 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's virtual author lecture with Daniel Carpenter, author of Democracy by Petition. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two upcoming programs you can view on our YouTube channel. On Thursday, May 20th, at 11 a.m., we present the latest installment of our Young Learners program, Meet Madame C.J. Walker. Actor and historian Daisy Sentry will portray Madame C.J. Walker, philanthropist, civil rights advocate, and America's first female self-made millionaire. At the end of the program, Alelia Bundles, Madame Walker's great-great-granddaughter, will answer questions. And on Thursday, May 27th, at noon, Jim Downey will tell us about his new book, Brain Storms and Mindfarts, a look at the brightest and most innovative American inventions along with the frivolous and utterly useless ones lost to history. The ability to petition the government and expect a resolution is a widely acknowledged practice in our society. The right to do so is spelled out in the Bill of Rights in the First Amendment. Along with the free exercise of religion and freedom of speech and the press, the right of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for redress of grievances is made explicitly clear. The National Archives holds large numbers of petitions of various sorts, to the President, to Congress, and to federal agencies. Our most recent exhibit, rightfully hers, contains several petitions calling for voting rights for women. The largest petition in our holdings is an 1893 appeal for a Department of Roads. That petition contains 150,000 signatures on papers attached end to end and wound around two wooden spools. The entire structure weighs 600 pounds and stands 7 feet tall. Whether a petition is one page or several thousand, Americans have energetically used this right to ask for help. In Democracy by Petition, Daniel Carpenter reveals the core role of the petition and the development of American democracy. Daniel Carpenter is L.A.S. Freed, Professor of Government at Harvard University and the author of the prize-winning book's Reputation in Power and the Forging of Bureaucratic Autonomy. At Harvard, he has led the creation of the Digital Archive of Anti-Slavery and Anti-Segregation Petitions and the Digital Archive of Native American Petitions. He's a Guggenheim Fellow, a Radcliffe Institute Fellow and Fellow at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. His academic articles have appeared in the American Political Science Review, Science, the New England Journal of Medicine, and the Journal of the American Medical Association, among other venues. His public writings have appeared in the New York Times, Le Mans, The Washington Post, Boston Globe, and other outlets. Now, let's hear from Daniel Carpenter. Thank you for joining us today. I want to thank David Farrow for that very kind introduction. And I want to begin today with a brief presentation that gives you some flavor of what's going on in the book. And so I'm going to share my screen here. So Democracy by Petition is a book that examines not the entire history of American Petitioning, but a particular moment when it became massive, much more democratic, and I argue in the book as influential in our history as ever before. Before beginning, I want to return to thank the National Archives. It's really a treasured national institution, and it has greatly supported my career and the career of thousands of other scholars, historians, writers. And frankly, the interests of millions upon millions of American citizens. Both of the monographs that David Farrow mentioned that have been previously published relied heavily upon the National Archives, as did this one. And those are just some of the record groups there in parentheses that I used. For this one, I want to especially thank the Legislative Archives Center, which is really a fantastic office, incredibly efficient with a dedicated staff. And I'm probably not going to remember everybody who has helped, but I want to thank in particular Richard Hunt, its director. Other people I've worked with in the past, Ken Cato, Sarah Waits, Richard McCully and apologies to anybody whom I've forgotten. And many of you who work as archivists, including those at the reading room, as well as people, even though this is an event at the National Archives, the Library of Congress and its manuscript reading room has also been a remarkably helpful resource over the years. I want to begin with a particular petition that was sent to Congress and came to Congress in the fall of 1865. It came from a group of black men who had just finished fighting in the Civil War in the South, and they wrote from Savannah. And they wrote to impeach President Andrew Johnson at the time. It was a document that mixed rhetorical audacity with subtlety and nuance. And it is a document that is excerpted in a recent article that I published, which is an excerpt from the book in Lapham's Quarterly, and you can see the HTML link there at the bottom of the screen. Or you can simply Google robust claims of vast lawlessness. And the document started as follows. We complain of our chief executive of causing by his agents and indulgence of outlaws, the outrages and murders that have been committed on loyal subjects and citizens of the union in 10 rebel states since May 29, 1865. We charge President