Public Opinion

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PUBLIC OPINION

On 16 April 1816 the Washington National Register carried a bitter comment by Napoleon Bonaparte, as he was departing for exile: "A new power has started up in every country, which is called public opinion, from the empire of which no person can withdraw himself, and to whose tribunal governments themselves instantly appeal." The rise of this new power of public opinion was a central part of the history of the United States from the 1750s to the 1820s. As in Europe, the ideas and practices of public opinion in America emerged with the rise of the newspaper press and the civil associations of what is now called the public sphere. But in the early United States the concept of public opinion had both a longer history and a more complicated relationship with revolution and nation building. And by 1829 the question of who exactly the American public was, and what sorts of opinions it might have, was about to explode in complexity.

an emerging colonial public and the american revolution

The idea that a "public" existed and might have an "opinion" had begun to develop by the mid-eighteenth century. The basis of government in colonial America lay in charters guaranteeing rights to representation in assemblies, confirmed to the colonies at large in the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689. But such rights were limited to men of property, and even they did not necessarily have the information that would allow them to form opinions that would mark them as "public men." Opinions abounded, but they were effectively the privileges of officially recognized bodies: judges, juries, assemblies, governors, churches. Public authorities deferred to what they called the "sense of the people" or the "minds of the people," but not to "public opinion." But by the early eighteenth century, as in English provincial towns, a specific but unrecognized public began to appear within the ranks of the "people." By 1760 there was a total of eighteen newspapers being printed in the colonies. Distinct public spheres comprised of these newspapers and small clubs and societies began to emerge in the leading colonial seaport towns, providing a field of information, commentary, and debate to an emerging "informed public." In the highly literate northern seaports this public spread beyond the bourgeois respectability of the merchant and master artisan to include women and laboring men. But in the vast stretches of the early American farming towns and counties the emergence of such a public was far more limited, both by the lack of print and a variable literacy: stronger in rural New England, it was weakest in the plantation South and the arc of the frontier backcountry.

These colonial patterns shaped American politics during the imperial crisis and the opening of the Revolution. The emergence of an American public was just strong enough to fool the British, but just weak enough to permit divisions among the colonials. The British government, under the ministry of George Grenville, assumed that Americans were divided by colonial boundaries and unable to generate a unified resistance to the Stamp Act in 1765. These assumptions were foiled by the network of newspapers, themselves targeted by the act with a wide array of other paper documents, which worked to shape a common resistance in the seaport towns and circles of planter gentry. On the other hand, people in more remote regions poorly supplied with news often had only the vaguest notions of the issues at stake. During the ensuing era of the Townshend Act resistance beginning in 1767, and then under the Articles of Association in the fall of 1774, opinion certainly was shaped by the growing number of newspapers, thirty-seven in 1775, but also by the threat of force. Individuals throughout the colonies were confronted with the demands of committees that they sign articles of nonconsumption or Continental Association, while printers not supporting the American cause were driven out of business. Once the war broke out state legislatures imposed a level of censorship on print to maintain the cause. Although Thomas Paine appealed to the "Common Sense" of the American people, that sense was shaped by the imperatives of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary force. During eight years of war that "sense of the people" was sharply divided: historians still accept the basic thrust of John Adams's sober assessment that during the Revolution a third of Americans had been Patriots, a third Tories, and a third disaffected.

confederation and constitution: competing understandings of the public

During the Confederation that followed the war, American opinion was fragmented, volatile, and controversial. Within the federated states the ranks of the public had been widened as much by Revolutionary mobilization as the growing number of newspapers. It manifested a spirit of populist democracy, and in state after state majorities of voters elected legislatures that protected the assets of poor households against the pressure of private and public debt. This Confederation-era state politics, unfolding in small, face-to-face legislative districts, derived more from the militia field than the newspaper.

