Causal inference and American political development: the case of the gag rule
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Causal inference and American political development: the case of the gag rule Jeffery A. Jenkins1 · Charles Stewart III2 Received: 1 July 2019 / Accepted: 18 November 2019 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2019
Abstract We investigate the “gag rule”, a parliamentary device that from 1836 to 1844 barred the US House of Representatives from receiving petitions concerning the abolition of slavery. In the mid-1830s, the gag rule emerged as a partisan strategy to keep slavery off the congressional agenda, amid growing abolitionist agitation in the North. Very quickly, however, the strategy backfired, as the gag rule was framed successfully as a mechanism that encroached on white northerners’ rights of petition. By 1844, popular pressure had become so great that many northern Democrats, an important bloc of prior gag rule supporters, yielded to electoral pressure, broke party ranks, and voted to rescind the rule, thereby sealing its fate. More generally, the politics of the gag rule provide an interesting causal-inference case study of the interplay between social movement development and congressional politics before the Civil War. Keywords Congress · Gag rule · Slavery · Causal inference JEL Classification D72 · N41
1 Introduction Before strains over American regional differences became so severe as to cause a bloody Civil War, the locus of regional conflict was the US Congress. Tariffs, admission of new states and the regulation of slavery were issues that were centered on congressional action. The speeches and votes of Members of Congress on those issues framed how most Americans viewed the tug of regional interests. This paper is about one episode in the antebellum regional drama—the so-called “gag rule”, which from 1836 to 1844 barred the House of Representatives from receiving petitions concerning the abolition of slavery. It was an episode of which most students * Jeffery A. Jenkins [email protected] Charles Stewart III [email protected] 1
Price School of Public Policy, University of Southern California, Los Angels, USA
2
Department of Political Science, The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
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of Congress and of antebellum American history are at least dimly aware; yet, it has elicited only a few scholarly treatments (Ludlom 1941; McPherson 1963; Rable 1975; Freehling 1990, pp. 308–352; Frederick 1991; Miller 1996; Wills 2003, pp. 204–225; Meinke 2007; Hoffer 2017). We identify two decisive movements in determining support for the gag rule in the House, both of which were driven by electoral dynamics. The first was between the 24th Congress (1835–1837), when the gag rule was first adopted, and the 25th Congress (1837–1839), when the rule’s initial partisan intentions were undermined by growing anti-slavery sentiments in the North. The second movement was between the 27th and 28th Congresses (1841–1845), when the contingent of anti-slavery northern Democrats grew sufficiently large (or northern sentiments grew suff
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