Johnson with giving aid and comfort to outlaws. We charge him with usurping legislative and judicial power. We charge him with wickedly and boldly striving to reproduce rebellion by making rebel outlaws, governors, judges, sheriffs, mayors, clerks, and the police of the 10 rebel states. This petition came in at a time of great national turbulence. President Lincoln had been reelected, but earlier that year had been assassinated. And there were many Southerners who believed with Lincoln's assassination and with the rise of Johnson that they could not only take control of the South, but potentially re-institute slavery. Johnson himself vetoed and or held up many reconstruction measures. And he appointed, as the petition rightly suggests, many former Confederate officers, those who the petitioners are regarded as rebels and traitors to the union cause, he appointed them in charge of many of the aspects of the Southern governments. As we know, Johnson was eventually impeached. This is possibly the first, one of the first, and certainly the most radical of documents calling for Johnson's impeachment. And there were many such petitions. We also know that that impeachment failed, but that Johnson who sought the Democratic nomination did not get it and ultimately was booted out of office by Republican voters who elected Ulysses Grant to the presidency in the 1868 election. But here's the puzzle. How was it at a time when black men who had only recently been freed by virtue of constitutional amendment, by virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation, and by, and occupying the place even in the north and throughout American society of electoral minorities, how could they bring so radical a document calling for the impeachment of a president to the U.S. Congress? What was the sense of equality and audacity that they felt at that time? And why did they call upon the mechanism of a petition rather than their membership in the union and or in the Republican Party to do so? Well, I'll get to that in a minute, but that petition is just one example of a flourishing culture of deeply democratized petitioning that I described in the book. And you can see that culture active in several different ways. The first is that petitioning became in a numerical sense much more common from the early Republic through especially what's called the antebellum period into the 1860s. This is the total number of petitions introduced to the House and Senate from the first to the 41st Congresses, that's 1789 to 1873. And you can see the rapid run up in the 1820s. Now this does not control of course for the fact that the American population is growing. And if we do so, we see again a clear run up from the early Republic especially taking off in the 1820s through the late 1840s and early 1850s. And we again see a little bit of a run up in the 1860s. But notice that there are more than 20 petitions sent and introduced to Congress per 100,000 population in the United States, roughly from the late 1820s all the way through the early 1850s. And that is a level of congressional petitioning that has never been, had never been seen before. And it peaks in the 25th Congress, which is during the middle of the gag rule, and that's something that I'll return to shortly. I want to suggest also that in the long run of American political history, as my colleague Maggie Blackhawk at University of Pennsylvania, Ben Schneer at the Harvard Kennedy School, Tobias Resch at Harvard and I have shown, that those early 19th century peaks other than the anti-sabotarian campaign in the 1890s around the World's Fair also account for the historical peak of petitioning. Never before the 25th Congress, and never since when accounting for population, had Congress received as many petitions as it did during the 25th Congress from 1837 to 1839. And it's worth pointing out that this is a book and this is a story writ large that's not just about the U.S. Congress and petitioning at the national level. It's also about the American states. And frankly, it's a story that extends beyond the boundaries of American sovereignty. So if we look at annual petitions to the Virginia House of Delegates and we also control for population, there is a rise during the revolutionary period, but that rise from a numerical standpoint is itself exceeded by the rise that occurs during the 1830s and 1840s. Similar things occur or patterns occur when we look at the aggregate level of petitioning in what was then called Lower Canada. Today roughly corresponds to Quebec. It was one of two Canadian provinces at the time, Upper Canada, which was largely Anglophone dominated and Lower Canada, which was largely Francophone dominated. And petitioning was very, very common. In fact, more common than voting for many populations in both areas. But the other thing that happened, and at some level it's something that those numbers I showed you really just can't speak to, is that the petitions themselves changed. What we began to see much more commonly in Antebellum America were mass signature lists. We had seen them before back in say the heyday of French Protestantism in the 1500s during the English Civil War, during the American Revolution and other times. But again, never with quite the frequency that we see them from the 1820s to the 1850s. More so than ever before, these petitions are often connected