and rising capitalist speculator and developer. In this way, Cooper’s novel registers a keen awareness of the competing desires—the complexly different desires for land monopoly or for freehold and citizenship or for simple competency emerging from the same historical process—that drove various classes of settlers in the colonies and early nation. The Pioneers shows the collision of these forces in scenes like the pigeon shoot, where settlers react to the prospect of scarcity that their own settlement, with its layers of enclosure large (for speculation) and small (for competence), will create. Soon to be banned, by law and by physical scarcity, from open taking, these settlers reactively overtake in an orgy of common privilege—while it lasts. Natty’s opening denunciation, “This comes of settling a country!” has for many suggested simple inevitability, but his later comments on wise use indicate that there could be alternatives within the logic of settlement, not just against it: “Put an ind, Judge, to your clearings. An’t the woods his work as well as the pigeons? Use, but don’t waste” (248–50). The judge’s regret for the carnage—of trees, pigeons, and bass though perhaps not Native or African Americans—often makes him seem allied with Natty’s wise-use principles. As he says of the fish netting, “Like all other treasures of the wilderness, they already begin to disappear, before the wasteful extravagance of man” (262). Both men calculate the cost of this natural abundance against the customs of overuse. But they speak, as it were, from opposite sides of the fence, the judge from the side of private accumulation, and Natty from the side of use-in-common. Sheriff Jones gestures toward this crucial difference when he complains against Temple’s expressed regret for the fish kill: “But this is always the way with you, Marmaduke; first it’s the trees, then it’s the deer, after that it’s the maple sugar, and so on to the end of the chapter. One day you talk of canals, through a country where there’s a river or a lake every half-mile, just because the water won’t run the way you wish it to go; and the next you say something about mines of coal” (262). The judge’s laws bind his “justice” to capitalist speculation and development. The novel first highlights and then hides this. The novel’s happy ending, where Temple can bequeath on Effingham his paternal estate and Marmaduke’s own daughter, works in a couple directions. First, it evaporates all the tensions suggested by Oliver’s antagonism toward Temple (questions hovering around Oliver’s alleged Indian heritage and the racial injustices of Anglo-colonial title) as it glosses the question of who gets access to ownership and power in the new nation, through the hetero-

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romantic solution of marriage. Second, it glues—and glues solidly—questions of personal interest to a specifically white liberal legalism and its stance of putative disinterest. In this condensed moment, what the novel asks of its readers parallels what the judge asks of Oliver: to acquiesce romantically to the justice of the white liberal state’s alliance with capitalist development. This acquiescence collapses indigenous counter-claims against dispossession into the white backcountry’s democratic investments in communal self-governance, dismissing them simultaneously as atavistic precursors to the modern liberal order: a political alliance between middling capitalist and elite interests that will fund national power. The romance between liberal, state-based law and capitalist privatization and expansion, historically well documented in the early nation, does not go to bed with the honeymooners. Rather, the novel’s critique of that romance and its legerdemain solution lives on (even as it fades into the sunset) with Natty. Natty’s voice as an environmental conservationist has been applauded: what has been less remarked on is the connection the novel underscores between common natural resources and communal self-governance. This connection comes clear through his repetitive castigation of “wasty ways,” Natty’s term for the double-pronged enclosure of natural and civic commons. He applies the term equally to behaviors fostered under civil law’s support of possessive individualism (such as overtaking of resources) and to civil law’s denial that communities can negotiate the allocation of their own resources. This linkage suggests that in losing control of commons, people lose rights to local self-governance in the early nation. The Pioneers gives body with fictional human actors to a story about the forces unleashed by liberal capitalism and its enclosures of personhood and property. Cooper’s analysis in the novel aims squarely at the sociopolitical as well as economic concessions demanded from local communities by the drive toward privatization, which in both the colonies and early nation put the elite in tension with underclass aspirants whose ideals for self-governing needed to be disciplined—and preferably selfdisciplined, as we can see in the final episode, where Kirby urges Natty to give himself up to the law to continue his punishment for resisting arrest. “So be civil,” he urges (437). Kirby, who throughout the novel has stood for the right of residents independently to negotiate fairness, here documents his willingness to self-subordinate to the new order. Just so, he suggests to Natty that surrendering to the judge’s version of the law will document the trapper’s good manners. Natty’s mannerly departure from Templetown has fueled a critical

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tradition that reads an ineluctable conflict between the individual and society as if there is only one option, one trajectory, toward “civilization” defined as a liberal legal order that prioritizes an individual’s right to exclusive property. Critics have maintained this reading by isolating Natty not just from civilization but also from the possibility of community, as though community can only be possible within the judge’s legal order. Such readings are—as Brook Thomas importantly suggests—a symptom of our own imaginative lack, arguably produced by enclosures that limit our historical memory. What is valuable about Cooper’s deeply historical and political novel, read more carefully and with the history of the commons in mind, is how it can help us see the enclosure of the civic commons in progress, and to see people in conversation with the very options that have seemingly disappeared from our civic memory today. The tragedy of the novel is not the one Hardin frames, of man’s “inevitable” selfishness, his inability to share in a commons. Rather, as Cooper frames it, the tragedy is produced as capitalist modernity eliminates both the natural and civic commons by fencing everyone but “qualified owners” out and asking everyone else to “be civil” about it. The civility Kirby finally advocates turns out to mean the surrender of local communal autonomy. It’s a shell game with words, like “We the People” in the Constitution, asking people to feel moved by their belonging in the process of surrendering a meaningful agency. Natty considers the prospects. Then he heads west, rejecting the choice to remain in a community with selfdiminished agency.

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 /

Settler Self-Governance: Democratic Politics on the Frontier

At the end of The Pioneers, Natty packs up his advocacy for equalitarian local self-government and heads west. Vernacular democracy and the ability of people to manage common pool resources in the 1780s seem to be retreating into the sunset, displaced by the forces of market capitalism and the modern nation-state. Natty’s retreat to the frontier flags both the lingering romantic appeal of the ideals he carts west with him, but also the apparent impossibility of their surviving in the judge’s modern order. And many recent historians who write about plebian Anti-Federalists, regulations, and other local movements for self-determination in the early nation seem to support this story line: that the passage of the U.S. Constitution marked a definite defeat for any further thinking about local democratic self-governing and communal self-determination. But Natty’s principled departure alternately suggests that these ideals might have continued thriving farther west. Indeed, political novels well into the 1840s continue registering the presence of such vernacular democratic practices and ideals, embodied not in solitary individuals but in larger collectives, from outlaw gangs to frontier settlements. Not that these communities are depicted as being a good thing. Frontier novelists, by and large, represented such equalitarian practices not as a genuinely viable political possibility, but rather (at best) as a naïve ideal that should be abandoned, or (more typically) as a form of savagery or organized crime that needed to repudiated and overcome in order for settlers to “mature” and earn their admission to the civilized nation. The frontier literature that became so popular after the 1820s largely worked

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to support the developing consensus narrative by consigning the equalitarian demands, practices, and beliefs of common citizens to the outlands or to the nation’s prehistory. In this increasingly durable plotline, we see the continuing resonance of Hamilton’s strategy in the Whiskey Rebellion decades past the event itself. Hamilton’s achievement in manufacturing a national spectacle from the showdown over the nation’s first federal tax came not merely in how the enforcement of the excise benefited wealthy bond and land speculators. Its more significant legacy accompanied the episode’s rhetorical refraction of the various communal, equalitarian, and direct democratic practices of local communities in the early nation through the terms of the frontier. In the aftermath of that signal battle, the consensus narrative imaginatively relocated vernacular democracy from the polis to the frontier, picturing its practice as an atavistic menace to the rational order of civic politics. It’s not as though these political ideals disappeared from the center of the nation, as would be affirmed by events like the Dorr Rebellion, Thomas Skidmore’s Workeyism, and the emergence of the National Reform Party in the 1840s. But the rhetorical relocation of these politics from the polis to the frontier allowed the conflict to be described mythically, as a fight to the death between “savagery” and “civilization” being staged on the nation’s borders. The sheer repetition of this plotline decades past the Whiskey Rebellion suggests that the practices Hamilton sought to curtail continued. The historian Bethel Saler in her impressive study The Settlers’ Empire notes that in the early unauthorized U.S. settlement in the lower Northwest, “one can see the village-based politics, the anti-authoritarianism, and the homestead rights galvanizing backcountry settlers”—a political culture that was often notably hostile to the aims of nationalist planners in the early United States (46). The thrill delivered by the recurring frontier plot I’ve described emphasizes the ongoing threat that proponents of liberal democracy felt from the alternative democratic cultures that frontier novels repeatedly go to such lengths to address, and usually to vilify. Practically, of course, it’s true that frontier governance was a source of worry as leaders sought to consolidate the nation politically and economically while expanding it geographically. In 1784 George Washington had voiced his concern that frontier inhabitants could easily “become a different people from us, have different views, different interests” (Van Atta, 342). It was not just the looseness of frontier communities’ national affiliation in the context of international commercial opportunities—the fear that Spain or France might strengthen their hold in the West—that would continue to worry political leaders and intellectuals in the Jacksonian era. At least as much as foreign powers, the self-determining equalitarianism

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of squatter settlements and frontier communities was a source of concern in the contest for territorial dominance. Ongoing developments repeatedly suggested that aspirations toward political belonging among Anglo settlers at the nation’s edges had not yet been reliably channeled into the liberally individual, self-seeking orientation toward property, markets, and hierarchically oriented national belonging. The real-world political conflict over the terms of developing democracy in the context of national expansion thus conditions the emergence of the fictional frontier narrative. The plots forwarded by frontier novels from the 1820s and beyond mostly repudiate the vernacular self-governing practices of rural settlers, hunters, and farmers (and, by proxy, urban workers and utopian movements) in the early nation. At the same time, they track the enduring challenge equalitarian political ideals and practices continued posing to expanding federal government during the tumultuous political and economic changes of the Jacksonian era. In the 1830s white men across the nation, regardless of property status, got the vote; at the same time, the political power of the common folk—a power suggested when Jackson opened the White House to them at his first inaugural—was vilified and feared by elites across the political spectrum. As lands opened up in the West (thanks first to the Louisiana Purchase and then to Jackson’s ruthlessly engineered campaign of Indian removal), land collateralization and slave speculation became rampant. Calhoun and Clay worked tirelessly to ensure that roads and canals were built. Western development fueled speculation in land and slaves, and launched an accelerating cycle of economic boom and bust that began to characterize the market economy. As western settlement expanded, a range of populist movements and belligerent forms of political majoritarianism emerged and the party system consolidated. Moreover, during this same period populist actions became markedly more destructive, aimed at property in the North and lives in the South, as David Grimsted details in American Mobbing. The novels I study in this chapter, Robert Montgomery Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837), William Gilmore Simms’s Richard Hurdis (1838), and Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? (1839), all explore the problem of defining and containing self-governing practices in the West, a western “disaffection” for nationalizing aims that, as Saler notes, “endangered not just the peripheries but the tenuous American union of regionally identified populations in independent states” (57). The three novels are composed and published in an emerging cycle of public land speculation and economic panic that began in 1819. That panic spurred the political populism and anti-bank fervor that resulted in Jackson’s election and drove debt relief and land policy into the turbulent 1830s, including the

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replacement of credit with cash on land sales and sharply reduced plot sizes and lots. The Panic of 1837, driven by similar factors, would launch a much longer recession and accelerate populist arguments in the West on behalf of “squatter relief.” That debate that would soon result in the 1841 Preemptive Act, establishing the right of squatters to claim surveyed public lands. It’s tempting to view “squatter relief ” as a simple process of recognition for poor white folk already working on behalf of state interests in territorial acquisition, slave expansion, and Indian removal—and I think mostly we habitually do. But the novels I study in this chapter outline something more complex than this simple historical common sense. Differently, they suggest that “squatter relief ” was a complex ideological and policy endeavor to constrain, harness, and colonize diverging squatter motives, patterns, and politics for the purpose of state expansion. Thus all three novels—with different emphases—grapple with an ongoing national debate, echoing the terms predicted by Cooper’s The Pioneers and its competing visions of community order and progress. Whose politics should control settlement in the West? Those of wealthy speculators like Marmaduke, who see the frontier as a commodity, a grounds on which they can develop profitable, orderly settlements and markets for trade? Or those of ordinary people like Natty and Billy Kirby, who view its lands as a basis for familial and communal competence, and for political and economic independence that enables them to engage as citizens in local self-governance? Read together, these very different novels suggest the extent to which squatting and ordinary citizen settlement was not yet securely harnessed to agendas of settler colonialism, and at the same time how formal modes of representative government had not yet succeeded at capturing local practices of democratic politicalness in the U.S. West of the 1830s that so frustrated the nation’s early Federalist leaders. Simms’s and Bird’s story lines vigorously reject political and economic self-determination, plotting the defeat of such equalitarian practices as their novels’ happy endings and laboring to effect and orient what Mark Rifkin so powerfully describes as “settler common sense.” Somewhat differently, Kirkland’s novel experiments with an openness to vernacular (or what she frames as “homely”) democracy’s possibilities for the white nation’s political, social, and economic practices and its democratic future.

“Bozhoo, Brudder” Bird’s Nick of the Woods (1837) develops its arguments about ongoing clashes over democratic possibility historically, focusing on a state that had already completed what Bird frames as an inevitable transition. The

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novel takes place in 1782, when the nation was still a political confederacy and Kentucky was still a district of Virginia. The novel’s hectic plot repudiates the equalitarian idealism that informed local practices and Revolutionary-era state constitutions of the early nation; furthermore, it advocates for a hierarchical political order, more like that imagined by the Federal Constitution that would be ratified in 1789, governing the entry of Kentucky into statehood. Kentucky in the 1780s was promoted as the latest “good poor-man’s country.” Flooded—as would become typical of western settlement in years ahead—by competence-seeking squatters and hunters with speculators hot on their heels, the influx of settlers encountered what Richard White memorably detailed as Middle Ground, a relatively peaceful region of villages comprising mixed indigenous peoples and some European hunters and traders in the Ohio River Valley. Kentucky itself was not, by and large, settled by Native Americans. Rather, they used it (and fought over it) as a hunting grounds, and the influx of aspiring white settlers there in the latter third of the eighteenth century would lead first to attempts at conciliation, then confrontation between Indian Country and the white United States’ newest backcountry—culminating finally in the dismantling of any hope for interethnic peace between whites and Native Americans or blacks, as elites maneuvered to guarantee slavery’s extension in Kentucky, aiming to attract, in Edward Baptist’s summary, “wealthy settlers who would buy land from speculators” (12). But at least some of the earliest white settlers of the 1760s and ’70s had values in common with their mostly Shawnee and Delaware Indian Country neighbors—including an ethics of communal mutualism and what historian Stephan Aron describes as a “system of leadership by example and persuasion” rather than social hierarchy (How the West, 33). These early settlers encountered an eastern Ohio River Valley population that aimed at intercultural alliances: when the Shawnee famously captured Daniel Boone and a party of men, their gambit was to negotiate to adopt the entire white backcountry community of Boonesboro, thus accomplishing a strategic alliance in the mode of Middle Ground. That brash intercultural attempt failed, though a long history of intercultural red/white alliances and identifications in the Middle Ground might have predicted otherwise. Indeed, Boone initially accepted the offer on behalf of his Boonesboro fellows, who finally overruled him, siding instead with another, Indian-hating member of the party (and still two members of the party, Joseph Jackson and Micajah Callaway, lived willingly with their Shawnee “captors” for many years—Jackson even fought with the Shawnee against his former white compatriots).

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What had long been a fluid world of intercultural alliance in the Middle Ground began turning into an increasingly durable frontier of racialized hostility between Native American and backcountry settlers in Kentucky in the 1770s and ’80s. But the consolidation of racist hatred did little to offset growing concerns of easterners who viewed the white settlers’ political and economic equalitarianism as dangerous radicalism. Historian Melissah Pawlikowski notes that in the 1770s, the white inhabitants of the eastern Ohio River Valley viewed it as a “resource commons” and prioritized cooperative labor and peaceful interethnic relations as part of their management of that commons (245; see also Chapter 4 passim). As Aron similarly summarizes: The [Kentucky] of Daniel Boone restricted the rights of private land use, though never to the same degree as neighboring Indian peoples . . . An informal consensus among [white] occupants limited private enjoyment of individuated property. Pioneers presumed that unimproved land, whatever its legal status, was semipublic property. They cultivated and enclosed only a small fraction of their fields, the rest, at least temporarily, remained like the unclaimed woods, a common on which all white inhabitants had certain rights—to cross at will, to range stock, to collect dead timber, and most important in Revolutionary-era Kentucky, to hunt game. With survival at stake, pioneers insisted that public needs eclipsed private rights. (How the West, 103) As he later summarizes, “Limiting wants and lending hands to neighbors in need held the key” for Kentucky’s early white settlers “to a good poor man’s country in which how well people got along counted for more than how frequently or how far they got ahead” (193). Kentucky settlers in the 1770s agitated for independence from Virginia proprietors and for homestead and squatters’ (or “preoccupancy”) rights. They drove land reform efforts well into Kentucky’s statehood. As both a district and a state, Kentucky was a site of fierce contention between speculators and smallholders. During its settlement, Virginia had granted land haphazardly, and early in its statehood the Kentucky surveyor general would report to the legislature that while citizens held grants totaling roughly twenty-four million acres, the state itself contained only half that acreage (Aron, 84). Smallholders had a predictably hard time defending their grant claims in the state’s consolidating formal legal system. Swiftly, Kentucky began to evidence a familiar pattern: by 1800, 10 percent of the state’s taxpayers owned a third of its lands; more than half its adult male residents possessed no lands at all. Baptist, drawing on the example of Abraham Lincoln’s father, Thomas, who gave up on Kentucky after find-

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ing himself unable to defend his land claims against repeated lawsuits launched by speculators back east, notes that the Lincoln family’s westward retreat “was part of a wider defeat for a vision of Kentucky as a land for yeoman farmers rather than as a region for high-capital speculation in land and human bodies” (16). But during the years of that transition, Kentucky’s backcountry populism made easy common cause with populist struggles farther east. Take, for example, Kentucky’s whiskey tax resistance. As historian Mary K. Bonsteel Tachau observes, nearly the entire district of Kentucky managed, in an impressive display of civil disobedience, to resist the excise until 1802, well into its young statehood. Kentucky’s resolute refusal to pay the excise, even after becoming a federally recognized state, demonstrated the ongoing viability of vernacular democratic principles and communally self-managing practices. And its resistance to the nation’s first official excise suggested the difficulties the federal government would face in selling a more self-subordinating role for citizens as it sought to incorporate more lands. Kentucky’s ultimate historical transition from an equalitarian backcountry settlement in the Revolutionary era to the thriving bluegrass and bourbon (and slaving) country we associate with Henry Clay’s resolute federal vision and liberal legalism by the 1820s and ’30s offered Robert Montgomery Bird a useful historical backdrop—at least in part. Bird wanted the setting to deliver a dramatic tale about the necessary defeat of political and economic idealism among ordinary citizens. Nick of the Woods is known today as a novel about Indian-hating. Repudiating Cooper’s romanticized depiction of Delaware Indians in The Last of the Mohicans (1826), Bird prefaces the novel with his famous rejoinder, “The Indian is doubtless a gentleman; but he is a gentleman who wears a very dirty shirt, and lives a miserable life, having nothing to employ him or keep him alive except the pleasures of the chase and of the scalp-hunt— which we dignify with the name of war” (32). Bird’s Shawnee are cartoonish, unredeemable, and undistinguishable: a drunken, rampaging killing machine. For that reason especially, it’s worth noting that Byrd crafted his story in defiance of a historical record that shows white and Native American inhabitants of the eastern Ohio River Valley of that era both policing and punishing racially oriented hate-murders as a key strategy for maintaining interethnic peace (Pawlikowski, Chapters 4–5). His disregard for that aspect of Kentucky’s history highlights Bird’s own political aims for telling the story. Notably, the racial dimensions of his sensational Indian-hating novel have obscured the intra-racial white politics it promotes from critical scrutiny. Though Indians are fundamental to his tale, they are less the

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subject than Bird’s vehicle for abjecting the democratic equalitarianism and informality he wants readers to associate with a savage frontier. The Indians are nothing more than stage props, in other words, for Nick’s promotion of Bird’s vision for white democratic citizenship. Subtending every bit of the Indian-hating action in the novel, Nick plots an insistent confrontation between commons and liberal democracy, staging the triumph of the latter over the former. Bird, in other words, does not substitute white brotherhood for the interracial possibilities of the Middle Ground. Instead, he works to discredit brotherly equalitarianism in toto, driving home a lesson on the unreliability of fraternalism for the construction of familial, political, or intercultural bonds. The novel’s action originates in brotherly betrayals. Roland Forrester, a young Virginian and the apparent hero of the novel, is descended from “one of the most ancient and affluent families on the James River” (59). Under the laws of primogeniture, his uncle Roland, the eldest, inherits all the family wealth and privilege, while the younger two brothers, including Roland’s father, “were left to shift for themselves.” Then the Revolution begins, and with a kind of structural, economic predictability, Uncle Roland remains loyal to the Crown, while the two younger brothers “who had suffered under the deprivation of their natural rights” cast their lot “with a system of government and laws more liberal and equitable in their character and operation” (59). Uncle Roland never forgives his siblings, who die in the opening days of the Revolution, though he seemingly forgives their offspring, Roland and Edith: “The stern loyalist took the orphans to his bosom, cherished them and loved them—or at least appeared to do so” (60). Roland, influenced by his father’s politics, rides off to fight for the cause of independence, leaving Edith to his uncle’s care. But when Uncle Roland dies, shortly after the British defeat at Yorktown, it turns out that he’s left Edith penniless and unprotected—or so it seems when the villainous Richard Braxley produces a will that makes him Edith’s guardian and leaves Uncle Roland’s money to a different heir. To save Edith’s honor (Braxley is also plotting to trap Edith into a marriage), Roland decides they must light out for the frontier, where he hopes to make the kind of living that might provide for them both. On the frontiers of Kentucky they’ll encounter a brawling band of whites, led by the aging patriarch Colonel Bruce, who are battling the Shawnee and trying to solve the mystery of a mysterious, ghost-like figure, the Jibbenainosay, who is inflicting terror among the Shawnee and cheering the whites with his brutal murders. The novel’s story functions as thinly veiled political allegory. It idealizes fraternal equalitarianism in the twins’ choice to fight in the Revolu-

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tion, and then plots the realpolitik of such romantic idealism. Uneven distribution of property, whether enforced by law or produced by the “diversity in the faculties of men” (as Madison put it in Federalist No. 10), combines with the vicissitudes of war to transform Revolutionary brotherhood into a post-revolutionary fall. The message is plain: brotherhood, however appealing, cannot be trusted. The symbolic citizenship the story depicts shifts attention decisively from the solidarity of brotherhood to the solitude of the son, who needs to forget cooperation and defend himself on all sides. Indeed, it emphasizes the theme of the son’s isolation to the point of logical absurdity. For instance, there’s the strange moment when the fifty-year-old Colonel Bruce sympathetically listens to Roland’s story of familial dispossession and responds, “I love ye and honor ye; and I could say no more if you war my own natteral born father!” (62). As the elder Bruce’s odd exclamation to the young Roland will eventually indicate, the problem the novel poses for its male characters is that there are simply no decent fathers to claim. Beyond the underclass Colonel Bruce, biological fathers in this novel are a disaster. Desiring brotherhood, they hand Indians the knives they use to kill the white family, or they abandon and betray their children in order to “go Indian.” These are lessons conveyed decisively by key two figures: the legendary Quaker frontier pacifist Nathan Slaughter, and the “white Indian” Abel Doe. When Roland first encounters Nathan in the opening of the novel, the frontiersman is attempting to purchase ammunition. For his pains he is savagely ridiculed by his backcountry fellows. They don’t want to sell it to him because he refuses to use it to kill Indians: they see him as traitorous in his refusal to help defend the settlement. Roland doesn’t give this scene much thought. But soon he discovers that his own fate—and Edith’s— depends on the strange hunter’s ability to navigate the backcountry in the midst of an organized Indian raid on the settlement. Nathan will navigate Edith and Roland into and out of danger, into and out of Indian captivity. Eventually and dramatically, Nathan Slaughter reveals to Roland that he is not just the killer of the three Piankeshaw who had kidnapped Roland and indeed, a rapacious Indian-killer after all, but more exactly, Nathan is himself the fabled Jibbenainosay. His own history, which he finally explains to Roland, suggests that Nathan’s strange, dissociative behavior is based in what we would now describe as a psychotic break. Bird is hardly interested, though, in psychology. Nathan’s story is more insistently a real-world lesson in the dangers of fraternal idealism (and here, interestingly, Nathan’s desire to hide his role as the perpetrator of hate-murders does find historical corroboration: in the eastern Ohio River Valley of the 1770s, backcountry communities’ official disapproval of such

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actions meant that committed Indian-killers needed to keep their crimes secret; see Pawlikowski, Chapter 5 passim, esp. 285–308). He tells the story of his young adulthood, when he was living in what was then the backcountry of western Pennsylvania. Married, and successfully providing for his mother, his wife, and his five children, Nathan recounts a bucolic setting that makes it seem that Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James might have been his neighbor. Nathan adds his Quaker commitments to Farmer James’s secularist Enlightenment ideals, and when a band of Shawnee warriors comes onto his property, with, as Nathan relates, “their hands . . . red with the blood of my neighbors,” Nathan hands the chief, Wenonga, his own gun and knife, to attest to his brotherly commitments (234). Wenonga cruelly uses these weapons to kill Nathan’s family and to scalp Nathan himself. Betting on brotherhood, Nathan looses everything, including his sanity. At the end of the novel he wreaks vengeance on Wenonga. Covered in the Shawnee chief ’s gore, Nathan straps his scalp belt to his own waist and departs into the forest, having turned into the very image of the savage he spent years plotting to defeat. If Nathan gave all for the possibility of creating brotherhood, the novel shows how Indians cruelly encourage this mistake. “Bozhoo, brudder” may be the most clearly intelligible thing Indian characters get to say in the course of the novel. It is precisely in this fraternal posture that they enact their savagery. What looks like a civil greeting culminates in cannibalism: the Shawnee make a habit of eating those they denominate “brudder.” Early on, Colonel Bruce describes a Delaware defeat of a Pennsylvania military expedition: “Beaten! . . . say that the savages made dinner of ’em and you’ll be nearer the true history of the matter” (56). The novel won’t let this specter die: later, as Roland suffers his second captivity, he listens to what seems “the wildest and maddest revelry,” to the sounds of men “abandoned to all the horrible impulses of lycanthropy” (303). The novel thus rules out the possibility of intercultural alliances, warning readers away from understanding the Indians’ offers of brotherhood as anything but a prelude to pure destruction. But Nick of the Woods is haunted by the possibility of the intercultural equalitarianism that factually was present in the backcountry during this historical period. Referencing this potential derisively in grotesque polyglot gibberish—“bozhoo, brudder”—the novel offers a second brotherhood-loving character who gestures toward the real-world option for people to form cross-cultural political alliances on the frontier. To introduce the problem of Abel Doe, the narrator invokes two infamous white frontiersmen, Simon Girty and Matthew Elliot, who “turned Injun” (and it’s worth noting here that in painting the history of the Kentucky

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wilderness, Bird avoids invoking the most famous Kentucky frontiersman willing to cross cultural lines in the name of brotherhood, Daniel Boone). Editor Curtis Dahl cooperatively footnotes Girty as “the Great Renegade . . . an American soldier who in 1778 turned against his countrymen and became the leader of bloody Indian raiding incursions against the western frontier,” emphasizing that he was “considered more savage than the Indians themselves” (Bird, 63n3). The historical Simon Girty grew up a frontier squatter whose family was routinely displaced when Pennsylvania landowners came calling for rent. At the age of fourteen Girty was taken captive along with his family by the Delaware, then separated from them when he was gifted to and adopted by the Seneca. He lived among the Seneca for three years, and then was liberated by a treaty in 1758. After this Girty often worked as an interpreter, liaison, and negotiator for various nations in the Ohio River Valley. But his fit back into “white” society was never comfortable: he repeatedly wound up on the wrong side of political and legal issues. And indeed, 1776 found Girty in western Pennsylvania “earning a living as a specialist on a cultural as well as a revolutionary frontier, brokering relations with all comers, Indians and non-Indians” (Calloway, “Simon Girty,” 45). Waffling between the Patriot and Loyalist causes, Girty finally threw his lot in with the Crown. Present at the capture and torture of Colonel William Crawford, he became widely reviled by white citizens of the early nation, and subsequent historians. Colin Calloway has recently studied his complicated history, arguing that “the key to understanding . . . Girty and the forces that moved him is to consider him not as a renegade beyond the pale of American society but as a marginal individual who moved freely and functioned as an intercultural broker between the Indians and the British” (40). As it turns out, neither is Abel Doe the kind of scoundrel the narrator tries to invoke by naming Girty. Conspiring behind the scenes for more than fifteen years with the novel’s arch villain, the Tory-sympathizing Richard Braxley, Abel has sold his soul to what he describes as Indian and white devils. Interestingly, though, Bird offers a vantage from which to understand, though not sympathize, with Doe’s decisions. In an argument with Braxley over how best to proceed in their scheme to usurp Roland and Edith’s fortune, Doe complains, “Though I’ve toed the track after your own leading, I’m jist as poor as ever” (274). If Doe’s poverty leads him to become a traitor to the white race, his daughter, Telie, helps him back away from the basest savagery. His soft spot for her first leads him to attempt to make common cause with Roland, and finally to hand Uncle Roland’s missing will (favoring Edith) over to Roland.

