H-Ohio Review: Hobbs on Ratcliffe,
H-Ohio Review: Hobbs on Ratcliffe,
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 08:26:22 -0500
H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by
H-Ohio@h-net.msu.edu
(March, 1999)
Donald J. Ratcliffe. _Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic:
Democratic Politics in Ohio 1793-1821_. Columbus: Ohio State
University Press, 1998. Xii + 336 pp. Tables, maps, notes, select
bibliography, and index. $52.50 (cloth), ISBN 0-8142-0775-8; $22.95
(paper), ISBN 0-8142-0776-6.
Reviewed for H-Ohio by Stuart D. Hobbs <
shobbs@ohiohistory.org
>,
Ohio Historical Society
Party Spirit in Frontier Historiography
Donald J. Ratcliffe of Durham University, England, has been
publishing significant articles about Ohio politics for twenty
years. For much of that time he has also been promising a book.
The volume under review is that long awaited study. Ratcliffe has
performed an impressive job of research and the result is the most
complete modern interpretation of Ohio politics in the early
republic.
Ratcliffe presents his book as a contribution to the political
history of the early republic, especially as an entry into the
debate about party systems theory, and as a challenge to recent
studies of Ohio political culture. Ratcliffe announces in his
introduction three basic themes for his book. The first is that
politics in Ohio was "as democratic as representative politics ever
can be in an inegalitarian society" from a very early period (p.
12). The second theme is that Ohio politics was partisan. That is,
political parties that focussed on national issues for their
defining characteristics existed in Ohio from the earliest days of
the state. The third theme is that the divisions created by these
parties defined the future of mature Jacksonian politics.
The idea of party systems gives the book theoretical focus and
direction. In the 1960s, Richard P. McCormick and other historians
argued that a well-developed party system existed in the United
States in the years of the early republic. In the 1970s and 1980s
Ronald P. Formisano attacked the notion party _system_ in the early
republic, and in the 1990s James Roger Sharp challenge the notion of
_party_ as applicable for those years. According to Ratcliffe,
these historians have looked at the writings of political elites
from the 1790s to the 1810s, noted that these elites deplored
parties, and concluded that if political elites disliked parties,
then they must not have been a part of them. But Ratcliffe insists,
"The historigraphic pendulum has swung too far. The tendency to
deny that proper institutionalized parities existed before 1815 has
led historians to underestimate how far the political experience of
these years was structured by partisan division, how far these
divisions penetrated into the electorate, and how significant the
experiences of these years proved for subsequent party development"
(p. 4). Ratcliffe then turns to frontier Ohio as a test case for
his argument. Ohio interested him because not only did Formisano
deny the existence of political parties in the state before the age
of Jackson, even McCormick placed Ohio outside of his party system
model.[1]
Ratcliffe also challenges prevailing ideas about Ohio political
history. In the 1980s, a new generation of Ohio historians began
studying the political history of the state. Finding a consensus
that political parties would not provide a useful analytic tool for
understanding Ohio politics, they turned to culture. The most
prominent of these "political culturists" have been Andrew R. L.
Cayton, Jeffrey P. Brown, and Emil Pocock.[2] Historians of
political culture argue that ethnocultural divisions defined the
politics of the early statehood period: the Virginians of the
Virginia Military District, for example, battled it out with New
Englanders in the Western Reserve for regional dominance. Ratcliffe
admits that studies of political culture do produce insights, but he
complains that the work is social and cultural history, not
political history. In particular Ratcliffe rejects the idea that,
once one has discovered cultural attitudes, one doesn't need to
"investigate what actually happened in politics because behavior is
the result of values, perceptions, and attitudes" (p. ix).
Ratcliffe criticizes the political culture school for not paying
close enough attention to the specifics of politics, particularly
elections.
Ratcliffe admits that election results are tricky to find and use.
Election returns have not been uniformly preserved. Because Ohio
counties changed rapidly during the early 19th century as the
state's population grew, comparisons across time are difficult. One
of the advantages of the political culture approach is that it
allows one to get around these difficulties. But Ratcliffe will
have none of it. He has scoured local newspapers, manuscript
collections, and official records, going so far as to examine "dusty
parcels" of Washington County voting records in the "grimy, sweaty
attic of the Marietta Courthouse" (p. 303) (Ratcliffe reports that
later researchers will be spared this rite of passage, perhaps
unfortunately, because the collection is now on microfilm).
Ratcliffe roots Ohio parties in the territorial politics that led to
statehood. The "proto-parties" of that time were largely involved
in a court versus country dispute over local power. But throughout
the book he stresses that the political tensions evoked in America
by the French Revolution were felt in Ohio. These tensions resulted
in a state that was largely Jeffersonian Republican but contained a
significant Federalist minority. Ratcliffe shows that there was
much straight party voting, suggesting a high degree of popular
identification with particular parties among the voters. He
disputes what he calls the "myth of gentry control" (p. 107).
