We hear much mourning today over federal gridlock. Because contention is built right into our system of checks and balances, Washington, D.C., institutions have actually been at loggerheads for much of our history. Yet the striking reality is that even amid government paralysis, American society has repeatedly been able to improve itself in dramatic ways. 

I’ve just written a historical novel that illustrates this in spades. It’s set in the most fractured, partisan, and socially limping phase of U.S. history: the Jacksonian era. That’s when modern party warfare was invented. Political brawling and corruption in the Tammany Hall style was a norm in many parts of the country. Drunkenness, prostitution, racial and ethnic animosity, and violence erupted often on our streets. Riots, some of them requiring declarations of martial law to restore order, were common in cities. Disagreements regularly escalated to bloody beatings, pistolings, and personal defamations that make current quarrels look like quibbles.