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The political allegory of Nick of the Woods works hard (if unevenly) to discredit the backcountry’s history of equalitarian self-determination that might have charted alternatives to Federal incorporation and selfsubordinating white citizenship. In the main, it represents such possibility on the frontier as nothing more than simple terror. From the Jibbenainosay, who tomahawks crosses into the breasts of the Indians he kills, to Wenonga’s ostensibly unthinkable offer to make Nathan Slaughter “my brudder” (right before Nathan kills him), the novel mostly reduces the different intercultural possibilities, negotiations, misunderstandings, and violences to an identical threat, one that simultaneously menaces bodies, whiteness, and political order (299). When Roland and Edith first arrive in the backcountry as fallen aristocrats seeking their fortune, Edith admiringly comments on the lack of presumption she sees among the white settlers. She chides her brother for calling them “barbarians”: “These wild people of the woods do not confine their welcomes to kinsmen. Kinder and more hospitable people do not exist in the world” (45). With the cross-racial / cross-cultural fraternity that the Girty “threat” represents, though, Nick of the Woods rebuts Edith’s romantic view of the brotherly backwoodsmen by invoking the peril of an equalitarian ethos that can spread like infection from the Indians to apparently good whites. Exposing the results of this infection, the novel, once again, invokes cannibalism. Colonel Bruce exhorts his men into battle this way: “If thar’s a thousand Injuns, or the half of ’em, thar’s meat for all of you” (92). The novel thus ultimately equates frontier equalitarianism of any stripe with political regression; in its plot, the national frontier project must be to end the fraternal idealism that trains its residents as savage renegades and not citizens. Fraternity, in this novel’s rendering, is a slippery slope, not a political ideal but a pre-political disorder. For Bird, the project of citizenship is to bring men away from the savage risks of corporate fraternity and into modernity, into rational political individual subjecthood. Citizenship’s noble aim subordinates the local to the federal, and tames primitive, self-determining political impulses. Just so, the novel’s happy ending sees all the backcountry whites settled into land ownership, and heralds Kentucky’s simultaneous entry into statehood and its defeat of the putatively savage frontier. As the narrator summarizes, “[Roland’s] inquiries . . . were continued for many years, until . . . the District and the Wilderness existed no more, but were both merged in a State, too great and powerful to be longer exposed to the inroads of savages” (345). Nick of the Woods directs desires for political self-determination toward the appropriation of territory in the name of the civilizing state. In its telling,

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freedom comes in individual ownership and self-subordinating citizenship. The novel harnesses readers precisely to “settler common sense,” confirming the benign inevitability of “the legal and political structures that enable non-native access to Indigenous territories,” asking readers to embrace and live within these structures as a “given, as simply the unmarked generic conditions for possibility of occupancy, association, history and personhood” (Rifkin, xvi).

Pirates and Squatters and Thieves, Oh My! William Gilmore Simms’s Richard Hurdis: A Tale of Alabama (1838) was published in the immediate wake of the Panic of 1837 when, as with the Panic of 1819, frontier smallholders who bought on credit lost all or the largest portion of their lands, once again unsettling the residency patterns and the political order of the state. In this heated context, Simms’s novel is even more direct than is Nick of the Woods in repudiating equalitarianism and brotherhood. Set in the early 1830s, the novel is loosely based on a legend then circulating about a real-life outlaw, John Murrell, the famed confidence man / Robin Hood whose legendary exploits spanned Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi. His alleged activities, wildly dramatized by one of the men who helped bring him to justice in Tennessee in 1834, included slave-running and -stealing, and the coordination of a multistate fraternity of bandits. The spreading legend of Murrell’s exploits and supposed conspiracies inspired fears of an interracially orchestrated slave rebellion and actual recriminatory lynching sprees in Mississippi in 1835 (a summer when the entire nation, as Grimsted summarizes, witnessed “maximum mob mayhem, in numbers and variety of riots never before or since surpassed in the United States,” ix). Simms’s novel, while drawing liberally on Virgil Stewart’s 1835 sensationalist account of the land pirate, mostly ignores the Murrell legend’s racial aspects. Instead, it drums up the threat of an underclass counternation being consolidated on the frontier among poor whites, offering a fictive framing that dramatizes real frontier battles, such as those Saler describes in Wisconsin territory (as true for Alabama) as the “clash of multiple economies and the opposing values that distinguished them” (122). Simms conjures a “Mystic Brotherhood”—a fraternity he alternately describes as a “nation”—composed of squatters, that self-organizes around its rejection of U.S. laws privileging the wealthy elite. It formulates its own laws and rules for citizenship and fairness. Members are committed (among other things) to robbing only from the rich and to making an absolutely fair division of all spoils, and they brag repeatedly that the

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group’s membership has topped 1,500, attracting members from Virginia to Mississippi. The novel’s looming threat of class warfare draws loosely on actual political battles in Alabama in the late 1820s and early 1830s that pitted land reform against development, and squatters and smallholders against land speculators. Apart from the legend Stewart manufactured out of the string of interstate petty crimes committed by Murrell, there was no “Mystic Brotherhood” of land pirates and thieves in Alabama of the mid-1830s. But there was an intensifying concern with the political questions surrounding squatters and smallholders. This led to increasing agitation for land policy reform in their favor, a reform effort that came in the wake of the Panic of 1819. The territory had been settled by a first wave of migrants who came to Alabama and Mississippi the aftermath of the War of 1812. Between 1812 and 1817 (when the state was recognized by Congress), the United States sold more than five million acres of land there, largely on credit. Cotton prices rose throughout this period, peaking in 1818. As historian Daniel Dupre summarizes, “Easy credit at the land office, ready cash, and high cotton prices pushed settlers to overextend themselves by buying more land than they could plant, sometimes for as much as twenty or thirty dollars an acre” (221). So the nation’s first major financial crisis in 1819—driven by international markets and compounded by a precipitous drop in cotton prices along with U.S. banking policies that over-issued paper money, thereby fueling rampant public land speculation—resulted in massive land debt and forfeiture, and commercial stagnation in the developing Southwest. Both smallholders and land speculators began agitating and petitioning for relief in a wave of public action and sentiment that echoed national debates. Alabama responded by endeavoring to reform land policy for smallholder relief and by undertaking transportation improvements that would stimulate trade, thus aiming to satisfy the contending parties. One scheme in particular, for building a canal in the north part of Alabama, depended on financing through a federal donation to the state of lands that had been relinquished by bankrupt settlers. Alabama debated whether to sell the donation by public auction or by a state-appointed commission, a debate that pitted Whig commercial developers against smallholders and squatters aligned with Jackson and interested in land relief. Though squatters had long been castigated in federal land policy, their political image had begun improving in the late 1820s, as the movement for universal white male suffrage swept the nation (and indeed, Alabama’s constitution guaranteed the vote to all white men). Eastern supporters with increasing effect promoted squatters not as criminals

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whose haphazard settlement patterns jeopardized orderly visions for the developing West, but as earnest citizens, willing to lay their life on the line in the name of settling and domesticating the American wilderness. The same populist politics that swept Jackson into office as arguably the first popularly elected president were also pushing squatters into new relief as a potential national force rather than hindrance, positioning them as a key wedge in (and thus harnessing them ideologically and practically to) the nation’s settler colonial project. Debates over land reform policies that would benefit less advantaged white economic actors would lead first to 1841’s Preemption Act (which allowed settlers who had resided at least fourteen months on Federal lands the right to purchase up to 160 acres at low prices before it could be auctioned to the general public) and eventually to the 1862 Homestead Act. But in 1838 such law and policy was by no means a foregone conclusion. Simms’s novel lends his voice to the debate, warning dramatically against the rising tide of equalitarian sentiment in favor of white squatters he depicts as rapacious wastrels. The representative squatter “cuts down fine trees, spoils a good site, and establishes what he impudently styles his improvements!” (138). Notably, though, the threat of the squatters’ criminally redistributive and equalitarian “Mystic Brotherhood” forms only the novel’s dramatic backdrop. The central story line features a literal fratricidal struggle: between the eponymous narrator, Richard Hurdis, and his oldest brother, John. It is as though Simms aimed to double down on his lesson against brotherhood, lest readers somehow miss his point. Much like Bird, Simms creates a resonantly psychological portrait in his narrator, who is neither (as readers soon learn) straightforwardly sympathetic nor heroic. Hurdis positions himself from the outset as a representative man, one who exemplifies “the hardihood of the American character” by seeking independence on the American frontiers: “I was true to the temper and the nature of my countrymen . . . With manhood—ay, long before I was a man—came the desire to range. My thoughts craved freedom, my dreams prompted the same desire, and the wandering spirit of our people, perpetually stimulated by the continual opening of new regions and more promising abodes, was working in my heart with the volume of a volcano. Manhood came, and I burst my shackles. I resolved upon the enjoyment for which I had dreamed and prayed” (1–2). Hurdis makes it clear that he is ideally suited for border life—“Stout of limb, bold of heart, prompt in the use of my weapon, a fearless rider and a fatal shot”—and also from the proper class background (2). Despite his many self-professed virtues, Richard is not favored by his father; rather, that luck falls to his eldest brother, John, whom Richard

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characterizes as fat, conniving, and lazy. As the novel begins, Richard admits to himself his love for the proverbial girl next door, Mary Easterby, but only when he begins to suspect that she might prefer to give the favor of her hand in marriage to John. These suspicions enrage him. Proudly refusing to ask either Mary or John and relying instead on the rumormongering of his southwestern Alabama neighbors, Richard provokes a fight with his brother by insulting him. He and John are interrupted from fighting, as luck would have it, by Mary, whom he similarly denounces. Then he decides to leave home for good. He sets out with his dear friend William Carrington to strike out into the territory of the Creek nation— William to purchase some land to live on when he is able to marry his fiancée, and Richard to make a life independent from his despised father and brother. Having witnessed his rashness, readers might find it hard to trust his narration. Richard freely admits and is indeed proud that he is easy to anger, impatient, and deeply suspicious. He is chided for these traits both by Mary and by William, who urges that “to look for rascals is to find rascals; and to believe in wrong, is not only to suffer, but to do wrong” (33). But Simms, like Bird, is less interested in psychology than political allegory. Richard for his part castigates William for his trustfulness and optimism, countering that William’s faith in humankind “will be rewarded by faithlessness.” The novel quickly confirms Richard’s gloomy assertion that his friend will “pay dearly” for his “philanthropy” (33). As soon as the two young men light out for the territories, John, insulted by Richard’s provocation and embarrassed by Mary’s refusal to marry him, hires a poor white squatter, Ben Pickett, to track and kill his younger brother. But Pickett mistakenly kills William as he flees from a gang of bandits that have entrapped the two young men. The bandits, members of the Mystic Brotherhood, quickly recruit Ben Pickett and John Hurdis to their cause. Having figured out that Pickett had murdered William, and having tracked Pickett back to John Hurdis, they have determined that these two men have precisely the kinds of proclivities and abilities they want to recruit for service to their fraternal order. They are so confident of this alignment of values that they present the recruitment as a fait accompli, delivering to Pickett his share of the bounty they stripped from William’s body. The stranger who addresses the puzzled Picket explains, “The Mystic Brotherhood consists of a parcel of bold fellows, who don’t like the laws of the state exactly . . . who have associated together, for the purpose of making their own, and doing business under them” (188). He later elaborates:

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We are simply seekers of justice . . . We are those who redress the wrongs and injuries of fortune, who protect the poor from the oppressor, who subdue the insolent and humble the righteous and vain. Perhaps we are, in truth, the most moral community under the sun; since our policy keeps us from harming the poor, and, if we wrong anybody, it is only those who do. We take life but seldom, and then only with the countenance of our social laws, and by the will of the majority, except in individual cases, when the fundamental law of self-protection makes the exception to other laws which are specified. (206–7) In the same way that he complicates the depiction of his narrator–hero by making him less than sympathetic, Simms offers multiple angles from which readers might—at least momentarily—admire the squatters. Not only do the members of the Mystic Brotherhood seek economic justice for the poor and social justice for underdogs in a competitive economic order they see as habitually privileging the wealthy, they defy the common depiction of their lawlessness by framing their own self-governing contract and set of laws. Interestingly, Simms depicts these so-called land pirates (much like their compatriots on water) as having established an alternative constitutional democracy based on a functioning social contract, an astonishing twist in a plot that otherwise works to caricature this socioeconomic class of men. The consensus narrative’s representation of frontier democracy habitually insists that it is primitive and pre-political. Simms, quite differently, elevates the threat posed by the Mystic Brotherhood and its redistributive orientation by attributing to it the status of a breakaway nation, simultaneously according its alternative political system of commons democracy with all the modern legal momentum of functioning citizenship and consent. The novel accords the brotherhood this extraordinary political stature cagily to reframe its significance in the consensus history’s familiar mythic terms. Once Pickett and John Hurdis are successfully recruited, the novel finishes its account from Richard’s perspective. Without knowing that his brother has been inducted into the Mystic Brotherhood, Richard disguises himself in order to infiltrate the outlaw gang and extract revenge for the death of William, which he does with the support one of Tuscaloosa’s local political elite, the gracious and measured Colonel Grafton (who, not surprisingly, is loathed above all by the members of the “confederacy”). Venturing first back to Marengo to break the news

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of William’s death to his fiancée, Hurdis then returns to Creek territory to find the outlaws. It doesn’t take long: on a steamboat up the Tombeckbe (Tombigbee) River, Hurdis meets a preacher he suspects to be an advocate for the brotherhood, and indeed, readers learn, is its ringleader, Clem Foster. Richard works carefully to earn his confidence. In the moment the preacher decides to bring Richard into the brotherhood, he fixes upon Hurdis “such a look as Satan may be supposed to have fixed on Adam in Paradise” (270). Thus the magnitude of the threat posed by the Mystic Brotherhood, which, the novel now more dramatically and even epically suggests, aims to undo the virtuous creation of U.S. Constitutional order with ruinous disorder. The democratic alternative offered by the brotherhood tempts a fall from the grace of competitive liberal individualism into a squalid equalitarianism. Notably, the brotherhood’s alternative is all the more powerful for its appeal to the fundamental decency of men. Even as Hurdis works to paint Foster as the archfiend tempter of mankind in the new world, he (as Milton does for Satan) lends him a humanity that evokes a certain sympathy. Foster recruits Hurdis (much as Nathan Slaughter recruits Roland to Indian-killing) by telling him his own story, of a dirt-poor boy in Tennessee who worked hard “for his bread and education” but at the end of every year found “more kicks than coppers” in his accounts. But instead of lamenting the unfairness that prevents him from earning a decent living “in an honest way,” Foster recounts how his analysis of the system that wouldn’t let him ahead for being honest led him to resolve “to be honest no longer.” He decides to make common cause with others “governed by . . . [the] necessities” of a system that shackles them to poverty. He recruits members by revealing to them “the principles which ostensibly govern society, a nice system of cobwebs, set with a double object, as snares to catch and enslave the feeble and confiding, and defenses for the protection of the more cunning reptiles that sit in the centre, and prey at ease upon the marrow and fat of the toiling insects they tangle” (275). But crucially, and bolstered by Richard’s apparently sympathetic interest, Foster details his scheme for achieving his alternative justice: he (much like the wealthy he analogizes to reptiles) entraps men into his brotherhood, blackmailing them with their own crimes and sins into a confederacy that leaves them, he brags, “instruments of [Foster’s] will, as docile and dependent as those of any Oriental despot known in history” (276). Foster’s fraternal social contract, like that of Milton’s Satan, does not free but rather enslaves. Thus the stakes of the novel’s advocacy for the cleansing redemption of fratricide, both ideological and literal. As luck would have it, when Richard Hurdis finally engineers his showdown, John is among the ban-

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dits. Richard, who by now has untangled the chain of events that led to William’s murder and understands that John had meant for Richard to die, aims explicitly to kill his brother: “I could no longer resist the conviction that the fates had brought me to my victim” (351). As he takes aim, though, he is obstructed by Pickett’s daughter, and while he struggles with her, one of his compatriots kills John. Happy that his brother is finally dead, Richard nevertheless pauses to “thank God, and the stout fellow who rode beside me, that my hand had not stricken the cruel blow that was yet demanded by justice” (353). He rides on to finish the work of defeating the gang and putting down the squatter threat. The novel concludes with the felicitous defeat of both affective and political brotherhood, a victory rewarded by Richard’s happy marriage to Mary, and a domestic economy modeled, as Richard has earlier suggested, on his hero, Colonel Grafton. As Richard enviously discerns on several visits to Grafton’s home as part of plotting the brotherhood’s defeat, “the whole economy” of the Grafton mansion household—including its slaves—“was admirable.” It was a household governed by the colonel’s “calm, methodical, symmetrical” vision of life governed every detail of order, in which the slaves knew just what to do, invisibly, where the colonel’s wife regaled guests with a walk to a “pleasant promenade of her own finding,” which she called “ ‘The Grove of Coronatte’ after a lovesick Indian maiden of that name, who, is said by tradition, preferred leaving her tribe when it emigrated to Mississippi, to an exile from a region in which she had lived from infancy, and which she loved better than her people,” in order to marry a “white man” (115–16). Graciously, the colonel “never seemed to insist on having things in their places, but he was always resolute to have them never in his way”—a distinction, Hurdis insists, any “citizen of the world” would appreciate. Thus the happy ending Richard achieves—and for which the novel advocates—is the quotidian and private everyday rewards of a graciously ordered settlement, a vertically ordered white citizenship where everyone knows and quietly assumes their proper place.

Homely Democracy Not all frontier novelists, though, wrote to discredit frontier practices of commons democracy. Another narrative published in 1838 paints these ongoing vernacular self-governing practices in a favorable light. Caroline Kirkland’s A New Home, Who’ll Follow? loosely fictionalizes her family’s experiences in the settlement of 1830s Michigan. It’s worth noting that Kirkland’s is not what would become regarded as a classic frontier novel in the sense that Bird’s most visibly is: while her narrator, Mary Clavers,

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occasionally acknowledges the Chippewas, Ottawas, and Potawatamis still living in that territory (fellow residents who within a decade would be petitioning the Michigan legislature for the rights of citizenship), they are no more part of the action of the plot or the world of political possibility for Kirkland than they are for Simms. This novel’s adventure has to do neither with Native Americans nor with white outlaws; rather, its adventure comes in the building of frontier community from a white woman’s eastern-trained perspective. The novel has long been critically understood through two traditions, first as a feminist document of women’s drudgery in the West, and more recently as Kirkland’s satirically condescending effort to bring her frontier fellow citizens into the civilizing economy of material accumulation. Kirkland does emphasize the difficulties of women’s lives on the frontier, insisting that women “are the grumblers in Michigan and they have some apology” (146). And it’s hard not to see in Clavers’s repeated description of the fineries she discards and does without in the fictional town of Montacute an emphasis on the accumulation of material goods as a mark of a better life, as when she triumphantly notes that “our neighbors are many of them beginning to perceive that carpets ‘save trouble’ ” (145). But too many readers have overlooked the narrative’s most central aim. The sketches detail its fictional heroine Mary Clavers’s hard-won pleasure in her frontier learning curve. Indeed, Kirkland pointedly offers what Mary learns as her boon to readers in the East, a specifically political lesson about how the daily equalitarian practices the Clavers encounters in frontier Michigan enhance Mary’s sense of community and belonging, and could, by extension, revitalize the larger practice of (white) U.S. democracy. If we read the sketches with an understanding of the historical battles over democracy I’ve been detailing in this book, we can see Kirkland tackling and questioning the consensus narrative’s terms for describing what she encounters on Michigan’s frontiers. From the beginning of her account, Kirkland specifically invokes the battle over alternative visions of democratic progress. She offers her narrative, as she states at the book’s outset, to weigh in on the “peculiar features of western life.” Within sentences, she makes clear that by “peculiar” she means the political and social economy of the commons: the “common place,” equalitarian “habits of society,” the “primitive arrangement” that organizes community on the frontier around its residents’ “common nature” and not their social class (3–4). Her sketches describe in detail the political economy of commons democracy she finds on the Michigan frontier, which she characterizes as “homely.” It’s a world where neighbors frame and raise one another’s

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houses, share the work of harvests, fight prairie fires together, barter labor for goods, borrow freely and without ceremony from their neighbors, refuse to recognize distinctions of class, and informally govern their community and regulate fairness, sometimes with rough justice. Kirkland insists that the relative goods and ills of such a system are worth weighing and taking seriously. Her account rejects the extremes of vilification or romanticization. Easterners may come with “high-wrought notions of the unbounded freedom to be enjoyed in this.” However, they learn with surprise “that this very universal freedom abridges their own liberty to do as they please in their individual capacity” because “the absolute democracy which prevails in country places imposes as heavy restraints upon one’s free will” (139–40). The communitarian ethic of—and sacrifices required by—the “homely” vernacular democracy means that individual advancement loses out to the good of the larger community, something that first dismays but ultimately impresses Mary Clavers. Kirkland moved with her husband and two daughters to eastern Michigan in 1835, in a massive influx of white settlers, mainly New Englanders and New Yorkers, who crowded into the northwestern territories after the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825. The Kirklands had originally been enticed by an offer to lead the Detroit Female Seminary. But the easy credit offered by what would quickly become fabled as “wildcat” banks lured the Kirklands, like many of their fellow immigrants, into purchasing eight hundred acres of land west of Detroit, speculating that they could take advantage of the land boom, or “western fever,” in the run-up to Michigan statehood. Their venture to found a village (Pinckney) was not as profitable as they’d hoped: though the state was recognized by Congress in 1837, the financial panic that began that same year meant that their attempts to attract occupants and buyers were overshadowed by the collapse of credit and the nation’s first long recession. And the Kirklands’ specific efforts were hampered by the animus their neighbors developed against them after the publication of her sketches. The family returned to New York City in 1843, a year before the seven-year recession ended. Since an act of Congress in 1820, land in Michigan had been sold on terms favorable to small-hold settlers, for $1.25 an acre in parcels as small as eighty acres. This in itself did not prevent the inevitable conflicts, though, between squatters, other early white settlers, and the influx of wealthier speculators and eastern fortune-seekers who arrived in the 1830s. This last huge wave of speculating settlers, steeped in the religious awakening and spirit of social improvement that had been sweeping the Northeast since the 1820s, aimed not just to profit from their land title but also to convert and reform the manners and drinking habits of the profligate

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white settlers who preceded them, simultaneously pulling backcountry settlements into the embrace of national order (as Saler observes, early U.S. settlers in the Northwest, “the bulk of whom showed heedless disregard for social rank, also upended the federalist vision of an elite-directed, orderly development of the West,” 61). As historian James Z. Schwartz elaborates, “In both Michigan and the East, reformers, steeped in Yankee culture, battled what they saw as sin and immorality,” deploying middleclass norms as a tactic (106). Thus in Michigan, standoffs between earlier, smallholding residents and the influx of white, northeastern settlers were battles that involved not just economic policy but also social norms and political beliefs. This context makes it a bit easier to see the extent to which Kirkland endeavors humorously in her sketches to critique and even correct this overzealous spirit of class and moral reform. In this sense Kirkland’s character, Mary Clavers, much castigated by contemporary critics like Leverenz and Merish for her zeal to reform her Michigan neighbors’ morals and manners, humorously exemplifies the wider attitude of New Englanders who came to the region in the 1830s. But many of her sketches end up highlighting the boomerang effect of Mary’s attempt to “school” her neighbors. And this is what critics have missed: Mary insists that the most important lessons of the frontier are for its newest settlers. In much the same way that the Kirklands would attempt to form a town among already-existing residents in the region, Kirkland’s narrator confronts an already-established sociopolitical order in Montacute. The Clavers are not prepared for what they encounter in rural Michigan, either practically or socially, and their lack of preparation serves as a basis for much of the early humor of the sketches, as well as a rationale for recruiting the interest of eastern readers. The Clavers arrive in backcountry Michigan with trunks loaded with fineries, only to discover their uselessness in the rough conditions. Paper shoes are worthless in the Michigan mud, as Mary repeatedly rediscovers when she loses yet another pair to her “Broadway habits” (73). This turns out to be similarly true of the many conveniences she takes for granted in the East. Over and over she finds that her supposed necessities are ridiculous to her new neighbors, who see her domestic comforts as creating more work. As Clavers summarizes their response to the unloading of her family’s effects, “Your carpets are spoken of as ‘one way to hide dirt;’ your mahogany tables as ‘dreadful plaguy to scour;’ your kitchen conveniences as ‘lumberin’ up the house for nothing’ ” (184). Encumbered with superfluous luxury goods, so, too, are the Clavers overburdened with northeastern condescension. Their attitude adjustment on the frontier is Kirkland’s central lesson. Mary is both aided and

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irritated by neighbors who spurn her idea of civilized comforts and who borrow butter only to return margarine. She describes at length their “peculiar habits”—stories that usually devolve around her neighbors’ assumption that everything their fellow residents possess is there for the sharing. For instance, Mary recounts a neighbor who kindly “chored out” whenever Mary needed help around the house, but who also frequently invited herself and her family to dine at the Claverses’ table. This helpful neighbor’s habit was to sample from each serving bowl and plate with her personal fork. When Clavers (not-so-secretly horrified by her aggressive unwillingness politely to wait) offered to serve her, the woman habitually replied, “I’ll help myself, I thank ye. I never want no waitin’ on” (51). Mrs. Jennings epitomizes the ethos of vernacular democracy: the assumption of social equality, common good, and common service that stolidly counters Mary’s politely liberal sensibility and resolutely middleclass manners. For Mrs. Jennings a meal, just like the labor she unstintingly offers to Clavers, is a common good: she no more imagines Mary should serve her dinner than she sees her proffered aid around Claverses’ house as “waitin’ on” Mary. The Clavers come to establish the town of Montacute as owners, assuming that they (much like Marmaduke Temple) will receive the social deference due to their class station from their new neighbors. Instead, they encounter a recalcitrant equalitarianism that includes a widespread prickliness about social distinctions and rituals of class. These attitudes at first leave Mary for a loss. She quickly discovers, for instance, that she will not find servants in Montacute despite the projections of her eastern friends that she’d easily be able hire local girls to serve. Instead, Mary learns that farm girls will “hire out” to help their families or to earn money for a new dress, “but never as a regular calling, or with an acknowledgement of an inferior station.” There is no ready “service class” in the community the Clavers encounter in the West: rather, “living with one for wages is considered by common consent a favor” (39). And girls who proffer this favor expect, as Mary finds out, not just to be paid but also to be treated as family equals: to eat with guests at the table, to take tea with the family, to share in food delicacies, to be visible as a member of the household. In the “peculiar” social ethos of the Michigan frontier, employment for wages does not connote independence and means on the one side, dependency and social demotion on the other, as is Mary’s original expectation. Rather, it functions in the same political economy as the practice of barter, an equal exchange between equal actors. The equalitarian notions of the Michigan community extend beyond social norms: they govern economic practice and philosophy. Mary

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Clavers offers her eastern readers a veritable ethnography of involuntary loaning, a practice inevitably justified by the observation that “you’ve got plenty” (67). From sifters to butter and flour, from horses, saddles, and carts to wheelbarrows and shovels, Mary finds that “to have them, and not be willing to share them in some sort with the whole community, is an unpardonable crime.” Worse for her than the easy assumption of her neighbors that they can borrow freely is their unpardonably corporatist understanding of ownership: as Mary discovers, everything she considers a personal possession turns out to belong “not to yourself, but to the public, who do not think it necessary even to ask a loan but take it for granted” (67). Here perhaps most clearly Mary clarifies the economic implications of this clash of democratic styles between the liberal individualism that undergirds the Claverses’ expectations of personal speculation and profit on the Michigan frontier, and her neighbors’ quite different expectation that the community will succeed or fail together. Readers, from her Pinckney neighbors to those in our own day, have habitually misunderstood Mary’s sketches on this score. Just like the angry neighbors who assumed that Kirkland’s point, like that of her fellow New Englanders and New Yorkers, was to mock and reform, contemporary critics have also argued that Mary aimed solely to satirize and thus to improve her neighbors’ backward habits. But Clavers never relates such an episode without detailing her own assimilation to these practices. For instance, as she tells of her travails in hiring a girl to help around the house, she notes, “This state of things appalled me at first; but I have learned a better philosophy since. I find no difficulty in getting such aid as I require, and but little in retaining it as long as I wish, though there is always a desire of making an occasional display of independence. Since living with one for wages is considered by common consent a favor, I take it as a favor, and this point once conceded, all goes well” (39). She lampoons strategically, in other words, to make a point, summoning her eastern readers’ predictable horror at the ethos of the democratic commons in the West, and then castigating them alongside herself for foolish pretensions, as in this same episode, which she summarizes thusly: “I cannot say I regret having been obliged to relinquish what was, after all, a rather silly sort of pride” (39–40). We could certainly excuse readers, then and now, for becoming confused for the pileup of double negatives in Clavers’ prose. Her syntax, as that last sentence suggests, can cloud her message, producing what critics habitually parse as Kirkland’s “ambivalence” about her western experiences. It’s hard to know whether we should attribute that ambivalence to Kirkland’s uncertainty about the reception her message will receive