Focusing in part on the rivalry between Worthington and Michael
Baldwin that Cayton has written about, Ratcliffe argues that across
the state, gentry leaders were challenged for office and even lost
elections if they did not listen to the views of their
constituents.[3] In the years after 1805, Ohio developed into a one
party state. However, Ratcliffe argues that partisan differences
shaped politics especially at the county level. Ratcliffe discusses
the party nominating conventions that functioned to give people say
in the choice of candidates and to ensure party discipline.
Ironically, the convention system also led to opposition to parties
as critics complained about the influence of a few men dominating
the nominating process and thus the determining the outcome of
elections. These concerns fed into opposition to the Tammany
Political clubs and, along with the dispute over the power of the
judiciary, led to factional divisions among the Republicans. The
Federalists exploited these divisions, of course, only to see the
War of 1812 reorganize Ohio partisanship yet again. In fact, the
Federalists were too much of a minority and too discredited by the
national party's opposition to the war to be a strong party at more
than the local level, and that only in a few places.
Ratcliffe maintains that the bank war, the Panic of 1819, and the
Missouri compromise fundamentally changed Ohio politics. Many
Ohioans began to see themselves as Westerners with economic
interests different from other regions of the country and as
Northerners with a concern about slavery that separated them from
Southerners. Unfortunately, a single candidate that combined all of
these qualities was hard to come by. John Quincy Adams did in a
pinch, but subsequently Ohioans would divide into various types of
Whigs and Democrats depending on how they defined and valued their
western and northern interests.
In evaluating this work, one is immediately drawn to compare
Ratcliffe with Cayton and the political culture school. Indeed, the
book could be read as an ongoing campaign against Cayton. Ratcliffe
says he is not partisan: "Fundamentally this book does not attempt
to contradict the understandings generated by historians of
political culture" (p. x). But behind anti-party rhetoric, he does
attempt to score points for his partisan view of Ohio politics.
Ratcliffe maintains that Cayton described Ohio politics as largely
non-partisan and based on personal rivalries among the gentry.
Ratcliffe argues that the gentry ruled only when they satisfied
their constituents. He also contends that partisan loyalty shaped
the views of those constituents. Ratcliffe also argues that Cayton
paid too much attention to the Chillicothe gentry led by Worthington
and Edward Tiffin. This group has long been called the Chillicothe
Junto, and Ratcliffe derives much pleasure from quoting a letter by
Tiffin in which he calls the local opposition "the Junto" (p. 110).
Probably Ratcliffe's most important contribution is to take the
story of early Ohio politics out of the Virginia Military District
and Scioto Valley. A comparison of Ratcliffe's index with that of
Cayton's _Frontier Republic_ illustrates the differences.
Ratcliffe's index has almost twice as many references to Cincinnati
and Hamilton Counties as Cayton; for the Western Reserve, Cayton has
one reference, Ratcliffe a dozen; for Bezaleel Wells, again Cayton
has one reference, Ratcliffe seven.
There are significant points of overlap. Ratcliffe's interpretation
of the statehood movement is not fundamentally different from
Cayton's and Cayton has written on the opposition between
Worthington and fellow Chillicothean Michael Baldwin.[4] What
strikes me as most significant about this debate is that the history
of early Ohio, after decades of languishing, is finally moving
beyond the work of Randolph Downes and William T. Utter in the
thirties and forties.[5] This is especially true in the area of
political history. Now, not only do we have cultural
interpretations of early Ohio politics, but also Ratcliffe's
political interpretation. It can only be hoped that the work of
Cayton, Ratcliffe, and others will encourage historians to turn to
the social and cultural history of the state. It is significant,
too, that both historians define their work as contributions to
American history and set Ohio in the context of the nation. There
is a parochialism among American historians that, to put it crudely,
defines the state and local history of Virginia or New England as
national history; while the history of Ohio or other states west of
the Alleghenies, is dismissed as at best local history, at worst
antiquarianism. I do not intend this review to be a manifesto for
the creation of a Mississippi and Ohio Valley Historical
Association, but I do believe that the revival of interest in
frontier history, along with the new western history, is a much
needed corrective to unconscious, but very real, biases American
history.[6]
Ratcliffe notes in the beginning that his book is likely to be
dismissed as "old fashioned political history" (p. ix). My training
in cultural and intellectual history schooled me to be dismissive of
a stereotypical political history that narrated one damned election
after another without attention to larger meaning. Ratcliffe's work
is hardly that. There is much that is very traditional in this
book: the work is chronological, and it narrates many stories, some
only a paragraph, others several pages. But more importantly, the
work is both highly analytical and, in an understated way,
contentious. All of his examples were chosen and are used to
advance his argument. The details he presents are tied to larger
themes and issues. The meaning of it all is central to the book.
What is that meaning? Ratcliffe presents his book first and
foremost as a contribution to the historiography of party
development. I think he effectively shows that political parties
did exist in early Ohio and that national party issues shaped local
politics. This historigraphic concern gives an analytical focus to
the argument, but it is also a weakness. It is a weakness, first,
because by the end of the book Ratcliffe left me wondering just what
he was asserting. Early in the book he says boldly, "after 1800 ...
