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The leading authority on the party politics of the Jeffersonian era, Noble E. Cunningham, Jr., died March 30, 2007, in Columbia, Missouri. Cunningham was born in 1926 at Evans Landing, Indiana, on the Ohio River south of Louisville, Kentucky. After army service at the end of World War II, he earned a B.A. from the University of Louisville in 1948. This undergraduate degree was quickly followed by graduate work at Duke University, where Cunningham earned his M.A. (1949) and Ph.D. (1952). After stints teaching at Wake Forest College and the University of Richmond, Cunningham began his long career at University of Missouri in 1964. At MU, Cunningham was chair of the history department (1971–1974), Byler Distinguished Professor (1980–1981), Frederick A. Middlebush Professor (1986–1988), and finally Curators’ Professor of History (1988–1997). In 1997 he retired from teaching and became Curators’ Professor of History Emeritus.

Cunningham was one of MU’s most honored scholars. In addition to the named professorships previously listed, he received fellowships from the American Philosophical Society, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Historical Publications Commission, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Besides a long list of internal awards at MU, Cunningham received the University of Missouri system’s Thomas Jefferson Award, a Gold Medal for contributions to Jefferson studies from the Thomas Jefferson Memorial Foundation, and book awards from the Missouri Conference on History and the Historical Print Collectors Society. He was elected to membership in the American Antiquarian Society and as a fellow of the Society of American Historians. Cunningham served on numerous editorial and advisory boards over the years and as an officer of most of the scholarly organizations in his field, including tours on the Advisory Council of the Society for Historians of the Early American Republic, the Executive Board of the Organization of American Historians, and the Council of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture.

Painstaking archival research and attention to detail were Noble Cunningham’s great strengths as a historian. He particularly excelled in his thorough use of scattered and relatively ephemeral printed materials such as newspapers and broadsides. The microfilm newspaper collection at MU’s Ellis Library still bears testament to his prodigious appetite for research. Cunningham initially made his reputation with two books that remain the definitive works on the development and political functioning of the world’s first opposition political party, The Jeffersonian Republicans: The Formation of Party Organization, 1789–1801 and The Jeffersonian Republicans in Power: Party Operations, 1801–1809, published by the Institute of Early American History and Culture in 1957 and 1963, respectively. Though written from a traditional viewpoint that did not worry much about ideology or policy or theoretical definitions of party, to say nothing of the social and cultural setting of party politics, Cunningham’s work impressed readers with its detail and scope. Recounting the groping efforts to create a new institution, Cunningham seemed to have looked into the activities of just about every single man who was prominently, or even not that prominently, involved in electoral politics, in every state of the Union. He certainly seemed to have read every scrap of paper they left behind.

While committed to a traditional Founder-centric narrative of the early Republic’s politics, Cunningham undermined that view in practice through his careful attention to the way politics actually operated on the ground. For instance, he highlighted the crucial role played by House of Representatives Clerk John Beckley, an obscure figure with little place in previous narratives, and gave the press unusual prominence in his account of the politics of the time. In both cases, these new elements were introduced simply because Cunningham found them in the archives. His emphasis on political facts-on-the-ground was and remains rather unusual in political history. Political historians have tended to spin out the thoughts and deeds of great statesmen or else count votes. Most of the stuff in between tends to get short shrift, but that middle ground was where Noble Cunningham lived. It was this aspect of Cunningham’s writings that inspired a small wave of state-level studies of the Democratic-Republican party and informed the work of the new generation of political historians showcased in the volume David Waldstreicher, Andrew Robertson, and I edited, Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2004).

Cunningham’s third major book took the same detail-oriented approach to the even-less-studied subject of governance. Nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, The Process of Government under Jefferson (Princeton, N.J., 1978) remains rather unique in the historical literature. Nominally, it focused on the way Thomas Jefferson used and reshaped the presidency to control the government, further his policy agenda, and maintain strong congressional support. In fact, it was a landmark study of not only the presidency but also the early American state as a whole. In the course of the book, Cunningham canvassed seemingly every department and branch of the federal government, including virtually unknown material on the internal operations of Congress and its committee system, based on little-used sources in the congressional archives.

In the latter half of his career, Cunningham produced a number of textbooks, edited volumes, and synthetic works but also the book that was his proudest achievement, In Pursuit of Reason: The Life of Thomas Jefferson (Baton Rouge, La., 1987). In one relatively brief volume, he provided a sharp and thorough, if traditional, account of Jefferson that interpreted the Sage of Monticello primarily as a man of the Enlightenment. Cunningham managed to do equal justice to Jefferson’s political thought, scientific interests, and political career and also give ample attention to his personal life, albeit with the slavery-related blinders of most of his generation of Jefferson scholars. Brought out in an inexpensive paperback edition by mass-market publisher Ballantine Books in 1988, In Pursuit of Reason became perhaps the most widely read modern scholarly biography of Jefferson. Translated into numerous foreign languages, including Chinese, it was certainly Cunningham’s most widely read book. In the 1990s he produced two other substantial works, Popular Images of the Presidency from Washington to Lincoln (Columbia, Mo., 1991) and The Presidency of James Monroe (Lawrence, Kans., 1996).

An intensely private man devoted to his work, Cunningham was buried quietly by his family without a public memorial service. He was survived by his wife, Dana Gulley Cunningham. On April 11, 2008, Cunningham’s former University of Missouri colleagues, including the MU History Department and his fellow Thomas Jefferson Award winners, convened an afternoon of memorial events celebrating his dedication to scholarship and the university. The afternoon kicked off with a roundtable session on Cunningham’s scholarship and teaching, “Jeffersonian Democracy Reconsidered.” Organized by graduate student Steven C. Smith and hosted by Cunningham’s former student Steven Watts, the immediate past chair of the history department, the session’s speakers included Andrew Robertson of the City University of New York, Larry Gragg of Missouri University of Science and Technology (another former Cunningham student), and me. Afterwards, a tree was planted in Cunningham’s honor off Francis Quadrangle in an area where Jefferson’s original tombstone and a statue of him stand. (The image of Jefferson actually sits on a bench with his lap desk, contemplating the Declaration of Independence.) Several university colleagues gave personal testimonials to Cunningham in the course of the ceremony. A permanent place at Jefferson’s side seemed to be exactly what Noble Cunningham would have wanted.

Jeffrey L. Pasley
University of Missouri