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among her eastern readers, or to her lack of personal resolution on the subject of her western experiences. But either way, it’s impossible to avoid acknowledging that for all her effort to distill a political lesson from her experiences in Michigan, Kirkland’s analysis of the political economy of the frontier in A New Home can be a bit double fisted, simultaneously confronting and evading. For example, in one sketch Clavers recounts an episode of “rough music,” lightly depicting herself as the heroine smart enough to create a diversionary ruckus for the angry community, thereby saving the itinerant ventriloquist who dared to charge the “sovereign people” twenty-five cents (120). She concludes the episode by observing that “the most mobbish of our neighbors have flitted westward,” assuring readers that the episode “was the first and last exhibition of the spirit of the age,” just before she catalogs the many traditions of local punishment these neighbors presumably took west with them: “a dead pig in one’s well . . . a favorite dog hung up at the gate post . . . cows milked on the marshes, hen-roosts rifled or melon patches cleared in the course of the night” (119). Here Kirkland brings into focus exactly the tradition of local, selfdetermining systems of justice that Cooper foregrounds in The Pioneers. Exploring—far more directly than her fellow author—their less pleasant manifestations, she asks readers at least momentarily to consider what continue to be the most disturbing aspects of vernacular practices for social order, how the community even brutally “warns” or “hates out” and disciplines members and visitors who violate their rules of fairness. The very fact that she ties it to the people’s sovereignty makes clear that Kirkland views these punishments as being intrinsic to the system of “absolute democracy” her sketches describe in the West. Having highlighted these practices, though, it’s hard to know why Kirkland so quickly redirects readers’ attention away from them. It’s worth noting that the sketch that follows immediately on the heels of this description of rough justice attacks the “General Banking Law” that funded wildcat banking and the speculation bubble that led to the crash of 1837. The juxtaposition of these two versions of “law,” local and federal, shows both to be damaging, and the latter clearly more so than the former. But Kirkland leaves this for readers to infer. Her avoidance of any clear analysis of rough justice itself perhaps registers a phenomenon noted by the legal historian Christian Fritz, who observes that the developing association between “popular sovereignty” and locally determined justice, or vigilantism, by the 1840s “tended to discredit ‘the people’ as a legitimate basis of power” (“Popular,” 45), a discrediting that would ostensibly work against Kirkland’s very aim for the sketches. Ultimately, the fact that Kirkland frames these practices

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as having already vanished from Montacute indicates her unwillingness to probe their connections to what she wants to celebrate about the vernacular practices of her Michigan neighbors. Elsewhere in the sketches Kirkland demonstrates her proclivity for launching farther west the aspects of commons democracy that she doesn’t like. We see this strategy when she tries to explain why some who rely on “involuntary loans” are more disturbing than others. She begins this sketch by insisting on the “inexplicable” quality of people like the Newlands, who accept the charity of the community but seem to “grow poorer every day” and “complain bitterly about their poverty” (107). Living at the subsistence level, no help from their neighbors seems to enable them to improve their sordid condition. Mary offers as an example her family’s spontaneous, solicitous visit to the sickbed of the elder Newland, one of the poorer members of the community who has been receiving their aid during a protracted illness. She describes their surprise when, instead of finding sickness couched in destitution, they discover the family hosting a Christmas party. Apparently this celebration—complete with whiskey—marks them as unworthy of the community’s goodwill. And if this is not enough to establish their unworthiness, Clavers then outlines the subsequent death of their eldest daughter due, she darkly hints, to a botched abortion. We could extrapolate an analysis that might give words to what is “inexplicable” to Clavers about the Newlands and “that class of settlers to which [they] belong.” Given her earlier discussions about the political economy of the “absolute democracy” the Clavers encounter in the West, it’s possible to speculate that the reason the Newlands are annoying (and perhaps the reason they end up leaving) is that they don’t seem to give back in proportion to what they receive. Neither are they anxious to “measure up” in the eyes of their more affluent neighbors. Alternately we might speculate that Mary is simply offended at their different moral standards: they don’t see a need to forego throwing parties when they’re on the dole, and as scandalously, they seem to pride themselves in female sexual autonomy instead of the modesty and chastity Clavers assumes as proper. But here again, Kirkland only delicately hints at such analysis; she does not make either line of critique explicit. Instead, the resolution of the problems presented by the Newlands—however they might be defined— comes when these promiscuous commoners move farther west. “Texas and the Canada war have done much for us this way,” Clavers blithely concludes, “and the wide west is rapidly drafting off those whom we shall regret as little as the Newlands . . . I trust we have few such neighbors left” (111). Thus she invokes the retreating frontier to make room for a western

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settlement both invigorated by the best features of, and simultaneously protected from what she considers to be the worst aspects of commons democracy’s “homely” equalitarianism, rather than developing any kind of analysis of how such vernacular practices might both revitalize Federal, representative democracy and simultaneously be tempered by government at a larger scale (as Brackenridge advocated for). Despite her lack of clarity about some aspects of the democracy she encounters in Michigan, Clavers consistently promotes its overarching value to her readers. Here Kirkland’s argument about frontier practices differs notably from Bird’s and Simms’s. In the story of her heroine’s transformation, Kirkland proposes a symbiosis, suggesting that frontier equalitarianism can redirect the more jaded and class-divided practice of representative democracy in the East. Finally, Clavers makes common cause with her Michigan neighbors, summarizing the lesson she learns from them for the edification of her eastern readers: “This simplification of life, this bringing down the transactions of daily intercourse to the original principles of society, is neither very eagerly adopted, nor very keenly relished, by those who have been accustomed to the politer atmospheres. They rebel most determinedly, at first . . . yet . . . after the barriers of pride and prejudice are once broken, we discover a certain satisfaction in this homely fellowship with our kind, which goes far toward repaying whatever sacrifices or concessions we may have been induced to make” (184–85). She counsels more elite immigrants and her city readers to sympathize with the class animosity of poor white folk burned by land sharks and wildcat banks. She explains the community-building value as well as the local pleasures of labor commoning in the fields and in the home. Eventually reaching beyond the terminology of the primitive for describing the informal democratic practices of the West, Kirkland elaborates on the idea of common as “universal” and promotes the West’s “compensating power of a feeling, inherent as I believe, in our universal nature, which rejoices in that freedom from restraints of pride and ceremony,” an “unbounded and unceremonious liberty” (148). In the end Kirkland takes seriously—and asks her readers to take seriously—the challenges that vernacular or commons democracy poses to the artificial distinctions of social class and the individualist political economy of liberal democracy. A New Home ends not by opposing the two models as the consensus narrative proposes they must be, but by insisting on the productive exchange of federal democracy with the equalitarianism still practiced in frontier territories. In his history of American populist movements from the Revolution to the 1850s, Ron Formisano has helpfully detailed how federal govern-

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ment by the 1840s succeeded in rerouting vernacular democratic energies into representative structures and institutions in the name of the power of the people. By the 1830s, as he notes, virtually all the parties began adopting populist rhetoric and claiming to speak on behalf of the sovereign people. In the process, as he acknowledges, the “Revolutionary-era climate of ideas concerning the people’s non-delegable sovereignty,” and notions of the citizens’ right collectively to “regulate” for good government, weakened significantly. As the Framers hoped in their aims to “tame” democracy, the more national parties spoke in favor of the power of the people while the less ordinary citizens seemed to demonstrate a “willingness to act on that belief ” (196). Kirkland, who calls for an infusion of the energies, practices, and ideals of vernacular democracy into federal structures of democratic representation, emphasizes the importance of not structurally collapsing the latter onto the former. When she projects, however, whatever she doesn’t like about commons democracy farther west, she documents the success of the consensus narrative’s insistence that such notions of communal self-determination ultimately belonged beyond the national pale. If we study literature, as Kenneth Burke long ago suggested, as “social medicine,” the three novels I’ve discussed in this chapter highlight the extent to which such practices still needed rhetorical framing, offering contemporary readers handy ways to comprehend the dangers of vernacular democratic cultures, even in light of their attractions. Despite the various political aims for their stories, then, Bird, Simms, and Kirkland all signal that commons democracy was fading into the western sunset. Like the Native Americans, similarly doomed by their commitment to what the consensus narrative framed as pre-political notions of tribal sovereignty and communal relationships to land and territory, the political alternatives proffered by the vernacular equalitarianism of whites on the frontier were, frontier novels affirm, doomed to extinction.

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 /

From Nothing to Start, into Being: The Anti-Rent Wars, the Indian Question, and the Triumph of Liberalism

Kirkland finally appreciates the alternative economy of commons democracy, the culture of what she denominates “involuntary loaning.” Simms, on the other hand, is entirely alarmed by its political economy, so that its “share and share alike” ethic becomes for him the sign of the Mystic Brotherhood’s utter depravity. These novels, published in the late 1830s, appear at a historical moment when market pressures like the Panic of 1837 and expanding state government and law worked in tandem, braking democratic power’s ability to demand economic access. Kirkland and Simms both locate these more radically democratic political principles in the nation’s backcountry, reassuring readers that any such threat was literally marginal to the nation’s most central affairs. In just a few years, though, James Fenimore Cooper would pen a trilogy of novels that would confirm the ongoing, real-world existence of vernacular democratic ideals and practices. The threat Cooper sees in the Anti-rent protests (and the novels emphatically frame these protests as a threat) is not at the nation’s retreating frontiers, but in the heart of the well-settled New York state (the Dorr Rebellion of Rhode Island of 1841–42 was posing a similar threat). Cooper’s novels trace upstate New York’s history from colony through the 1840s, using the genre of the frontier novel to bring readers to the showdown featured in its final installment, titled in terms that (deceptively) signal a familiar frontier conflict: The Redskins. The three novels were hardly read in the 1840s and are read even less often now. Readers habitually assume that in writing them, Cooper exercised only partisan advocacy for the political outcome

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he preferred from the Anti-rent Wars, not the skills of a novelist. Few who have studied these novels treat them as serious literature, scanning them instead biographically. Some have puzzled over Cooper’s triple-decker passion on this subject, assuming that since the Anti-rent Wars had not spread to Otsego County, the home of his family properties, that he had no personal stake in the matter. But Cooper had inherited from his father in 1809 twenty-three tenant farm families, paying an annual rent of 650 bushels of wheat. As David Ellis summarized it in 1954, “Any challenge to the land system of New York was therefore a direct threat to his family heritage, his way of life and his personal wealth” (413). Cooper’s passion for family investments and history were famously exercised in The Pioneers, but the strong consensus is that the Littlepage trilogy lacks the artistry of that more lauded novel. Cooper’s uneven skills as a novelist have long been fodder among readers. But determining whether these novels stand up to the artistic test of his more acclaimed Leatherstocking novels seems less interesting than understanding Cooper’s enduring use of all his novels for exploring historical conflict—his attention to political disputes, cultural complexity, and sociohistorical transitions. Such interests are no less on display in the Littlepage than the Leatherstocking novels, and for those who say the novels are not worth reading because they are only propaganda for “pro-Rent” interests haven’t really explored the novels’ complex plots, which emphatically do not function as such. We might start by observing that in the trilogy, the landlords become increasingly less sympathetic characters over time— hardly what readers might expect if Cooper aims for the landlords to promote his personal politics. These novels—worth reading for a number of reasons—have an important story to tell about how the energies and ambitions of commons democracy get corralled by the advancing social and legal forces of liberal democracy. We could loosely overview the plot of the trilogy in this way: The Princeton-educated Littlepage hero–narrators of the three novels (Cornelius in Satanstoe, Mordaunt in The Chainbearer, and Hugh in The Redskins) are British-descended, pro-Dutch, anti-Yankee gentlemen New Yorkers. They establish, and then strategize how to manage and profit from what they envision as an orderly and civilized settlement, one governed by a contractually sovereign law. Predictably, the Littlepages come into conflict with others in this project. Primarily, their opponents are represented in the Newcome family: hearty, rustic, Puritan-descended New England Yankees who rent from the Littlepages, imagining that they, too, will share in the project of self-governing. The Newcomes look for political and economic advancement through the terms of vernacular de-

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mocracy: laws negotiated locally among the people (government by the people). Another set of adversaries appears in the second book. This is the Thousandacres family, Vermont settlers squatting serially in a westward direction. They also advocate for local, face-to-face self-government, which Mordaunt Littlepage dismisses as clannish, “wild and patriarchal” (the family much resembles the Bush clan in The Prairie). The Thousandacres disappear at the end of The Chainbearer, but the Newcomes present an enduring obstacle to the political, social, and economic ambitions of the Littlepages. They prosper and proliferate, and by the third book are threatening the Littlepages’ political supremacy in the region, just as the Anti-rent Wars heat up for their final round. Over the course of the three novels, the Littlepages “heroes” become more aristocratically rarified, more blatantly self-interested, more annoying—and for all that, less heroic and less interesting. By the beginning of the third installment, it’s hard to tell who Cooper imagines should win the contest for reader sympathy, even if it’s clear from the prefaces what he hopes the real-world political outcome will be. The Redskins—which ends before there’s a clear, real-world resolution to the property rebellion—gives the last word to the Onondaga character Susquesus, one of two characters (the other is Corny’s personal slave, Yaap) who survive the span of the three novels. Cooper has the antiquated Susquesus condemn the property lust of all the novels’ white characters, shaming the massed “Injins” (white rent-protesters dressed as Indians) into giving up at least this particular battle. In this way, Cooper leaves readers today with the option of writing all three novels off as a simple tale of white greed. Our consensus story about democracy teaches that while citizenship may have depended on property-holding in the early nation, by the 1830s most states had detached freehold from civic requirements. Knowing that is what makes it easy to accept Susquesus’s simple closing verdict on the destructive land greed of white settlers in the mid-1840s. But such a pat conclusion does not even begin to get at what’s going on in the 1840s, let alone what’s going on in the novels. It’s worth noting that even for the characters Cooper’s narrator seems most eager to discredit in The Redskins, the last installment of the trilogy, the prospect of property-holding still heralds, as it did for Farmer James, the promise of agentic citizenship. We see this, for instance, when the wage-laboring Joshua Brigham says, “I expect there’ll be trouble in the eend [sic] when we come to the [property] division, but I’m not the man to make it. I s’pose I shall get my turn at the town offices and other chances” (186). Cooper wrote the 1,300-plus pages of his trilogy in the heat of what was only the most recent episode in a battle over the purview of democratic power that had been being waged

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in New York for more than three quarters of a century (the first rent rebellions began in 1766). He banked on having readers who would know at least some of the historical (though perhaps not all the convoluted legal) dimensions of this story. But readers today are largely unacquainted with the contours and stakes of central New York’s Rent Wars. Familiarity with the larger historical, political, economic, and social setting for these stories makes clear that it’s not just property that the renters in Cooper’s novels are fighting for: theirs is a battle for the scope of democratic action, democratic justice, and capitalism’s ethos in the early nation. It is a story we can’t actually remember how to tell, operating from within a welldefined and carefully limited liberal version of democracy, the legacy of which was defined for us in this period. It’s not simply Cooper’s biases and convoluted plots, I’m suggesting, that trap us into our blinkered understanding of novels we no longer read. Rather, as I’ll explain in this chapter, it’s the formalism that emerges from liberal democracy’s complex developing legal enclosures around capitalism and economic power that keeps us from seeing and understanding the alternative democratic possibilities being fought over and suppressed in the last long episode of the Anti-rent Wars during the 1840s and ’50s. Notice that Joshua Brigham sees political officeholding as a power that rotates among citizens, on a share-and-share-alike basis rather than on a professional representation model. This is not just Cooper using a dopey idea to discredit a character he doesn’t really like. Rather, Brigham’s comment flags the amount of time it took for liberal democracy to reorient ordinary citizens’ ideas of democratic power away from the notion that it is directly exercised by the people, and to redirect these energies toward the westward appropriation of property on the vast continent in service of a federal unity that organizes sovereignty as the government’s power, from above. The association of property-holding with civic entitlement— the conjoining of freeholding and citizenship that Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James described with such awe in his famous “What is an American?” passage—was formally effaced with the putative democratic triumph of universal white manhood suffrage beginning in the 1820s. For that reason, the previous conjoining of freehold with citizenship has fallen outside the interests of democratic history proper. From inside liberalism we see this association of property and citizenship as an aristocratic anachronism that happily was superseded early in our nation’s history. From this vantage, the white yeoman class—who saw landholding as conjoining economic competency with democratic citizenship—past 1822 are just a mass of land-grubbing Jackson supporters. Their swift reclassification as “white trash”—a pejorative that dates exactly to the 1830s—becomes an

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easy denigration. It frames their desire for the liberties of landholding to a greed apparently extraneous to the political sphere, an illiberal manifestation of their pre-politicalism, not a political claim on a democratic commons of citizen access and power with its own genealogy and force. But Cooper’s Littlepage trilogy helps us track historically the substantive, if diminishing threat that the power of commons democracy posed to the growing economic power of liberalism in the early United States. It gestures toward a wide familiarity with the social and political as well as economic entailments of commons culture in the late colonies and early republic, and it follows the accommodations commons culture makes to the expanding imperatives of market capitalism in the mid-nineteenth century. The novels help us see how the universal suffrage that seems like a democratic advance covers over the more complicated capitalist constraining and harnessing of “democracy” in this period.

Brother Captain For the purposes of my arguments in this chapter I focus largely on the second and third novels in the series, The Chainbearer (1846) and The Redskins (1846). But it’s worth recapping what happens in the trilogy’s first book. In terms of sheer plot interest, it’s fair to say that the 1845 Satanstoe is the best read—the most interesting and enjoyable story—of the three. Differently from the political and economic concerns that animate the second and third installments, the first backgrounds its frontier historical romance with the French and Indian Wars. Satanstoe introduces the calculating Yankee Jason Newcome. But other than noticing that he went to the wrong university (he’s a Yalie, whereas Princeton is the trilogy’s college of choice), this novel pays almost no attention to the competing political ideology of its yeoman characters. Rather, its fleeting attention to the tenants who are filling the aristocratic Herman Mordaunt’s Ravensnest estate, at the fringes of the Adirondacks, is only for plot purposes: it is their backcountry anxieties over Indian attack during the French and Indian Wars in the summer of 1758 that provides Herman and his daughter Anneke the occasion for traveling there, to prevent them from retreating to safer territories in the Hampshire Grants (now Vermont). They undertake this trip at the same time that their new neighbor (and Anneke’s undeclared beau), “Corny” Littlepage, is out surveying his adjoining estate. The novel’s attention to the foundations of the larger Littlepage domain plays out as a romance that unites the up-and-coming Corny with his social better, Anneke. The marriage of these only children cements Corny’s socioeconomic status as a landlord before the Revolution.

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As Corny speculatively frames the point, “for the first time in the history of the colonies, the Littlepages had become the owners of what might be termed an estate,” a fact that, as Corny admits, “excited certain feelings of avarice within my mind” (127, 126). Corny Littlepage is by far the most appealing of the three Littlepage heroes: youthful, energetic, resourceful, and forthright. And without doubt, Corny’s son Mordaunt, the narrator of The Chainbearer, is one giant step down for reader interest. Volubly touting his “liberality,” Mordaunt lives for the pursuit of self-interest and the defense of social hierarchy. We get a hint of this in the opening chapter, which begins with Mordaunt recounting his family’s fortunes during the Revolution. He begins by explaining the death of his maternal grandfather (Herman Mordaunt), which he characterizes as “perhaps fortunate”: the passing of that ardent Loyalist before the beginning of the war allows his father, Corny, and Corny’s own father, General Hugh Roger Littlepage, to freely declare for and fight on behalf of the Patriot cause. It’s this political gamble that allows the family to maintain its landholdings in the new nation (1:5). Mordaunt inherits Ravensnest from his namesake grandfather, who had managed partially to settle his Washington County holdings of “many thousands of acres” with tenants before the war. But during the Revolution the leases had mostly expired, and the tenants were living, as Mordaunt summarizes, “at will.” These rents will provide an income for Mordaunt, but only after he renegotiates the tenants’ lease terms. His adventurous trip to Ravensnest in 1784 constitutes the action of the novel. In describing the family estate, Mordaunt mentions in passing that it is “at no great distance from the Hampshire Grants.” Cooper’s contemporaries would have recognized a reference to what had become, during the Revolution, the Republic of Vermont (and would in 1791 become the state of Vermont). This “ republic,” self-declared in 1777 and made nationally famous by Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys, ratified the most democratic of all state constitutions in the early nation. Modeling its government on Pennsylvania’s unicameral body, it outlawed slavery and delivered the franchise to all white male residents. The proximity of the republic whose name Mordaunt won’t speak to his own Ravensnest estate hints not just at the slipperiness of land claims in the colonies and early nation (an issue at the center of both Vermont’s self-creation and all three novels) but also at the stakes of the battle over political economy in this second book of the trilogy. Residents there, as readers will soon learn, like their near neighbors in Vermont, have ideas about democratic self-government that will imperil the good order Mordaunt imagines for his newly inherited estate.

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Readers get a bigger whiff of Mordaunt’s stake in that conflict from his discussion of his own involvement in the Revolution and his account of the bonds he forged there. Though he spends much of the war studying at Princeton, he manages to see action during vacations and by sneaking away from school for key military campaigns. It is during these vacation adventures that the prospective heir meets Andries Coejemans (pronounced “Queemans,” Mordaunt informs readers to avoid any Yankee mispronunciations of the Dutch name), the man whose occupation as surveyor titles this volume of the Littlepage trilogy, The Chainbearer. When Mordaunt first meets him, Coejemans is a “captain in my father’s regiment.” A common volunteer, Coejemans’s skills had quickly earned the respect of his fellow militiamen who elect him captain, a rank, Mordaunt trenchantly notes, “above which he never rose.” Mordaunt manages to spend at least six campaigns in Coejemans’s company, and in fact he is attached to that man’s company at Cornwallis’s surrender, an event that for Mordaunt “clenched the friendship I had formed for that singular old man” (1:13). Mordaunt professes to love Coejemans “without knowing why”: He was illiterate almost to greatness, having the drollest notion imaginable of this earth and all it contained; was anything but refined in deportment though hearty and frank; had prejudices so crammed into his moral system that there did not seem to be room for anything else; and was ever so little addicted, moreover, to that species of Dutch jollification . . . Nevertheless, I really loved this man, and when we were all disbanded at the peace, or in 1783, by which time I had myself risen to the rank of captain, I actually parted from old Andries with tears in my eyes. (1:14) He notes with approval that Coejemans never takes advantage of the honorary promotion (to major) granted by the government to veterans (and he poses this in contrast to his father, a colonel at the war’s close, who, he asserts, “bore the title of brigadier for the remainder of his days”) (1:14). Surprisingly, though, Mordaunt’s reminisces of the man he denominates his “brother captain” (1:116) leads him less to a description of Coejemans’s virtues, than to a reflection on what he describes as the “respectable mediocrity” that has come to reign in the wake of Independence. The social result of democracy, editorializes Mordaunt, is that meritorious people are held back and the undeserving promoted due to the “opinion of the people” (1:10). This is not necessarily the case for the chainbearer, he admits out of one side of his mouth. And yet he nevertheless details Coejemans’s poor Dutch education: “One may easily imagine what indifferent cultivation will effect on naturally thin soil” (1:11). The good thing

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about Coejemans, he finally remembers in this convoluted reminiscence, is his willing self-subordination to his leaders, exemplified in his admiration for General Washington: “He felt that it was an honour to be even a subordinate in a pursuit in which such a man was a principle” (1:11). Mordaunt describes a bond forged in Revolution in the fraternal terms of democracy. But he equivocates in his description of this “brother,” underscoring what he presents as the chainbearer’s inferior merit. Mordaunt’s inability to commit to democratic equalitarianism, even regarding a brotherhood forged in Revolution, presages the tenor of the conflict over political economy flagged by Ravensnest’s proximity to Vermont. Mordaunt is indeed so ungenerous that it’s hard to see his family resemblance to his father, Corny. After the war, Mordaunt hires Coejemans to finish the survey of Mooseridge, the estate his father owns with Dirck Follek in Washington County. As Mordaunt prepares to follow Coejemans up the Hudson River Valley so that he can himself visit the nearby Ravensnest, he enjoys a dinner with his father (“the General”) and Dirck (“the Colonel”). They clearly share Mordaunt’s affection for the chainbearer. Indeed, Dirck suggests, “Suppose we make old Andries a present of a farm” (1:69). “With all my heart,” cries Corny, instructing Mordaunt to choose the lot on Mooseridge during his trip there, and “send us the description that we may prepare the deed” (1:70). Mordaunt tellingly dismisses his father’s suggestion: “You forget, general, that the Chainbearer has, or will have his military lot, as a captain . . . Besides, land will be of little use to him, unless it might be to measure it.” Corny reminds him of Coejemans’s dependents: not only his niece Dus and her half brother Bob, both of whom carry chain along with Coejemans, but also three slaves of African descent, whom, as he admiringly relates, Coejemans “would not sell . . . on any consideration” no matter how poor he became, because “ ‘they were born Coejemans,’ he always said ‘as much as I was born one myself, and they shall die Coejemans’ ” (1:70). Mordaunt brushes off his father’s argument, seemingly misunderstanding his point: “ ‘This is agreeable news to me, general,’ I answered, ‘since it promises a sort of home. If the Chainbearer has really these blacks with him, and has hutted judiciously, I dare say we shall have quite a . . . comfortable time’ ” (1:70). Thus it’s more than “perhaps” fortunate for Mordaunt that his grandfather died before the Revolution, but less fortunate from the perspective of his tenants, whose leases have expired during the years of the war. They hope that Herman Mordaunt made loyalty to the British crown a condition of inheritance for his namesake grandson, in which case the Patriot/ veteran tenants might be able to claim the lands they had improved and

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farmed for generations as their own (1:81). The coming of the chainbearer indicates the renewed interest of the young landlord in his ownership and bodes badly for the freeholding aspirations of the tenants Mordaunt inherited. Mordaunt travels to his estate in 1784, a historically auspicious moment for giant landowners in eastern New York. Mordaunt observes before he sets out on his travel—and history corroborates—that “young men and men of all ages of the older portions of the new republic poured into the woods to commence the business of felling the forests, and laying bare the secrets of nature, as soon as the nation rose from beneath the pressure of war, to enjoy the freedom of peace” (1:74). This flood of migrants, combined with rising timber and grain prices, enabled landlords to raise the price of their rents. Mordaunt is aware of his advantage, approaching fellow travelers on the boat ride up the Hudson about possible purchases (on Colonel Dirck Follock’s half of the Mooseridge estate) and tenancies (on his father’s half of Mooseridge, and his Ravensnest). These voyagers, to his surprise, already knew “much . . . of me and of my movements” (1:75). Propertyless men pouring into eastern New York from overcrowded New England and tenants of the great manors in the Hudson River Valley and its environs in the years after the Revolution were indeed vigilant, not just about the actions of landlords but about the winds of political climate that would shape their claims on property and civic agency in the early republic. As Sklansky observes, “The freehold farm, unburdened by feudal bonds, had been the primary economic and political unit since the first English settlements in the seventeenth century. The American Revolution was in many ways dedicated to the defense of the freehold against monarchical and aristocratic encroachment” (23). Cooper’s contemporaries would likely have known that the 1760s through the 1780s were a period of great volatility for the landlords. However, during the 1790s the landlords reconsolidated political and economic power. That is the future into which Cooper’s contemporaries knew Mordaunt was venturing.