[proto-parties] did develop ... into formations that deserve the
name party-which is what contemporaries called them" (p. 5) and "the
new world of populism and parties was becoming commonplace in some
areas long before Andrew Jackson's name was put forward for the
presidency" (p. 12). Yet in the conclusion he concedes that the
politics of the time he is studying "certainly did not constitute a
'party system' in any meaningful sense of the term." The best he
can say is that the first decades of the century "foreshadowed" the
"partisanship, vitriol, and passion" of the 1820s and thirties (p.
242). What he presented us in two hundred and forty pages of
closely reasoned text he takes away in just a few lines. He wants
to argue that this was a time of transition, a time of evolutionary
emergence from "proto-parties" to parties. He is looking, one might
say, for the missing link. But in the end he waffles. I think he
owed it to us to come down somewhere. What were Thomas Worthington
and Michael Baldwin doing? Were they part of parties,
proto-parties, or mere shadows? Ratcliffe is the expert on this.
If he doesn't tell us, who will? Perhaps we see here a culture
conflict between English reticence and American bluster. But I
think Ratcliffe's evidence and argument are strong enough that he
can run against Formisano and Sharp with more than just bluster. I
think in short, that Ratcliffe has the votes.
Ratcliffe's historigraphic interests weaken the book in a second
way. The debate about political systems detracts from the larger
meaning of these events for American history. That larger meaning
is the relationship between the development of political parties and
the practice of American democracy. American political parties
emerged from a political culture that deplored parties, especially
when the parties politicians favored were out of power or seriously
challenged. Political parties exist to give legitimacy and
direction to the different opinions people have about how they
should be governed. In the early republic, Americans were learning
how this process worked. Ratcliffe discusses, for example, Charles
Hammond of St. Clairsville "who started the _Ohio Federalist_
because he objected to the Democratic doctrine that criticism must
not be allowed in time of war, and so 'by the exercise of my rights
I practically demonstrated their existence' " (p. 199). The
appropriateness of partisan disagreements over foreign policy, in
war or peace, remains a subject of debate among Americans. In 1818
Hammond stated the philosophical issues very well, describing a
Republican editor as part of "that class of politicians who identify
their party with the country, and who consider every measure
directed against the party as a species of high treason. He looks
upon the agents employed or appointed to administer the government,
as the government itself, and hence he interprets every attempt to
expose the imbecility and wretchedness of the administration, as an
attack upon the [system of] government" (p. 200-201). Ratcliffe
concludes that the Ohio Federalists "made a decisive contribution to
the development and acceptance of the concept of a loyal opposition,
and so helped to ensure the ultimate acceptance of the legitimacy of
political parties" (p. 200). The idea of a loyal opposition is a
truism today, but Americans had to learn how to do this. The
history of the Cold War in America demonstrates that these issues
are still matters of unresolved debate in the United States. This
theme could have been developed and especially emphasized more. It
is larger and more important than the historigraphic debate.
Ratcliffe, one could say, is somewhat lacking in the vision thing.
He could have been bolder here.
And no doubt we can all be bolder. This is an important
contribution to the history of Ohio and the early Republic. It is
well researched and engagingly written. Utter and Downes have met
their match.
Notes:
[1]. Richard P. McCormick, _The Second American Party System: Party
Formation in the Jacksonian Era_ (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1966); Ronald P. Formisano, "Federalists and
Republicans: Parties, Yes-System, No," in Paul Kleppner et al.,
_The Evolution of American Electoral Systems_ (Westport, Conn.:
Greenwood Press, 1981), 33-76; James Roger Sharp, _American Politics
in the Early Republic: The New Nation in Crisis_ (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1993).
[2]. Jeffrey P Brown, and Andrew R. L. Cayton, eds., _The Pursuit
of Public Power: Political Culture in Ohio, 1787-1861_ (Kent, Ohio:
Kent State University Press, 1994); Andrew R. L. Cayton, _The
Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio Country,
1780-1825_ (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1986); Emil
Pocock, "Frontier Dayton: Dayton, Ohio, 1796-1830" (Ph.D. diss.,
Indiana University, 1984).
[3]. Andrew R. L Cayton, "The Failure of Michael Baldwin: A Case
Study in the Origins of Middle-Class Culture on the
Trans-Appalachian Frontier," _Ohio History_ 95 (1986), 34-48.
[4]. Ratcliffe's model for understanding Ohio statehood politics is
the same as that used by Andrew R. L Cayton, _Frontier Indiana_
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996).
[5]. Randolph Downes, _Frontier Ohio, 1788-1803_ (Columbus: Ohio
State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1935); William T.
Utter, _The Frontier State: 1803-1825_, vol. 2 of _History of the
State of Ohio_, Wittke, Carl, ed. (Columbus: Ohio State
Archaeological and Historical Society, 1942).
[6]. For some the newest work on American frontiers, see for
example, Andrew R. L. Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute , eds., _Contact
points : American frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the
Mississippi, 1750-1830_ (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1998); and Craig Thompson Friend, ed., _The Buzell About
Kentuck: Settling the Promised Land_ (Lexington: University Press
of Kentucky, 1999).
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