Harlow Sheidley | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4

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Harlow Sheidley | Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Magic of the Many: Josiah Quincy and the Rise of Mass Politics in Boston, 1800–1830. By Matthew H. Crocker. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999. xvi, 222 pp. $35.00, ISBN 1-55849-222-4.)

In this fine book, Matthew H. Crocker analyzes the early-nineteenth-century populist insurgency of Boston's Middling Interest, which fatally weakened the Bay State's Federalist party and forever altered Boston politics. Previously, Boston had been ruled by a Federalist oligarchy dominated by Harrison Gray Otis and others in a deferential political culture that awarded office on the basis of such attributes as birth and wealth. By the end of 1828, when, after a decade of grass-roots activism, Bostonians voted Josiah Quincy out of the mayor's office, the city's political culture had become a harbinger of Jacksonian democracy. Whereas most accounts of that movement focus on either the insurgents or the elite, Crocker's contribution is to explain why the elitist Quincy appealed to the dissidents, becoming the (unsuccessful) Middling Interest candidate in Boston's mayoral election of 1822, and why so many of the city's mechanics and laborers continued to support him after his subsequent election to that office, despite his autocratic rule and the demise of their party. . . .

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