Anti-Rent Each novel begins with an authorial preface denouncing the current anti-rent protests of the mid-1840s. So there’s absolutely no confusion about Cooper’s political investment in writing the novels or that he aimed them at a reading public highly attuned to the current controversies. Cooper was spurred on by only the most recent installment in a battle that had been ongoing for more than seventy years. The anti-rent protests

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had begun spreading in the Hudson River Valley the decade before the Revolution, and they heated up again in its immediate aftermath. Historian Thomas Humphrey observes: The Revolutionary War had thrown the manorial economy and landlordism into turmoil. The acreage owned by landlords in the southern Hudson Valley decreased significantly during and after the Revolutionary War. Revolutionaries sold off the estates of landlordsturned-Loyalists, and manor lords who became Revolutionaries faced mounting anti-landlord sentiment in the region. Sometimes landlords responded by selling land to tenants. The state legislature followed suit by outlawing primogeniture, entail, and feudal tenures [on subsequent sales and rents, but not preexisting ones]. Despite these attacks on manorialism, the Van Rensselaers and the Livingstons held fast to their Hudson Valley estates after the Revolution. Newly available land in the west eased tensions by offering dissatisfied people the chance to start over, but not everybody moved. Many preferred to take their chances with landlords and stay on land they had worked for years rather than pit themselves against antagonistic Indians and roving bands of British soldiers. Landlords in the northern Hudson Valley also kept their estates by obtaining powerful seats in a state and federal political system that inhibited governments’ ability to attack property rights any further. (115) Curiously, though, The Chainbearer, set in the year of 1784, is staged as though these protests have not yet begun. By locating Mordaunt’s estate just beyond the Hudson River Valley where, like their protesting neighbors, tenants had been on their land for generations with plenty of time and experience to develop their political awareness and arguments about labor theory of value and tenancy’s unfairness, Cooper seemingly takes a historical dodge: he renders his fictional Ravensnest’s tenants—and readers today—unaware of the long-simmering controversy. The history of the anti-renters’ economic struggle, made all the more politically pointed by the shared democratic revolution of tenants and landlords, remains implicit in the second book of the series. But Cooper’s contemporary readers doubtless understood that long debates over the law, politics, and economics of New York rents undergirded the property arrangements that Mordaunt, like many landlords in the aftermath of Revolution, aimed to re-impose. The terms of conflict crop up repeatedly in Mordaunt’s exchanges with tenants, demonstrating that Cooper knew his readers would be familiar with this history. It’s easier, though, for modern readers unfamiliar with the rent protests occur-

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ring just south of Washington County, New York (as well as in Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Massachusetts), to miss the resonance of these implicit references and exchanges, or to see them in fact as representing actually existing, well-developed, well-supported, competing political ideologies, as Cooper’s contemporaries surely would have. It’s worth explaining the historical and legal anomaly of the Hudson River Valley’s rent structure, not in the least because the Anti-rent Wars did not exactly involve what modern readers would think of as “rent.” New York state remains, in legal historian Charles McCurdy’s pithy summary, “the world’s only common law jurisdiction in which rent-charge covenants r[u]n with the land forever” (315). What that means is that even today, home-buyers in the Hudson River Valley of New York can discover at closing that the terms of purchase require them “every year to pay a nominal rent charge to some remote assignee of Stephen Van Rennselaer III” (336). This feudal tribute is the legal remainder of what McCurdy describes as one of the strangest forms of property in law— indeed, a form of property outlawed in England in 1290 by the act of Quia Emptores, which “established the principle of free alienation and forbade subinfeudation,” effectively ending “a form of fee-farm rent known as rent-service” and dismantling feudalism in England (26). Because this act did not apply to territories conquered from enemies, though, the colony of New York, captured from the Dutch in 1664, and thus unlike every other colony in British North America, did not come under the rule of the act. This legality enabled Dutch patroons to ensure the continuance of their feudal manors simply by securing British title. And it enabled numerous military officers and other Crown favorites to establish similar estates. Their manors, and their fortunes, were constituted by the strange form of property—“lease-in-fee”—which McCurdy declares a legal oxymoron (24). Landlords like the Rennselaers sold their tenants (whose purchase obligated them to pay their land’s taxes) a perpetual interest in an undeveloped plot of land (what looks legally like a grant-in-fee). But the original landholder retained all the rights of a landlord (what looks legally like a lease): they could claim a significant portion of, and sometimes all, improvements made to the property by tenants (as Mordaunt asserts to Jason Newcome); they could take land from the tenants for their own designs; they could repossess all the tenants’ possessions if the rents were in arrears; and, if a tenant tried to sell his farm to someone else, the landlord had the right to a “quarter-rent” (anywhere from one-fourth to one-half of the total sale price). He furthermore retained all mineral, right-ofway, and water rights. When the original lease expired at the death of the

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named tenant his children could renew the lease for the family land for a fee, or abandon the land, and their improvements, to the landlord. Other families in the Hudson River Valley, like the Livingstons, negotiated not perpetual but lifetime leases (as we’ll see, this is the form the Newcomes lease took), which usually ran the course of one to three specified peoples’ lives plus twenty-one years. That form of lease was more of a crapshoot. Lessees usually chose young children, assuming this would guarantee continuity for the family and allow the children to grow old with secure access to land. But if luck ran bad and the children died in their youth— not an uncommon event—then twenty-one more years ended the lease with no assurances for the living. Recognizing the difficulties tenants would encounter in their early years on a wilderness property, landlords often collected no rent for the first four to seven years a tenant occupied their unimproved land. Past this, tenants owed landlords rents payable in a stipulated number of bushels of wheat per hundred acres, or, later, a cash payment based on the price of wheat. Moreover, they owed annual tributes, often “four fat fowles” and a specified number of days of labor for the landlord, complete with wagon and horses. The landlord required tenants to use estate mills (which also extracted usually 10 percent of the wheat milled, a portion shared with the miller who himself did not own the mill) and estate stores, structuring a relationship that allowed them to end up with much of what tenants produced. Humphrey describes how landlords extracted both “goods and services from tenants, resulting in a disproportionate transfer of wealth from tenants to landlords” (12). The landlords expanded the value of the goods they accumulated from their tenants by sending it into the transatlantic market, and by this means they grew wealthy. As Humphrey observes, “They may not have been the wealthiest men in the British colonies, a contest likely won by Caribbean sugar planters, but they were as wealthy as any group of men on the mainland, and there were fantastically wealthier than their tenants” (29). Nevertheless, this accumulation was only accomplished by negotiation and accommodation with their tenants. And landlords—like Mordaunt, who emphasizes his family’s economic deprivations during the war years—felt they were making sacrifices: for instance, by “indulging” their tenants with development leases, landlords waited many years to see the first rents. They agreed to these “deprivations” because such indulgence was to their benefit: should landlords become too harsh, tenants might leave for better conditions elsewhere, leaving the land undeveloped and unproductive. Through the granting of such favors, landlords endeavored to create a relation characterized by what historian Reeve Huston

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describes in Land and Freedom as “benevolence” on the side of the landlords and “deference” on the side of the tenants. In other words, a certain tolerance on the side of the landlord—for late rents during times of drought, infestation, or war; for looking the other way when a tenant sold and pocketed the full value of improvements—structured a reciprocity that earned tenant deference and, ideally for the landlords, quiescence. Increasingly after the Revolution, this reciprocity was politically strained: Huston notes that in this period, “many who signed leases on Rensselaerwyck appended the term ‘yeoman’ after their names, thus asserting their status as independent proprietors while entering a relationship of dependency” (34). But the battle was uneven, growing more so over time: because so much of the eastern part of New York was controlled by a few men with enormous holdings, arable land in that region was virtually monopolized, and the value of adjacent lands was driven up, trapping poorer people in leases. Over time, as the soil was depleted, making wheat nearly impossible to grow, tenants found themselves unable to sell their leases. They could not pay off their back rents with the price of wheat going up (thanks to rich land opening up farther west and improved transportation systems); could not afford the technologies and techniques that would allow them to replenish and maximize their yields; and could not afford to walk away from their improvements. Having lived on their land for a lifetime, and not infrequently for generations, yeoman families began to feel that their rents, work, and investments had more than paid for the value of the land. Their labor had cleared and improved it, their taxes had funded roads and bridges: labor- and tax-based improvements literally creating the land’s current value. Given that they couldn’t afford to walk away, they wanted to own it. Their arguments in favor of this were informed by seventeenth-century British political radicalism, by U.S. Revolutionary ideals, by evangelistic Christianity, and by Lockean labor theory of value, all registers that Cooper’s tenants resort to in their arguments with the Littlepages, as we shall see.

Hurrah! There Comes the Young Landlord! The novel’s complex dialogue over political economy, labor theory, democratic sovereignty and property begins as Mordaunt launches his trip. Stopping at a log tavern for dinner, he queries the owner’s wife, Mrs. Tinkum, about backwoods postwar economy. Probing for his postRevolutionary sentiments, she asks his opinion of squatting, not a small matter to the many backwoods residents who bought farms from departing tenants. As she puts it to Mordaunt (whom she deferentially denomi-

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nates “Major” and who, she’s clearly aware, does not claim title to the land on which she herself resides), “Some folks calls us squatters, I s’pose . . . but I do not. We have bought the betterments of a man who hadn’t much of a title, I think likely; but as we bought his betterments fairly, Mr. Tinkum . . . is of the opinion that we live under title, as it is called” (1:70–80). Mordaunt dismissively responds, “I can only say that nought [sic] will produce nought; nothing, nothing. If the man of whom you purchased owned nothing, he could sell nothing. The betterments he called his, were not his, and in purchasing them, you purchased what he did not own” (1:80). Informing him that, as word has it, he’ll have “dreadful squatters” to deal with on his lands, Mrs. Tinkum impishly hints that he should save his breath for them. Soon back on the road, Mordaunt encounters a man who turns out to be his father’s old acquaintance, Susquesus, who immediately remembers Corny’s son (1:86). When he learns that Mordaunt is heading to Ravensnest, Susquesus asks how long it’s been since he last visited. Mordaunt confesses he has never seen the property, and Susquesus exclaims, “Dat queer! How you own land, when nebber see him? . . . What dat mean, [in]’herit? How man haf land, when he don’t keep him?” (1:94). This moment launches the novel’s first substantive exchange on property and property rights. Mordaunt pompously lectures this old family friend as though he were a child, explaining how the “pale-faces” keep all track of their laws—and ownership—on paper. Completely unimpressed, Susquesus counters, “T’ink dat good? Why no let man take land where he want him, when he want him? Plenty land. Got more land dan got people. Nough for ebbery body.” The Onondaga’s appeal to a democratically self-dispensed common bounty gets Mordaunt’s dander up. He launches another lecture, this one on the “betterments” of white civilization, expounding on the rights of men to accumulate and bequeath property to their descendants as fundamental. He bullies Susquesus to concede the superiority of white civilization: “And why can the pale-faces march in large armies, with cannon, and horses, and bayonets, and the red-man not do the same?” (1:96). Susquesus’s apparently abject response—“ ’Cause he no got ’em . . . no got nuttin”—does not placate Mordaunt. “You have,” he indignantly returns, “given the effect for the cause . . . I hope to make you understand me . . . The white man is stronger than the red-man, and has taken away his country, because he knows the most.” Susquesus rebuts Mordaunt’s bullying by invoking Christianity: “You t’ink Great Spirit say who shall haf land; who no haf him?” (1:97). Mordaunt rejoins that if law supports an unequal division of property, that’s only what God intends. Susquesus quickly replies, “T’ink understand. Great

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Spirit, den, say must have a farm.” Here he mischievously evokes evangelical arguments for equal distribution (previewing arguments the squatter Thousandacres will elaborate later on in the novel). Then he caps the argument by asking Mordaunt if he knows where he is. Mordaunt can’t do more than guess, and Susquesus finishes the argument where it began: “That queer ’nough too! Own land, but don’t know him” (1:98). Mordaunt’s conversations with Mrs. Tinkum and Susquesus prime readers to be critical about how land claims were staked in the late colonies and early United States. And in Mordaunt’s circular, “queer ’nough” exchange with Susquesus we find another instance of Cooper’s narrative dodginess: the lone Onandaga apparently stands in for historical Native Americans’ involvement in the rent protests of the Hudson River Valley. As Humphrey details, Stockbridge Indians from New England and indigenous Wappingers began joining with tenants in the protests of the 1750s and ’60s “to oppose manorialism and bolster their claims” for land title (44; see also 46). Susquesus gestures broadly at the outset and the end of his conversation with Mordaunt toward the Wappingers’ position in this battle and their support for the tenants. As Humphrey summarizes, they “believed that use of the land equaled ownership of it”; by the mid-eighteenth century, Wappingers were encouraging settlement by and creating leases (some for 999 years) for whites as a way of “documenting” Wappinger claims to lands (65; see also 66–67). The loyal if arch Susquesus leads Mordaunt to Ravensnest where another revealing episode ensues. Entering incognito so that he might better assess the disposition of the settlement, Mordaunt strides into a scene of localist democratic negotiation in the civic commons. The tenants he encounters have paused before completing the framing of a church to decide its denomination. Newcome, who is leading the negotiation among those he denominates “fellow citizens,” favors a Congregationalist church. He proposes that the community should decide the question before the landlord comes and enforces his own preference. The community quickly assents. At the first vote, there is only a slim majority on Newcome’s side: twenty-six for Congregationalist, twenty-five for the Presbyterian form Mordaunt silently prefers (the community offers the apparent stranger a vote, which he sniffily declines), fourteen for Methodist, nine Baptist, three Universalist, and one Episcopalian. Seemingly dissatisfied with a mere plurality for something that must represent the whole community, Newcome next constructs a preferential voting system, where voters eliminated as members of small minorities can recast their vote toward their next preference. Then the vote becomes tied at thirty-nine. Newcome, angling to find a way to tip the crowd toward his own preferred

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result, suggests the people treat the standoff, Congregationalists versus Presbyterians, as a party question, and sends off one voter to retrieve a law book from his wife to ensure the legality of proceeding thusly. While that man is gone, a friend of Newcome proposes that the group vote on the notion that Presbyterianism is antirepublican, which vote passes by a margin of one. But Newcome does not stop here. He asks the crowd, now reassembled, to vote one last time to confirm their support for a Congregationalist church. Now the conformist pressure of commons culture kicks in: “About three-fourths of the hands went up, at once. Cries of ‘unanimity—unanimity’—followed, until one hand after another went up” (1:111). Mordaunt counts seventy-three hands, leaving five who hold back from joining in the “unanimous” acclaim for Congregationalism. These recusers have their say moments later, refusing to throw their shoulder into the church frame-raising and creating real peril for those who do. Mordaunt continues in his self-recusal, first from the civic and now from the labor commons. As the community begins the difficult and dangerous work of raising the church frame, the young landlord, in Robert Zoellner’s summary, “displays a finicky fastidiousness about getting his hands dirty or compromising his dignity” (59). Mordaunt watches from the edge of the crowd as the men of the settlement (minus the few) undertake raising the church frame. They heave, and place stakes, and heave again. Meanwhile Mordaunt nurses his grudge that his good looks and rank aren’t drawing the usual amount of attention from the girls. After a few rounds the men are still struggling to accomplish their goal. Mordaunt still holds back: “As yet, not a sign, look, or word, had intimated either wish or expectation that I was to place myself in the ranks. I will confess to an impulse to that effect; for who can look on and see their fellow-creatures straining every muscle, and not submit to human sympathy? But, the recollections of military rank, and private position, had not only their claims, but also their feelings. I did go a step or two nearer the frame, but I did not put my foot on it” (1:120). In their next heave, it becomes dangerously clear that the men might fail and be crushed. Finally, Mordaunt decides to help: “ ‘Hurrah!’ shouted the boss—‘there comes the young landlord!’ ” (1:120). The men heave again, but, hilariously, Mordaunt’s help is not enough to make the needed difference. It takes Coejemans’s niece Dus, who darts in and strategically places a support so that the men may accomplish their goal. (Moments like this make it hard to believe Cooper’s narrative aim lies solely in promoting the Littlepage narrators.) Mordaunt soon turns to the project of renegotiating his leases. He has determined that he should be able to clear $1,742 per year in annual rents,

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a realization in which, as he puts it, “I exulted greatly,” since such income would more than double his annual allowance of $1,100 (1:155). Relishing the prospect of humiliating the man he despises, he saves his negotiation with Newcome for last. Mordaunt describes his disgust for the man: [He appeared] to engross in his single person all the business of the settlement. He was magistrate, supervisor, deacon, according to the Congregational plan, or whatever he is called, miller, store-keeper, will-drawer, tavern-keeper by deputy, and advisor-general for the entire region. Everything seemed to pass through his hands; or it would be better to say, everything entered them, though little came out again. This man was one of those moneyed gluttons, on a small scale, who lived solely to accumulate; in my view, the most odious character on earth, the accumulations having none of the legitimate objects of proper enterprise and industry in view. So long as there was a man near him whom he supposed to be richer than himself, Mr. Newcome would have been unhappy; though he did not know what to do with the property he had already acquired. (1:156) The narrative proper offers little to corroborate Mordaunt’s contempt for Newcome’s putatively low character. Indeed, most of the people with whom Newcome interacts seem to like him (except Coejemans, who hates him generically for being a Yankee). Mordaunt’s speculative fantasy—flagged by the modal “would have been” in the last sentence—finally reveals more about Mordaunt than the object of his contempt. As far as Mordaunt is concerned, Newcome owns no property. He gleefully reminds Newcome of this fact as soon as he enters the office: “You took a mill-lot and the use of five hundred acres of wood-land from my grandfather for three lives; or failing these, for a full term of one-and-twenty years . . . and for a nominal rent; the mills were to be kept in repair, and to revert to the landlord at the termination of the lease” (1:156). Mordaunt’s projections about Newcome signal for readers that his obsession with character is really a straw man for something else: Mordaunt hates Newcome’s political standing among the tenants, and even more, he despises the ideology of democratic equalitarianism and yeoman capitalism that Newcome represents. Mordaunt’s lease renegotiation with Newcome neatly maps the historical dynamic of the unraveling Revolutionary-era democratic alliance between elite and ordinary citizens. Newcome begins by expressing his hope that his lease renewal might allow him to keep as clear profit the mill he built. In the aftermath of the Revolution, he anticipates the “legal right of an old tenant to a enj’y a new lease” (1:157), thus articulating a widely felt hope among tenants that the ban on feudal entailments would apply to

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leases made before the Revolution. (Sadly for tenants like Newcome, and as Cooper’s readers would know, none of the anti-feudal laws passed in the aftermath of Independence through the culmination of the Anti-rent Wars would apply retrospectively.) Mordaunt archly signals his intent to enforce the feudal relation: “Then you have been misinformed sir. I am not weak enough to admit a right that the lease itself, which . . . contradicts in terms” (1:157). Here Mordaunt adverts to the strict contractualism to which the landowners would successfully appeal down the road, in the 1830s and ’40s. They favored, in other words, Constitutionally protected adherence to the letter of “freely bound” contracts (and Mordaunt is happy to remind Newcome that these feudally styled contracts bind tenants to a social and political as well as economic arrangement). Newcome tries to negotiate, invoking exactly what contractualist arguments repress: contingencies of history. He mentions tenants’ unfamiliarity with the law at the time of original signing, their uninformed inattentiveness to the contract’s covenants, and the landlord’s initial “desperation” to have the land developed, conveniently forgotten after the fact of that development. And he invokes the labor theory of value, describing the backbreaking work tenants put into clearing and developing the land that raises its value; that builds the grain, timber, and oil mills which process and therein add to the yield of the developed land. But Mordaunt refuses to concede that added value is the result of tenant labor: “I am not aware that all honest persons are hard-working, and more than that all hard working persons are honest . . . Phrases will procure no concession from me . . . Twenty-three days from this moment, you will have been paid for all you have done on my property according to your own agreement; and, by your own reasoning, there must be an end of your connection with that property” (1:159). Newcome pleads that the landlord not “rob me of all my hard earnings” and then Mordaunt, quite perversely— having emphasized that Newcome has nothing—suggests that Newcome buy land from him on Mooseridge, rather than continue renting in Ravensnest. Newcome replies that he wants the land on which he’s invested years of his labor: “I kind o’ wanted this.” Mordaunt mockingly replies, “But I kind o’ want this too, and as it is mine, I think, in common equity, I have the best claim to enjoy it” (1:160). Newcome seizes on Mordaunt’s reference to equity, construing it as an ethical imperative: “It’s on equity I want to put this very matter, major—I know the law is ag’in me—that is, some people say it is; but some think not, now we’ve had a revolution—but let the law go as it may, there’s such a thing as what I call right between man and man” (1:160). He proffers tra-

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ditional deference (“major”) even as he asks for the Revolution’s promise, of fraternal equalitarianism, and hints at the democratic power to decide these questions (“some . . . say it is; but some think not”) that forms the practice and fact of political independence. Unmoved, Mordaunt returns this ethico-political appeal to a legal framework: “Certainly; and law is an invention to enforce it” (1:160). Mordaunt’s reply presages an important historical maneuver against democratic sovereignty radically conceived within the logic of the commons: Mordaunt aims for the sovereign of the new nation not to be the people, but “the law”—a law that was quickly being retooled in the early nation for the purposes of capitalist expansion. Here he participates in the modernizing thrust of liberalism. Political theorist Ellen Meiksins Wood observes that “the very condition that makes it possible to define democracy as we do in modern liberal capitalist societies is the separation and enclosure of the economic sphere and its invulnerability to democratic power. Protecting that invulnerability has even become an essential criterion of [liberal] democracy” (235). From where Mordaunt stands in his lease renegotiation with Newcome, those essential protections had not been firmly established (this will clearly become the aim of the contract clause of the Constitution and of its Federalist proponents—still a few years away in the plot of this novel). And Mordaunt’s dread is precisely that the democratic power of the majorities he’s busy despising on his estate will come to exercise the powers of citizenship over economic questions, creating laws for land redistribution. This exchange cannily anticipates a significant shift. The protective enclosure of the economic sphere from democratic political influence would soon be accomplished, as Mordaunt predicts and historians like Charles Sellers and Morton Horwitz detail, through the law. Specifically, as Horwitz outlines, this change is accomplished by what we might thumbnail as the de-commonalization of U.S. Common Law. Horwitz explains that in the early nineteenth century, the “common law” transitioned from being a body of law that is “of the people,” arising from their customary usages, from the “people’s common sense,” to one aiming to preside over the people. In this new usage, law itself becomes conceptualized as a “sovereign command”: its “supremacy” (as Mordaunt terms it) becomes impervious to challenge by peoples’ locally negotiated “common sense” or rules for “fair play” (2:158). Horwitz summarizes: “Only in the nineteenth century did judges and jurists finally reject the longstanding belief that the justification of contractual obligation is derived from the inherent justice or fairness of an exchange” (161). Thus, despite his suggestion to “let the

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law go as it may,” Newcome is in fact making what was in the early 1780s still a legal claim about contractual unfairness—and one that had been only recently become disallowed in private law as Cooper composed his novel in the mid-1840s. As important, Newcome is making a claim about revolutionary democratic power—the self-governing power of the people to negotiate fairer, equalitarian resolutions—that widely informed the grassroots democratic philosophy of commons culture (evangelical, economic, radical) in the eighteenth century, and informed Jefferson’s thinking, too. As Hardt elaborates in a passage worth quoting at length: Liberty and freedom mean simply for Jefferson that the multitude is autonomous and thus able to exert its priority over government. This has little to do with individualist notions of the freedom to do as one pleases in the course of everyday life [the appeal of contractualism, n.b.]. Freedom for Jefferson is the right of the multitude constantly to exert its power over and determine the actions of government. Freedom is the affirmation of the primacy of resistance in opposition to the primacy of sovereignty. This political autonomy of the multitude is clearly built on . . . [an] equality that is achieved through the equal division of and free access to productive property. Equal and independent citizens are the necessary components of a society that is able to generate its own coherence and exert its primacy over government. Equality, in this sense, is inseparable from freedom. (“Jefferson and Democracy,” 65) Newcome invites Mordaunt to join this equalitarian collectivity by negotiating a fairer contract. Mordaunt denies him by “liberally” renewing his lease on the same terms for twenty-one years: “the only inducement I have for offering the terms I do, is the liberality that is usual with landlords; which is conceded as no right, but as an act of liberality” (1:160, 161). Here we can begin to see how, in Wood’s terms, liberalism is a “modern idea based on pre-modern, pre-capitalist forms of power” (234). In other words, Mordaunt’s appeal to liberalism is not simply an archaic appeal posed from a backward-looking feudalism (“the liberality that is usual with landlords”), but simultaneously a modern appeal to a new form of economic power he expects to participate in wielding, of liberal capitalist democracy. This liberal form of democracy, in Wood’s summary, “leaves untouched the whole new sphere of domination and coercion created by capitalism, its relocation of substantial powers from state to civil society, to private property and the compulsions of the market” (234). It protects the economy from the political power of the people, and it is this complex

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historical struggle to place the economic sphere out of the political reach of the democratic mass that Cooper’s trilogy helps us remember.