to one another. They don't come in just as a single petition, but they're connected to one another in the architecture of a campaign, often organized by preexisting organizations, but often in ways that left an organizational imprint later on. And finally, what we see is the mass involvement in organization of women, indigenous people, black people and other people of color and minority groups. And so here are just some of the notable mass petitions and petitioning campaigns in Antebellum North America that are listed in Table 2.1 of the book. There are two, the first and third, there are petitions from lower Canada, largely signed by French Canadians, also signed by many women, that are some of the largest petitions of the entire period in the Atlantic world. One against the Governor Dalhousie, amasses over 87,000 signatures on a single document. It, like the petition, the large petition that is hundreds of pounds that the National Archivist just showed you is also rolled in a museum in Montreal. There were anti-auction petitions in New York City that gathered over 10,000 signatures. Free Men of Color, a mixed race and black men in the 1820s, authored a range of petitions for legal equality that were sent to the British colonies. And those petitions were both remarkably influential in terms of eventually setting the agenda for legal equality among black men in the British West Indies. They also alarmed American slaveholding interests who saw these petitions, worried about them, and openly themselves petitioned and then lobbied for the restriction of the movement of free black men and women in the United States. There were, especially before the 1830s and 1840s, larger free black populations in the South, obviously outnumbered by black slave populations. I'll discuss the anti-Jackson pro-bank petition campaign in the 1830s shortly. We see massive Cherokee petitions around the Treaty of New Ashoda in the 1830s. Again, that burst of massive petitioning to the U.S. House in the 25th Congress, where we see 600,000 signatures on petitions in just two years. Women's anti-slavery petitions to the state legislature in Massachusetts. Angelina Grimke presents those in the first invited address by a woman before a North American legislature. The Mormon Scroll Petition from Nauvoo comes in at this time, for those of you who study or know the history of the Latter-day Saints, and that's a really important petition in the history of the LDS Church. There are other anti-slavery petitions that come in, the Temperance Petition Movement that occurs in many states especially. There are petitions in Spanish-speaking and Mexican-controlled places such as Santa Fe, and even in the period that's called La Reforma in Mexican history in the 1850s, with thousands of signatures, including thousands of women's signatures, a level of mobilization that rivals, if it doesn't even surpass, anything observed during the U.S. South in that time in the 1850s. And then I'll talk about the Sumner Petition in a little bit. So let me just direct you through three mobilizations in which these democratic or democratized petitioning campaigns occurred. And then I'll talk to you, I'll discuss a little bit at the end, about why I think it was not simply a democracy of petitions. A world in which the act of petitioning had become much more democratic in many ways, democracy with a small d, but how what we regard as our democracy in America, our democratic republic, was in part built through this democratic petitioning process. So I'm going to start with Native America, move to the anti-Jackson campaign, and then move to American anti-slavery and women's rights. Native Americans petitioned as much or more than any other population during the 19th century, especially when one controls the size of their population. And this was true not simply within the United States, but was also true in Canada, and was also true in Mexico. In part, they petitioned so much because governments, both American, Canadian, and Mexican, but especially American, were dead set on using the machinery of administration to remove them from their ancestral spaces, and to create new spaces in what was called Indian Territory, some of which became Oklahoma, during the 18 teens through the 1830s. And very early on, and this is a really important feature of Native American petitioning campaigns, is that women led and took a leadership role in those campaigns as much as among any other population. We see this in an important petition from a Cherokee elder, Nancy Ward, in 1817. It's actually a petition not to the U.S. Congress, but to the leadership of the Cherokee Nation. And she and other women call upon the chiefs and the warriors of that nation not to engage in any more land sessions. And it's a very important petition in part because it sets an agenda within the Cherokee Nation at the time. And my colleague, Tya Miles of the Harvard History Department, has carefully studied this petition and others in a way that leads the Cherokee to become much more active, organized and militant against anti-removal. One also sees a certain degree of petitioning among northern villages. This is a petition on the left from the Mash P. Wampanoag. And you will see here a traditionally organized signatory list of men and women in different columns, similar to the anti-slavery petition that you see