The Soul of the House

This broadly- and deeply-researched volume offers a nuanced accounting of the importance of the Speakership and its occupants' individual characters, balanced with the context that so often constrained their choices. Peart's close attention to the role and impact of the respective Speakers sheds fresh light on a stunning array of well-known (as well as more obscure) events in the political history of the early American republic.

Daniel Peart is a premier scholar of nineteenth-century U.S. politics. The Soul of the House shows how, as led by its Speakers, the House of Representatives was a powerful and independent legislature, a vital source of democracy, conflict, policymaking, and governance. Such a timely and critically important point to make.

Daniel Peart's lively and careful study of the development of the speakership between the first Congress and the outbreak of the Civil War is a must-read for all political historians of the early republic.

Daniel Peart brilliantly reveals the central role of the Speaker of the House in shaping American politics before the Civil War. Overturning long-standing assumptions about the way Congress works, this 'institutional history with a human face' deserves a wide audience.

The Speaker of the House is the most important political office that most Americans know nothing about. An unabashed historian of U.S. political institutions, Daniel Peart expertly guides the reader through the evolution of Congress, opening a window on a world of mostly unremembered men who shaped the basic workings of our republic. Absolutely unique in the literature of American history.