He applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, To Organize the Sovereign People: Political Mobilization in Revolutionary Pennsylvania, and reported the following:
Page 99 introduces the debates over Pennsylvanians’ use of town meetings and other forms of popular forms of political mobilization to try and convince President George Washington to withhold his signature from the Jay Treaty. Federalists rejected the notion that town meetings could represent the will of the people and argued that, under the Constitution, citizens expressed their will exclusively through the ballot box. Critics of the treaty, in contrast, believed that the people always had a right to assert their sovereignty directly.Learn more about To Organize the Sovereign People at the University of Virginia Press website.
This page does actually give the reader a fairly good idea of what the book as a whole is about, so the test was successful.
Although it is only a snapshot in a much larger exploration of the relationship between shifting understandings of the nature of popular sovereignty and evolving approaches to political mobilization, the debates over the Jay Treaty represented a key turning point in this story. In essence, opponents of the treaty argued that the adoption of new state and federal constitutions did not fundamentally alter the relationship between the people and their government while Federalists claimed that the new governments established elections as the only legitimate expression of the will of the people. I argue that the failure to prevent to adoption of the Treaty, in conjunction with the outbreak of the Whiskey Rebellion, convinced critics of the Federalists to abandon efforts to engage the people directly in the deliberative process and instead focus on coalition building and winning elections. This shift in strategy is what laid the foundation for the emergence of the Republican Party. In the following chapters I demonstrate how Republicans harnessed existing forms of popular mobilization to build a statewide network of like-minded men who focused on turning out voters on election day. Although this shift in strategy came at the expense of a more participatory form of democracy, Republicans’ focus on winning elections ultimately succeeded where other more direct forms of mobilization had failed. Ultimately, the book provides an important new perspective on how the struggle to define the meaning and scope of democracy in the years following the Declaration of Independence.
--Marshal Zeringue
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