on the right from the 25th Congress that also separates signatories by sex. But not all of those petitions in Native American spaces separated women and men by gender or by sex. This is an 1807 petition to the Massachusetts General Court, again from the Mash P. Wampanoag. And this image again appears in the book. It's also available at the Digital Archive of Native American Petitions in Massachusetts. And what you see here is the rough interchangeability, almost if you will, the political equality of men and women signing on the same page. And again, this is from 1807, a period when smaller villages in New England and St. Lawrence Valley are sending many French and English language petitions to different, usually smaller venues, such as state legislatures, colonial assemblies and so forth. And you see, again, women taking a roughly equal role in the signatory list that one does not see nearly as commonly when it comes to white populations. And so there's a contrast. Again, gender separated columns on the left and a non-separation, a rough equality of women's and men's names on the right. What comes from this during the heyday of, if you will, or the peak of Indian removal is a massive campaign by the Cherokee. It was led by the president or the leader of Cherokee Nation, John Ross, but also any number of others. And what one sees is the explosion of mass signatory lists, such as the signatory lists of thousands upon thousands of names in the 1820s that I showed you earlier. Many of them are written down in the Sequoia cilibary, such as the signatory list that you see here, and that's in RG 233. And here from table 5.1 is just a long list from 1821 through 1839 of the thousands of the many petitions. And this is just to the House of Representatives. There are others sent to the Georgia legislature, the Tennessee legislature, the Office of Indian Affairs and the Department of War, many, many others. And you see, again, women signing collectively in at least one example there in 1829, which, again, is not as common for women to be collectively petitioning Congress, individually petitioning, yes, often as pensioners, as widows, but collectively petitioning the U.S. Congress, again, something of an original moment there. And again, you start to see thousands of names upon these petitions. And so one of the innovations, and it's an innovation under deep duress, it's an innovation under the duress of dispossession of the Cherokee is to mount these massive petitioning campaigns to Congress. And at some level, we might read these as a heroic defeat. The Cherokee were removed. Jackson ignored the Supreme Court's decision, defied it, and Congress passed the Indian Removal Act. But there's another story that I want to get to a little later that involves the Seneca tribe in the late 1830s. They had been in communication throughout this period with the Cherokee, and they drew upon the Cherokee's example to mount an anti-removal petitioning campaign of their own. Many of the Seneca and of the other Haudenosaunee people were removed. That part of the story should not be lost. But the ability to reverse a fraudulent treaty in 1838 that the Seneca, along with their Quaker allies, were eventually able to do, relied in part upon their cooperation and their emulation of cooperation with what they had learned from the Cherokee in the previous decades. And that's an important thing to keep in mind when we think about the longer history, the longer legacy of those Cherokee petitioning campaigns. Okay, a second mobilization, the Bank War. The early Bank of the United States, the child of Alexander Hamilton, lived for 20 years. It then was eclipsed in 1811 and then reauthorized with some new functions. It became a little bit more of a regulator, but still a national bank in 1816. And as you know, Andrew Jackson decided very early on that he, like Thomas Jefferson, did not like the idea of national banks, and he pushed for its elimination. He vetoed the Recharter Bill and he and his Treasury Secretary Roger Taney, he asked that Roger Taney later Supreme Court Justice began to remove deposits from the bank. That led Clay or excuse me, Jackson's enemy, Henry Clay, then head of the National Republicans, or one of the leaders of the National Republicans, to begin to organize against Jackson, not simply on the basis of the old National Republican dialogue, and not simply on the basis that Clay, as a votary of what would later be called the American plan, wanted national development, wanted national infrastructure, but also on the basis of what they began to see under Jackson as executive user-patient, as a too powerful presidency at a time when in the 19th century, presidents were not known to be the kind of post FDR, super powerful presidents that we today examine. And so Clay and many of his allies among the, what I'm going to call the anti Jackson forces, because it wasn't just a reproduction of earlier National Republican networks, began to sponsor petitions like this one. And this is a petition that basically says, look, we think that the bank should persist and we think more than that, whatever the disposition of the bank, that the Senate and House should know that the current Treasury, the Secretary, again, Taney under the direction of Johnson, is engaged in unlawful activity, counter to the spirit of a free republic. The geographic