A Stouter, More Broad-Shouldered, Sinewy Race Mordaunt takes on the multitude in the next section of the novel, where he encounters and is taken prisoner by a squatter family deep in the backwoods of the Mooseridge estate. Here we encounter what looks like another dodgy narrative move: just as Cooper reduces and refracts the claims of the Wappinger and Stockbridge Indians through the solitary figure of Susquesus, he reduces and refracts the political claims of the plebian classes in the early nation to a “private” and “illegal” family—a group of more than twenty people dependent on the leadership of their patriarch, Aaron Thousandacres. As a novelist, Cooper relishes the conflicts produced by ethnic and social cultural differences—and here, those of political culture as well. He may attempt to reduce “the people” by portraying it as a solitary family, but their very presence in this drama implicitly broadens the sociohistorical context for the Anti-rent Wars. Introducing the squatter family, Cooper links anti-rent politics to the informal commons economy of the backwoods, to the struggles of the non-propertied classes to gain a freehold in the colonies and early nation, and more broadly to the formal politics of the developing free labor and free soil movements. He introduces the self-naming Thousandacres (the narrator confides that his “real” name is Timberman!) as an immigrant from the Hampshire Grants, a region of “hardy mountaineers” who maintained a certain independence during the war, “sufficiently patriotic, if left to do as they pleased in the matter of their possessions, but not sufficiently so as to submit to the regular administrations of the law” (2:5–6). The members of this “self-created colony,” Mordaunt reflects, played “off their neutrality . . . as a means of securing themselves in the possession of lands to which their titles, in the ordinary way, admitted of a good deal of dispute, to say the least” (2:6). Though putatively a single family, Cooper paints them in broader sociopolitical terms: as Mordaunt puts it, “A stouter, more broad-shouldered, sinewy race was not often seen” (2:18). Cooper ties the contest in this long scene over tenancy and timber to the historical record. In the colonies, landlords had been notably indulgent of their tenants’ use of the wood-lot commons. Indeed, as readers have just learned, Newcome was encouraged by Herman Mordaunt to clear and use the timber on his lot, since the free use of timber both encouraged buildings that facilitated development and cleared the lands for agriculture and settling. But in the aftermath of Revolution, landlords, as

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Reeve Huston details, looking to consolidate and maximize profits, began discouraging timber-cutting and attempting to reconfigure a common resource into private holdings (25). Mordaunt discovers the squatters’ presence on family property after spending the night in the woods. Indignant at their incursion, he still relishes the prospect of a good breakfast at their table. Therefore, he plans to enjoy it incognito, even as he aims to scope out the squatters’ operation so that he can move against it. His complacent anticipation of hospitality demonstrates Mordaunt’s familiarity with a backwoods commons culture, “it being so much a matter of course for the American to share his meal with a stranger, that little is said or thought of the boon.” Just as he expects, Thousandacres greets him welcomingly: “Walk in, fri’nd; I don’ t know your name, but that’s no great matter, where there’s enough for all and a wilcome in the bargain” (2:15). “All’s wilcome” he warns, “but the landlord” about whose arrival in the area they’ve already heard (2:11). When the family finally uncovers Mordaunt’s identity, they immediately comprehend the aim of his deception, guessing that he will hand them over to a legal system they see as rigged against them. And so, playing out the precise threat that Mordaunt dreads when it comes to the democratic aspirations of his tenants, the Thousandacres take him captive, intending to keep him in their storehouse until they can float out all their boards, thereby getting away with the profits of their labor before abandoning the site and moving on. During Mordaunt’s captivity, Thousandacres takes the occasion to elaborate on his theory of ownership, one that draws variously on Revolutionary rhetoric of equality and the people’s sovereignty, on Common Law claims of possession as improvement, on fair use tenets (“every man has a right to as much as he has a need on”) (2:124), and on JudeoChristian principles of common, restorative right (Thousandacres calls this the “Lord’s title”) (2:182). The squatter patriarch refers to landholding in the pre-capitalist terms of agrarian radicalism, as the only sure basis for human freedom. He sees land as the peoples’ commonwealth, and not itself a commodity to be monopolistically controlled by the few who best in competition. He argues that if Mordaunt is “a fri’nd of liberty, he should be a fri’nd of liberty’s people; should give liberty and take liberty. Now I call it liberty to let every man have as much land as he has need on, and no more, keepin’ the rest for them that’s in the same sitiation. If he and his father be true fri’nds of liberty, let ’em prove it like men, by giving up all claims to any more land than they want. That’s what I call liberty! . . . that’s my religion and my liberty too” (2:124). Thousandacres refuses to concede to the chainbearer’s insistence that he might be glad

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for laws if he should come into dispute over boundaries of need with his neighbors: “Curse on all chains and compasses, say I! They’re an invention of the devil, to make ill blood in a neighbourhood, and to keep strife awake, when our bibles tell us to live in peace with all mankind” (2:85). His solutions are insistently localist, informal, and equalitarian: his presumption is that goodwilled people can figure out how to negotiate common resources among themselves, without the interventions of distant lawmakers or the rigged terms of big landholders. Mordaunt dismisses all Thousandacres’ arguments as pre-political primitivism: “All of that semi-barbarous breed fancied themselves invested, in their lawless occupation, by some sort of secret natural right . . . on the level with that of all the rest of mankind” (2:78). For all his theorizing, Mordaunt can’t dismiss the political force of the “confused jumble of social maxims in which their selfishness had taken refuge” (2:78), which is not to say that he considers Thousandacres’ arguments. Yet he does finally understand the squatter as a democratic, specifically political threat, as we see near the end, when he declares the now-dead squatter “selfish and self-willed,” echoing his earlier denunciation of Vermont’s “self-created” colony, and anticipating President Washington’s denunciation of self-created Democratic–Republican societies (2:175). These “selfcreating,” “self-willing” bodies insist on the primary power of the people’s sovereignty, positing the sovereign (law, president) as secondary to their immediate and collective strength. It is this notion of self-creating power that Mordaunt, like President Washington in this same historical moment, wishes to discredit, to put down absolutely. We might know where citizen Cooper comes down in all of this. But that doesn’t answer the more complicated question: how does the novel sort out this battle over sovereignty? It’s hard to tell. Mordaunt denounces Newcome and Thousandacres alike for the supposed selfishness that goes hand-in-hand with self-creating democratic power. But selfishness is equally Mordaunt’s strong suit. Cooper makes it difficult to see Mordaunt as anything but a very limited consciousness, and a very partial, very selfinterested narrator. Late in the novel, his own father makes this point, in response to Mordaunt’s recounting of his captivity. Corny counters Mordaunt’s intolerant denunciations of Jason Newcome and delivers a short homily on regional affiliations and practices of property, implicitly accusing his son of having an overly narrow and self-interested perspective: In a word, the Yankee despised the Dutchman, and the Dutchman abominated the Yankee. In all this there is nothing new . . . differences do exist, I admit, and I consider the feeling with which every

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New Englander comes among us, to be, by habit, adverse to our state of society in many particulars—some good and some bad—and this merely because he is not accustomed to them. Among other things, as a whole, the population of these states do not relish the tenures by which our large estates are held. . . . I never found any gentleman, or man of education from New England, who saw any harm in a man’s leasing a single farm to a single tenant, or half-a-dozen farms to half-a-dozen tenants; proof that it is not the tenure itself with which they quarrel, but with the class of men who are, or seem to be, their superiors. (2:188) Corny concludes his lecture by saying, “As a question of political economy, Morduant, depend on it, this is one that has two sides to it” (2:188). Mordaunt is aware that there are two sides, even though he tries to repress this recognition (and it’s fair to note that the narrative/historical dodginess I’ve attributed to Cooper is a charge more properly lodged with this novel’s self-interested narrator). Just before his father’s lecture, as he, Frank, and Dus hold vigil for the dying Coejemans, Mordaunt reflects on rise of democratic sentiment and the struggle over sovereignty in the aftermath of Revolution: “Some observers pretend that this respect for law is gradually decreasing among us, and that in its place is sensibly growing up a disposition to substitute the opinions, wishes, and the interests of local majorities, making the country subject to men instead of principles.” Mordaunt frets about the nascent power of the democratic citizenry: “When they attempt to substitute for these pure and just rules of right, laws conceived in selfishness and executed by the power of numbers, they merely exhibit tyranny in its popular form . . . It is a fatal mistake to fancy, that freedom is gained by the mere achievement of a right in the people to govern, unless the manner in which that right is to be both understood and practiced, is so closely incorporated with all popular notions of what has been gained” (2:168). For Mordaunt, democratic self-rule is a boon only when the people already understand that they can’t really use their power to change the order of things. Mordaunt grudgingly realizes that his political leadership—long the assumed right of lords on their estates—is an entitlement he can no longer take for granted, as his father, elected to Congress under the new Constitution, and grandfather have done. Instead, years later, Mordaunt will have to run for his seat in Congress against the local assemblyman, Jason Newcome (2:203). Thousandacres has predicted this democratic contest before his death: “I hold to liberty and a man’s rights, and that is no reason I should be deflected on. My notions be other men’s notions, I known, that they be called squatters’ notions. Congressmen have held

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’em, and will hold ’em ag’in, if they expect much support, in some parts of the country, at election time. I dare say the day will come, when governors will be found to hold ’em” (2:25). Those governors begin appearing the late 1830s. And so, as this trilogy painstakingly delineates, the battle that stakes the emergence of liberal “democracy” against plebian political economy and its more vernacular democratic practices continues being waged into the 1840s, the setting of the third novel.

Anti-Rent Redux A lot changes between the 1780s Washington County featured in The Chainbearer and that we encounter in the 1840s. A halcyon period launched at the close of The Chainbearer. Rising wheat and timber prices of the 1790s and early 1800s allowed landlords to reconsolidate their finances. Their ensuing benevolence allowed tenants to secure conditions they were comfortable enough abiding by, for a time. Since many tenants technically “owned” the land, those men over twenty-one were able to vote before the advent of universal white manhood suffrage, and their numbers made their support vital to the landlords’ political aspirations. This temporary restoration of tenant deference allowed landlords to recement their political leadership and their terms in office, fortifying economic interests through legislative control. The peace allowed tenants to continue cultivating their own plebian economic sociality, a world that featured, in Huston’s words, “a comparatively equal distribution of wealth” (42–43). The yeoman tenants gave deference to the landlords while they solidified their own way of life. Huston details how tenants named towns after local millers and manufacturers and elected them to public offices such as assemblyman, sheriff, and judge. Thus each group kept the careful peace while nurturing cultures that would soon be in conflict. By the late 1810s things began changing rapidly on both sides. Cooper has his second and third narrators, Mordaunt and Hugh, both marrying “down” in class, reflecting a decided trend among the great proprietors in the post-Revolutionary years, one with significant economic consequences. Before the Revolution, landlord parents only sanctioned marriages that buttressed family wealth. But their children, like others, embraced the new companionate ideal of marriage that Jay Fliegelman so memorably traced as part of Revolutionary ideology. As the landlords began marrying down, their vast fortunes became both less ample and less stable. In Huston’s summary, the “result was inevitable. With the passing of each generation, the wealth of the proprietors was carved up like a carcass at a barbecue, and the betrothal of young heirs did nothing to fatten

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the portions. By the 1810s and ’20s, individual landlords were beginning to feel the pinch” (46). Racking up children and debt simultaneously, this younger generation of landlords could not afford to indulge the delays in rent payments their fathers could sustain. Meanwhile, tenants, like the landlords, were facing population pressures. And they were dealing with soil depletion, molds, and rusts at the same time that widening commercial competition, due to improved transportation networks, began to drive wheat prices down. Falling wheat prices meant that rent, keyed to wheat prices, was effectively driven up, and all this just in time for the Panic of 1819, which drove wheat prices down even faster. Unlike the post-Revolutionary era, there would be no bouncing back this time. McCurdy highlights the dilemma of landlords like Stephen Van Rensselaer III, who had become vigorous proponents of developing commercialism in the early nation, but who were at the same time unwilling to give up the idea of income attached to their rents and the status that went with their feudal station: He was a tireless promoter of the Erie Canal and served as president of the Canal Board from 1825 to his death in 1839. Yet the transportation revolution diminished the income of tenants on his estate. In 1820 he helped establish the New York Board of Agriculture, an organization dedicated to the dissemination of improved agricultural techniques. Yet the form of land tenure on Rensselaerwyck prevented his tenants from adopting the readjustment strategies advocated by agricultural reformers. In 1824 he endowed the college at Troy that became Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute: its mission, in his words, was “instructing the sons and daughters of farmers and mechanics” in the “application of science to common purpose in life.” Yet very few of his increasingly desperate tenants had the means to educate their children there. (13) Things kept getting worse: Hessian fly infestations in the 1830s made wheat-growing nearly impossible as land prices fell. It was harder and harder for tenants to sell out and leave. Those who could began cultivating herds of cows (for butter) and flocks of sheep (for wool). These were expensive transitions and yeoman tenants’ scramble to survive—often by producing more for the market—drew them deeper into the competitive market economy and its individualist ethos. The distribution of wealth among the tenants became increasingly uneven, and the closing access to timber, hunting, and grazing commons turned the formerly independent poor into dependent wage-seekers, subtenants, beggars, and migrants whose goal shifted from eventual proprietorship to mere survival. The

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“pleasing uniformity of decent competence” that Farmer James had so prized and these tenants had cultivated and elaborated over generations began breaking down. The crisis that launched the next generation of anti-rent protest began in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837 and the death of Stephen Van Rennselaer III in 1839. His will divided the rents of his gargantuan estate between two of his sons (two, that is, of ten children). Along with the land, he left them with piles of debt and rents $400,000 in arrears. The will disappointed his heirs as well as his strapped tenants, who hoped—encouraged by Van Rennselaer—that he might have forgiven their debt. As McCurdy summarizes, “In effect, his will called for the systematic impoverishment of people whose loyalty, even devotion, he had cultivated assiduously for more than fifty years” (15). Stephen Van Rennselaer IV sent out notices for immediate payment. But people didn’t have the money required, nor did it seem that the Rennselaer inheritors could have forced the value out of them if they’d sold their tenants’ improvements and personal goods at a sheriff ’s sale. Similar prospects loomed on the horizon for the tenants of other estates. The tenants organized to negotiate terms to resolve the crisis. Along with numerous demands (including relief from back rent), the tenants asked to buy out their rent. Much like Mordaunt with Jason, Van Rennselaer countered their terms with an admonitory lecture: “Your ancestors or yourselves, who are tenants, accepted leases with a full knowledge of the kind and amount of rent to be paid” (McCurdy, 16–17). Van Rennselaer was willing to sell, but for double the prices they proposed, and only after they’d paid off their back rents. Thus began the final round of the “war.” Battles legal and extralegal played out across the countryside, in courts and the New York legislature for the next half century. Protesters issued an “Anti-renters’ Declaration of Independence,” formed associations, launched newspapers, and organized boycotts. They sought a court of public opinion and political alliances. They staged out-of-door actions and organized vigilante groups of “Indians” to fight off repossessions and sheriff ’s sales. They launched legal investigations into the legitimacy of the owners’ land title. Trained for political activism by the emergence of the second-party system across New York state in the 1820s, they organized through formal political channels, electing sheriffs, judges, and assemblymen of every political stripe, carefully monitoring their support in official office. They petitioned legislatures and lobbied governors. And it worked, sort of: state government paid attention to the claims of both tenants and landlords. Commissions were launched, reports issued, legislation proposed, and rent protests put down by force. It was one step forward, one step back. Pro-rent initiatives

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languished or were defeated in nearly every session of the 1840s. A small gain came when the 1846 state assembly imposed a new tax on rent income. In the same year, the new state constitution’s bill of rights promised an end to feudal arrangements but made no grandfathering provisions, and so offered no relief to the protesters. As the battle and its boycotts raged on, landlords began selling out. Those who fought their tenants in court eventually won, but they often went bankrupt in the process of the drawn-out legal battles. In the end (an end that didn’t come until the Civil War and beyond), both sides would effectively lose.

Indignation and Rough Justice In the trilogy’s final installment, The Redskins, published in 1846, Mordaunt’s elderly son Roger (“Uncle Ro”) has been completing his nephew Hugh’s Princeton education by touring him through Europe and the Middle East. They departed on this trip sometime after the Panic of 1837, have been away for five years, and out of postal contact for the past eighteen months. Returning to Paris and catching up on their mail, they discover news of the escalating rent protests and resolve to return to the United States, disguised as a poor German trinket peddler father and hurdygurdy player son, so that they can assess the state of affairs on their estate without becoming targets for anti-rent action. The ensuing drama comes in three key scenes. In the first, anti-renters meet in town for an “indignation meeting,” and the still-disguised Hugh and Roger have an extended encounter with the vigilantes the novel denominates “Injins.” In the second, two of the “Injins,” including, as it turns out, Jason Newcome’s grandson, Seneca, attempt to burn down the Littlepage residence along with its now-unmasked landlord. In the third, the “Injins” mass onto the Littlepage estate to enforce the demands of the anti-renters, only to be shamed off the property by condemnation of Susquesus, whom they’ve interrupted in entertaining a visit from actual Indians. The plot of this novel foregrounds the anti-rent movement, and the action is rollicking. Characters make fun of the political pandering of governors and assemblymen (they accuse them of being, in Irving’s memorably derisive term, “slang-whangers,” 45), and we learn a lot about the political battles during this period in New York state. But in the main, the wider legitimate aspects of the movement’s organization are ignored. The novel devotes its most serious attention to the vigilantes it denominates “Injins,” and indeed, these groups were at the center of anti-rent action—and the publicity it received from the media—in 1844, when the movement escalated in response a new layer of rent collection enforcements and some

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severe disappointments from the New York State Assembly. The vigilante groups coordinated informally with more legitimate anti-rent associations. As Huston observes, when anti-rent leaders “began organizing throughout the leasehold district in 1844, they established Indian bands wherever they went” (117). The novel means the term “Injins” as a sign of contempt, and not just for the vigilantes: for Cooper they discredit anti-rent even in its legal manifestations. But whatever the biases of citizen Cooper, novelist Cooper is, as usual, fascinated by the details of conflict: the novel registers the complexity of “Injin” sociality and fraternal organization, detailing their calico costume and masks (see 195), their social rituals including self-naming in an “Indian” fashion, and their approximation of putative Indian dialect when in disguise. In every way, Cooper is attentive to the social dynamics of these actors. He highlights how membership among the “Injins” is solicited as waged employment (when Joshua Brigham invites the disguised Hugh to join, he observes that “the wages is good and the work light,” 181). Cooper knows that these wages are a boon for a membership made up largely of young, unmarried men. In Reeve Huston’s summary: The Indians drew heavily from two inextricably linked groups: young men and the landless and land-poor. A few had achieved a measure of prosperity, and many more would achieve it within a few years. A handful of others were older men whose prospects of achieving economic independence were already dim. But the majority were young men whose prospects were uncertain. These men suffered under a double handicap: the landlessness and dependence to which their youth temporarily subjected them, and the propertylessness and submission to which changing economic circumstances might condemn them permanently. Most Indians were unlucky enough to be present at the meeting of two systems of exploitation: an older (and still vigorous) one based on gender and age, and a newer one that was beginning to graft itself on the old—that of class. (117–18) Cooper details the tense emerging division of class and age. In one scene, the disguised Hugh accompanies Seneca Newcome to his older brother Orson’s store, and notices that Orson is distinctly uncomfortable with Seneca and his “Injin” fellows. It quickly emerges that the young men are pressing their new importance within the movement, exacerbating the very class divisions that are beginning to fray anti-rent communities: taking calico for their costumes, they refuse to pay Orson, saying “Charge it to Down Rent.”

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Cooper registers the Injins’ awareness of their extralegality when he portrays them waiting outside the meetinghouse where the paid traveling speaker starts off the “indignation meeting.” And he fairly represents the coercive and usually harmless actions of the white Injins. For instance, at the end of the indignation meeting, the young men threaten to tar and feather the mechanic speaker, Tom Hall, with whom they disagree: “The tumult continued. The Injins seemed undetermined what to do; equally afraid to carry out their menaces against Hall, and unwilling to let him go. At the very instant when we were looking for something serious, the storm abated, and an unexpected calm settled on the scene. How this was effected, I never knew; though it is reasonable to believe an order had been communicated to the Injins, by some signal that was known only to themselves” (238). Cooper paints the ugliness of vernacular practices of rough justice but, as he underscores, the Injins’ threat is more symbolic than actual. So, too, for the historical “Indians” whose perpetration of violence was minimal. (When bloodshed occurred in 1844 with two killings—one accidental—and even more notoriously with a killing of a deputy sheriff in 1845, the anti-rent associations made the “Indian” protest groups disband.)

Injins versus Indians Near the closing of the novel, Cooper stages a tableau in which the white anti-rent rebels encounter a delegation of Plains Indians who are returning from a diplomatic trip to Washington, D.C. Susquesus, the Onondaga who has abandoned his tribe for reasons finally revealed here, gets the last word on the protestors who’ve massed and marched on the Littlepage estate to try shaming and intimidating Hugh into selling the land their families have lived and improved on for generations. But first, the ancient Susquesus addresses the visiting delegation of Native Americans, who want him to come and die among his own people. He tells them he now understands that the Indians will never escape the whites, a fate willed by the “Great Spirit.” He urges that “the red man must submit.” Susquesus decrees that he will stay and die among the whites with whom he has lived “until one half of my heart is white; though the other half is red” (420). His achieved wisdom in the two cultures establishes his authority to proffer what turns out to be a racially definitive message. In this same vein, he denounces the “Injin” rent protestors: “They are not braves.” Glossing various broken legal agreements between whites and Native Americans, and between whites themselves, he subtly turns his pronouncement on the anti-renters to implicate all who share their skin

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color: “This is the difference. Indian will keep his word with Indian; paleface will not keep his word with pale-face.” The visiting dignitary Eaglesflight now tells the story of Susquesus’s departure from the Onondagas, a story that also contains a lesson for the impostor Indians. Eaglesflight details how Susquesus, then a chief, fell in love with a beautiful Delaware prisoner of an Onondaga warrior, Waterfowl. The woman reciprocated his love, and public opinion was on the beloved chief ’s side. But though he technically outranked the warrior, Susquesus decided to forsake his love along with his place in the tribe, the better to honor the letter of Onondaga law, which decreed that prisoners of war belong to the warrior who took them. As Eaglesflight summarizes for the white protestors, “The chief was gone, but the law remained. Go you, men of the pale-faces, who hide your shame in calico bags, and do the same. Follow the example of an Indian—be honest, like the Upright of the Onondagoes!” (426). Eaglesflight urges that there “are bad red-men and good red-men; there are bad pale-faces, and good pale-faces.” Emphatically, though, the more acculturated Susquesus draws a hard line between the reliable behavior of Native Americans and the unreliable behavior of whites (423). As he explains to his fellow Indians, gesturing to Mr. Warren, the preacher, “This is a great medicine of the pale-faces. He talks always of the Great Spirit, and of his goodness to men. It his business to talk of . . . good and bad pale-faces. I cannot tell you whether he does any good or not. Many such talk of these things constantly among the whites, but I can see little change, and I have lived among them, now, more than eighty winters and summers—yes, near ninety. The land is changes much that I hardly know it; but the people do not alter” (421). The aged chief links two provocative assertions. The man who claims a heart half-white and half-red rejects Eagleflight’s intercultural tolerance. And he suggests that the whites prevail precisely because their practice of contract is founded in dishonesty: “The pale faces sign papers, and laugh at them afterward” (432). Before the delegation leaves, Susquesus urges, “My children, the red-man . . . is his own master. He does not say so, he is so. How is it with the palefaces? . . . They never stop talking of their being their own masters. They talk of that more than they read their own Bibles . . . They do that, then they take away another’s wigwam . . . My children, farewell; do what is right, and you will be happier than the richest paleface who does what is wrong” (431–32). Susquesus’s parting shot is to argue that neither Native Americans nor whites should expect to get a square deal with whites. The white “Injins” back off, not so much because they are cowed by the “real” Indians as they are by the threat of legal force, in the person

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of Jack Dunning, an elected sheriff actually “disposed to do his duty” (as Hugh puts it) by enforcing the laws of the state as opposed to those desired by his constituents (427). The arrival of Dunning takes us back into the story’s actual conflict, a battle between whites over the stakes of self-rule and questions of property. This, as we saw in Chapter 3, is not the first time Cooper has made an intra-racial conflict look like an inter-racial one. We could think of this as his winking “Beware the Indian Menace! . . . Just Kidding!” strategy. Dismissing Cooper’s narrative maneuver, however, as settler imperial bad faith misses what his feint puts on display. The juxtaposition of these two groups, both still fighting for their commons traditions and practices and yet here apparently opposed, stands as the dramatic cliff-hanger to a novel Cooper finished before any real conclusion to the Anti-rent Wars or to what would soon be denominated “the Indian question” had been reached. Both groups, as Cooper’s ending suggests, were coming under similar pressures, which increasingly pitted them structurally against one another. If some white squatters and settlers had been able to find ways to coexist amicably with Native Americans into the early nineteenth century, such alliances had been decisively fractured by the agendas of large land speculators and by federal policy, aimed variously at both groups. Moreover, racial identification was hardening rapidly in the nineteenth century for both whites and Native Americans. Some whites would decide to embrace the United States’ liberal democratic economic order, like The Redskin’s Tim Hall. Native Americans, along with resisting whites, were driven farther west by the forces of enclosure. By setting up a comparative analogy between white commoners and Native Americans, Cooper highlights two distinct historical phenomena: first, the extent to which both Native Americans and white commoners practiced a form of self-governing that did not take the state for its telos, and second, how the forces that aimed at state capture also encouraged racialization, inviting those willing to identify as “white” into what Charles Mills has enduringly termed the “racial contract.” Noting that practitioners of commons democracy did not understand the state as the ultimate destination or best repository for their sovereignty and self-rule is not to say that these two groups resisted the state in the same ways or with the same things at stake (as we have seen, the anti-renters worked hard to gain representation for their position in state government in the 1840s—here we can see them precisely in the process of being drawn into an orientation toward the state). Acknowledging such differences though, we might nevertheless consider how commons or vernacular practices—the politics of mutuality and equalitarianism

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that existed among Native Americans and some white communities—did not depend on state institutions for either existence or maintenance. As the state became distinctly hostile to such practices, commoners—both those of European and indigenous descent—had to choose between some form of assimilation into the state, or a more direct resistance. As we saw in the aftermath of the Whiskey Rebellion, such political organization was emphatically redescribed as pre-political primitivism and equated with Indian savagery in order to justify the colonization, or “taming,” of both groups. Like the hill communities James Scott describes in Asia, the very traits cited in official state narratives as evidence of both squatter and indigenous “primitivism” could as easily be read as practices of state “evasion and . . . prevention”—evidence including common property regimes, cooperative subsistence strategies, a preference for egalitarian social structures that emphasize mutuality over individualism, a reliance on vernacular knowledge and governing strategies, and oral histories (Art, 8; for his discussion of strategies that resist capture see passim). Scott summarizes such structures as evidence of “anti-state nationalisms,” a term that describes indigenous peoples in the nineteenth-century geopolitical area of the United States and could also helpfully describe outlier communities of whites endeavoring to preserve communal self-determination beyond the reach of an increasingly invasive, liberalizing state (244). Cooper’s racial feint, his closing tableau of confrontation between rebellious “Injins” and nobly resigned Indians, simultaneously underscores the extent to which both groups increasingly described themselves in racial terms, reflecting their unwillingness and/or rendering them less able to find common cause and aligning whites increasingly with the anticommunal stance of liberal individualism. White protesters dressed up like Indians to menace authorities, admiringly appropriating Indians’ imagined “manliness,” equalitarianism, and “independence” for their own battle against economic dependency and political subordination. But they seemingly did not identify their plight or ideals with the contemporary plight of Native Americans, an admission Hugh’s Uncle Ro, disguised as a German peddler, extracts early on when he is invited to join the ranks of the anti-rent Injins. “Vhat goot vill it do to be an Injin?” he queries. “I thought it might be better to be a white man in America?” Joshua Brigham quickly responds, “Oh! I mean only an anti-rent Injin. We’ve got matters so nicely fixed now, that a chap can be an Injin without any paint at all, or any washin’ or scrubbin’, but can convart himself into himself ag’in, at any time, in two minutes” (181). In their battle for democratic access, white commoners increasingly wanted to access goods they identified with whiteness. As Huston notes of the anti-rent

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Indians, “Like most antebellum white men, the anti-renters did not listen to actual native peoples or to African Americans; rather they created an image of racial others that served their own purposes. In doing so, they gave voice to a class identity that was unmistakably white. In promoting their egalitarian class agenda, the anti-renters simultaneously helped advance the multi-class cause of white supremacy and Indian removal” (129). And just as Susquesus describes an inflexible line of racial difference between “pale-faces” and “red men,” so, too, did indigenous political leaders of the late-eighteenth- and nineteenth-century increasingly take for granted predictable behavioral divides between the “two” groups of people, for instance, the supposed white racial propensity for greed (see Shoemaker). The trilogy’s historical trajectory from the French and Indian Wars to the Anti-rent Wars highlights the growing pangs of the republic. But here especially in this closing scene, Cooper gestures also toward the republic’s twin form: the sociopolitical and economic imperatives of settler empire. Hugh flags the intra-racial clashes these imperatives create when he lets dangle the idea that it’s the poor whites who were responsible for any bad faith over land policy condemned by the Indians he admires. But Cooper has already suggestively outlined the economic and political common ground between white squatters and Native Americans on the subject of land use in the second book, showing that the class of whites Hugh is most eager to condemn might have been less the problem for Native Americans than the large landholders (in Susquesus’s words, “The richest paleface . . . does what is wrong”). Thus this strange closing scene thumbnails vanishing intra- and inter-cultural possibilities even as it sketches the hardening racial lines of the nineteenth century (where “whites” can be shamed by Indians for imagining the two groups have anything in common) and the extent to which the nation’s political elite was willing to pin the blame for the worst aspects of settler colonialism on the very “poor white trash” it hailed into whiteness’s liberal U.S. embrace. If, as Bethel Saler observes, “independence freed the United States to govern its own colonial territories and subjugated populations,” Cooper paints the anti-rent protesters wavering suggestively in this moment between the status of empowered citizen and subjugated population.

