Can ‘The People’ Speak? Popular Meetings and the Ambiguities of Popular Sovereignty in the United States, 1816–1828

Abstract

This chapter examines popular assemblies during the so-called Era of Good Feelings (1815–1828) in the United States in order to explore how politically active, white, male Americans understood popular sovereignty and sought to put it into practice. All white, male Americans believed that a unitary public with a single will existed and that that will should rule in public life. But such a will did not exist, and Americans never agreed on how, exactly, that fictitious will should rule. In attempting to put this belief into practice, public meetings and the officials who responded to them exposed the ambiguities and contradictions contained in the doctrine of popular sovereignty and articulated several competing visions of how that doctrine ought to be put into practice.