distribution of these petitions, one can see, is, and they came in both for and against the bank. At first, what we're going to see here is just combine the four and against together. And you see immense degrees of petitioning in the Northeast, but also in the Ohio Valley, including parts of the South, including Virginia, including North Carolina, including North Carolina, including Kentucky. And of course, you see a lot in Pennsylvania, which at some level is not a surprise because that is where the bank is headquartered. One also sees, and here the colors now correspond not to the amount of petitioning, but to the bent or the direction of the petitioning. So darker orange or reddish counties had a majority petitions favoring restoration of the deposits, which is to say reversing Taney's rule, putting the deposits back in the bank. Yellow counties had a majority petition supporting President Jackson in the removal of the deposits. And you see, and again, this amounts to about 150,000 signatures over really just about a six to seven month period. That for what it's worth is almost at the level of the peak anti-slavery mobilization, again, to the house of three to four years later. Now, what's important about this is when we begin to think about where the opposition to Jackson's party came from. Jackson's democracy was dominant in 1832, and it would win again in 1836. There was not, after the 1832 election, a viable opposition party. The National Republican Party was collapsing. But from the seeds of this petition mobilization, we begin to see the emergence of an anti-Jackson network that seems to predict very well the later mobilizations of the wing parties. So one of the things that I've done with my colleague Benjamin Schneer at the Harvard Kennedy School is that we've examined these pro and anti-deposit removal petitions, and we find controlling for a range of other variables, including previous anti-Jackson voting in the National Republicans, urban population, state-specific effects, things like that, that they're remarkably powerful predictors of where the Whigs would appear. And remember, at this time, from December 1833 to 1834, there isn't a Whig party organization that Clay can draw upon to launch this petitioning campaign. No such party organization is there at the local level. And if anything, what we show is with important local elites, it is through this petitioning campaign that we get the second party system at some level. We get the organization in part, not in whole, but we get the organization of an opposition party that comes to contest elections regularly until the 1850s. Final mobilization, anti-slavery. That is the Black woman and orator Maria Stewart there on the left. That is Angelina Grimke there in the middle. And that is William Lloyd Garrison on the right. I could also include of course, Frederick Douglass and others. Anti-slavery is a much longer story and there are a number of fantastic historians who have been studying it in recent years. A great recent book by Kate Mazur, another great recent book by Manisha Sinha and others that I want to recommend. But you may or may not know of an important counter petitioning effort that was launched by Southern Democrats in the 24th Congress. And this was called the picnic gag. And it basically meant that no slavery-related petition, not just anti-slavery, but any slavery-related petition would receive a customary reading on the floor or would be met with a response. It was variably enforced. There was also a gag rule in the Senate. But the gag rule in the House really upset a lot of people. And the collective response of Americans who, many of whom were not deeply committed to the anti-slavery movement, who thought Garrison was a quack, who thought that the immediateists and the abolitionists were too radical, many of them began to be much more sympathetic to the anti-slavery movement, in part because of the gag rule. And the gag rule, as well as a call by Angelina Grimkate to the women of America, the women of the nominally free states of the United States, from 1837 to 1839 petitioned as much as any population has ever petitioned in American history. Of course, these came primarily from the North, a few from border states. And what you can see here is a heat map of these petitions. And they're coming not only from places like Massachusetts and New Hampshire, but also from what's called the Burnt Over District in New York, the Northern Ohio, Southern Michigan, even out to Illinois. Women canvassers were absolutely crucial, especially after the gag rule in 1836. What we were able to show with these data, again, collected from the National Archives, RG233, is that women canvassers gather 60 to 90 percent more signatures for the same prayers in the same township over the same two-year period. And what is more, many of those women canvassers go on to become important activists, including not just in the anti-slavery movement. Some of them, by the way, are as young as 11 to 14 when they're canvassing petitions, sometimes with their mothers at other times alone. Some of them appear on the Seneca Falls Declaration. And that leads to a more broader, excuse me, a much broader mobilization of women later on in the movement for suffrage. There are important petitions for suffrage in New York in 1846. There's, of course, the Seneca Falls Declaration