"Settled Out of Doors": Sociability, Caucus Building, and Partisan Development in the Early Republic (1795-1828)

A social history of political culture, partisanship, and party development in the early republic, this dissertation interrogates the interdependency of political activity, social life, and partisan development in the rapidly developing communities of Philadelphia and Washington City in the years between 1795 and 1828. I demonstrate that political alliances and partisan positions during this period were actively created and curated outside of Congress, in social spaces. Much of the political and partisan infrastructure that is often taken for grated as normative congressional business, such as the make-up of voting blocs, congressional committees, and caucus development, was established by politicians in private settings that included men and women as essential players. The primary focus of this dissertation is to widen the scope on the evolution of partisanship in America—a historiographic field which has previously been largely male-centric. By highlighting the essential role that sociability played in disguising partisan organizational practices and protecting political reputations in an honor-based, "anti-party" political culture, it becomes clear that the maintenance and eventual success of partisanship in the early republic relied on an ongoing collaboration between male and female politicians. Instead of viewing women as agents of unity, this study argues that elite women actively operated as partisan agents. Taking advantage of their unique positions in society—as disinterested paragons of virtue and morality—political women created and presided over the dynamic social spaces that ironically enhanced and furthered partisan activity and party development, while protecting male politicians' fragile reputations from public scrutiny in the staunchly anti-partisan political culture of the Early Republic. Women used their legitimizing status, and the innocuous nature of domestic spaces, to act as partisan facilitators, creating a safe space for male partisans to organize and create the political organizational tools needed to find necessary consensus in Congress—with minimal personal risk to themselves or their reputations. After the 1790s backlash against female political involvement, elite women arriving in Washington City, with partisan identities firmly intact, exerted partisan influence in the only way still available to them—through their indirect roles as influential facilitators of politicized social spaces. Using the legitimacy they marshaled from their positions as virtuous keepers of morality and manners in the United States these women created useful diversions that protected male partisans from scrutiny in social spaces. Thinking expansively about what constitutes political and partisan activity, this dissertation tells the story of how political actors of both genders worked together to grapple with the creation of an imperfect and experimental governmental infrastructure that required them to think creatively to solve practical problems. Male and female partisans collaborated to carry out the daily maintenance of partisanship and legislative life, employing both formal and informal avenues of power to create new congressional political tools and strategies in order to overcome the constraints of a strict and watchful anti-partisan political culture and keep the American experiment afloat.