Donald J. Ratcliffe, Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793-1821 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1998, $52.50 cloth, $22.95
This review first appeared in in the Journal of American Studies 35, no. 1 (April 2001), 183-184.
< Back to book reviews listing
Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic: Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793-1821
Donald J. Ratcliffe
Reviewed by Michael A. McDonnell, University of Sydney
Donald Ratcliffe, of the University of Durham, readily confesses in the Preface of Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic that his book is likely to be dismissed as "old fashioned political history" because it is about "how politics actually worked" in the all-important developing state of Ohio. For the most part, Ratcliffe delivers what he promises - a book about "political contests, about electoral trends, about the way in which electoral competition became structured in the early years of the republic "-in a meticulously researched and detailed work which even proponents of the more "fashionable approach" to the period cannot and should not dismiss as easily as he thinks they will. The book makes three important claims, the most compelling of which is that there were significant bodies of partisan sentiment in existence before 1815 - amounting to more than just a "preparty" form of political organisation - and which were orientated around national rather than local politics. Ratcliffe is clearly most at ease in delineating the complex and confusing nature of partisan activity in Ohio and at his best in describing the extent and evolutionary nature of party alignments and conflict. The second claim is that these pre-1815 partisan divisions had far-reaching consequences. Approaching Jeffersonian politics from a Jacksonian perspective in what appears to be the first of two books (the second taking the story up to 1828), Ratcliffe found more continuities than differences between the political histories of the two. Old loyalties and the memory of party division and mutual antagonism affected new alignments after 1825, when party politics once again revolved around national identifications and contests rather than local politics, and politicians often used the "language and symbols and ideas learned during the conflicts of Jefferson and Madison's day." Perhaps this is enough of an accomplishment for one author, and one book, but the work ultimately fails to prove Ratcliffe's final - and perhaps most crucial point - that these partisan divisions had penetrated deep into the electorate with the result that "Ohio was thoroughly democratized by the early nineteenth century." It may have been, and there are some suggestive insights here, but this book does not and perhaps cannot prove such a claim because it so exclusively focuses on the politicians and what they said or believed. Apart from a short review of "ethnocultural sources of partisanship, " we are given remarkably little information about who really supported them, and why. This is an important problem, for, as Ratcliffe readily admits, the electorate often failed to provide and act as party politicians and Ratcliffe himself expected, bringing into question the pervasiveness of partisan politics and, in turn, the significance of national versus local issues. In the end, Ratcliffe's work will be indispensable in understanding the origins of a more democratic polity, but a more complementary marriage of the two approaches the "old-fashioned" and the new "political culture" studies (which Ratcliffe for the most part eschews) is still needed. As it stands, the work will be extremely useful to those engaged in that very endeavour, and to historians of the later period who have failed to recognise the importance and lasting significance of partisan politics in the early national period. Yet, while the detailed and fascinating reconstructions of evolving party alignments will be of especial interest to those who want to know how local elites worked at politics in Ohio, those wishing to uncover the full story of "how politics worked" and how a more democratic polity emerged in the early Republic will want to know more.