in 1848, but the first campaign actually occurs in the state of Massachusetts. And I'm relying in part here on the excellent work of the historian Joelle Millian. And these are also petitions that we have. And you'll see here the list of these petitions as they begin to come into the Massachusetts General Court, which is the state legislature in the 1840s to the 1850s. And then here on the right, you'll see the traditional separation of men and women. But you'll see the women who describe themselves not as legal voters, but as should-be voters there on the right. You also see, and this is, I think, really crucial, during the Civil War, during, right after secession, especially during the 37th Congress, petitions for the abolition of slavery. So the 25th Congress was not the last hurrah for anti-slavery. Basically, a number of petitioners, especially Republican radicals and those who were dismayed or outraged by the South's secession, call upon President Lincoln and the Congress in the 37th Congress to use wartime powers, the powers of war, under Article I of the Constitution to abolish slavery in these enemy states. These petitions do help to set the agenda for what would emerge later on as both the 13th Amendment and before that the Emancipation Proclamation. We also see black women petitioning in greater numbers, not as much for what it's worth. And this is also true of black men, not as much to the U.S. Congress. Black women and black men petition much more commonly to state legislatures, especially in the North. This is deeply strategic on their part. It's in those places where many of the laws that affect them most directly are passed. And finally, an aspect of what I'm going to call the democracy of agendas that emerges from this, out of the anti-slavery campaign and the movement of so many women, tens of thousands of women, not just as petition signatories but as canvassers as organizers. And towards that period in the late 1840s and early 1850s when women are pushing not merely for voting rights but also for legal equality, the end of coverture and other things which they achieve to a degree in Massachusetts in some other states. We begin to see something that isn't noticed in the statute books but should be noticed if we think about a different kind of democracy, namely the democracy of agendas. And that is a continuation of the pattern that we saw with Angelina Grimke when she was invited to speak before the Massachusetts General Court in 1838. We see women regularly appearing, invited to testify at legislative hearings or reports induced by petitions for women's equality. Again, I'm partially relying here on the excellent work of Joelle Millian but here is a partial list of what we see when women are regularly appearing before legislative committees in the northern and western states in the 1850s. And again, these are deeply connected with petitioning campaigns. So let me conclude with the following note. I hope I've showed you that petitioning becomes more common, more radical, more organized, more diffusive than at any time previously, at least after 1776 and after 1789 in American history. I hope to have showed you that these kinds of patterns did not occur with as much frequency and you can see it in the numbers, not just the numbers of documents, but the numbers of signatures on those documents that something is afoot from the 1820s to the 1850s and not just in the United States. You see it in French Canada. You see it in the British West Indies. You see it among Native Americans and so forth. And by the way, let me as I'm on this final slide encourage you to type any and all of your questions into the chat. Feel free to use that. I do want to emphasize too that the democratized petition helped to bring us what we know as American democracy. It was not alone. There were many other factors and there are a number of historians and political scientists who've written about that process. But I don't think that this democratized petition can be ignored. When we often saw movements for broadened suffrage, both among white unpropertyed men, among women, among black men, we often saw petitions behind those. When New York and then French Canada got rid of menorial or senioral tenure, which was basically feudalism on this continent, long after it had been abolished in France, it was petitions that helped do it. When we begin to look at the mobilizations for women's rights, it's often petitions that involve it. And of course, I don't think we can talk about anti-slavery and the eventual abolition of slavery without at least talking about the agenda setting process by which petitions placed slavery upon local and national agendas. But I want to emphasize it's not simply a democracy of parties, although I think it matters that petitions often lend themselves to parties. It's also a more robust organizational and associational democracy. And again, that democracy of agendas, democracy isn't simply about who shows up to the voting booth. It's about what's discussed in government and who appears at the table on a daily basis, not just at episodic elections that occur every few months or in some cases, every two to four years. So let me conclude there and I will stop sharing and I will turn to the chat and turn to any questions that you might have. And again, feel free to ask any questions. So I see one