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Support of the Federalist Party and opposition to the Democratic‐Republicans afforded Lemuel Haynes his first engagement with a public sphere beyond church congregations and revival audiences. He supported Federalists George Washington and John Adams, both of whom had some reputation in the early republic as enemies of slaveholding. New Englanders Ezra Stiles and Timothy Dwight, each man a president of Yale College, articulated a vision of blacks and whites united in a Christian postslavery society. This was a patrician vision that Haynes and black contemporaries like Richard Allen, leader of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, found convincing insofar as it suggested that a class of social and religious leaders would act to protect black rights. However, Jeffersonian ideology spread even into western Vermont; in 1818, Haynes was dismissed from his pulpit because of his Federalism and his criticism of the War of 1812.

The Berkshire County in Cheshire, Massachusetts is a community of Baptists and supporters of Democratic Republicans. To demonstrate their political statement, the women of Cheshire prepared a four feet in diameter, eighteen inches tall and 1,200 pounds cheese as a tribute to President Jefferson. Federalists opposing Jefferson satirized Cheshire's gift as the “Mammoth Cheese” in the Federalist literary journal, the Philadelphia Port Folio. This chapter discusses the significance for the cheesemakers' veneration of Jefferson and how the political culture of the Jefferson era gave rise to mass participatory democracy. During this period, there was a surge in voting in the cheese- and word-producing region of Cheshire and Pittsfield, Berkshire County. The Berkshire numbers rose up immediately after the two major local political events of 1800, Jefferson's victory in the national election and the founding of the Sun.

This chapter examines the Universal Democratic Republicans, which formed the core of the union of “liberal societies” by early 1854. The listed participants included both the “Free Democratic League (Americans, opposed to the Extension of Slavery)” and the “Ouvrier Circle (American workmen).” Given that the personnel of these groups overlapped, the Brotherhood of the Union in New York saw itself alongside the revolutionary secret societies of Europe and their successors and, in an American context, as part of the radical wing of the antislavery movement. This coalition addressed American politics on its own. That July, it recommended Hugh Forbes's Manual for the Patriotic Volunteer as “indispensable for the Revolutionists” and endorsed the view of American politics reflected in Forbes's “Catechism” that described the Democrats and Whigs as existing “to procure public occupation in the diplomatic service, custom house, post office, treasury, patent office, land office, municipality, police, or any other where salary and profit can be enjoyed.”

This chapter examines how political violence challenged the old Enlightenment faith that reason and right would guide the new nation-states. However, the nation-states themselves had been subverting that faith for almost a century. Events in Europe continued to confirm the disaffection of the Ourvrier Circle and its allies among the Universal Democratic Republicans in America. Armed conflict in the Kansas Territory had already forcibly refocused their Brotherhood of the Union whose agrarian, socialist, and abolitionist visions had relied so heavily on reasoned moral discourse. On the other hand, groups such as the Knights of the Golden Circle had always equated progress with the violent subjugation of the more primitive.

The ratification of the US Constitution forced Pennsylvanians to adapt their democratic, extra-governmental political practices to the new federal government. This chapter looks at how these practices evolved in the early 1790s, investigating gubernatorial and legislative elections, as well as the creation of Democratic-Republican Societies and the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794. These activities focused on opposing the actions of George Washington’s administration, defending popular political activity against the Federalist policies including Alexander Hamilton’s excise tax on whiskey. The chapter particularly focuses on the events of the Whiskey Rebellion, looking at how Pennsylvanians from all corners of the state developed political institutions as they sought to resolve the long-running tensions which led to violence. Ultimately, the resolution of the Whiskey Rebellion vindicated a vision of popular sovereignty in which non-violent, representative political action, rather than an appeal to federal authority, proved most successful.

Chapter 1 examines the family background, early education, friendships, and legal and political careers of James Buchanan and William Rufus King. King entered politics as a Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican, while Buchanan started out as a Federalist. This chapter considers both men’s efforts at romantic courtship: King’s foray into romance during his time as secretary to the Russian legation with Czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, and Buchanan’s failed engagement to Ann Coleman of Lancaster. In both cases, the chapter argues that these love stories established the necessary preconditions for their bachelorhood and for a future in which intimate male friendship superseded the more traditional responsibilities of marriage and family. Their earliest experiences had leavened them into the later forms of northern “dough-face” (a Northerner who supported the Southern agenda for political gain) and southern moderate (a Southerner who placed national concerns over sectional interests).

In the first generation after the Constitution, active Protestants organized to spread Christianity throughout the land. But three very different visions drove these Protestants. Custodial Protestants (linked with the Federalist Party) saw religion as supporting traditional structures. Mostly Congregationalists and Presbyterians, these individuals and groups sought to perpetuate at least some forms of national Christendom, but through voluntary means. Sectarian Protestants, mostly Baptists and those who followed Thomas Campbell, were linked with Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republicans. They viewed true religion as supporting individual liberty and opposing any organized national authority as tyranny under another guise. Methodists (the next chapter) focused primarily on spiritual concerns. Eventually, custodial Protestants were won over to using voluntary means to spread Christianity and ensure public morality.