The campaign to write and ratify a national constitution in 1787–1788 tipped the balance toward the beginnings of a recognizably modern understanding of public opinion. The Federalist proponents of the Constitution won ratification in critical states, most importantly New York, by the narrowest of margins, and after a full-scale effort in the press, where the printers almost uniformly supported the Federalist cause. This advantage contributed to their sweeping victory in the first federal elections, and in the first years of the 1790s the printers of what were now roughly ninety newspapers worked to shape a remarkable consensus of support for the new federal Republic.

public opinion in the early republic

The federal constitution had established not just a national government but a national context of publicity, shaped by a new national system of mail. As a national politics emerged, the old corporate language of the "people" began to give way rapidly to a new language of the "public": the terms "public opinion" and "public mind" appeared in American newspapers and magazines with accelerating frequency, surging with each presidential election. The Federalists in power attempted to manage this opinion with the founding of the Gazette of the United States: they hoped to build a political order in which voters chose lawmakers but articulated no opinions regarding the policies of government. Opposition soon emerged: as soon as Alexander Hamilton presented his plan for a national bank, Jefferson and his Democratic Republican followers demanded that voters think for themselves and form their own independent opinions, the central goal of the Democratic societies of 1793–1794. Although the Federalists decried the Republican efforts as factional—raising "passion" and "party" against "reason" and good government, and "inflaming" and "corrupting" public opinion—they themselves mobilized public opinion in organizing a wave of petitioning to ensure the funding of Jay's Treaty in 1796.

Jeffersonian appeals to opinion—and the possibility of war with France—precipitated the Federalist effort at suppression, the Sedition Act of 1798, which made the writing or publishing of criticism of the government punishable by fines and imprisonment. The Jeffersonians were not cowed. The historian Jeffrey Pasley has demonstrated that Republican newspapers spread even more rapidly after the Sedition Act than before it, and the arrest and conviction of twenty-five editors merely provided a wider sense of outrage. A host of young men taking up political printing in the months before the election of 1800—publishing many of the roughly 230 newspapers in circulation—narrowly swung the popular vote to Jefferson's Republicans. This generational experience launched the career of many a political editor, as this cohort became the foundation of political opinion making for both Democratic and the National-Republican/Whig Parties.

The seesaw of repression and mobilization of 1798–1800 crystallized the emerging role that the scholar David Waldstreicher has ascribed to the early political parties: Federalist and Republican visions became the vehicles for competing understandings of the nation and the purposes of its government. But the concept of public opinion retained an ambiguity that it may not have shed to this day. Although made up of millions of individual opinions, "public opinion" was still conceived in monolithic terms. Even after Jefferson's election, political parties were seen as illegitimate factions of interested men that in some way violated the reason of the true public. The press labored under the threat of libel suits brought by both Republicans and Federalists for partisan purposes. Exactly when Americans began to be truly comfortable with the legitimacy of opposing opinion is a matter of some debate among historians. Whereas the historian Richard Hofstadter has argued that partisan opinion was accepted in the United States by the 1820s, a number of other historians have dissented, arguing that many Americans into the 1830s were uncomfortable with party and organized political opinion, and saw it as undermining a broader, more legitimate public opinion.

Throughout this era, stretching back into the mid-eighteenth century, the emerging idea of public opinion had had other limits and boundaries. It was still assumed to be the domain of propertied, literate respectability. But in the 1820s the boundaries around public opinion were beginning to be challenged by "counter-publics," as women, free blacks, and unpropertied labor were beginning to be heard and read in public. These first tentative developments in the 1820s anticipated an explosive transformation of public discourse in the 1830s, and the emergence of a truly modern configuration of public opinion.

bibliography

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Brooke, John L. "To Be 'Read by the Whole People': Press, Party, and the Public Sphere in the United States, 1789–1840." Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 110 (April 2000): 41–118.

Brown, Richard D. The Strength of a People: The Idea of an Informed Citizenry in America, 1650–1870. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996.

Hofstadter, Richard. The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780–1840. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969.

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Wilson, Kathleen. The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

John L. Brooke

Encyclopedia of the New American Nation