question here that says, would I say that petitions are best characterized as a product of democracy, a tool of democracy, or an attempt to improve imperfect democracy? That's a good question. I'm not sure I'm going to, it may be a punt as an answer to the question. I'm not sure I'm necessarily going to choose among those options. Democracy in the form of revolutions, in the form of changing partisan organizations, in the form of what we call Jacksonian democracy with its marches and its pamphlets and its ward organization, that actually did, as I discuss in the book, change petitioning. But I also think petitioning is a tool of democracy. For as long as there's been any form of democracy, there has been a form of a petition. Petitioning is as old as human society itself. And petitioning, I would argue, is an ancient practice that co-evolved with, that was transformed by, but also that transformed democracy in many different ways over the past several centuries. And again, not just in the United States, I would also point you to Canadian political development, English political development, 19th century France, if you want to consider some of the cahiers de de Lyon's form, even in Ancien regime and Revolutionary France, things like that. So I hope that addresses that question. Let me see here, other questions. Have I seen a connection between the rise of petitioning by women and the wave of married women's property acts in the 19th century, giving married women a partial form of equal economic rights? Excellent question and yes. Chapter 11 of the book talks about the women's mobilization. It's right after the anti-slavery chapter or the 1830s anti-slavery chapter. Now I want to emphasize, again, the work of a number of historians and Boylan, a number of folks I'm going to forget, Ellen Fitzgerald, Laurie Ginsburg, so many people who've talked about the different mobilizations that women created during this time and place. What I regard as absolutely crucial about these mobilizations from the petition standpoint is that the petition did some things that weren't as easily done under other auspices. So what were those? First is the creation of alliances where a lot of the signatories for women's rights petitions, and this is also true as you see the Seneca Falls Declaration, which is not a petition in and of itself but, of course, has a signatory list, is that men and women are signing on the same page. And that is what I interpret as and many other historians have interpreted as an alliance emergent on paper, emergent on parchment. Second, and that's in part what I would call organizational democracy, associational democracy, the kind of building of networks, alliances, and organizations that occurs from these petitions that is a crucial part of democratization in the 19th century. Second, again, the democracy of agendas. There were many attempts by state legislatures or many bills introduced, many hearings that aimed to legally overturn or amend the doctrine, the legal doctrine of coverture from the old French, the idea that women are simply covered in or covered legally under the title of their husband in terms of property, in terms of civil rights, economic rights. And so the Married Women's Property Acts in the 19th century aimed to undo that. And again, in order to change the law, well, first you have to change the agenda of those state legislatures. And this is actually not something you're going to see a lot of petitions in the National Archives about because this is something that came before state legislatures, really not the U.S. Congress. But the petitioning campaigns were absolutely crucial because without the petitioning campaigns, you don't get those hearings. You don't get women testifying before the legislature. You don't get a committee report. Many legislatures are spawning committees throughout the early 19th century, and petitioners know that and they aim to, as part of a petitioning campaign, get a hearing before one of those committees and a report that might end up being, you know, turning into a bill. And so in addition to the work that has been done, again, by so many fantastic historians of feminism of women, I just want to emphasize that what the petitions brought to this campaign as to so many others was that associational democracy, that organizational legacy of petitioning, and the agenda democracy that left such a huge, huge wake, huge legacy. I just want to thank everybody for their questions. And I want to conclude by saying, and I think I have a final slide here, one moment. Let me, again, treat you to the book here. And you can find that, you can just Google democracy by petition. You can also see, if you're interested, if you go to the Radcliffe Institute, or if you type in petitions.radcliffe.edu, that is petitions.radcliffe.edu, you'll see a lot of the data that my colleagues and I have collected from the National Archives. And I again want to thank the National Archives, a treasured national institution, without which many of these voices would be lost to history, lost to our citizens. And I want to encourage the audience to both examine the data that we produced and to support and to use the National Archives, pandemic recovery permitting, of course, in the future, as we reexamine our history of American democracy through the lens of the petitioning process. Thank you.