To Organize the Sovereign People: Political Mobilization in Revolutionary Pennsylvania

David W. Houpt’s To Organize the Sovereign People studies the evolving political culture in Pennsylvania from the start of the American Revolution to 1808. Over that roughly thirty-year span, Houpt argues “that citizens embraced political parties and elections because other, more direct ways of exercising their sovereignty proved unwieldy and ultimately ineffective at translating public opinion into public policy” (5). The concepts at the heart of this work, such as popular sovereignty, “the people,” and effective government are often hard to pin down. To counter this, Houpt focuses his study on the “mid-level political activists who connected the realms of formal and informal politics” to better understand how Pennsylvanians balanced popular sovereignty and effective government (10).The historiographical intervention advances the argument and makes the case for why you should read this book. Houpt distances himself from what he terms the two camps of post-revolutionary scholars: scholars who see the 1780s and 1790s as a “counterrevolution” and those who see a “slow but steady march toward greater rights and freedoms” (5). Houpt breathes new life into this field and contributes to a growing number of early American scholars looking towards mobilization as a way to bridge debates that have become entrenched.The book’s narrative arc bolsters the argument with clear political evolution demonstrated as one progresses from one chapter to the next. Chapter 1 establishes how radical patriots used violent and nonviolent mobilization to obtain their desired outcome of revolution. However, radical patriots had moderate counterparts and an ensuing struggle over defining who counted as “the people” during the American Revolution remained a key point of departure for these two groups.Chapter 2 demonstrates the struggle between radicals and moderates for political control of the state from 1783 to 1790. This chapter is particularly interesting in that moderates-turned-federalists adopted the methods of radicals in order to successfully appeal to the voting public, despite little moderate/federalist interest in input from the general public.1 It worked as moderates won crucial elections in 1785 and 1786. It should be noted, however, that federalists resorted to mob violence (51) and other illegal and/or unconstitutional tactics (61) to make it appear that Pennsylvanians supported federalist goals.Chapters 3 and 4 illustrate Pennsylvania’s political growth across the 1790s. Federalists sought to instill deferential politics, a term ill-defined in the text, while the opposition to Federalists eventually organized into the Republican Party. Republicans worked hard to organize and garner political wins on state and national elections while Federalists did not. The author claims that Republican wins indicated a rejection of deferential politics. However, this seems less convincing since Republicans embraced the Federalist obsession of confining popular sovereignty to election day and restricted popular input into candidate choice (131), although not as restrictive as Federalists. In addition, by 1798, if not earlier, Houpt notes that the majority of Republicans did not accept violence as part of their understanding of popular sovereignty. And Republicans-turned-Democrats consciously constructed their party as one “compatible with capitalism” (139), which is to say a Federalist position from the 1790s. Seen in these ways, did Federalist deferential politics actually win out?Chapter 5 explains the schism and reconciliation within the Democratic party under the Jefferson administration and concludes that party structures became entrenched and accepted as the intermediary of the people and their government.Overall, Houpt is convincing that Pennsylvanians embraced parties as the intermediary for the people with popular sovereignty briefly conferred to voters on election day. Although the text focuses on political disagreements between White men, Houpt rightfully mentions Black and female perspectives periodically, with a heavier emphasis in the conclusion. The book could have mentioned the petition from Black Pennsylvanians over the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 or the Absalom Jones led petition over slavery and the slave trade in 1799 to, I am guessing here, underscore the glaring absence of state parties even considering Black rights, despite the peaceful political mobilization of Black Pennsylvanians. Translating the will of the people into an effective government never wavered from the dominant racist and patriarchal theories common among White Americans of the era. In short, Pennsylvanians “accepted a more limited form of citizenship” in exchange for “a more stable, and arguably more effective . . .” that perpetuated a racist and patriarchal political vision (166–67).Yet, how the author gets to the main conclusion remains somewhat perplexing. Mid-level activists get short attention throughout the text. This is not a prosopography of a few prominent activists. Nor is it clear that a number of mid-level activists remained committed to influencing Pennsylvania’s politics over this period, or if mid-level activists turned into state-level politicians. Indeed, the text often mentions “moderates” or “Republicans” or “Democrats” without specific names. For example, when moderates copied radicals and utilized party organization to win the elections of 1785 and 1786, the only moderate organizer named is Jared Ingersoll (49). Does Ingersoll, a former member of the Continental Congress, count as a mid-level activist? For these reasons, the author is less convincing in his claim that this book bridges the gap between studies of the politics indoors and those who study the politics out of doors.Although Houpt does not make an explicit argument about media power in the book’s thesis, it is apparent throughout the text that newspapers held outsized influence in driving political turn out. For example, the author points out a herculean task undertaken by John Beckley and others to create and distribute nearly 50,000 handwritten ballots that voters could take with them to the polls in 1796 to vote for Republican electors for the presidency. Houpt points to this feat of party organization not only to show how Jefferson edged a tiny victory to win the majority of Pennsylvania’s electoral votes but how to show high-level Republican success through organizing. To that end, the author notes that the variance between the highest and lowest Republican electoral vote candidates clocked in at 133 from over 12,000 voters. However, Federalists seemed to have mounted nothing close in terms of organization except for puro-Federalist newspaper articles and their slate of electoral voters also received over 12,000 votes each, with a difference of only 146 between their highest and lowest vote getters.2 Organization surely contributed to Jefferson’s victory and that point stands, but the rest of the interpretation is less persuasive. Perhaps media always controlled the will of the people?In sum, Houpt’s work contributes to the larger discussion about how we can better understand the translation of the will of the people into government. It seems that a handful of people did successfully claim to represent the will of the people and the majority of Pennsylvanians accepted it by 1808. The excellent final paragraph connects the concepts of “the people” and voting rights to the present day and demonstrates why deep research and historical study remain integral to the health of America’s democratic experiment, an experiment Houpt pins to the outcome of election day.