For the Balkinization symposium on Daniel Carpenter, Democracy by Petition: Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870 (Harvard University Press, 2021).
Frances Lee
This fascinating book illuminates a democratic
practice that was very important in 19th century politics but has
disappeared almost entirely from view: the petition to Congress and other
legislative assemblies. The First Amendment right to petition government for
redress of grievances is today construed informally, almost as merely an
extension of the rights to speech and assembly. But for much of the 19th
century, the right to petition Congress had a more judicial character.
In the 19th century, individuals
or groups could bring petitions to Congress in a manner analogous to a
petitioner’s complaint in court. One could file a petition and actually expect a
response from Congress, just as one expects a response from a judge. As
Carpenter explains, petitions had a formal structure. Congress set aside
specific times to hear petitions. On each of the first thirty days of a session
of Congress, the House would call the roll of states for the presentation of
petitions. After that, every other Monday was designated a petition day. Petitions
would be read on the floor, entered into the Congressional Record, and be tabled or taken up for further
consideration.
In other words, petitioning in the 19th century was a way to actually have an effect on Congress’s agenda. Petitions constituted a large share of the workload of the 19th century Congress. Carpenter estimates that petitions were on the agenda on 30-50% of the days Congress was in session. Petitioning activity grew over the first half of the 19th century, peaked on a population-adjusted basis in the 25th Congress (1837-1839), and then declined. The petitioning era comes to a close with the 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act, which banned the private bills often used to resolve petitions and transferred jurisdiction over the most common topics of petitions to the courts and the executive.
Carpenter’s book investigates how
petitioning was used in the 19th century, with a particular focus on
the democratizing potential of this form of political participation. Importantly,
the right to petition was available to those who could not vote, including
enslaved people, women, and native Americans. Some of the most important and
famous petitioning activity occurred around the effort to abolish slavery.
Readers who don’t know much about petitioning generally are probably familiar
with the gag rule that the House of Representatives adopted in 1836 to bar the
consideration of petitions involving slavery.
As a fascinating example of how
petitions could empower those otherwise excluded from the political system, Carpenter
memorably recounts Angelina Grimke’s 1837 speech before the Massachusetts
General Court in support of her petition of 20,000 black and white women to end
slavery in the District of Columbia. Not only did she have an opportunity to
make her case on the merits of the petition, but the act of doing so had
democratizing implications beyond her argument. This was the first time a woman
had addressed a state or national legislative assembly in the U.S. Carpenter
details that Grimke’s address was received respectfully, a breakthrough for
women’s participation. Grimke herself recognized the importance of petitioning
for women’s voices to be heard. At a speech in Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania hall
in 1838, she urged women to avail themselves of this right. “Especially let me
urge you to petition,” she said. “Men may settle these and other questions at
the ballot box, but you have no such right” (Carpenter 2021, 326).
Carpenter recounts numerous political
battles around petition campaigns for the rights and interests of freemen,
enslaved people, indigenous people, and other causes. In many cases, he shows that
petitioners were able to accomplish at least some of their aims. Carpenter
emphasizes that petitioning was important beyond the specific causes at issue. Like
Grimke, petitioning afforded a platform and an institutionalized role for
people with no other voice in the system. It also served as a focus of
political organizing. The task of canvassing connected supporters together in organized
networks. In that way, petitioning campaigns could leave behind an
organizational legacy.
The book offers an encyclopedic
treatment of its subject. Carpenter shows how petitioning was deployed in
numerous causes and controversies. Reading this book, one gets a new sense for
the vibrancy of 19th century American politics and the capacity of
the disenfranchised to affect their own political fates. The book is also
notable for examining petitioning beyond the 19th century U.S. It
examines contemporaneous petitioning in Canada, the Caribbean, and parts of
Mexico. These investigations give the book a wider lens and set U.S.
petitioning efforts in a broader context.
A key question left unaddressed in the
book is how one should weigh the effect of petitioning in the balance. Petitioning
was a tool that had special value to the disenfranchised, but petitioning could
be and was used by anyone. Petitioning, like most forms of political
participation, is not a level playing field. To bring petitions effectively,
one needs education and literacy. One needs a sense of political efficacy, a
belief that one can be heard and can make a difference. One needs leisure time
to organize. One needs resources to canvas. The book focuses on how petitioning
could be used by the disadvantaged and marginalized to enable a fuller
democratic participation than was possible via the franchise.
If one added up all the petitions
brought to Congress during this era what proportion of them would be
democratizing in the ways Carpenter emphasizes? Clearly, a very great many
petitions were brought in the cause of slavery abolition. This was the cause of
the high peak in petitioning activity in the 1830s. Nevertheless, I would have
liked more detail on how many petitions—and with what effect—were brought by
settlers seeking western lands, land speculators disputing claims after Indian
Removal, petitions for canals and roads, and to charter banks. Carpenter
includes a chapter on these non-democratizing, in some cases,
anti-democratizing petitions. But, overall, they get very little attention in
this book. Tantalizingly, Carpenter observes that “there was no more common
subject of petitioning in North America than . . . land” (89).
The book focuses on how petitioning
could be used to expand democracy and to create a more inclusive polity before
slavery was abolished, before women had the right to vote, and at a time when
the franchise was the nearly exclusive province of white men. But the question
left unanswered is the relative balance for the different types of petitions in
Congress’s petition-driven workload. Informed by Verba, Schlozman,
and Brady (1995)
and other important work on political participation, we know the depressing
data on the share of letters to Congress written by the well off, the share of
campaign contributions donated by the rich, the overall class imbalances in who
participates in democratic politics overall. Was the balance in 19th
century politics more favorable?
With the amazing data that Carpenter has
put together for this project, future scholarship can explore more about what
the overall distribution of 19th century petitioning efforts looked
like with respect to democratization. What share of petitions had an inclusive
effect on democracy? Which petitions aimed at more restrictions on democracy?
And which had nothing to do with expanding or contracting democratic
participation at all?
By focusing so heavily on the ways in
which petitioning expanded US democracy in the 19th century, the
book somewhat underplays the contradictory story of 19th century
democratization. One gets a relatively optimistic portrait of how disadvantaged
peoples could make their voices heard. But one doesn’t get the ironic perspective
offered by David Bateman in his marvelous 2018 book, Disenfranchising Democracy, in which at
the same time as democratic rights were being extended to all white men in the
Jeffersonian era, one state after another was amending its constitution to
withdraw the franchise from free blacks. Carpenter’s book does not lay out a
teleology of ever-expanding democracy, but it devotes relatively scant
attention to petitions that would deny, withhold, or even roll back democratic
rights.
None of the above should be taken as
criticism of Carpenter’s kaleidoscopically rich book. It’s a plea for even more
work on the subject. Carpenter opens up vistas for new work on 19th
century politics. Democracy By Petition
enriches our understanding of political history and democratic politics. It deepens
our appreciation for the varied forms of effective political participation that
were possible even in a restricted polity.
Frances Lee is Professor of Politics & Public Affairs at Princeton University. You can reach her by e-mail at Frances.Lee@princeton.edu.
Works Cited
Bateman,
David A. 2018. Disenfranchising
Democracy: Constructing the Electorate in the United States, the United
Kingdom, and France. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Carpenter,
Daniel. 2021. Democracy by Petition:
Popular Politics in Transformation, 1790–1870. Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press.
Verba,
Sidney, Kay Lehman Schlozman, Henry E. Brady. 1995. Voice and Equality: Civic Voluntarism in American Politics. Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press.