It is common in classroom discussions of representation to start with Edmund Burke’s address to the Bristol Electors, perhaps the most famous elaboration of a trustee model of representation. It might also be common to mention that Burke lost his election, a nice example of the perils of disregarding public opinion. I expect it is less frequently noted that Burke was quickly returned to Parliament from a “pocket borough,” which provided wealthy patrons with their own representatives. Some early American commentators on the “right of instruction”—the right of constituents to direct a representative’s activities authoritatively through written instructions about the position to take on an issue—recognized the difficulties of cramming an authoritarian example into a republican framework. Whether for or against, these writers explained that they would “not resort to the writings of Englishmen in relation to their rights and the authority of their parliaments; but to the constitution of the U. States” (p. 30).

With Peverill Squire’s The Right of Instruction and Representation in American Legislatures, 1778 to 1900, scholars of United States politics can now more easily do the same. Rather than an ineffectual practice that quickly disappeared, constituent instructions emerge in the book as a vital component of representation that persisted for more than a century. Squire draws on an impressive corpus of material from newspapers, legislative publications, state archives, and county histories to construct two datasets of constituent instructions. The first compiles more than 5,000 instances of instructions or requests issued by constituents to state legislators. The second includes more than 6,000 such communications issued by state legislatures to a state’s congressional delegation. It is very likely that there are many more instances that have gone unrecorded, especially constituent-initiated instructions to state legislators, which were not recorded in official records.

The book begins by laying out the major points of debate among contemporaries. A number of state constitutions affirmed that “the people have a right to instruct the members of their Legislature” (p. 12), which was understood as implying something more binding than the right of petition (p. 19). Contemporaries also distinguished between instructions and requests. At issue was the authority of the originator under republican theory. A meeting of the people, in numbers sufficient to constitute a majority and in a form capable of “fairly and unequivocally express[ing]” (p.18) its sentiments, could be considered a primary assembly. They were not “a chosen few who may assemble at a coffee house or an hotel and imagine themselves the people—not of a committee who shall fancy themselves clothed with plenipotentiary power, and being irresponsible themselves shall undertake to prescribe rules of conduct for the responsible agents of the people” (pp. 18–19). These latter assemblies had diminished or even no authority to instruct, making requests more appropriate. One of the more interesting findings of the book is simply that requests gradually displaced instruction.

In addition to showing that such communications continued for much longer than usually claimed, Squire revises the literature in at least three ways. Most work has focused on state legislatures’ attempts to direct their US senators, where the right can appear as a smaller detail in a broader inquiry into federalism or representation before the 17th Amendment. Squire’s book shows instead that the most common form of instruction was of state legislators by constituents. Voters could also instruct their state legislators to issue instructions and requests to their congressional delegation. Whether prompted by public instruction or acting on their own initiative, state legislatures regularly issued instructions and requests to congressional lawmakers. On some rare occasions, voters might even issue instructions directly to their congressional representative—this was so infrequent, however, that it is only glancingly addressed in the book.

Why were publics so willing to instruct state legislators, whom they elected, but not federal legislators, whom they also elected? The answer is suggested by two other revisions to the literature: instructions were primarily concerned with local economic development priorities rather than high-profile controversies over slavery or war; and rather than being a Southern phenomenon, instructions played their greatest role in New England’s town meetings.

That it was state legislators who were at the heart of the practice of constituent instructions follows from the fact that the states carried more responsibility for those issues that voters seem to have cared most about. The vast majority of instructions, whether sent to Congress from state legislatures or to state lawmakers by constituents, concerned issues of local economic importance, internal improvements, public buildings, post offices, and (for state lawmakers) tax rates, county boundaries, and county seats.

That constituent instructions were not predominantly Southern is similarly instructive. Those states that authorized slavery in 1860 contributed approximately 22% of instructions and 36% of requests to state lawmakers, as well as nearly 40% of both sorts to US senators. This was roughly in line with the region’s share of the free population. The West and Midwest—with public lands and greater need for internal improvements—were more important sources of communication to members of Congress, but not to state lawmakers. Instructing state lawmakers was especially common in New England: by my count, this region issued nearly 60% of all instructions to state legislators and less than 5% of all requests. Only 10% of congressional communications originated here, the majority of which were requests.

The reason, Squire argues, was both institutional and theoretical. The New England town meeting, usually coterminous with the state legislative district, was incontestably a primary assembly, and as such was emboldened to not only announce its preferences, but authoritatively instruct its representatives. In states where legislative districts were composed of counties, by contrast, there was no organic body in which the people regularly assembled. The “mass meeting” was the best alternative, and its dictates might be more easily evaded by legislators who found that a meeting had failed to meet the requirements of republican theory. These limits were magnified at the congressional level, where the difficulties of assembling voters meant that very few meetings could claim the status of primary assembly.

State instruction to US senators occupied an awkward middle ground. Legislatures were easy enough to assemble. But did a senator represent the legislature or the people of a state? When John Quincy Adams resigned from the US Senate because he could not obey instructions sent to him from the legislature, his father remarked that “the right of the people to instruct their representatives is very dear to them, and will never be disputed by me. But this is a very different thing from an interference of a State legislature” (p. 11). The legislature might claim the right of instruction as an implication of the right of election, but it might also be seen as overstepping its role as a representative agent of the people.

As the century progressed, fewer meetings at any level could meet the standard of being a primary assembly. Instead, the century’s end saw public bodies or organized interests issuing requests, more as supplicants than sovereigns. The forms that public opinion had taken as well as the practices and substance of representation were being transformed. The Right of Instruction and Representation in American Legislatures, 1778 to 1900 helps us understand both what was being lost and why, and it marks an important contribution to the study of representation in the United States.