Framing: Contours of Class in the Early Republic

As the term ‘agency’ has tended to crop up in our seminar discussions and writings, I find it appropriate that one of our readings (“On Agency” by Walter Johnson) should focus so explicitly on the term’s implications. In this 2003 article, Johnson confronts the tendency of scholars to suggest that “stolen ‘agency’” is “addressed through the writing of history which returns that ‘agency’ to its rightful owners” (Johnson, 119) and argues that “we are practicing therapy rather than politics: we are using our work to make ourselves feel better and more righteous rather than to make the world better or more righteous” (Johnson, 121). Rather than confronting injustices in the present, some of which are invariably rooted in the legacy of African slavery and the slave trade, for example, scholars have chosen to congratulate themselves on how far they have come. Although the complementary readings (Osborn, Bushman, and Gienapp) are not as deliberately self-reflective as is Johnson’s work, I wonder if it is possible to engage them on Johnson’s terms.

These are works principally concerned with adding nuance and clarity to the tensions and contradictions of class formation in the Early Republic, rather than restoring ‘agency’ to marginalized populations. Although there is obviously much more at stake in these works, one of their most striking characteristics is the degree to which the ‘agency’ of contrary classes informs the behavior of the primary groups: thus, just as Richard Bushman suggests that, “The attacks on the black elite provide a clear example of middle-class sensitivity to invasions from below . . . . Of all black people, aspiring blacks were the most threatening” (Bushman, 438 – 439), so too Matthew Osborn argues that, “In American cities, prevalent attitudes toward poverty shaped perceptions of the disease” of cholera (Osborn, 116). Class formation—particularly middle-class formation—is shaped for these scholars, as much by aspirations from above as by fears from below. Thus, diagnoses of “delirium tremens,” in Osborn’s work, was associated “with middle-class economic failure and social downfall” (Osborn, 119), and Bushman’s dreams of refinement are dependent on, “Fixing responsibility for the condition of the poor” on the their lack of gentility (Bushman, 424). In these works, the middle class consumes and is diagnosed within the context of lower class, which these works tend to reference with precisely the same tone Johnson finds in scholarship of chattel slavery. While the poor and marginalized may not be the primary subject of study in their works, both Bushman and Osborn display sensibilities toward the pretensions of the middle class vis-à-vis the lower sorts that Johnson cites in the racism of slaveholders: “As such it has a similar function to the knowing laughter you hear at conference panels when someone reads out the remarks of the racist other” (Johnson, 120). It is not simply that the middle class can be analyzed based on material culture and medical terminology, but that these scholars discuss the “patronizing attitude” of the middle class (Bushman, 425) and physicians’ tendency, by the mid-nineteenth century, to separate “respectable inebriates . . . rather than expose them to the violent behavior of delirium tremens patients” (Osborn, 132) with the same “advertisement of good will” Johnson is criticizing (Johnson, 120).

Even more overt is William Gienapp’s article, which is ostensibly intended as a corrective to the legacy of Charles Sellers, Jr.’s scholarship. Gienapp levels a sharp critique, charging that “radical historians have increasingly fallen back on the argument that the American party system deliberately stymies the popular will,” meaning “party leaders . . . divert[ed] the masses from their true concerns” (Gienapp, 253 – 254). This tendency, Gienapp argues, has led Sellers to write history for the present—in Sellers’s case, for the 1960s—rather than for the past. In fact, Gienapp begins with a discussion of the 1960s as an explanatory preface for the historiographical context of Sellers’s work, before challenging it as a “throwback to the progressive school” of Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (Gienapp, 234). The problem, for Gienapp, is not simply that Sellers, distracted by present-ist concerns, has strained to find ahistorical class divisions, but that Sellers appears to be patently un-self-reflective of this tendency. One wonders what Walter Johnson would make of this challenge—allowing for a number of areas in which Gienapp does legitimately undermine Sellers’s conclusions; as in the case of the 1828 election, for example—to Sellers’s understanding of the ‘market revolution.’ It is not difficult to imagine, for example, the conferences of the early 1990s in which a suggestion that, “Americans, particularly the rural majority, eagerly embraced the market” would be met cordially (Gienapp, 248). Gienapp freely adopts the same knowing tone—“Embracing the permissiveness of the sixties, Sellers attributes no redeeming qualities to middle-class Americans” (Gienapp, 249)—as does Johnson’s imagined scholar. Ultimately, however, the point is not simply that Gienapp, like Sellers, Osborn, Bushman—and Johnson, for that matter—find ‘agency’ or fault based on present-ist conditions, but that, as Johnson suggests, there is little to nothing at stake when they do so.

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