The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America

Early American Studies

by Richard Beeman

On the eve of the American Revolution there existed throughout the British-American colonial world a variety of contradictory expectations about the political process. Not only was there disagreement over the responsibilities of voters and candidates, confusion extended beyond elections to the relationship between elected officials and the populations they served. So varied were people's expectations that it is impossible to talk about a single American political culture in this period.

In The Varieties of Political Experience in Eighteenth-Century America , Richard R. Beeman offers an ambitious overview of political life in pre-Revolutionary America. Ranging from Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania to the backcountry regions of the South, the Mid-Atlantic, and northern New England, Beeman uncovers an extraordinary diversity of political belief and practice. In so doing, he closes the gap between eighteenth-century political rhetoric and reality.

Political life in eighteenth-century America, Beeman demonstrates, was diffuse and fragmented, with America's British subjects and their leaders often speaking different political dialects altogether. Although the majority of people living in America before the Revolution would not have used the term "democracy," important changes were underway that made it increasingly difficult for political leaders to ignore "popular pressures." As the author shows in a final chapter on the Revolution, those popular pressures, once unleashed, were difficult to contain and drove the colonies slowly and unevenly toward a democratic form of government. Synthesizing a wide range of primary and secondary sources, Beeman offers a coherent account of the way politics actually worked in this formative time for American political culture.

Genres: American History, History

377 pages, Kindle Edition

First published February 1, 2004

About the author

Richard Roy Beeman was an American historian and biographer specializing in the American Revolution. Born in Seattle, he published multiple books, and was the John Walsh Centennial Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania.

Reviews

[Carl Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an intriguing survey of the social and political conventions (and key players) of colonial Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, and Pennsylvania (as well as discussions of the backcountry and the major cities) in the decades prior to the secession from England.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Topic and scope of the book:
Beeman discusses, unsurprisingly, the various forms which political reality (as opposed to political ideology) took in pre-revolutionary and revolutionary America. He offers an extensive, if not comprehensive, survey; chapters deal with Virginia, Massachusetts, New York, South Carolina, the northern and southern backcountries, Pennsylvania, and the northeastern cities.

Thesis:
The reality of political experience, Beeman argues, gives the lie to the argument that the form of American government that arose after the revolution was a product of a Whig-republican synthesis common in pre-revolutionary America. While this synthesis was a common rhetorical trope, its relation to actual political practice varied greatly. This, Beeman argues, stands to reason, as the colonies were founded by a diverse set of interests during one of the most politically tumultuous periods in British history; perhaps the only common identity that the colonists shared was that of subjects of the British monarch. Accordingly, the extent to which each colony hewed to the republican ideal bore relation to the political practices established in that colony.
The most republican of the colonies, perhaps, was Virginia; there, Beeman argues convincingly, government was consciously and carefully structured and practiced according to republican principles, both before and after the Revolution. No other colony so nearly approximated this ideal; New York, for example, fell prey to the vicissitudes of the quasi-feudal manor system, and the other colonies had their own idiosyncracies as well. The move toward what would, eventually, become the distinctly American style of government - pluralist democratic-republicanism - was driven by the politics of the backcountry and the city, rather than by any national ideological commonalities. In both of these places, the rapid growth of an ethnically and religiously diverse population, and the open political (and sometimes physical) conflict that came along with it, exposed the inadequacy of the republican ideal to the American situation, and gradually forced the democratization and pluralization of government. The earliest such shift comes (unsurprisingly, if Beeman is correct) in Pennsylvania.

Author’s point of view:
Beeman, like Saul Cornell, is concerned with the tendency, evident in many accounts of eighteenth-century political life, to distill political controversy into manageable and influential factions. While Cornell responds with an exploration of a more diverse array of ideologies, Beeman explores the way in which various political practices may subvert the image of a common political ideology. He is interested, particularly, in discovering the origin of the peculiarly American understanding and practice of government; a major weakness of the book is a tendency to depict the development of this practice as inevitable. This is, however, the book’s only major weakness, and is probably a necessary device to tie together the diverse array of historical studies which Beeman presents.

Use of evidence:
Beeman draws from a vast array of sources, both primary and secondary, and ably weaves various narratives together with statistical and geographical evidence. He is heavily (although by no means exclusively) reliant upon secondary sources for material dealing with the history of the various colonies - but such a reliance is necessary, given the scope of the study undertaken. Among primary sources, he relies particularly upon correspondence, diaries, newspaper accounts, and pamphlets.

Contribution to knowledge:
Beeman’s book is a sweeping and nuanced presentation of the variegated nature of political life in the American colonies, and serves as a helpful reminder of such. Particularly, his argument for the particular significance of the backcountry and the cities has potentially major implications for any understanding of the ratification debate and the formation of the first party system.