The Unrecognized Importance of Petitioning for Redress of Grievances

Sandy Levinson

For the Balkinization symposium on Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021).

        I have read many fine books over the past year, but at the head of the list are Kate Masur’s Until Justice Be Done:  America’s First Civil Rights Movement, From the Revolution to Reconstruction and now Dan Carpenter’s stunning  Democracy & Petition:  Popular Politics in Transformation 1790-1870.  Masur’s book was the subject of a Balkinization symposium last May.  I am utterly delighted to be part of a similar symposium now on Carpenter’s book. Both deserve the widest possible readership, not to mention whatever awards they might be eligible for.  They are truly intellectually transformative.  I have already begun incorporating their insights into my teaching and, no doubt, will do so in any future writing.

There is a deep connection between the two, beyond the fact that both are stunning scholarly achievements, based on copious old-fashioned archival research even if that is no doubt easier in the age of digitized records.  Both illustrate the way that the common emphasis, especially by elite scholars, on national institutions can be profoundly misleading.  One of Carpenter’s favorite words is “granular,” and both he and Masur indeed offer highly granular accounts of state (or, as with Canada and Mexico, provincial) and local politics that require significant revisions of many standard narratives of ostensibly “national” history. It is not enough to know what was happening in Washington, Ottawa, or Mexico City; one must also be aware of what is going on in Cincinnati, Three Rivers, and Orizaba.  This last sentence alludes to the fact that Carpenter goes well beyond the borders of the United States in his studies.  I know of literally no book that is so truly exemplifies what might be called “North American history” instead of focusing exclusively on a single polity. At the same time, though, Carpenter emphasizes that many of the petitions he studies were directed a state legislatures, active fora of important decisionmaking regarding, say, what we today call civil rights.  Congress might have been hopeless in passing any progressive legislation, but that was not the case elsewhere, as Masur demonstrates.  There were occasions where Blacks (or “Blacks and whites together”) could indeed overcome the political forces of evil.  What goes on in Las Vegas may stay in Las Vegas, but it turns out that what was going on in a number of towns and cities had ramifications going far beyond local boundaries, reaching not only state capitals but sometimes spilling over into national politics as well, if only, say, to antagonize representatives of the slavocracy eager to suppress any and all anti-slavery petitions.  

        But there is a second connection as well:  Both books, often quite movingly, emphasize the agency present among people we tend to view almost exclusively as victims of relentless discrimination by white male elites.  Masur elaborates the extent to which free Blacks throughout the North and Midwest—obviously, the South presents a different narrative in this respect—organized in many ways to create what she calls “America’s first civil rights movement.”  It is an unfortunate temptation to present the downtrodden as simple victims, without any genuine agency, and therefore reliant on what has come to be called "white saviors."  No one can believe that any longer after reading these two books.

Early in her book, Masur tells us that “[a]t the eighteenth century, free Black Philadelphians, with support from Quaker allies, had identified themselves as ‘citizens’ when petitioning Congress.”  I confess that I quickly went past this sentence; it did register on me, as a lawyer, that they claimed to be “citizens,” but I paid no attention to the fact that they were petitioning Congress.  It is Carpenter’s achievement to bring home the importance of not only the abstract right of petition, an important, but rarely discussed—in part because almost never litigated—part of the First Amendment, but also the genuine political importance of petitioning.  It manifested the willingness of persons, whether or not “citizens” or voting members of the polity, in fact to exert themselves to prepare, sign, and submit petitions to those charged with governance.  And, obviously, the Canadians and Mexicans who so exerted themselves made no reference to First Amendment rights.  It represented in some ways something far more important:  petitioners possessed their own sense of self-worth as potential participants within the polity in discussing issues of importance to them.  This is most obvious with regard to a variety of petitions by members of Indigenous nations in both the United States and Canada, faced with forced dispossession and relocation, in the case of the United States literally many hundreds of miles from their native lands.  Less inspiring, at least to a modern sensibility, was the militant opposition of many Mexican women, expressed in many petitions, to the toleration of non-Catholics, for fear that this would destroy what today might be called “traditional family values.”  But one might still be inspired by the sense of agency manifested by those we generally view as voiceless victims of patriarchy.

Carpenter certainly does not disdain the importance of the suffrage.  But he offers a valuable corrective to the view that the suffrage is either a necessary or a sufficient condition to achieve what might be called a truly “republican form of government.”  His book is full of the already noted Indigenous peoples of both the United States and Canada, or the women of the United States, Canada, and Mexico who were deprived of the suffrage, obviously without justification, but who, nonetheless, had a sense of their own civic identity and participated actively in various and sundry petition movements about various issues.  Carpenter has performed truly amazing feats of scholarship in determining who exactly signed various petitions and demonstrates that women often outnumbered men.  A key moment in the book is when Angelina Grimke is allowed personally to present an anti-slavery petition to the Massachusetts legislature, even though Massachusetts rejected the idea of women’s suffrage.  A sense of what political scientists call “efficacy” is all-important.  We know that many people with the legal right to vote do not, because they lack a sense of efficacy. By the same token, Carpenter’s book is replete with unknown individuals who did have such a sense, revealed in their willingness to become involved in petition movements. 

