What role did petitioning play in early America?

0:03[MUSIC] It's important to recognize in a way that I don't think we can anymore just how critical petitioning was at that time. Everybody would have been understood to have the right to petition, even when they didn't have the right to vote, and of course, it's important to understand that at the founding of the American Republic, a minority of all people, and including not all white men had the right to vote. A lot of white men did not get the right to vote until state legislatures began to expand the franchise from the 1810s through the 1830s. But everybody would have been considered to have the right to petition, which included at some sense, a right to be heard before the legislature. To give you an example, there was a big dispute in Massachusetts between the Wampanoag tribe at Mash P, which is still in existence and federally recognized today and the Massachusetts government.

1:02At one point, the Native Americans at the Wampanoag began to petition and complain about the way that the state was mistreating them. Now, this was a state legislature, but similar norms applied as to what you would see in the U.S Congress. One member of the Massachusetts Legislature arose and said, "Look, these are not voting citizens, these are Native Americans. We should not be hearing their petitions here."

1:28Generally, the rest of the assembly, the Massachusetts General Court, disagreed with this person, and there was a remark to say, "Look, we don't know what the right to petition means, if it doesn't mean that anybody." That would include people who don't yet have the right to vote, which would have included women.

1:48Or even people who wouldn't have the right to vote today, such as children, they would be considered to have the right to petition. The right to petition applied to all subjects of the government. That's a case in which everybody felt that they could petition. Not everybody did, but everybody felt that they could. The other thing that I think it's important to keep in mind is that everybody felt that the petition should get a response, even if the response was no and even if the response was expected to be negative.

2:20You ask for a new road or a county split, or you ask for some change to the laws on slavery or marriage or something like that. We don't have great statistics on this, but, a large number of these petitions were rejected. But what was always expected was a response. You were expected to be heard and you were expected to be responded to. I think it's fascinating that in the early 1800s, basically the first month of each congressional session.

2:52But for the first session, which often went two or three months, sometimes more, the first month of that entire session would be devoted to reading petitions from constituents. Then after that month, every Monday, every first day of the week that they were in session, would also be devoted to reading these petitions. The volume of petitions was so large that literally, you can see in the house journals, members standing up and saying, why are we wasting all this time reading these petitions? Why are we doing this? You see this in the very first Congress, and then there was a pamphlet writer in the very first Congress named Candias, and said, "Well, we do this, not because it's efficient or inefficient, but because it's just." That, if you are going to have people submit to the power of a government,

3:42then they have the right to complain and they have the right to be heard. That was an ethic that governed the United States for much of it's first decades through the 19th century. It's interesting, again, not to say that we should re live that experience, but it's quite different from the way that say our United States Congress or any state legislature conducts itself today. We know that most members of Congress, most legislators spend most of their time fundraising.

4:13They have to. It's not to point the finger at any one of them it's a systemic issue. But there's nothing like the Congressional petition process with us today where the entire attention of the nation's Article 1 governing branch, is at least for a few weeks focused on what citizens have sent to them and debating these things and deliberating them and referring them to committees and things like that. Then, if you look at the most important democratizing moments of the 19th century, petitions were absolutely crucial when men without a lot of property began to press for the right to vote in and around and after the war of 1812. They would make arguments such as, "We just fought this war, we defeated the British, and yet, why do we not have the right to vote in our state and for federal officials?" The antislavery movement, in the long run, creates, basically the Republican Party as an Antislavery Party in the 1850s really gets it start and takes a lot of its leaps forward in the 1820s and 1830s as a petitioning campaign.

5:22It's doing many other things. There are speeches, traveling lectures, boycotts, things like that, but petitioning is just absolutely crucial. It's petitioning that Henry Clay uses to basically create the first mass Opposition Party in the United States, the first opposition to the Democrats in the 1830s. It's petitioning by which women in the United States begin to end coverture, the legal doctrine that when they got married, all of their property would be subsumed under the name and legal title of their husband. I could go on and on. Native Americans petitioned often unsuccessfully, but in some really important cases successfully to hold on to lands that they still have ownership over now on reservations and trust land. Any number of other things, religious liberty, and so anytime you look at the period from,

6:18say, 1789 to roughly the Second World War, and you see an important change happening in politics, a new social program, the government stepping forward to combat discrimination, look for petitions that were probably an important part of that movement.