Who Deserves Political Influence? How Liberal Ideals Helped Justify Mid-Nineteenth-Century Exclusionary Policies
Author(s)
Scalia, Laura J.
Abstract
Theory: Too much credit has been given to liberalism as the ideology of inclusion. Moreover, it is an oversimplification to suggest that America’s exclusionary policies arose either because liberal ideals were misapplied or because illiberal values such as republicanism or ethnocentrism prevailed. Hypothesis: Neither the theory of misapplied liberalism nor of widespread illiberalism fully explains the ideological origins of America’s long-term practice of selective political inclusion. Instead, exclusions and liberalism lived side by side in large part because liberal ideology was a tradition of sufficient ambiguity. Methods: The author looks at a sample of state constitutional conventions held during the first half of the nineteenth century. The author focuses on speeches therein that deal with question of who should participate in leader selection (and why) and analyzes how answers to that question differ according to the race of whose power is at stake. Results: Debates over how far to empower freemen of African descent verify recent studies which argue that ethnocentric language rationalized political exclusions. In debates over white empowerment, however, those arguing to restrict citizen privileges unequivocally used the language of liberalism to make their case. This suggests that nineteenth-century liberalism was not just the language of greater empowerment and inclusion; it was dynamic enough to serve as the language of exclusion as well.