        It is also the case, of course, that voting in elections can be a notoriously inadequate way of registering opinion on discrete issues unless a given election indeed turns into a “single-issue” referendum in which the candidates campaign exclusively on their positions about this issue.  Petitions, on the other hand, allow a much more granular way of ascertaining public opinion insofar as they do focus on given issues and offer individuals, whether or not they are voting members of the polity, to register their views on just that issue. Indeed, Carpenter shows that petition campaigns could lead to the formation of new political organizations and parties rather than being the product of existing party structures.  Petition campaigns could serve as an outlet for what are sometimes called “issue entrepreneurs” who wish to break up congealed notions of what is (or is not) fit for discussion.  

One might think, if one accepts certain models of political incentives, that the views of non-voters would be of no importance to legislators.  Why should they care since, by definition, the non-voters cannot exact retribution (or offer rewards) at the ballot box?  But Carpenter, who as a political scientist combines skills of empirical measurement and analysis together with his comfort in delving into the archives, demonstrates that petitions, like elections, could have measurable consequences.  Most of us are aware of the Congressional gag rules that operated between the mid-1830s and ‘40s to prevent the myriad of anti-slavery petitions from being even formally recognized by Congress.  Carpenter argues convincingly that the very horror of these petitions, by proponents of slavery, is an implicit testament to the potential impact that petitions, even if formally rejected after discussion,  could have on the polity, and that became even more true once the gag rule was lifted.  The road from the gag rule to emancipation and the Thirteenth Amendment took, as he writes, “many turns.  No single factor alone explains the wartime triumph over American slavery.  Yet electoral and partisan democracy provide some of the weakest explanations for the shift” (p. 464).  Any full explanation must include adequate attention to the petitions from all parts of the country (save, of course, the Southern states committed to slavery, which exercised all power at their control to deter any such subversive activities), from all elements of the polity, critical of chattel slavery.  And, as Masur noted, these petitioners included not only white men and women alike, but also free Blacks offering their own critiques of American slavery.  “The advance of American freedom,” Carpenter writes, “relied on the democratization of agendas and the cultural democracy enacted through signed prayers” in petitions (p. 465).   

Carpenter begins his “Afterword,” entitled “Agenda, Organization, and the Democracy of Petitions,” by quoting the dour words of the democracy-skeptic John Adams, who in 1776 (the same year, of course, when his wife delivered her personal petition to him to “Remember the Ladies”) wrote of his fear that the rising spirit of equality will mean that “New Claims will arise.  Women will demand a Vote.”  (Horrors!)  The various calls for equality will “confound and destroy all distinctions and prostrate all Ranks, to one common Levell” (p. 475).  He was right, of course.  As Robert Filmer had suggested in his own critique of John Locke, attack the authority of the Divinely-sanctioned Monarch, and there is no stopping point; one will end up with a 1960s tee-shirt saying “Question (all) authority.”  

Petitions might have originally featured humble “prayers” submitted to those clearly accepted as the petitioners’ betters. But Carpenter demonstrates that over time they became demands, sometimes respectful, on occasion not so much, by people who viewed themselves as equal members of the polity who were entitled to register their opinions and to have them acted upon.  The signatories of petitions often included those he describes as “the dispossessed, the enslaved, the dominated” (id).  This is most noticeable with regard to women “across a hemisphere—indigenous women at Kahnawá:ke, Buffalo Creek, and Cattaraugus, Red Clay, Michigan, and Taos; Black women ranging from Mary Prince of Bermuda and Mary Venus of Trinidad to Martha Stewart of Boston and Sojourner Truth; Quebecois widows and Mexican señoras catolicas along with Angelina Grimke and Protestant women in the United States.” Languages went beyond English, French, or Spanish.  Indigenous nations desperately trying to maintain their own cultural identity on traditional lands wrote their entreaties in their own languages (accompanied by English translations)—and on occasion they were successful in winning at least partial victories.

I think it is fair to say that few of us today ever really think of the importance of the ability to petition government for redress of grievances.  Far more time is likely to be spent in a law school course on “Freedom of Speech (or Expression)” on the protection accorded nude dancing than on the implications of the last clause of the First Amendment.  Even if some of us have occasionally signed a petition or two, they are unlikely to be part of truly coordinated campaigns directed at decisionmakers who will, in turn, actually care about what the petitions say.  Indeed, they are probably most likely to be petitions to qualify someone to run for office in an election.  However, it is very important, and altogether relevant, that citizens in the Western United States may often be invited to sign petitions for initiatives and referenda, a possibility foreclosed by the drafters of the 1787 Constitution, who hated the idea of direct governance by “the people.”  Professional lobbyists have taken over some of the tasks associated in the past with petitions, with obvious distributional consequences with regard to the kinds of issues and views that are likely to come to a legislator’s desk. 

    We probably cannot go home again to the kinds of politics pervasive in the 19th century.  But we should be aware, in a way that I certainly was not before reading Carpenter’s marvelous book, of the genuine importance of the right to petition, not only of the historical importance of the practice, but also what we almost certainly have lost in our own time, when most of us have the right to vote, combined with what seems to be an ever-diminishing sense of citizen efficacy.