Rachel A. Shelden. Washington Brotherhood

Studies of Washington, D.C., as it was during the mid-nineteenth century, often center on Congress and, to a lesser extent, the two other branches of the United States government. Nearly 20 years ago William Lee Miller, in Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle in the United States Congress (1995), recreated the drama of congressmen debating the Gag Rule, which during the late 1830s and early 1840s barred antislavery petitions from the House of Representatives. Perhaps the most notable history of Washington, however, is Constance McLaughlin Green's Pulitzer-Prize-winning Washington: Village and Capital 1800–1878 (1962), which describes the city as a developing community where men and women, black and white, had roles. Rachel A. Shelden's Washington Brotherhood: Politics, Social Life, and the Coming of the Civil War melds Miller's and Green's approaches by placing congressmen, and issues dividing them, within a broader Washington community and transcendent social life. As Shelden notes in her introduction, this is a story “of elite white men” (p. 7). The men's wives on occasion appear as social figures. There is, though, almost nothing about the black men and women who served at the various social events. Shelden's goal is not social, class, gender, or race analysis. Rather she shows that various forms of social interaction among congressmen (at the Capitol and beyond) distracted them from their work and encouraged intersectional friendships that moderated sectional discord. Shelden deals mainly with congressmen, but covers the social activities of some Supreme Court justices and members of presidential administrations as well.

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