Democracy’s Forgotten Leap Year Despite the prefaces in which he broadly condemns the anti-renters in toto as savage political actors, Cooper is keenly attuned to the extent to which the anti-rent movement, like the communities from which it

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originated, was in the process of collapsing internally. These internal tensions are broadly sketched between characters like Joshua Brigham and the indignation speaker on the one hand, and Tim Hall on the other. As Cooper knew, the more affluent and influential leaders among the antirenters were increasingly accommodating themselves to the notion of the state’s sovereignty and its formal protections for property. Joshua Brigham represents the labor and agrarian land rights theory that still informed official anti-rent propaganda. As he explains to the disguised Hugh, “The young spark that pretends to own all the farms you see, far and near, never did anything for ’em in his life; only to be his father’s son. Now, to my notion, a man should do suthin’ for his land” (180). His position draws on the more radical and less prosperous hill town anti-renters, who, in Huston’s summary, “distrusted the ‘speculation’ they saw among merchants and other commercial men as an effort to create false wealth with no basis in labor” as much as they scorned the monopolistic aims of the giant landholders (56; see also 113). Brigham invokes George Henry Evans’s controversial 1845 antimonopoly arguments about land limitation in his new land reform weekly Young America, as well the commonwealth theory of land and its fair use principles: “Some among us maintain that no man ought to hold more than a thousand acres of land, while others think natur’ has laid down the law on that p’int, and that a man shouldn’t hold more than he has a need on” (186). Gesturing toward the complex electoral strategizing of the anti-renters, who allied with various parties to accomplish their goals before beginning to front independent, anti-rent candidates themselves, Brigham remembers an election cycle for his interlocutor, summarizing “I was a whig that summer, though I went democrat last season” (184). And interestingly, Brigham seemingly registers what Wood describes as a deliberate strategy that emerged within liberal democracy to downsize citizenship. In her words, “Where classical republicanism had solved the problem of the propertied elite and labouring multitude by restricting the extent of the citizen body . . . capitalist or liberal democracy would permit the extension of citizenship by restricting its powers” (208). In Brigham’s words, “What’s the use of a vote if a body gets nothing by it? . . . What’s the use of having a government of the people, if the people’s obliged to want farms?” (184). Similarly, the visiting speaker, a self-declared Democrat paid to lecture from fees paid by local anti-renters to their association, cleverly articulates the principles of opposition that organized the movement of natural rights and universal land ownership: “Land is an element, and so is fire, and so is water, and so is air. Now who will say that a freeman hasn’t a

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right to air, hasn’t a right to water, and, on the same process, hasn’t a right to land? He has, fellow-citizens, he has. These are what are called in philosophy elementary rights; which is the same thing as a right to the elements, of which land is one, and a principle one” (225). The speaker— like real-world anti-renters—insists that the security of land ownership is the best guarantee for political independence and the virtue of republican government. In the words of New York state’s Delaware County antirent association, “In all free governments, it is essential that the people themselves be free. They cannot be free unless independent . . . To be completely sovereign, they must individually be the lords of the soil they occupy, and hold it freely, subject to no superior but the people themselves” (Huston, 114). Like the Delaware anti-renters, the speaker aims at something more than a narrowly legalistic view of equality: “Equality is my axiom. Nor, by equality, do I mean your narrow pitiful equality before the law, as it is sometimes tarmed, for that may be no equality at all; but I mean an equality that is substantial, and which must be restored, when the working of the law has deranged it” (227). To accomplish this equality the speaker espouses limited land possession, through a scheme he describes as a democratic “leap year.” As the calendar is adjusted every four years to make up for the imprecision of clocks, thus “it will be with democracy . . . in humanity, we must, from time to time, divide up the land” (228). These arguments for redistribution invoke ideals of radicals like Orestes Bronson, who in 1840 argued for the abolition of inheritance, and his predecessor Thomas Skidmore, co-founder of the Working Men’s Party and author of the 1829 Rights of Man to Property! Being a Proposition to Make It Equal among the Adults of the Present Generation. While perhaps still useful for whipping up an “indignation meeting” in the mid-1840s, these ideas, as Cooper realized, were becoming less and less common among anti-rent leaders, whose positions began sounding more like those of the mechanic Tim Hall, who steps forward at the meeting to defend the rights of property and the Constitution’s protection of contract. Identifying himself a Democrat, like the speaker, Hall counters the speaker’s equalitarianism by adverting to the subject of democratic sovereignty. He upholds the Littlepages’ advocacy for the sovereignty of law: “By democracy I understand a government in which the sovereign power resides in the body of the nation . . . By equality I do not understand anything more than equality before the law” (229). Like the many tenants who abandoned more radical, agrarian ideals in favor of challenging the legitimacy of the landlords’ titles, Hall reflects

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an adaptation to competitive market ideals that characterized the more prosperous among the anti-renters. In Huston’s description: The chasm between most anti-renters’ social vision and their specific proposals grew out of their leaders’ attempt to come to terms with agrarian traditions in the context of a changing economy . . . Members of the anti-rent associations thus entered their conflict with landlords poised between older agrarian ideals and newer realities. In remaining silent about common rights and the presence of the landless, most anti-renters gave mute assent to the existing distribution of land in their communities and to the practices that made some community members the employees of others. While they mobilized agrarian ideals against the landlords, they were unwilling to apply those ideals to themselves. Their social vision thus remained ambiguous, evasive, and contradictory. (115–16) But Hall, in Cooper’s handling, is neither ambiguous nor evasive. He challenges his fellow tenants to appreciate the protections of law and its capitalist corollary, contract: “If my son didn’t inherit the property of Malbone Littlepage, neither will Malbone Littlepage’s son inherit mine. We are on equal footing in that respect” (232). Hall appeals to, and asks his interlocutors to appreciate, the formal equality made possible by liberalism’s separation of political power from economic power: equality before the law. He repudiates as ridiculous the speaker’s vision: This doctrine that one man’s as good as another has got two sides to it. One man ought to have the same general rights as another, I’m ready to allow; but if one man is as good as another, why do we have the trouble and cost of elections? We might draw lots, as we do for jurors, and save a good deal of time and money. We all know there is ch’ice in men, and I think that so long as the people have their ch’ice in sayin’ who shall and who shall not be their agents, they’ve got all they have any right to. (232) His democracy does not share in a notion of the people’s power, the principle on which the earlier and more radical versions of the anti-rent, free labor, and free land movements relied. Rather, his democracy is U.S. Constitutionalism’s formally contractual democracy, where, in Wood’s terms, “the transfer of power to ‘representatives of the people’ constituted not a necessary concession to size and complexity but rather the very essence of democracy itself ” (217): “So long as the people have their ch’ice in sayin’ who shall and who shall not be their agents, they’ve got all they have

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any right to.” This, precisely, is the lesson Benjamin Rush hoped people would learn about their “sovereignty,” and it echoes Billy Kirby’s advice to Natty in The Pioneers, too: “So be civil.” In its concluding scene, the novel seemingly elevates “real” Indians for having accepted their fate, suggesting that the “Injin” protesters could gain nobility by similarly resigning themselves to the loss of their lands and their traditions of communal self-governance. But here, as Hall models, you don’t have to be resigned: a judicious self-subordination to the rule of law guarantees the rights and protections of liberal white citizenship within an increasingly powerful state.

Capitalism’s Formalisms and Democratic Memory Though Hall’s speech can sound to modern ears as though he is simply mouthing the position of landlords in his defense of contract and thus serving as Cooper’s mouthpiece in his supposed advocacy for pro-rent, he advocates for a view more forcefully modern and liberal than the landlords’, and indeed advocates for the emerging trends that contributed to the landlords’ as well as to the tenants’ downfalls. Hall’s speech heralds the transition of property-holding from a political status to capitalist entrepreneurship, which marks quite literally the place where the sovereignty of a law that serves the interests of capital is established: it is this sovereignty he celebrates before his tenant peers. And this is where he distinctively parts ways from men like the fictional Littlepages and the actual Livingstons. Despite the landlords’ liberal promotion of commercialism and their accompanying capitalist confidence that they could find refuge from change in capitalism’s contractual modernity, in this specific instance they were clinging to an outdated notion of property. To use Morton Horwitz’s deft phrasing, the Littlepages vociferate about contract in order to cling to a “static agrarian conception” of land “entitling an owner to undisturbed enjoyment,” whereas the new entrepreneurial classes vaunted contract as a way of mobilizing a “dynamic, instrumental and more abstract view of property that emphasized the newly paramount virtues of productive use and enjoyment” (30). The most radical tenants and the landlords united, then, in their pre-capitalist understanding of the land, their definition of property as an importantly political and not simply an economic status. Hall represents the newer, capitalist view of land, and the culmination of a historical stage where the economy was shielded from the political power of the democratic majority by the simultaneous divorce of land from its political status and the downsizing

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of citizenship (“universalizing” the vote even while shrinking democratic power’s purview). This is not to say that Hall’s personal interests would triumph, but that this understanding of property as a capitalist and not a political entity would. This particular triumph has important entailments for how we remember debates about democracy and its possibilities in the early nation. The nation’s commitment to developing capitalist power at the direct expense of democratic power hardened in this era, and it did so in ways that are difficult to conceptualize—let alone historically remember—with precision. It’s hard to remember alternatives because the casting of this formal separation of property from political status through universal suffrage is historically understood as an already accomplished and democratic good. This casting occludes from view those arguments that depended on this prior link, and which held out for a far more substantive notion of democratic equality (access) than simple equality before the law (opportunity). The law hardened in this period as well, contributing to our misremembering of this formulation, “equality before the law,” as an apolitical and not a political position. Horwitz describes this transition in the early nation: Law, once conceived of as a protective, regulative, paternalist, and, above all, a paramount expression of the moral sense of the community, had come to be thought of as facilitative of individual desires and as simply reflective of the existing organization of economic and political power . . . The rise of legal formalism can be fully correlated with the attainment of these substantive legal changes . . . There were, in short, major advantages in creating an intellectual system which gave common law rules the appearance of being self-contained, apolitical, and inexorable, and which, by making “legal reasoning seem like mathematics,” conveyed an air . . . [of] inevitability about legal decisions. (254) By establishing its putatively scientific basis, legal thinkers worked to make the law the only objective agent within the post-Revolutionary realm. And the clearest reason for this, according to Horwitz, “is that the attempt to place law under the banner of ‘science’ was designed to separate politics from law, subjectivity from objectivity, and laymen’s reasoning from professional reasoning” (257). In this transition to legal formalism, then, what was articulated as objective, apolitical, and purely legal was the market regime the newly configured Common Law was designed to

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protect, the very market regime that eventually brought about the manorial downfall of the landlords, strangled the political aspirations of the yeoman classes, and continues hindering our ability fully to remember, comprehend, and appreciate the struggles over democratic sovereignty and scope evidenced in the early nation. Cooper’s forgotten Littlepage trilogy challenges contemporary readers to make this attempt.

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Conclusion: “Those Wayward, Multitudinous People”

Cooper might have named the final installment of his Littlepage trilogy The Redskins because it was easier for him to decide who counted as Indian than it was for him to resolve the most central problem for this novel’s political theory: who counts as the People (“The People” being the novel’s more proper title). The anti-renters assert their sovereign powers legally and extralegally throughout the novel. The aristocratic narrator Hugh amply pronounces on his neighbors’ upstart notions. And, as is usual for Cooper, the protesters get plenty of opportunities to reply. For instance, late in the novel the community holds a public meeting to deliberate whether the Littlepage family should be able to continue aristocratic pretensions like placing a canopy over the family pew in the meetinghouse. A delegate presents the people’s resolutions to Hugh Littlepage, who refuses to accept the document. The man is astonished and asks whether he is “to tell the people you refuse even to read their resolutions” (359). Hugh replies: I know of no people, except in a legal sense, and under the limited powers that they exercise by law. As for this new power, which is rising up in the country, and has the impudence to call itself the people, though composed of little knots of men got together by management, and practised on by falsehood, it has neither my respect nor dread . . . If you will ask me, respectfully, as if you were soliciting a favor instead of demanding a right, to read the contents of the paper you hold in your hand, I may be willing to comply. What I object to is a handful of men, getting together, setting themselves up as the people,

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pretending to authority in that capacity, and claiming a right to force their notions on other folks. (359–60) Perhaps Hugh’s youth, his Federalist upbringing, and his five years abroad lead him to believe the invocation of the people’s sovereignty is a “new power” in the United States. But Cooper knows differently, and so, at this point, do readers of my book. Hugh’s standoff with the protestors sounds a bit like Captain Farrago expostulating with crowds of people in Modern Chivalry, with the difference that Hugh has far less sense of play and pleasure in this battle—still ongoing into the 1840s as the staging of actions like the Dorr Rebellion and the Anti-rent Wars attest—to define the People, the reach of their sovereignty, and the scope of terms like “democracy,” “equality,” and “liberty.” Hugh responds to his community’s assertions of popular sovereignty by invoking the Constitution’s law: “I know of no people, except in a legal sense.” The back and forth in this scene recapitulates what William Connolly has called the “paradox of politics,” the chicken and egg dilemma at the heart of democratic practice. Glossing Rousseau’s “paradox of founding,” Connolly observes that “for a general will to be brought into being, effect (social spirit) would have to become cause, and cause (good laws) would have to become effect. The problem is how to establish either condition without the previous attainment of the other upon which it depends” (138). What comes first: good laws or good people? Hugh Littlepage views popular sovereignty as outside the bounds of democracy, calling the self-assembled people of his community “unlawful.” Those people accuse him of denying democracy’s treasured principle of majority rule, insisting that the sovereign people should not uphold bad law. Both sides insist that the challenge to democratic legitimacy comes from the opposing side and that their own side only can be in the right. Hugh holds up the law as purely self-legitimating; the anti-rent protesters hold up popular decision-making as the only true reflection of the will of the people. Neither side gets it right (which might structurally be what produces Cooper’s irresolute ending to the novel). As political theorist Bonnie Honig neatly encapsulates this point in her discussion of Connolly’s paradox, “The paradox of politics is not a paradox of founding, a problem only at a regime’s beginning, but rather a problem of everyday political practice in which citizens and subjects try to distinguish general will from the will of all without knowing, for sure, whether they have got it right (or whether it has got them right)” (3). The law created in the name of the People (law rule) can never fully be in every citizen’s interest or consented to by every citizen: it inevitably substitutes particular for

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general will. And just so for popular sovereignty (self-rule). No better than formal law can it serve as a full and pure representation of the will of the people: as Honig summarizes here, “Popular sovereignty is always haunted by heteronomy” (20). Honig’s summary echoes Brackenridge’s advocacy for a form of democratic practice that could apprehend and thrive on the tensions generated between the centripetal drive of representative government and the centrifugal energy of local practices in the democratic commons. Rather than splitting and opposing these two claimants on democratic legitimacy, giving absolute priority to either formal government or the people’s self-governing, Brackenridge argued that the paradox of politics, this fluid back and forth contest between formal law and the vernacular practices of the democratic commons, is precisely the contest, or better, the dynamic, that generates democratic power. I’ll return to Brackenridge’s political theory below. More practically, Brackenridge understood that what the Framers attempted to “tame” and the Federalists demonized as mobs was in fact the friendly culture within which the nation’s democracy could take root and flourish. Brackenridge saw commons democracy and its daily exercises of political negotiation as an important resource for the new country’s project of self-governance. He insisted that this heritage of vernacular democracy should be nurtured and balanced with the aims of formal, representative constitutionalism rather than repressed, constrained, and abjured, and that only by constantly accepting the challenge to find ways to straddle the tensions between these two forces, centripetal and centrifugal, could we as a people come closer to true, rather than mere, democracy. He understood that a democracy of laws alone would exclude to its detriment the disruptive and dynamic energies of the people acting, however locally and irrationally, in common. Hannah Arendt argued in On Revolution that the success of the American democratic revolution came exactly because of the revolutionary practice of local democratic self-rule, a practice grounded in the daily exercise of self-generating powers among ordinary people. She argues that the Framers’ mistake was “that they took this spirit for granted because it was a spirit which had been formed and nourished throughout the colonial period. Since, moreover, the people remained in undisturbed possession of those institutions which had been the breeding grounds of the revolution, they could hardly become aware of the fateful failure of the Constitution to incorporate and duly constitute, found anew, the original sources of their power and public happiness” (239). Arendt, like Brackenridge, understood that while the machinery of government could save the nation from the tyranny and instability that vernacular practice

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can produce, “this machinery could not save the people from the lethargy and inattention to public business, since the Constitution itself provided a public space only for the representatives of the people, and not for the people themselves” (238). As Arendt observes, the practice of commons democracy informed colonial and early U.S. experience for decades at the ground level. In shaping Federal government, the Framers saw this abundant, overflowing democratic energy as a problem—“those wayward, multitudinous people . . . on whom everything democratic depends, but by whom everything democratic is threatened” (Honig, 27). And indeed, our consensus narrative has represented ordinary citizens in the new nation, buoyed by their daily practices of democratic self-rule, as, at best, youthful hindrances and, at worst, anarchic and primitive threats to the peaceful development of a civilized democratic practice. The point that Brackenridge and Arendt make, however, is one we should not miss: that the vernacular, daily ordinariness of commons democracy was neither an obstacle to the cultivation of the Framers’ liberal, representative democracy nor a misunderstanding of it. Rather, it was the cultural, practiced ground on which the United States’ fabled democracy took root and held. As such, both its legacy and its lessons for democratic practice in the United States are vital.

Recovering the Legacy of the Commons for U.S. Democracy Democratic revolutions sometimes succeed. Just as easily—as we have seen repeatedly in our own day—they fail. Democratic governments vary widely, comparatively, and internally over time in the democratic results they actually achieve. Since the ratification of the Federal Constitution, the United States has insistently located democracy in its institutions of government. But as political (anti)theorist C. Douglas Lummis observes, we don’t mistake peace treaties for actual peace. Institutions can be more and less democratic but can never on their own guarantee democratic outcomes. All of this means that democracy, here or elsewhere, should never be taken for granted just because we think we have durable structures in place. We live in an era of political “realism,” a governing wisdom that teaches us not to bemoan but to accept as “human nature” the fact that most people do not want to involve themselves in the daily work of political government. For that reason, it’s good, the argument goes, to depend on our institutions for democratic continuity. But as this book has insisted,

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the Framers faced a problem that gives the lie to the supposed bedrock “truth” of political realists. In their aim to “tame” democracy, the Framers undertook institutionally to limit and redirect ordinary citizens’ enthusiasm for the daily work of political self-governing. As the political novels in this study demonstrate, the daily practices of commons democracy generated enthusiasms and energies that took decades to quell both inside and beyond the edges of the nation. The robust practices and expectations of vernacular democracy fueled citizen thinking and action (and settler peregrination) well into the mid-nineteenth century. But we’ve lost our ability to appreciate these actions and ideas as valuable political contributions to the United States’ democratic history. This book has tried to suggest what we gain by remembering. In particular, I have suggested that we pay attention to the historical legacies of European and American enclosure, considering not just what Britain, colonial America, and the United States might have lost in that long historical drive, but also what has been retained. I’ve argued that poorer, common immigrants from Europe brought with them local traditions of self-governing and communal resource allocation that they learned in their various levels of association with the culture of the commons, traditions they nurtured, generalized, and expanded in the American colonies. Practices of commoning, what legal historian Stuart Banner describes as a third form of ownership (ownership in common as an alternative to the two predominant forms in our culture today, private and public holdings), offer participants vital access not just to resources but to a meaningful form of participation in self-governing. This selfgoverning neither aims at nor requires state organization and administration. Instead, its ownership remains collectively in the local community. At the same time, it is not necessarily incompatible with state-based democratic institutions of government. My point is that these traditions of communal self-governance gave ordinary citizens both a daily practice and an ongoing investment in the hard work of resource production and allocation, in what we could call, following Thomas Princen, the ethics of sufficiency. I’ve already made this point but it’s worth repeating: though commoning can sometimes be distributive (of goods and access to land), it is always productive in that it produces tangible and non-tangible communal good—like stories, or knowledge about local remedies, and (importantly) practice in the labor of communal self-determination. In this sense, recovering and developing practices of commoning can produce a tangible good. Commoning cultivates energies that can be invested in multiple directions, aimed perhaps at revitalizing practices of state-

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organized democracy but certainly not limited to that single direction or purpose. While I have argued that commons democracy offers both an important historical legacy that we should study more carefully as well as some valuable possibilities for democratic revitalization today, I have urged at many points against idealizing it as a stand-alone political alternative to formal democratic government, drawing on both social science and political theory to make my arguments. I’m sure it’s obvious to readers that I’m persuaded by Brackenridge’s advocacy for “the middle way,” or what in our own lifetime Elinor Ostrom advocated for as nesting, multiple scales for self-government that can balance and overcome local tyrannies, providing the state with the input that wise administration needs from local actors while protecting those actors from mistakes and mismanagement produced by bureaucratic ignorance. Ostrom’s advocacy is structural: her teams’ empirical studies have documented over and over that commons administration schemes are more likely to succeed with robust interplay between local, state, regional, and federal collectives. Interestingly, her polycentric model contests the design of the Federal Constitution, which basically designated the state as the scale of the “local,” which is far too remote to capture the vernacular wisdom generated at levels genuinely local. She invites government leaders to recognize local communities of actors as fundamental to the success of any resource management or government scheme. Related in spirit to Ostrom’s practical arguments, Bonnie Honig’s advocacy for embracing the “paradox of politics” (the “fundamental problem of democracy in which power must rest with the people but the people are never so fully who they need to be . . . that they can be counted upon to exercise their power democratically,” xvi) provides us with a way to appreciate rather than abjure the apparent standoff staked by the Framers between the sovereign law and the sovereign people. The Constitution pretends to resolve the very standoff it stakes once and for all at its outset, where the fictive people, “in order to achieve a more perfect union,” give their sovereignty away to government, a gift they’re invited ritually to repeat each Election Day (here we might plausibly observe that the Constitution opens with a gambit for enclosure). It’s conceivable that the Constitution’s claiming of full democratic legitimacy for the institutions of government invited parallel claims from its newly self-discovered opponents: both Federalist advocates for the sovereignty of the law and antiFederalist advocates for the sovereignty of the people argue for the purity of their side and wield that supposed purity to delegitimate the other— precisely the ongoing drama Cooper records in The Redskins. Honig, like

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Brackenridge, urges us to see that there is no such purity in democratic politics, and (again like Brackenridge) she argues that we might usefully and productively relinquish purity as an ideal. As she puts it, “If the paradox of politics is real and enduring, then a democratic politics would do well to replace its faith in a pure general will with an acceptance of its impurity and an embrace of the perpetuity of political contestation made necessary by that impurity” (38), where the constant tension generated between the people as a unity and a multitude “is not just a danger for democratic politics but also a resource” (xvii). Honig, like Brackenridge, invites us to welcome the ongoing messiness and danger, the dynamic and always “unfinished business” of democracy. As I mentioned at the start, the ordinariness or dailiness of politics in the commons contrasts badly to the grandeur of the formal institutions of government. And it’s not just ordinary citizens who have learned to associate democracy (for better and for worse) with the institutions of representation and state power. My friend Melissa Orlie once quipped in a seminar that “we are probably too enthralled by spectacles of sovereignty.” She elaborated that political theory is overly invested in the forms of power that comes from the top, that we academic intellectuals focus on top-down spectacles of power in ways that lead us to overlook all the power that emerges, haphazardly and unpredictably, and nevertheless transformatively, from ordinary actors at the bottom or in the middle of the heap. The negative contrast of disorderly vernacular democracy with the nation’s formal representative institutions has kept many of us looking away from it when we think about political change and democratic revitalization: as Brackenridge realized, it would take real patience and a good sense of humor to cultivate a more tolerant orientation toward commons democracy. It’s also the case, as I indicate in the last chapter, that liberalism and its legal formalism encourages us not to see the “wayward, multitudinous people” as a resource for democratic practice either in history or today. Here “the people” are, by and large, ordinary, ignorant human beings. From this perspective, liberal democratic institutions discern and represent their proper interests to their benefit without expecting or even wanting them to become involved with the project of government. As Margaret Canovan frames this point, liberal democracy takes its ethical legitimacy from the putative sovereign power of the people but in practice conceptualizes that sovereignty as a danger: constitutional liberalism, “associated with individual freedom as well as unequal property, is thought of as essentially opposed to popular power, which is associated . . . with mob rule and the tyranny of the majority. And since ‘the people’ are ap-

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parently on one side while freedom, rights and civilization are on the other, modern democracy has on this view only been made possible by drastically curbing popular access to politics” (85). For liberalism in practice, “the people” become modern democracy’s third rail: they provide power to the state, which for safety’s sake must be fully or almost fully insulated from direct contact with them. And it is here where liberalism’s putatively foundational democratic equality between the governing and the governed begins to fall apart. As Canovan summarizes of liberalism’s practice of egalitarianism, because its “goals are to be achieved progressively, some groups are always further ahead than others; more enlightened, more liberated, more able to show the way to laggards. Despite its mission to all people, liberalism’s belief in progress cannot avoid devaluing the existing culture, values and way of life of most of the people to whom it is addressed” and on whose behalf it claims to govern (86–87). Embracing the unfinished business of democracy and its paradox of politics by building a strong role for more vernacular democratic practices would mean relinquishing our penchant of associating democracy with the unity and grandeur so powerfully evoked in the white marble architecture of representative state government, or the formal contours and clean outcomes we associate with “proper” political deliberation, or the wisdom of experts and administrators who joke about the stupidity of voters as they design laws that putatively benefit them. It might mean a new appreciation for the commonness, the daily ordinariness, haphazardness, and the often productive irrationalities and misrepresentations of democratic politics among ordinary and perhaps not “fully informed” and even “stupid” citizens. With that exercise we might also develop an enhanced tolerance and perhaps even appreciation for the political contributions of ordinary actors to the larger democratic commonweal. In this vein, Honig urges that we give up “the binary of ordinary–extraordinary,” asking readers to imagine a sovereignty that “looks more contestable than in Schmitt and Agamben, more democratic, more fraught, more fragile,” and one that is produced not just by representative leaders but also by citizens, where sovereignty is not located in one side or the other but is produced by the interplay between active citizens and their nominal leaders (even when those leaders are acting “unilaterally”) (197; see also Chapter 4 passim). This is exactly the democracy Brackenridge encouraged his readers to imagine—one more fraught and fragile, but something that had a better chance of remaining vital and engaging, more flexibly responsive to conditions on the ground and yet tempered by the cooling distance from representative institutional structures at the

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top, a democracy that emerges productively between the key forces of institutions and people. Kirkland, along with Brackenridge, advocated for this “middle way”— appreciating what is produced in the commons and emphasizing the vital space for democratic engagement produced between the common and the formal, the vernacular and the official. Recovering the legacy of the commons for U.S. democracy could mean an expanded appreciation of democratic practices that do not take the state as their aim, an enhanced role for ordinary actors in the work of local, regional, state, and national self-governing, and an enlivening of our awareness of the productive space that is produced between “law rule” and “self-rule.” It could also lead to a practical reinvestment in what Banner highlights as that forgotten category of common ownership. Commons ownership (as Kirkland recognized) marks a distinct alternative to private ownership (the forces of the market) and public ownership (associated with state power). This third category of ownership-in-common challenges the habit of seeing the market and government as either tightly paired actors or strictly contending forces, where either markets or government administration are the only answer, and political parties contend in rigidly fixed positions for market cures or governmentally administrated solutions. This third category takes us, perhaps, as the authors of “In Defense of Property” suggest, from ownership to stewardship. As Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley observe, classic, liberal “ownership theory tends to overlook the possibility of nonowners exercising custodial duties . . . both as a matter of internal community values that emphasize collective obligations to land and resources, and as a matter of practical necessity” (1028). They advocate for taking indigenous notions of ownership more seriously and argue that stewardship, “whether rooted in indigenous, corporate, or environmental sources . . . extends beyond the traditional ownership model. The stewardship concept . . . embodies a notion of mutual trusteeship . . . and a sense of shared responsibility” (1078). Importantly, then, as Carpenter, Katyal, and Riley suggest, ownershipin-common has to do not only with regimes of possession, but also with the kinds of subjecthood that can be fostered within particular regimes (this is something Kirkland’s story emphasized). The political subjectivity of the commons challenges what we tend to think of as a pitted opposition between the individualism undergirded by markets and private property, and the socialism of large government redistribution schemes. Just as Banner asks us to think about how the commons structures a third form of ownership, Orlie invites us to contemplate the possibilities of this

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overlooked form of subjecthood, generated by forces other than those structured within the framework of liberal democracy, a subjecthood which aim at modes of political and economic self-empowerment that emphasize collaboration over competition and/or sovereignty. The writers I’ve studied in this book understood that by the midnineteenth century these more radical understandings and subjectivities of democratic practice were being officially discouraged and representationally contained. Though the spirit and legacy of the commons can be powerfully obscured, persuasively represented as a danger rather than a resource, it’s important to remember that these energies and ideals were never eliminated. Even in the great era of enclosure in the western United States in the late nineteenth century, it was possible to see the legacy of commons or vernacular democracy in such divergent phenomena as the ghost dance and the farmers’ cooperative movement of the late century. Today, commons are proliferating, and thanks to such forces as the Internet, grassroots local activism, and the concentrated data collection and analysis of scholars associated with Elinor Ostrom, we are more and more able to recognize them as a growing force and to appreciate the values they produce. From the acequias of New Mexico and the Maine Lobster Fishery to time banks, seed share cooperatives, and worker-owned companies, from public libraries, food co-ops, and blood banks to opensource software, the Creative Commons, and Wikipedia, commons and our ability to participate in them are once again growing. And so we have an opportunity not just to embrace their apparent newness, as for instance in Internet communities and collaborations, and not just their ancient wisdom, as a form of communal self-managing that goes back to the earliest days of human history: we can also take up the challenge of reclaiming their vital contributions to democracy in history, and taking those historical lessons into account today.

