The political status of the District of Columbia is once again the subject of debate in the United States. The District, which forms Washington's central city enclave, an area of some 69 square miles, is closer now than ever before to achieving its oldest political ambition, that of full representation in Congress. A bill to allow such representation by Constitutional amendment was passed for the first time by both the House and the Senate in 1978. Since then, State legislatures have begun to consider ratification of the Amendment with the result that this long-standing issue has entered a new phase.

Throughout its existence, Washington, D.C. has had a more distinctive and more complex political geography than is commonly supposed. Until the recent decision to support the measure, Congress had consistently opposed the idea of giving full voting rights to the District of Columbia. When the city of Washington was created at the end of the eighteenth century, the legal detachment of a Federal District from the States by means of cession was regarded as crucial to its future role as the permanent seat of government, and to the exclusive legislative control Congress was to exercise over such a district. As a result, the lack of Congressional representation became an early source of discontent, and for nearly two hundred years, D.C. has been trying to escape this particular consequence of its unique position within the federal structure.

Washington, D.C. has been called “both the most American and the least American city in the United States,” and this paradox is apparent in the States' often ambivalent views of the nation's capital.

No fanfare or stirring resolves marked the founding of Connecticut's first antislavery organization. Quietly instituted late in the summer of 1790, the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom and the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage soon betrayed a lack of direction and purpose. Upon reading the newly-drafted constitution of the Society, one Connecticut minister decided, “It does not appear that the Society is of much importance as it respects its influence in this State, as there is here scarcely a claim for its exertions.” And yet, during the five uneventful years of its existence, the organization attracted a large contingent of hyper-Calvinist ministers like Benjamin Trumbull, moderate Calvinists like Yale's Ezra Stiles, and unrepentant liberal clergymen like James Dana. All of the ministers involved were Congregationalists. The Society also included a number of prominent and pious laymen and even a sprinkling of prominent and openly irreverent ones. If the Society's work is compared to the ambitious programs of sister organizations in New York and Philadelphia, however, it appears that the Connecticut Society did not do much more than enlist the moral support of religious, political, and social leaders in the state.

“The Americans,” observed a European expatriate in 1837, “do not laugh at honest bluntness, or good-natured simplicity.… If Jonathan is to laugh, he must have a point given him, or, in other words, he must laugh to some purpose.” To Vienna-born Francis Grund, contemporary comic melodrama and its first cousin minstrelsy demonstrated beyond all doubt that his adoptive countrymen were decidedly “fond of laughing at the expense of their neighbors.” “English, French, Dutch, and German,” he noted, “are in turn made to suffer the stings of American wit.… The Irish, of late, has [sic] become very popular.” Grund's commentary reflected both the frequency with which ethnic characters of all sorts were portrayed upon the mid-nineteenth century American stage and, in particular, the emerging public taste for the stage Irishman. A tourists' guidebook to New York City published in 1850 pointed out that six of its seven principal theaters had been turned over to the “burlesque and broad fun” of melodrama and minstrelsy and to Irish character pieces especially. Twice during the 1830s, the British actor Tyrone Power conducted triumphal tours of the United States by relying upon a repertoire of Irish parts.

“I consider the war of attempted secession, 1860–1865, not as a struggle of two distinct and separate peoples,” wrote Whitman in Specimen Days and Collect, “but a conflict (often happening, and very fierce) between the passions and paradoxes of one and the same identity.” He interpreted the Civil War as a violent expression of the persistent conflict between democratic and broadly anti-democratic tendencies within the one “identity” of American republicanism; and he emphasized that this conflict was as much a subtle feature of social and political life in the North as it was in more blatant form the underlying cause of the war between North and South.

The ante-bellum years had seen the political life of the North dominated by Democrats against whom, in “The Eighteenth Presidency,” Whitman had directed some of his coarsest and most unforgiving (if unpublished) invective:

Office-holders, office-seekers, robbers, pimps, exclusives, malignants, conspirators, murderers, fancy-men,…deaf men, pimpled men, scarr'd inside with the vile disorder, gaudy outside with gold chains made from the people's money and harlots' money twisted together; crawling, serpentine men, the lousy combings and born freedom-sellers of the earth.