"The Only Mode of Avoiding Everlasting Debate": The Overlooked Senate Gag Rule for Antislavery Petitions

Wirls, Daniel

doi:10.1353/jer.2007.0017

Cited by 10 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…This, however, failed to thwart contentious debates in the House, where several congressmen continued to evade the rules and argue for unlimited right to petition. In fact, the gag rule, especially its House version, transformed the issue of the legality of slavery into an issue of freedom of expression and undoubtedly enhanced the popular appeal of abolitionism (Ludlum 1941;Wirls 2007).…”

Section: Abolitionismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770–1840

Stamatov

2011

Theor Soc

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This article examines the formative influence of the organizational field of religion on emerging modern forms of popular political mobilization in Britain and the United States in the early nineteenth century when a transition towards enduring campaigns of extended geographical scale occurred. The temporal ordering of mobilization activities reveals the strong presence of religious constituencies and religious organizational models in the mobilizatory sequences that first instituted a mass-produced popular politics. Two related yet analytically distinct generative effects of the religious field can be discerned. First, in both cases the transition toward modern forms of popular mobilization was driven by the religious institutionalization of organizational forms of centralized voluntarism that facilitated extensive collective action. Second, the adoption of different varieties of the same organizational forms led to important divergences. The spread in the United States of societies for moral reformation-in contrast to their non-survival in Britain-steered popular politics there towards a more moralistic framing of public issues. These findings indicate the importance of the organizational field of religion for the configuration of modern forms of popular collective action and confirm the analytical importance of religion's organizational aspects for the study of collective action.

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Section: Abolitionismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770–1840

Stamatov

2011

Theor Soc

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“…However, given the salience and urgency of this issue, we expect sincere voting even on procedural votes; indeed, after John Calhoun's failed attempt to impose a gag rule on the Senate considering antislavery petitions in 1836, the chamber began a practice of deciding whether to accept the question of receiving the petition, that is, the crucial votes in the Senate became procedural. 81 Measuring how senators perceived public opinion concerning abolition in the early 1800s presents a special challenge. Most studies of democratic representation that focus on time periods that precede the advent of reliable opinion polling utilize the voting behavior of citizens in presidential or statewide elections to approximate voters' preferences.…”

Section: Datamentioning

confidence: 99%

Democratic Representation of all “the People”: Antislavery Petitions in the U.S. Senate

Griffin

Sager

2020

Stud. Am. Pol. Dev.

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In keeping with the demands of political philosophers, America's constitutional design harnesses elected officials to the mass public's prevailing views, but also provides avenues for the opinions of disenfranchised groups and numerical minorities to be reflected in policy. We seek to shed light on this constitutional balancing act by studying U.S. senators’ decisions on thirty-six roll call votes related to the practice of slavery between 1835 and 1847. These voting decisions are modeled using the prevalence of antislavery petitions sent to Congress over the same period from each state's residents. We observe considerable and systematic senator representation of perceived majority opinion on antislavery petitions, despite the presence of nineteenth-century institutions buffering senators from the public. We also report evidence that the representation of disenfranchised women's views (as expressed in petitions) relative to those of men varied by party, and in ways that are predictable. Finally, we observe that senators sometimes represented perceived minority viewpoints, seemingly motivated by their political ambitions. These findings not only hold important implications for our understanding of democratic representation, but also for the processes of American political development.

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“…The gag rule was, however, a bicameral affair. In fact, the Senate enacted its version first; and the Senate's practice of squelching such speech was more effective, more enduring, andespecially in the long run-subject to less debate (Wirls 2007).…”

Section: The Gag Rule Controversymentioning

confidence: 99%

The “Golden Age” Senate And Floor Debate in the Antebellum Congress

Wirls

2007

Legislative Studies Qtrly

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An image of an antebellum “golden age” of Senate debate and deliberation has passed virtually unblemished from one generation of historians and political analysts to the next. In what ways, if any, is the image of a more deliberative Senate evident in the realities of antebellum House and Senate debates? In this article, I present a series of case studies to examine elements of the quantity and quality of floor debate in each chamber. By providing comparative evidence about House and Senate debate during the antebellum period, I offer an assessment and critique of the bicameral implications of the largely untested “golden age” understanding of the Senate and join other recent efforts to reassess the nature of the early Senate and its relation to the House. My results show the conventional wisdom to be an oversimplification, at least in its implications about the scope and depth of House debates. The House debated as long, and arguably as well, as the Senate on the signal issues of the day.

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"The Only Mode of Avoiding Everlasting Debate": The Overlooked Senate Gag Rule for Antislavery Petitions

Cited by 10 publications

References 13 publications

The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770–1840

The religious field and the path-dependent transformation of popular politics in the Anglo-American world, 1770–1840

Democratic Representation of all “the People”: Antislavery Petitions in the U.S. Senate

The “Golden Age” Senate And Floor Debate in the Antebellum Congress

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