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Acknowledgments

This book has been a long labor of community, written over many years. It’s my good fortune to have so many to thank. First, to Vanderbilt University, which generously supports my research with an endowed position. I’ve been blessed with wonderful colleagues and administrators who’ve provided needed layers of support and collegiality for my work on this project: Nick Zeppos, Richard McCarty, Carolyn Dever, John Sloop, Jay Clayton, Mark Schoenfield, Michael Kreyling, Houston Baker, Vanessa Beasley, Colin Dayan, Lynn Enterline, Jen Fay, Gary Gerstle, Joni Hersch, Rick Hilles, Scott Juengel, Emily Nacol, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Cecelia Tichi, Mona Frederick, Sandra Bohn, Natalie Baggett, Donna Caplan, Sara Corbitt, Calista Doll, Margaret Quigley, and Janis May. Thanks as well to my many wonderful graduate and undergraduate students over the past decade here, who invigorate the Vanderbilt commons and actualize dividualism. I am so grateful—really more than I can say—to the brave and wonderful Vanderbilt participants in and visiting faculty to the Commons Seminar I team-taught with my adventuresome Earth and Environmental Sciences colleague, John Ayers, in 2012: Caroline Cecot, Leslie Duncan, Felipe Giron, Andy Hines, John Jacobi, Matt Owen, Luke Semrau, David Bollier, Peter Gleick, Lewis Hyde, Erik Reece, and Elinor Ostrom, whose sparkling wisdom and human being we were lucky to share in before she passed away that June. Thank you to the colleagues who have invited me to give talks from this book as I’ve developed my ideas, methods, and arguments over the years,

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184 / acknowled gments

and to the institutions that supported my visits, the English departments and American or Comparative studies programs at West Virginia University, Michigan State University, University of Texas, Penn State University, Notre Dame University, University of Florida, Macalester College, University of Kentucky, Purdue University, Ohio State University, and University of Nevada, Reno, and the ASPECT program at Virginia Tech, the Huntington Library, and the Dartmouth Futures Summer Institute. Thanks to good people and friends at those places and beyond who invited, read, and questioned hard: Stephen Arch, Hester Blum, Tina Chen, Jeff Clymer, James Cox, James Dawes, Andy Doolen, John Ernest, Sean Goudie, Glenn Hendler, Jen Hill, Coleman Hutchinson, David Kazanjian, David Leverenz, Wolfgang Natter, Don Pease, Stephen Rachman, Chris Reed, Ryan Schneider, Ivy Schweitzer, Barry Shank, Tim Sweet, Betsy Taylor and Herb Reid, Rebecca Wanzo, Robyn Wiegman, Ivy Wilson, and finally to Aimé Ellis, who passed away much too soon. This book is better for the faculty and graduate students from the English department at Southern Methodist University, who invited me to give a weeklong summer seminar from my work at their branch facility in Taos. Their spirited discussions and challenges to my thinking deepened this project in ways I hope they’ll see reflected here: Darryl Dickson-Carr, Dennis Foster, Nina Schwarz and Steve Weisenburger, Kristina Booker, Chris Goldsmith, Megan Hinshaw, Geoff Hoppe, Carrie Johnston, Kari Nixon, Micah Robbins, Fred Siegmund, Bethany Williamson, and Charles Wuest. Thank you as well to colleagues who encouraged me to write essays for them that allowed me to experiment with early versions of my arguments here: Bob S. Levine and Caroline F. Lavender, and Brook Thomas. Thank you to my Democratic Vistas co-seminarians for stimulating summer conversations, especially Nick Bromell who convenes us, Liz Anker, Lawrie Balfour, Cristina Beltrán, Chris Castiglia, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Tom Dumm, Jason Frank, Robert Gooding-Williams, Bonnie Honig, Vincent William Lloyd, John McGowan, Lloyd Pratt, Melvin Rogers, Shirley Samuels, and George Shulman. Special thanks to one anonymous, thoughtful Press reader; to copanelists, historical/critical fellow travelers, and interlocutors Terry Bouton, Reeve Huston, and Mark Rifkin; to the women I think of as my Commons gal pals, who made this work fun and set me an impressively high standard—Joanna Brooks, Melissah Pawlikowski, and (again) Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (who also read this manuscript and gave me the encouragement I needed to tackle some of its harder issues); to my longtime collaborator Russ Castronovo, with whom I always feel as though I am

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acknowled gments / 185

working even when we don’t have a project in the mixer; and to beloved friends who make life rich in so many directions, Amy Kaplan and Elisa Tamarkin. I’m beyond grateful for my best readers, Teresa Goddu and Dale Bauer, who generously argued, demanded, cajoled, and encouraged; and for my J19 co-editor and co-conspirator Chris Castiglia (already named once and impossible not to thank twice), who gave me more good advice on this book than I heeded. Thank you most especially to my editor Richard Morrison, with whom I’m so lucky to work and whom I’d follow to Timbuktu. Finally, my deepest gratitude to the family who offer unstinting support and give me such joy: Dee and Bob Arnold, Rick and Dee Hane, Scott Hane, Tristan Hane (and his friends Andrew Gibson and Nathan Williams, who make weekends around our house lots of fun and whose names I promised I’d put in my book), and—who could ignore them?— our nutty dog pack Caden, Sadie, and Mojo, endlessly, hilariously diverting. And best of all, thank you to my husband, F. Kirk Hane, who makes my circle just, makes me better, makes me end where I begun. This book is for Kirk.

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Notes

Commons Democracy: An Introduction 1. By “ordinary” I mean people of middling to poor means, who did not consider themselves by birth, education, or financial means to be “natural” rulers. 2. An important companion to my work in this respect is Bert Emerson’s forthcoming book, “Local Rules: The Vernacular Aesthetics and Alternative Democracies of Antebellum U.S. Print Culture,” which asks, “Can flabby, despised, small-scale literature— that is, ‘bad’ or ‘local’ literature—be good for [our study of] democracy?”

 / Telling Stories: Vernacular versus Formal Democracy 1. See, for instance, Kars, McConville, Richards, Cornell, Smith-Rosenberg, Holton (Unruly Americans), Bouton (Taming Democracy), Formisano, Fritz (American Sovereigns), Taylor, Edwards, Jacoby, and McDonnell. 2. See especially Richards, Holton, and Bouton. 3. As James L. Huston notes, it’s possible that this revolutionary alliance failed because “on the one hand, orators and writers commonly attested to a republic’s need for an egalitarian wealth distribution, but on the other hand these statements were seldom more than one or two sentences long” (6). There may have been a clear agreement, but the terms were so broad that separation at the level of detail was almost inevitable: “The discussion of the principles of the distribution of wealth contained much ambiguity that was directly attributable to the analysis being conducted in qualitative, verbal terminology. Certain terms, especially labor and property, were ill-defined and could be interpreted in radically divergent ways. Distribution of property is a subject that demands calculation and the application of simple mathematics. This analysis was never done” (60). 4. Even John Adams, known for his hostility to democratic forms of government in the early nation, argued in a May 26, 1776, letter to James Sullivan for the self-evidence of such ideas in a passage worth quoting at length: “Harrington has Shewn that Power

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188 / notes to pages 29–37 always follows Property. This I believe to be as infallible a Maxim, in Politicks, as, that Action and Re-action are equal, is in Mechanicks. Nay I believe We may advance one Step farther and affirm that the Ballance of Power in a Society accompanies the Ballance of Property in Land. The only possible Way then of preserving the Ballance of Power on the side of equal Liberty and public Virtue, is to make the Acquisition of Land easy to every Member of Society: to make a Division of the Land into Small Quantities, So that the Multitude may be possessed of landed Estates. If the Multitude is possessed of the Balance of real Estate, the Multitude will have the Ballance of Power, and in that Case the Multitude will take Care of the Liberty, Virtue and Interest of the Multitude in all acts of Government” (4:208–12). 5. Orlie intriguingly suggests that “sovereignty”—so durably associated with a notion of power wherein the strong state protects and guarantees individual “rights”— may not be the best name for this alternative. She develops this argument against Morgan’s contention that ordinary actors had no ability to imagine sovereignty: “There would have been no logical barrier to thinking of the people of every village as a sovereign body, but that is not what happened . . . The sovereignty of the people was not said to reside in the particular constituencies that chose the representatives, it resided in the people at large and reached the representatives without the people at large doing anything to confer it” (49). Orlie flags Morgan’s “misrecognition of the alternative” to national sovereignty, “namely that organized multitudes represent a competing conception of the political, an alternative to one sovereign body. Indeed, organized multitudes are antithetical to sovereignty . . . Colonists may have said little about sovereignty, not (as Morgan claims) because they recognize the king as its locus . . . but because their political practices opposed the conception of politics and power definitive of sovereignty” (118). Orlie concludes that “in our time, as we observe the growing inefficacy of the sovereign national state, a reconsideration of the inevitability of the sovereign conception of the political may have salutary effects” (118). This collapse of various forms of popular power into a single, catchall term, sovereignty, is a problem that has not much been taken up. Instead, political theorists of democracy have, without the precision of better terms to define what are arguably quite different categories, practices, and manifestations of democratic power, have been left to puzzle over whether sovereignty doesn’t ultimately compromise the ideal of democracy and its modern practices. Jennifer Greiman puts this investigation at the heart of her impressive study Democracy’s Spectacle. Studying manifestations of “sovereignty and public life” from the early to mid-nineteenth century, she asks, “Are sovereignty and democracy antithetical, or does is democracy dependent on sovereignty? Or, alternately, does democracy depend on a sovereignty that is nonetheless antithetical to it?” (7). Ultimately, Greiman argues that we must understand antebellum manifestations of popular sovereignty “as a sovereignty that both constituted and burdened the public sphere.” Her focus on how people enact democratic power is related to mine, but she emphasizes the theatrics of “belonging and exception” that take place in the nineteenth-century public sphere, the implicit and physical violences that often undergird its staging of inclusion and exclusion. In her compelling reading, key antebellum writers reveal how “public opinion comes to represent a key term in an experience of public life as both intimate and alienating, the place where political power could be regarded as abstract, external, and yet also strangely personal, intimate, even familiar” (17–18). I would simply note here that what Greiman postulates as a theoretical given for public enactments of democratic power is arguably the effect of the contests and historical transitions my book describes. This

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notes to pages 37–60 / 189 is an historical movement away from corporate sensibilities and practices, the people’s vernacular practices of commons democracy, and toward individual accommodations of “the people” to their modern Constitutional individual and national “sovereignty.” 6. Terms that echo, it’s worth noting, Edmund Burke’s resonant description, in his 1775 speech on reconciliation with the colonies, of American backwoodsmen settling the Appalachians as “English Tartars.” 7. See Banner, notes 13–17; see also, for example, Huston, Jacoby, Hahn and Prude, Brown, Danhof, Durrill, Hershock, King, Konig, and McWhiney and McDonald. 8. See, for instance, Innes, David Grayson Allen, and Lockridge. 9. Consider, for instance, Phillip B. Gonzales’s “Struggle for Survival,” in which he studies the legal entailments of ejidos, or communal grants to settlers by the Spanish Crown, which “placed ownership of the land in the hands of villagers,” a communal system of ownership still practiced in New Mexico towns, but one that has an antagonistic history past the U.S. annexation of Mexican territory in 1848 (297). See also Lisa Brooks’s reparative reading of Native texts, cultural practices, and history in The Common Pot, a book that, like mine, innovates archivally and methodologically in order to offer readers a history previously obfuscated by traditional methods and existing archives. 10. Hobbes’s conception likely informed George Washington’s description of ordinary farmers as the “grazing multitude” and his condemnation of such self-organizing political watchdog groups as the Democratic Republican societies in the early nation (see Bridgman, 576). Even such rare Framers who were notably friendly to ordinary peoples’ claims to self-governing power could at the same time be habitually dismissive, as when Jefferson describes his educational schemes in Virginia as designed so that “twenty of the best geniuses will be raked from the rubbish” (Notes, 146). 11. Pauline Maier helpfully defines “extralegal” practices as those which “served the community where no law existed, or intervened beyond what magistrates thought they could do officially to cope with a local problem” (5). 12. See also Hardt’s “Jefferson and Democracy” for an account of how the commons informed Jefferson’s democratic thinking.

 / Between Savagery and Civilization: The Whiskey Rebellion and a Democratic Middle Way 1. Gregory Nobles offers an examination of the incongruity of linking Shays and Shattuck—two men from different parts of Massachusetts who did not even know each other—as “leaders” of the Massachusetts Regulation. Their lack of acquaintance, let alone coordination, highlights the complexity of the event and, indeed, indicates why it should not be considered in the singular, as an event, but rather as a broad and linked series of events. As Nobles puts it, “It makes more sense, in fact, to see them as participants in parallel protest movements that arose at the same time, shared the same concerns, and contributed to a statewide, even national, sense of crisis in the still-unsettled society in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution.” Shays and Shattuck “began to appear on the same pages of history,” Nobles emphasizes, “only when their enemies put them there” (218). 2. While Washington officially attempted negotiation before ordering military suppression, his own description of his negotiating demands in his 1794 Annual Address to Congress suggests the structural imbalance of the Executive’s representative respon-

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190 / notes to pages 60–7 8 sibilities to the People: “My proclamation of the 7th of August last was accordingly issued, and accompanied by the appointment of commissioners, who were charged to repair to the scene of insurrection. They were authorized to confer with any bodies of men or individuals. They were instructed to be candid and explicit in stating the sensations which had been excited in the Executive, and his earnest wish to avoid a resort to coercion; to represent, however, that, without submission, coercions must be the resort; but to invite them, at the same time, to return to the demeanor of faithful citizens, by such accommodations as lay within the sphere of Executive power” (889–90). 3. See Terry Bouton’s intriguingly different argument about Findley’s book in his essay “William Findley, David Bradford, and the Pennsylvania Regulation of 1794.” In Bouton’s account, Findley book effaces his long involvement in radical democratic reform in Pennsylvania. Bouton criticizes Findley for denying “any connection between resistance efforts and the kind of reform he was trying to achieve. As he framed it, the 1794 protest was only about a whiskey tax . . . [and] not about ideology or the threats that Federalist policies posed to democracy and equality” (248). Bouton concludes that Findley’s book actually works to compound “the distortion of ‘history as written by the winners’ ” in this event (249). 4. As Findley concludes his narrative, “I have suggested oftener than once, that the head of the revenue department conducted the execution of the law in the western district, in a manner that was calculated to promote the event that happened. To support a suggestion of this nature, positive proof cannot be obtained; to me, however, it appears better established than could reasonably have been expected” (312). 5. In one of the best recent articles on Modern Chivalry, Grantland Rice positions Brackenridge’s novel among contemporary writings by Fisher Ames, Benjamin Franklin, and Charles Brockden Brown, to specify his focus in Brackenridge’s skepticism about print culture: “What makes . . . [Brackenridge’s] critique of the tyranny of print consensus different from Ames’s . . . is the way in which he deployed the mixed didacticism and sensationalism of prose fiction in an effort to scrutinize and demystify the nation’s uncritical faith in print” (261). See also Barry K. Grant, who argues that the novel offers a “remarkable panorama of life in the exuberant democracy of the early American frontier” (1). 6. I use the Newlin reprint for citations throughout, since Ed White’s reprint relies on an edition that omits fifty pages of text that I quote in my analysis. 7. The narrator makes a similar point with regard to Hamilton’s scheme for war bond redemption. Here, the narrator charges that government operated more with a view to advantage commercial power than “common industry,” producing an injustice against the public (since Hamilton’s bond scheme was designed to benefit the few— wealthy speculators—at the direct expense of that public). See Vol. I, Bk. 3, 1793 ed., especially pp. 221–23. 8. See Lefort, “The Question of Democracy,” 17–20 and passim, and “The Permanence of the Theological–Political?” 225. 9. Robert Hemenway notes this feature of the novel, but argues that Brackenridge forwards it either inadvertently or caustically: “Paradoxically, it is only by forgetting to be reasonable that Brackenridge’s advocate of reason, Captain Farrago, is able to effect change. Although obviously Brackenridge did not intend it, Modern Chivalry documents the efficacy of non-reason in dealing with a world where the unexplainable, irrational act can be successfully posed. The novel argues, despairingly, that the democratic process usually supports the non-rational solution to political problems” (93).

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notes to pages 81–89 / 191 10. Emory Elliott offers perhaps the best discussion of the difficulties that come in attempting to disentangle the narrator’s views from Farrago’s (and indeed, Brackenridge’s). As he notes, “Although closer in viewpoint to Brackenridge than Farrago, the narrator does not always speak for Brackenridge either. Especially in the early books, Brackenridge often used the narrator ironically by having him address the audience about some issue with apparent innocence, when it is clear that Brackenridge himself held opposite opinions” (183). 11. This theory allows us insight into the novel’s bracketing of representation as a form of management, an argument that has sinister overtones, promising, as it seems, to manage democratic agency on behalf of those less qualified. The novel first seems to present it that way, for it is precisely by this mode that Farrago undertakes his control over Teague’s career: “The Captain, finding that it answered no end to dispute the mater with him, by words of sense and reason, took a contrary way to manage him” (25). In the opening chapters, Farrago repeatedly displays his willingness to mislead Teague in order to accomplish his own selfish ends. But to conclude that Farrago’s behavior here is the limit of the novel’s intent I think is a mistake. Much later in the novel, the narrator re-summarizes this argument: “There is nothing so difficult as to manage the public mind. It must be done by the lever, or the screw, or by other mechanical power; to speak figuratively, and not by direct force” (602)—by, we might say, indirection. At this point Farrago has helped Teague leave his service, he has relinquished control of his career, and while he does not see Teague as an equal in terms of expertise, readers have seen him repeatedly treat Teague as a civic equal. For that reason, it makes more sense to take seriously the metaphor of indirection that the narrator posits. Modern Chivalry has throughout insisted on the value of proliferating modes of representation because of what their proliferation offers for balancing, for holding open the space of the democratic paradox for careful deliberation. In this sense, “management” seems to be a cognate for the expanded notion of representation the novel proposes.

 / The Privatizing State: The Pioneers and the Closing of the Legal Commons 1. And, as Pawlikowski notes, despite their frequent anti-tax sentiment, squatter communities sometimes even made constitutional provisions for collecting quitrents. “Guardians,” 19. 2. See the introduction of this present volume for an elaboration of Hardin’s famous thesis. 3. As Joanna Brooks has recently summarized the scholarship on poorer white immigrants to the colonies, “Nearly three quarters of us who came to British North America during its first two centuries came in some state of unfreedom: whether as slaves, indentured servants, convicts or redemptioners” (36). See also Young, American Revolution; Bouton, Taming Democracy; Holton, Forced Founders; McDonnell; and Jordan and Walsh. 4. While venison was less prized than in England for its abundance, it had a strong association with aristocratic privilege, thanks to Britain’s game laws that for centuries had dictated that only men of wealth were privileged to hunt deer. As Lund notes of England, “Deaf to the plea that game might nourish the poor, Parliament instead applied the resource to enhance the already abundant perquisites of rank. In their

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192 / notes to pages 89–94 consummate form, the English game laws ensure that the poor could neither consume game, nor interfere with the beasts that ravaged their crops” (19). Perelman argues that game laws colluded with enclosure to turn most of England’s lower classes into factory/ wage labor. 5. As Lund tells us, “Because most game animals were spread out over rural and wild lands [in colonial British America], many hunters were needed to exploit the resource efficiently. But hunting was so arduous and dangerous and the returns were so small that only those without other prospects were willing to devote their energies exclusively to hunting. The rest of America’s hunters had to come from the ranks of farmers, woodcutters, and such when they had free periods in the seasonal rhythm of their work, or when they serendipitously chanced upon wildlife” (20). 6. As Lund outlines it, in the American colonies, had “American lawmakers considered game to be the property of the owner of the land on which it was found, landowner interests might have impeded the development of legal doctrines that facilitated free taking. Instead, each of the preemptive rights of landowners was rejected in favor of free taking” (20–21). 7. Later Temple himself will draw exactly this point as he recounts for his daughter the early years of his development plan, commenting on the painful scarcity of provisions for his settlement, a scarcity driven by inflation in Europe and the greed of speculators: “Even at that moment, the restless spirit of emigration was not idle; nay, the general scarcity which extended to the east, tended to increase the number of adventurers” (235). 8. Hugh MacDougall documents that “a Law of March 15, 1788 (11 Session Laws, Ch. 82) prohibited the killing of deer [in Otsego County] from January through July . . . The first New York closed deer hunting season dates from 1705. . . . The 3 pound fine, set in 1788, had been reduced from a previous 5 points set in 1769” (5). Factually speaking, then, such laws were not being imposed for the first time in this area of New York in the period when The Pioneers is set, though whether they had been evenly enforced in the backcountry is another question altogether. 9. I’m thinking here especially of John P. McWilliams’ sensitive and careful reading of Cooper in moments like the following: “We find that Cooper’s characterization of Natty Bumppo exactly corresponds to Locke’s definition of the just man in a State of Nature. Judge Temple, however, exactly corresponds to Cooper’s definition of the just man in a State of Civilization. The Pioneers records the evolution of the one state into the other. To Cooper, Natty’s values are neither better nor worse than the judge’s; they simply do not apply to the Templeton of 1793” (102). 10. Thomas shows how Cooper’s depiction of law in the novel, influenced by Jacksonianism’s simultaneous embrace of market capitalism and its nostalgia for the simple agrarian life made increasingly impossible by capitalism, works to normalize a legal order (the judge’s) that leads to less, rather than more, freedom for the laboring classes it wanted to support. He summarizes: “Too often lovers of democracy, who are convinced by works like Cooper’s that the loss of freedom is the cost of civilization, have a tendency to neglect the possibility of increasing human freedom within civilization . . . If Cooper admits a disparity between what the law stands for and its execution, that disparity is more tolerable once we believe that pure freedom can exist only outside society” (110). 11. In this sense, Natty’s political battle echoes that of many of the “lower orders” in the late colonies and early nation, like the North Carolina Regulators, the western

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notes to pages 94–103 / 193 farmers involved in Whiskey Rebellion, Fries’s Rebellion, and in other local rebellions and actions related to protests against government policies. See Slaughter, Holton (Unruly Americans), Kars, Bouton (Taming Democracy), and McConnville, for example. 12. Doolen’s explication of the novel’s treatment of black characters is worth reading in its entirety. For a fascinating reading of the normalization of violence in local and federal U.S. law and culture, see Lockard. 13. As such, Natty has been interpreted as the voice of “nature” against the forces of “civilization.” Thus critics have long read the novel as regretfully or ambivalently accepting deforestation and species extinction as the price of social and economic modernization. John Kandl’s arguments about Cooper’s “ambivalence” exemplify this critical tradition: “Throughout the novel, Cooper operates in the throes of two irreconcilable forces, his love for the untamed wilderness—the ideal of the individual living in harmony with nature: and his love for frontier society—the ideal of society conquering and taming nature” (104). 14. As Temple explains to his daughter at the fish netting, “These fish, which thou seest lying in such piles before thee, and which, by to-morrow evening, will be rejected food on the meanest table in Templeton, are of a quality and flavour that, in other countries, would make them esteemed a luxury on the tables of princes or epicures” (262). He invokes, in other words, the very logic of the game laws that enclosed the “best” provisions for the tables of those who least needed access to their nutrient value. 15. It’s also worth noting that Natty and the judge view history from opposite sides of this fence. As Nancy C. Shour puts it, “The Judge’s rendition of the past makes no mention of the past to which Oliver will ultimately lay claim [a past that includes Natty and Indian John as well as Loyalist colonists]. Instead, the Judge’s ‘history’ of Otsego literally begins when he first laid eyes on his possession” (22; see 21–23 for her elaboration of this argument). 16. See Sellers and Horwitz. 17. Michael Goldman describes 1960s–70s conservation philosophy in terms that echo suggestively for the analysis I’m developing here: “The politically conservative camp of conservation biologists argued that blame for the wildfire of post–World War I ecosystemic destruction should be attributed to the selfishness of the people. Their call was, and still is, for replacing communal institutions (in which footloose people reign) with private ownership and stronger state interventions in order to reverse the actions of the world’s majority who blindly think they can have the freedom to overgraze, overconsume and overbreed. This is a political discourse with its roots in the predominant Anglo-American critique of community and common property, dating back to the fourteenth century: that the ‘sloth, idleness and misery’ of serfs in feudal England represented the biggest obstacle to the productivity of agriculture. Only through the enclosures of common land and the forced removal of serfs could vast swathes of communal landholdings be consolidated in to private holdings. The communal culture of shared land use was attacked on the basis of being ‘anti-progressive’ ” (“Introduction,” 24). As many historians have documented, common land was not what most yeoman-class colonists wanted. But their desire for land holding was much more restrained than was the land hunger of big speculators like George Washington and Judge Temple, and included an ongoing commitment to a variety of commons and common-good. 18. Douglas Buchholz terms Kirby a “semi-proletarian,” schematically positioning him in his Marxist–structuralist analysis of the novel. Buchholz’s reading is more sche-

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194 / notes to pages 103–35 matic and less historicist than mine, but we share an interest in the novel’s sociohistorical investments and its portrayal of political struggles relevant to residents of the early nation.

 / Settler Self-Governance: Democratic Politics on the Frontier 1. Like Girty, Matthew Elliot was an intercultural broker, though one who did not waiver in his loyalties either to the Shawnee (he was fluent in the language and his wife was Shawnee) or to the British, whom he served throughout his career as an Indian interpreter and agent. 2. See Calloway, “Neither White nor Red.” 3. Interestingly, his description of the squatter cabin—“a single story, raised upon blocks four feet from the ground . . . a mere shell” (138)—nicely summarizes what Pawlikowski more sympathetically describes as a North American creation, a blend of both European and Native American building traditions, and one ideally suited for the often peripatetic life of squatters: “The conscious choice squatters made to build with wood over more durable brick or stone, that would have yielded structures British squatters culturally had more familiarity with, is telling” (192–93). Advantageous to squatters precisely for the ease of quick construction (they could be communally built within a few days), log cabins also evidence the lack of value squatter communities placed in the accumulation of material goods: “Backcountry consumers considered most matter ephemeral and rebuilt their settlements without the physical trappings they deemed without long-term consequence” (196). 4. For an interesting discussion of the social contract in relation to the political practices of pirates, see Leeson. 5. Here is where I take exception to Sandra Zagarell’s wonderful analysis of the novel in her editor’s introduction to A New Home. Kirkland, by historical fact, and Clavers by my reading, does not help create an ethos of communal interdependence in the way Zagarell credits her with doing. Rather, that community and its values clearly pre-exist her arrival. That Kirkland at least partially assimilates to it and begins to appreciate its benefits—and has her narrator speak so carefully to its benefits—is to Kirkland’s credit. 6. Bethel Saler has noted that “federal efforts and those of private citizens to reform the lives and landscapes of Wisconsin Indian Peoples also paralleled and intersected with the cultural work of territorial development aimed at Euro-Americans—the older French trading communities as well as new immigrants from other states and European countries. The reorientation of the debt-based fur trade economy, for instance, around the annual treaty payments owed to Indian nations and their creditors helped facilitate a more global privileging of land-based wealth and of material objects over reciprocal relations” (119). 7. See, for instance, the work of Lori Merish, who argues that Kirkland “represents her Jacksonian neighbors’ carelessness and resistance to private ownership as an index of their uncultured psychological state” (107).

 / From Nothing to Start, into Being: The Anti-Rent Wars, the Indian Question, and the Triumph of Liberalism 1. For more on the Dorr Rebellion, see Fritz, American Sovereigns; Formisano; and Chaput. 2. Chainbearer, 2:77.

