Eric Ledell Smith was an African American archivist and historian who wrote and edited several books and articles on African American history and performing arts history. This article won a prestigious Pennsylvania history prize in the year it was published. 

Partisan politics are a key ingredient in what happened at the Pennsylvania Constitutional Convention of 1837-1838 and related events, especially the court case in Bucks County about whether it was legal for black people to vote in Pennsylvania. In the 1830s, the two main political parties were the Whigs and the Democrats. The Whig Party came out of the tradition of the Federalists, but was formed in the 1830s specifically to oppose Andrew Jackson’s Democratic Party. Supporters included industrialists and the urban middle class, and advocated for modernization and greater powers of congress over the president. The Democratic Party on the other hand appealed to immigrants and working-class white Americans as well as southern slaveholders, and advocated for an agrarian society and weak central government. In this article, Smith refers to a coalition between Anti-Masons and the Whigs that gained political power in Pennsylvania in the 1830s. The Anti-Masonic Party was formed in the late 1820s to oppose Freemasonry, a secret society mostly comprised of wealthy and powerful men. It soon merged with the Whig party, however, to oppose the policies of the Democratic Party.