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notes to pages 135–4 1 / 195 3. The author’s preface in Redskins is clear about Cooper’s intentions: “This book closes the series of the Littlepage Manuscripts, which have been given to the world, as containing a fair account of the comparative sacrifices of time, money and labor, made respectively by the landlord and the tenants, on a New York estate . . . In this downward course, our picture embraces some of the proofs of that looseness of views on the subject of a certain species of property which is, in a degree perhaps, inseparable from the semi-barbarous condition of a new settlement; the gradation of the squatter, from him who merely makes his pitch to crop a few fields in passing, to him who carries on the business by wholesale; and last, though not least in this catalogue of marauders, the anti-renter” (3). There’s no mistaking citizen Cooper, either, in his condemnation of the anti-renters and his support for a hierarchically ordered, class-based society. As he puts it in his American Democrat (1838), “Equality of condition is incompatible with civilization, and it is found only to exist in those communities that are but slightly removed from the savage state.” He elaborates: “The rights of property being an indispensable condition of civilization, and its quiet possession every where guarantied, equality of condition is rendered impossible. One man must labor, while another may live luxuriously on his means; one has leisure and opportunity to cultivate his tastes, to increase his information, and to refine his habits, while another is compelled to toil, that he may live. One is reduced to serve while another commands, and, of course, there can be no equality in their social condition” (392, 394). He later emphasizes that “whoever employs, with the right to command, is the master; and whoever serves, with an obligation to obey, a servant . . . So far from republican institutions making any difference in this respect, in favor of him who serves, they increase the moral duty to be respectful and assiduous, since service in such a case, is not the result of political causes, but a matter of convention, or bargain” (423–24). While it’s clear then where Cooper stands as a political and economically interested citizen, as my readings of the novels will show, it’s not as clear where he stands as a literary author. In other words, novelist Cooper seems to muck things up a bit for citizen Cooper. 4. The Oxford English Dictionary cites two initial references for “trash” specifically designated “white” beginning in the 1830s: “1831 H. J. Finn Amer. Comic Ann. 88 ‘You be right dere,’ observed Sambo, ‘ . . . else what fur he go more ’mong niggers den de white trash?’ . . . 1833 F. A. Kemble Jrnl. 6 Jan. (1835) II. 112 The slaves themselves entertain the very highest contempt for white servants, whom they designate as ‘poor white trash.’ ” 5. This novel’s interest in lower orders is trained toward New York City’s black underclass, in a fairly elaborate description of its Pinkster festivals. 6. This estate is importantly located north of the Hudson River Valley, in Washington County, which allows Cooper to develop his plot in reference, without exactly owning up, to the complicated colonial legal history that backgrounds the Anti-rent Wars. 7. See the work of Reeve Huston, who observes that after the Revolution the continuance of the feudal estates was in severe political jeopardy. But during the 1780s, “patriot landlords and other members of the gentry united behind the conservative nationalist movement headed by Alexander Hamilton. In 1788, they passed a federal constitution that put strict limits on legislators’ ability to abridge the rights of property. Soon after, they regained control over their tenants’ votes. With these accomplishments, Federalist proprietors were well positioned to contain further challenges to their estates. Where a politically united gentry strengthened the leasehold against po-

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196 / notes to pages 14 1–61 litical challenge, western migration gave it new economic life. With war’s end, migrants began pouring out of New England” (13–14). 8. Humphrey notes, “In post-Revolutionary New York, officials and landlords did not need to imagine any connections between Hudson Valley insurgents and their counterparts in the Wyoming Valley, Vermont and Western Massachusetts. Insurgents and revolutionaries such as Ethan Allen and Thomas Young had moved through these regions during the Revolutionary War, spreading anti-authoritarianism and antilandlordism as they went” (128). 9. It seems historically that at least for some accepting the original lease, the terms of rent past the initial grace period for development were not even made clear until tenants returned seven years later to claim their lease terms. See Huston, 98. 10. See Horwitz, 4–19. Horwitz is less inclined to attribute intention to the generations of lawyers and judges who effected this enclosure than is Sellers, who calls lawyers the “shock troops of capitalism” (47). Horowitz studies the apparently “apolitical” if activist entailments of private law in the early nation, its de-commonalization of Common Law and its redistributive consequences, suggesting that “viewed retrospectively, one is tempted to see a Machiavellian hand in this process . . . The plan that the historian sees in retrospect, however, is not what the participants in this process saw. They were simply guided by the conception of efficiency prevailing at the moment” (34). 11. See also Wood, 233: “The oligarchs of 1688, defending the rights of Parliament against the crown, made their ‘revolution’ in the name of liberty. They were asserting their right, their freedom to dispose of their property—and their servants—at will against interference from the king. The property they were defending was already substantially capitalist, but the liberty the invoked to protect it, in a usage virtually synonymous with privilege, was rooted in pre-capitalist lordship. This takes us to the heart of the contradictions in ‘liberal democracy.’ What makes the story of modern democracy particularly interesting and problematic is that, at the very moment that the history of democracy of was being conflated with the history of lordship, lordship itself had already been displaced as the main form of domination . . . replaced not only by a centralized state but by a new form of private property, in which a purely economic power was separated out from juridical status and privilege.” 12. According to Neeson, as we saw in Chapter 1, eighteenth-century British critics of the commons similarly “loathed commoners with a xenophobic intensity” (32). Mordaunt soon compares the Thousandacres clan precisely to the self-deluding democratic multitude: “They had gained very little in the way of freedom, by throwing aside the trammels of regular and recognized law, to live under the rule of their patriarch. In this respect they might be likened to the masses, who, in a blind pursuit of liberty, impatiently cast away the legal and healthful restraints of society, to submit to the arbitrary, selfish, and ever unjust dictation of demagogues” (2:45). 13. Huston notes that “faced with chronic overuse of the commons and continuing conflicts over timber and wayward livestock, increasing numbers of estate residents began to question older visions of property rights that emphasized the ability of all local residents to take natural resources from unimproved land. These tenants took a significant step toward a vision of property that constructed natural resources as subject to exclusive use by those who held paper title to them” (55). 14. McCurdy suggests that the “long lull in ‘Indian resistance’ ” between 1841 and 1844 “brought an end to newspaper coverage of tenant activity,” allowing most New

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notes to pages 161–67 / 197 Yorkers “to assume that the problem had been resolved” (96). Thus the reemergence of “Indians” in 1844 may have been aimed as much at regaining attention through media as at local interventions. 15. For a survey of “Indian” fraternal sociality, see Huston, 188–219. 16. In Huston’s somewhat more generous summary, “The Indians helped their members cope with their subordinate and insecure status in their communities” (123). 17. Huston details the consequences of the killing of a deputy sheriff, Osman Steele: “The repression that followed the killing of Steele quickly outstripped anything that had preceded it. Sheriff More called together a posse of 500 men . . . troops and posses combed the anti-rent towns for suspects, using information from local spies to track down their quarry. In the process, they adopted something like the Indian’s tactics of intimidation . . . In Delaware County alone, almost 250 were indicted for murder, robbery, riot, or appearing armed and disguised; 84 were convicted . . . The effect on the leasehold towns of Delaware County was devastating; the impact on the Indians, permanent. ‘Whole neighborhoods’ were stripped of their young men, as those who were not arrested went into hiding or across the Pennsylvania border . . . Landlords quickly began dunning tenants, issuing eviction notices, and holding sheriff ’s sales” (149–50). 18. And though Cooper couldn’t have known what lay ahead, poor whites would be lured by successive Gold Rushes in California, Colorado, and the Dakotas. The Preemption and Homestead Acts (1841 and 1862), with their proffer of land-free-forthe-taking that pitted whites competitively against other whites, and together aggressively against Native Americans, were a master stroke of divide-and-conquer, attacking commoning traditions and practices at the ground level. Encroaching Federal policy combined with economic, political, and even environmental pressures as migratory whites and their grazing animals tramped across the delicate grassland ecosystem of the Great Plains. All these forces fueled the violent national drama of the United States’ western expansion and what anthropologist James Scott terms “state capture,” or we could think of as the preemption and enclosure of many self-determining commons, for Native Americans and also for whites (see Art of Not Being Governed). 19. Saler describes precisely such a Federal taming process for indigenous, French, and Anglo-European settlers in the Northwestern Territory in Settlers’ Empire. 20. Similarly, Erik J. Chaput has traced the hardening white supremacy politics of Thomas Dorr (an avowed abolitionist in the early 1840s) and the Rhode Islanders battling for popular sovereignty in the 1840s and ’50s. 21. See McCurdy, 207–12. 22. By the elliptical clues of his comments to Hugh, he here seemingly refers to the disappointment of the anti-renters in their supposed Whig champions. More generally, as McCurdy notes, “Anti-Rent activists took it for granted that [the landlords’] excessive claims grounded in rights of property and contract might be checked by democratic action . . . The Anti-Rent view, though attractive to some people even now, overestimated the promise of democracy in the ‘nineteenth-century polity of courts and parties’ ” (334). As he elaborates, “Most of the agents whom party machines selected and the voters elected—governors, legislators, judges, and members of the 1846 constitutional convention—were lawyers. Training and experience inclined them to take seriously the constitutional constraints that Anti-Rent leaders assailed as mere landlord talismans” (335).

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198 / notes to pages 169–7 1 23. In his careful history of the rise of market society in the Hudson River Valley, Martin Bruegel argues against its inevitability, documenting the often anti- and extramarket intentions that led individuals into the market economy. 24. The distinction is perhaps more clear if we examine Hugh’s early casting of contract’s equity, where landlords are the proprietors of rights that they contract out to tenants: “The tenant had no rights at all until he got his lease, and can have no rights which that lease does not confer” (33). 25. As Horwitz notes, though, “except for the identification of ‘science’ [in the midnineteenth century] with systematization and classification, however, there is no coherent content or methodology to be found in these persistent claims to the scientific character of the law” (257).

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Index

access, economic, 15–16, 21–23, 29, 51–52, 88, 90–91, 102, 133, 137, 148, 165, 171, 176, 180 Adams, John, 187–88 Adams, Willi Paul, 31–32 Addison, Alexander, 55 African Americans, 21, 88, 102, 166; and commoning, 11 Agamben, Giorgio, 180 agrarian radicalism, 164 Alabama, 16, 116–18, 120 Allen, Ethan, 138 American Philosophical Society, 68 American Revolution, 3, 8–9, 11, 19, 24, 26–30, 32–37, 42–43, 46–47, 51, 53, 56–59, 76, 85, 88, 92, 95–97, 109, 111–13, 115, 131–32, 137–42, 145, 149–53, 156–58, 171, 175–76, 187, 189, 191, 195–96 Anarchiad, The, 53, 67 anarchy, 13, 27–28, 30, 43, 53–55, 61–64, 67, 71, 78, 83, 176; as cooperation without state rule, 54–56; as political disorder, 52, 54, 97, 116, 122 anti-enclosure resistance, 42. See also Chapter 3 anti-monopoly, 81, 167 anti-rent, 23, 41, 133–36, 141–43, 150, 153, 157, 158–62, 164–69, 173–74, 194–95, 196;

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“Injins” and extralegal resistance, 135, 160–63, 165 archive, 8, 12, 44–45, 189 Arendt, Hannah, 36–37, 51, 175–76 Aron, Stephen, 109–10, 153, 199 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 13; and dialogic/ism, 13, 68 Banner, Stuart, 39–40, 171, 177, 181, 189 Baptist, Edward, 109–10, 147 Barlow, Joel, 53 Barter, 125, 127 betterment, 89, 91, 93, 100–1, 146; as “modernization,” and “economic development,” 88, 94; as modern rationalization, 91; as production of scarcity, 91–92, 102 Bird, Robert Montgomery, 19, 23, 107–8, 111–13, 115–16, 118–20, 123, 131–32; and Indian-hating, 111; Nick of the Woods, 23, 107–17 Bollier, David, 6, 183 Boone, Daniel, 109–10, 115 Boonesboro, Kentucky, 109 Bouton, Terry, 11, 20, 27, 42, 46, 187, 190–91, 193 Bronson, Orestes, 168

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214 / index Brackenridge, Hugh Henry, 22, 55, 58, 61, 64–73, 75–76, 78, 81–84, 131, 175–76, 178–79, 181, 190–91; Incidents of the Insurrection, 64–65, 67; Modern Chivalry, 22, 55, 65–83; political theory of, 68–83 Bradford, David, 57 Brown, Charles Brockden, 68 British Enclosure Acts, 5 Bronson, Orestes, 168 Brooks, Joanna, 6, 88 Brooks, Lisa, 21, 189 Burke, Edmund, 189 Burke, Kenneth, 132 Calhoun, John, 107 Callaway, Micajah, 109 Calloway, Colin, 115, 194 Canada War, 130 Canovan, Margaret, 179–80 cannibalism as frontier degeneracy, 114, 116 Carpenter, Kristen, 181 Carlisle, Pennsylvania, 44 Chaput, Eric, 197 Charter of the Forest, 5 Chippewa Indians, 124 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 6 Clay, Henry, 107 Clemmer, Richard, 41 common law, 91, 100, 143, 151, 154, 171, 196; de-commonalization of, 151 common property law’s roots in both common right and laissez-faire practices, 41 common right, 38, 40, 169 commons, 3–8, 182; civic, 37, 51, 84, 87, 89, 103–4, 147; commoning, 5–9, 14, 21–22, 37–41, 43, 49–51, 89, 131, 177; culture of the commons, 6, 177; “customs in common,” 6, 22; as distributive and productive, 6–7, 177; new world evolution of, 47–48; performative commons, 7–8; and political subjectivity, 36–37, 181–82; political value of, 40; as practice, 4, 6–7, 9–10, 16–17, 36, 39–44, 71–76, 83–86, 124, 131–32, 174–77, 179–82; and racist exclusions, 7–8, 19, 99, 162–66; as rule-making system, 4, 7, 17, 72, 78, 89, 94, 96, 98, 100–1, 114, 117, 129, 151, 156,

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171, 187; as third form of ownership, 39, 177, 181–82 commons democracy, 1–3, 34, 36–37, 52, 54, 60, 84, 123–24, 130–32, 134, 137, 164, 175–79, 187, 189; as backwoods culture, 49–50 154; as culture that nurtured US formal liberal democracy, 175–76; as mythical frontier drama, 55, 60, 84, Chapter 4; as unceremonious liberty, 131; as vernacular, 3, 6, 8–13, 15–19, 21–25, 31, 33–37, 39, 41, 43, 45, 47, 49, 51–52, 54–55, 60–61, 66, 68, 71, 74–75, 78, 83–85, 90, 97, 105–8, 111, 123, 125, 127, 129, 131–34, 157, 162, 164–65, 175–82, 187, 189 commonwealth, 2, 10–11, 29, 48, 50, 77, 81, 89, 154, 167; as strategic mixture of private ownership and public good, 11 communal labor, 6, 48 competence (as economic term), 10, 11, 18, 45, 47, 91, 102, 107–8, 136, 179. See also sufficiency Connecticut Wits, 53 Connolly, William, 174 consensus story (of democracy), 10, 22, 24–25, 27, 85, 124, 135 Constitutional Convention, 53, 63, 197 constituent power, 27, 30, 32 Continental Congress, 9, 27 Cooper, James Fenimore, 10, 14, 19, 23, 41, 48, 54, 84–85, 87–89, 92, 94, 99, 101–4, 108, 100–11, 113, 115, 129, 133–38, 141–43, 145, 147–48, 150, 152–53, 155–57, 161–62, 164–70, 172, 174, 178, 182, 192–93, 195, 197; The Chainbearer, 23, 134–35, 137–47; 154, 157, 194; Littlepage Trilogy, 133–35, 137, 139, 172; The Pioneers, 14, 23, 105, 110, 129, 134, 170, 191–92; and “racial feint,” 102–3, 164–66; The Redskins, 23, 133, 135, 137, 160–74, 178, 195; Satanstoe, 137–38 Cornell, Saul, 11, 44, 187 Creative Commons, 3, 182 Crèvecoeur, Hector St. John de, 1–3, 22, 45– 51, 114, 202; Eighteenth-Century Sketches, 49–51; Letters from an American Farmer, 1–3, 22, 45–49, 135 Dahl, Curtis, 115 Danhoff, Clarence, 41

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index / 215

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Davis, Jeffrey, 57 Declaration of Independence, 24, 36, 51, 159 Delaware Indians, 66, 109, 111, 114–15, 163, 168, 197 democracy: as boon from Framers, 25; as contest of ideas, 16; defined, 7; downsizing of, 17, 136–37, 151, 167; as “homely,” 17, 108, 123–25, 131; as opposed to representative republic, 3, 24; as original principles of society, 131; as practice, 9–17, 21–23, 26, 36, 39–44, 46–47, 52, 54–55, 57, 62, 66–69, 71–76, 78, 83–86, 91, 97, 99, 101, 104–9, 111, 123–24, 127–33, 151, 155–57, 162–65, 169, 174–77, 178–82, 188–89, 194, 197; as structurally self-dividing, 72–73, 75–83; as “ugly,” 17 democratic equality as savage, 53–54, 56, 60–62, 64, 66, 68, 70, 72, 74, 76, 78, 80, 82, 105–6, 111–16, 165–166, 189, 195; as frontier phenomenon, 23, 116, 131 democratic paradox, 78, 191. See also paradox of politics democratic practice and self-doubt, 72–73, 79–83 Democratic-Republican committees/ societies, 56, 189 Derrida, Jacques, 31 Detroit Female Seminary, 125 Dillon, Elizabeth Maddock, 7–8; and “colonial relation,” 8 Doolen, Andy, 99, 193 Dorr’s Rebellion, 106, 133, 174, 194, 197 Dupre, Daniel, 118

self-governance, 103; represented as betterment, 102 (see also betterment) equality before the law, 168–70; as apolitical, not political, 171 Evans, George Henry, 167

Ecologist, The, 27, 92 economic fairness, 11, 16, 59, 64; as collective versus individual right, 29 Edwards, Laura, 85–87, 90, 93, 97, 187 Elliott, Emory, 191 Elliot, Matthew, 114 Ellis, David, 134 Emerson, Bert, 187 enclosure, 5–8, 20–21, 23, 37–42, 47, 49, 88–89, 91–92, 102–4, 136, 151, 164, 177–78, 182, 192–93, 196–97; and production of scarcity, 88, 92; as limit on communal self-governance, 95; as loss of communal

Hamilton, Alexander, 30, 55–60, 62–65, 67, 81, 83–84, 106, 190, 195 Hampshire Grants, 137–38, 153. See also Vermont Hardin, Garrett, 9, 87, 101, 103, 191 Hardt, Michael, 43, 152, 189 Hemberger, Suzette, 33, 35–36 Hemenway, Robert, 190 Herschock, Marin, 41 “history before the fact,” 14 Hobbes, Thomas, 15, 43, 78, 189 Hogeland, William, 56, 59–60 Holton, Woody, 27–28, 34–35, 187, 191, 193

fair play. See vernacular legal practice fair use, 154, 167 Federal Constitution, 11, 22, 30–36, 55, 60, 65–66, 71, 97, 105, 109, 122, 176, 178, 195; as enclosure, 178; professionalizing work of government, 36 Federalist Papers, 40 Federalists, 11, 18, 24, 30, 33, 36, 44, 61, 72, 84, 105, 175 Findley, William, 59, 61–65, 67, 83, 190 Fliegelman, Jay, 157 Formisano, Ronald, 52, 131, 187, 194 Foster, Hannah Webster, 68 French and Indian Wars, 166 Fritz, Christian, 31, 35, 129, 187, 194 frontier. See commons democracy frontier republicanism, 15 Gallatin, Albert, 59–62, 67 Gallo, Marcus, 86, 99, 101 game laws, 91, 98, 191–93 George, Susan, 7, 106 Girty, Simon, 114–16, 194 Goldman, Michael, 193 Green Mountain Boys, 138 Greiman, Jennifer, 188–89 Griffin, Patrick, 19 Grimsted, David, 107, 117

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216 / index Homestead Act, 119, 197 homo economicus, 9 Honig, Bonnie, 174–76, 178–80, 184 Hopkins, Lemuel, 53 Horwitz, Morton, 151, 170–71, 193, 196, 197 Hudson River Valley, 140–44, 147, 195, 197 Humphrey, Thomas, 142, 144, 147, 196 Humphreys, David, 53 Huston, James, 187 Huston, Reeve, 41, 44, 144–45, 154, 157, 161, 165, 167–69, 184, 187, 189, 195–97 Ignatiev, Noel, 20 Illinois, 40 Indian Country, 109 Indians, 40, 73, 83, 111–16, 135, 142, 147, 153, 162–63, 165–66, 170, 197; anti-rent protestors dressed as “Indians,” 153, 159–66. See also Native Americans interdependence versus independence, 50 Internet commons, 3 involuntary loan, 128, 130, 133 Irwin, Benjamin, 9 Ives, Timothy, 40–41 Jackson, Andrew, 24, 106–7, 109, 118–19, 136, 192, 194 Jackson, Joseph, 109 Jacobson, Matthew, 20 Jacoby, Karl, 41 Jay, John, 50 Jeffersonian Republicanism, 15 Jefferson, Thomas, 15, 24, 50–51, 68, 152, 189 Jehlen, Myra, 14 Katyal, Sonia, 181 Kentucky, 56, 109–12, 114–16, 184; and Federal whiskey excise, 111; as “good poor-man’s country,” 109 King, J. Crawford, 41 Kirkland, Caroline, 19, 23, 107–8, 123–27, 128–33, 181, 194; and Pinckney, Michigan, 125; A New Home, Who’ll Follow?, 23, 124–32; as western satire, 124 Kruman, Mark, 32–33 Kulikoff, Allan, 37, 47

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labor theory of value, 142, 145, 150 lease-in-fee, 143–44 Lefort, Claude, 31, 75, 190 legal commons, 23, 84–85, 87, 89, 91, 93, 95, 97, 101,103, 191. See also vernacular legal system legal formalism, 23, 136, 170–71, 179; as enclosure, 136 liberal individual, 10, 17, 43, 122, 128, 165 liberalism, 5, 10, 122, 128, 151, 165; and protection of economic sphere from democratic input, 10, 151–53 Lincoln, Abraham, 110 Lincoln, Thomas, 110–11 Linebaugh, Peter, 5 Little, Elizabeth A., 41 local/localized law, 86–87, 90, 97, 129, 199. See also vernacular legal system Lummis, C. Douglas, 176 Lund, Thomas, 192 Lutz, Donald, 32–33 Madison, James, 30, 63, 76–77, 113 Magna Carta, 5, 86 Maine, 50, 66, 110, 163, 169, 175, 182 Mayflower, 40 Maryland, 26, 42, 56 Massachusetts, 36–38, 33, 40, 42, 54–55, 143, 189 Matthiessen, F. O., 13 McCay, Bonnie, 41 McCurdy, Charles, 143, 158–59, 196–97 McDonald, Forrest, 41 McWhiney, Grady, 41 Melville, Herman, 13 Michigan, 16, 41, 123–31, 184 Middle Ground, 109–10, 112 middle way, 53, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77–79, 81, 83–84, 178, 181, 189 Mifflin, Thomas, 58 Mills, Charles, 164 Milton, John, 122 misrepresentation. See representation, political Mississippi, 117–18, 123 Missouri, 39–41

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index / 217 Montaigne, Michel de, 78 Morgan, Edmund, 30–32, 36, 188 Morris, Robert, 59 multitude, 14, 36, 43, 64–65, 69, 71, 82, 152– 53, 167, 179, 188–89; as mob 7–8, 11–12, 18, 27–28, 31, 43, 53–54, 62–63, 70, 76, 79, 85, 107, 117, 129, 169–70, 175, 179, 188 municipal blessing, 3, 46, 51. See also public happiness Murrell, John, 117 myth: as antipolitical representation, 53–54, 61, 84–85, 94–95, 106, 121; and symbol critics, 84 National Reform Party, 106 Native Americans, 21, 25, 41, 66, 86, 88, 109–12, 124, 132, 147, 162–66, 196; and commoning, 21, 40 Neeson, J. M. 38–39, 44, 49, 196 Negri, Antonio, 43 Neville, David, 57–58, 64 New Jersey, 26, 42 New Mexico, 182 New York, 7, 16, 23, 26, 30, 40–41, 84–85, 88–89, 92, 94, 125, 128, 133–34, 136, 141–43, 145, 158–61, 168, 192, 195–96 Nobles, Gregory, 189 North Carolina, 26, 56 Novak, William, 85 O’Brien, Jean, 41 Onondaga Indians, 135, 146, 163 “ordinary people,” defined, 187 Orlie, Melissa, 37, 179, 181, 188 Ostrom, Elinor, 18, 71–72, 76, 99, 178, 182–83 Otsego County, New York, 89–90, 134, 192 Ottowa Indians, 124 Panic (economic): of 1819, 107, 117–18, 158; of 1837, 108, 125, 129, 133, 159, 160 paradox of founding, 174 paradox of politics, 174–75, 178, 180 Parkinson’s Ferry, 61 Pawlikowski, Melissah, 15, 85, 110–11, 114, 191 Pennsylvania, 16, 26, 28, 42, 48, 55–56, 58–61, 63–64, 66, 114–15, 138, 190, 197 Pennsylvania Constitution of 1790, 60

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people, the (sovereign), 8, 9–10, 16, 24, 26–37, 42, 59, 70, 74–75, 77, 80–83, 97–98, 129, 132, 136, 147–48, 151, 155, 168, 170, 173–76, 179–80; as liberal democracy’s third rail, 180 people’s peace. See vernacular legal practice pirates, 117–18, 121, 194 plebian anti-federalists, 44, 105 plebian political economy, 46–47, 157 Preemption Act of 1841, 108, 119 pre-political (as signaling politically irrelevance), 43, 61, 94, 116, 121, 132, 137, 155, 165 political equality, 17, 28–29, 44–46, 56, 59; dependence on economic equality, 20, 28–19 political officeholding as shared civic duty, 136 political realism 9, 176–77 polycentricity, 18, 72, 178. See also Ostrom, Elinor poor white trash, 18, 20, 136, 166, 186, 195; empowered or subjugated, 166 popular sovereignty, 7–8, 13, 22, 30–32, 97, 129, 174–75, 188, 197; as haunted by heteronomy, 175, 188–89 Potawatami Indians, 124 Princen, Thomas, 177 property-holding: and association with civic entitlement, 45–51, 136–37; as capitalist entity, 171; in relation to universal white manhood suffrage, 136. See also municipal blessing public happiness, 22, 29, 50–51, 67, 175 Quia Emptores, 143 redistribution, 151, 168, 181 regulation, 6, 12, 26, 28, 33, 51, 54–55, 58, 71, 86, 100, 105–6, 125, 132, 189–90 Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute, 158 Rent Wars. See anti–rent representation, political, 33, 132, 136, 175, 179–80, 191; as basis for formal and informal democratic decision-making, 70; as form of management, 191; misrepresentation as useful tool in representa-

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218 / index representation (continued) tion, 69–70, 73, 82–83, 180; as result of democratic decision-making, 70; as social and aesthetic as well as political, 67–83 restorative right, 164 Richards, Leonard, 28, 187 Rodey, Peter, 101 Roediger, David, 20 Rhode Island, 26, 133, 197 Rifkin, Mark, 108, 117, 184 Riley, Angela, 201 Rice, Grantland, 190 Rose, Carol, 5 rough justice, 7, 125, 129, 160, 162 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 174 Rush, Benjamin, 34, 61, 72, Ruttenberg, Nancy, 13 Raynal, Guillaume Thomas François, Abbe, 1 St. Louis, Missouri, 39–40 Saler, Bethel, 106–7, 117, 126, 166, 194, 197 Schmitt, Carl, 180 Schumpeter, Joseph, 15 Schwartz, James Z., 126 Self-governing without the state, 39–40, 164, 177 Sellers, Charles, 151 settler: common sense, 108, 117; empire and racialization, 19, 108, 119, 166 Shattuck, Job, 53, 189 Shawnee Indians, 109, 111–12, 114, 194 Shays, Daniel, 53, 189 Shays’ Rebellion/Regulation/Massachusetts Regulation, 26–29, 53–54 Shour, Nancy, 193 Silverman, David Jay, 41 Simms, William Gilmore, 19, 23, 107–8, 117, 118–21, 124, 131–33; Richard Hurdis, 23, 107, 117–23 Skidmore, Thomas, 106, 168 Sklansky, Jeffrey, 46–47, 141 Slaughter, Thomas, 58, 193 Smith, Barbara, 29 Snell, Keith, 39 South Carolina, 26, 42, 86

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sovereignty, 7–8, 12–13, 15, 19, 21–23, 28–32, 34–37, 39, 43, 53, 58, 60, 63, 75, 93, 97, 129, 132, 136, 145, 151–52, 154–56, 167–68, 170, 172, 174–75, 178–80, 182, 188–89, 197; possible alternative forms of political power to, 36–37, 181–82; theoretical versus actual, 30–37 Spinoza, Baruch, 43 squatters, squatting, squatter communities, 15, 18–19, 49, 85–86, 88, 90, 91, 97, 101, 108–10, 115, 117–21, 123, 125, 135, 145–47, 153–56, 164–66, 191, 194–95; as land pirates, 121; and settler-colonialism, 18, 108, 164–66; and struggle for economic justice, 121 squatter relief, 108 state capture, 19, 164, 197 state-based law, 90, 103; as enclosure, 88, 103; and protection of individual property rights, 86–87 state constitution-making, 9, 31–34 state of nature, 43, 93, 192 Stewart, Virgil, 117 Stockbridge Indians, 147, 153 sufficiency, 10, 38, 71, 101–2, 177. See also competence Sullivan, James, 187–88 Tachau, Mary K. Bonsteel, 111 Taylor, Alan, 29, 48, 50, 92, 184, 187 Tennessee, 117 Texas, 130 Thompson, E. P., 6, 22 Treaty of Paris, 29 “universal” suffrage, 23–24, 80, 82, 118, 125, 131, 135–37, 147, 157, 167, 171; as constraint on more radical democracy, 137 University of Pittsburgh, 66 Van Rennselaer, Stephen, III and IV, 143, 159 Vermont, 26, 32, 135, 137–38, 140, 143, 155, 196; Republic of, 138 vernacular legal practice: as “fair play” 84, 86, 99, 101, 151; as laws-in-common, 94, 100; as “people’s peace,” 6, 18, 42, 50, 55, 61–62, 84–87, 93, 97, 129–30, 151, 155;

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index / 219 and protection of collective community interest, 86–87 Virginia, 26, 33, 40, 42, 109–10, 112, 118, 184, 189 Virno, Paulo, 43 voice of the people, 24 Wangunk Indians, 41 Wappinger Indians, 147, 153 War of 1812, 118 war bonds, 27, 56 Washington, George, 55, 57–59, 63, 67, 106, 140, 155, 189, 193; economic interest in crushing Whiskey Regulation, 58–59 western fever, 125 whiskey, as commodity and means for economic independence, 56 whiskey excise: Federal (1791), 55–67, 106, 111; Pennsylvania State (1781, 1783), 55 Whiskey Rebellion/Regulation, 22, 53, 55–67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 79, 81, 83, 93, 106, 165, 189, 193; and democratic compromise,

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60, 62–63; as federal war against backcountry radicalism, 63; and international credit, 59 White, Ed, 65, 190 White, Richard, 109–10 Whitehill, Robert, 59 whiteness, 19, 116, 165–66; becoming white, 19–20; as “common” property, 19–20; and state capture, 19, 162–66 Wilson, James, 60 Wisconsin Territory, 117, 194 Wood, Ellen Meiksins, 10, 34–35, 151 yeoman class, 46–47, 89, 111, 136–37, 145, 149, 157–58, 172, 193; reclassification as poor white trash, 136 Young, Alfred, 37 Young America, 167 Young, Thomas, 32 Zagarell, Sandra, 194 Zoellner, Robert, 148

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